The "loot" problem and my observations as a 1k hour giga blaster.

I want to preface this by saying that I've been loving the patch. 0.2 has a lot of potential for builds compared to 0.1, and I see tons of people running really cool little interactions between new uniques/supports. I only want to share my thoughts as someone that pushed endgame incredibly hard in both "leagues" so far.

Loot is substantially worse in 0.2 and I think that's a measurable fact at this point. But it's obviously not because GGG simply dialed down our drop rates. It's very multi-faceted and here's my best summary of why loot feels so much worse for everyone, and possibly a few suggestions to fix it.

1.) A lot of sources of rarity/quant were indirectly nerfed. The "Rares and uniques have 1 to 2 additional mods" atlas node was removed. Rarity/quant tablets were nerfed. Rarity soul core gone. Ingenuity nerf obviously impacted stacking rarity on gold rings. Breach, something many people were farming, was hit very hard. There are a few other examples I'm sure I'm forgetting.


2.) The new tower system, despite towers having 3 slots, makes it much harder to pump desirable mods into maps. Aside from the difficulty of obtaining the right tablets (of which you need far more of now) and tower setups, tablets in general provide significantly less quant. Overall this new tower system makes the problem they were trying to fix (people feeling the need to seek out 3-4 tower overlaps to juice areas for good loot) much worse.


3.) Corrupted (and now cleansed) zones changed from being +1 level implicitly to having 1 map in the zone having the +1 level. This means we're able to run far, far fewer lvl 82 waystones than before. The new implicit mods (extra prefix/less suffix, +1 level, increased rarity/reduced quantity) that can spawn in these cleansed zones aren't frequent or impactful enough to make up for this.


Overall, all of these contribute to 0.2 having both a lower floor and lower ceiling for the loot people are obtaining. This makes progression feel a lot worse on trade. Some of the fixes are as simple as reverting changes (gives us +1 level on all maps in corrupted/cleansed zones please), others will need adjustments I'm not savvy enough to know.

Regardless, I hope someone at GGG sees this and considers that there are measurable things behind why players feel like their "loot is worse", because I know there's a lot of heat and emotion around here. Thanks for reading, feel free to contribute suggestions. Sorry for the formatting, I tried my best lol

Thanks for sharing your information and thoughts.
It's nice to read something that isn't just hate, but actually includes something constructive.
I can understand your perspective, even though I don't really have much knowledge about the topic myself.
I hope your thread gets more attention.