GGG - great job with 0.3 - but one suggestion for currency

I guess I’m one of the few here who truly believes in GGG’s vision for PoE2, and for me, patch 0.3 is definitely a step in the right direction. It also shows that the devs are listening to the community – great job on that! Sadly, a lot of people start criticizing the patch even before it’s released…

When I saw the new currency update, my first thought was: “Nice idea, but won’t this just add even more currency items and make the game more complex again? Isn’t the whole point of PoE2 to be more beginner-friendly?”

You already nailed this design philosophy with the Sorcerer in 0.3: instead of adding more complexity, you simplified things. The Sorcerer can now reduce all elemental resistances at once, making it much easier to combine different spells. Why not take the same approach with crafting? Instead of introducing even more orbs (higher and perfect transmutation, regal, chaos, exalted orb), I’d suggest the following:

Make item level not only raise the maximum possible tiers, but also increase the guaranteed minimum tier when using orbs.

For example:

Life can roll tiers 1–13.

On an itemlevel 1 body armour, you’d only ever get tier 1–2 life.

On an itemlevel 80 body armour, you’d be guaranteed at least tier 7 life, with a chance up to tier 13.

Yes, I get that randomness is part of the thrill, and hitting all max tiers should feel amazing. But most of the time crafting is just frustrating, tedious, overly complex, and expensive. With a system like this, at least you’d know that an ilvl 80 armour will always roll something decent (tier 7+), while still leaving room for the excitement of hitting the higher tiers.

This change would solve several problems at once:

We keep the number of currency items low, instead of endlessly adding new ones.

Orb crafting would always yield at least a solid items, since the minimum tier scales with item level.

Players would feel more motivated to actually use orbs, since they’d be buffed into something that feels rewarding, rather than just wasting resources.

What do you think?