The Magic-Find Problem in Path of Exile 2

Perfect and timely vid.

Extremly good takes. Glad someone doesnt sugarcoat the issues just because its early access

Throughout the decades I’ve been playing games one of the most common issues, and one that feels the worst is when you push and finally defeat a top tier boss, level, raid etc and then the loot that drops is trash or is the same that drops in other content. When you beat the hardest content you should get rewarded with better drops than you can get from lower power stuff. It gives people something to work towards, and gives a reward for grinding and overcoming the challenge. Magic find could work fine, but it should be like and enchant or something. It should be additional not that you have to sacrifice stats for it.

Palsteron you didn't just cook

You're Gordon Fucking Ramsay.

@ggg: This man speaks for me.

Stopped playing after seeing the loot players get with 500% rarity. Feels like I have to play a rarity focused char or i get 1/1000 the loot

My man Palsteron's coming yet again with some solid BASED take and I couldn't agree more

basically, trading is the problem. always has been always will be.

It's not as bad as once thought. After rarity 100% you get diminishing returns.

I like this one.

Affliction league was the best league ever, thanks to insane amount of IIR & IIQ

Think also rarity needs to go, especially in this testing phase early release. Why? Because we arent testing gear that doesnt have rarity. I would guess out of all people in waystone phase 90% are running rarity on every piece that can have it. No uniques used if they dont have rarity, it kills the building fun. Bad for testing.

At ExileCon 2023, around 4 hours and 48 minutes in, they ask Jonathan if magic find is in the game. He answers: 'Yes, and it's better than ever.' This was massively overlooked at the time.

In a game where the sole reason to keep grinding is to find more and better items, having a stat that literally gives you more loot is such a joke. Stats should complement your character and build, helping you achieve more loot through gameplay, not just directly give you loot. It makes NO SENSE.

This is a classic problem from an old game where it was trash even back then, but people keep bringing it back for "tradition" or whatever. I've seen many games adopting garbage mechanics from old classics just because. NO. They didn’t know better at the time—it was creative and innovative back then—but that time is long gone. Nowadays, developers should be smart enough to recognize those mechanics weren’t good to begin with. We just dealt with them because we had no other choice.

I think GGG should double the rarity and quant rolls/values from the atlas tree, maps, etc and then remove all rarity stats from rolling on gear. That way if you have a better build you are naturally getting better items rather than being forced to walk a thin line between rarity and itemization.

The point on uniques is the best argument I've heard.

And as far as #5 (capping) goes, I think as long as you add it to the character sheet alongside resistances it will get discovered by the majority of players

I really hate rarety. shouldnt be in games, loot should come from killing monster and bosses special bosses.

Imagine a movie character gearing up to fight forces of hell and Lucifer himself going like "yup that powerful ancient god's lightning ring looks sweet and all buuuuuut this one makes demons drop fucking dollars on the ground".
This is your last point - immersion breaking.

A weird part of PoE2 is that it seems like they wanted to copy Diablo II more than their own better game where they already learned the lessons. All the problems described are directly verbatim imported from D2 Magic Finding. (and same for mana costs, skill levels, etc) If you don't league start an MF char and then re-roll, you're playing "wrong'. The same would be true in a year in PoE2 without changes.

Nice vid Pal. Well spoken, well structured and solid arguments. Appreciate it.

Jonathan just appears as a liar to me

"a little more recent"
" Scourge"

Ventor's unique ring only has 55% rarity maximum lol

Well put! I agree and I forgot if it was you who used this term, but item rarity should absolutely be "democratised" in PoE, exactly as you said. It should be on the atlas tree and separate from itemisation as much as possible, so it's clear to new players and accessible to everyone WITHOUT harming itemisation diversity.

Also appreciate your self awareness in explaining why you feel defensive :D So understandable given how there's so much unreasonable bad-faith criticism out there.

me hearing you explain all of this reminds me why my a** put poe 2 down for right now,

Couldn't agree more, anything mandatory ought to be inherent to our character or the item itself.

Rarity/Quantity are far too capable of warping everything around them.

IMO they would do well to make rarity/quantity an end of league event or something.
Like what URF is to league of legends.

A bit off topic, but since you did touch on it in the video....

I think movement speed should be a reward for an Act I unique monster encounter. Like around the mid point of the first act.

If this man goes missing in the next few weeks, it was Fubgun.

I bricked God tier boots because it had 0 movement speed, if you have stock movement or negative speed, you can't avoid act3 final boss mechanics

Quality of life, speed and blastiness of your build is a much more interesting way to "scale" your build into endgame. Just look at empys video, he smiled like a child getting his favirte toy bro, when he teleported like madman. He didnt even make a smile when he got 500+ rarity. Imagine being able to scale how fun your build is instead of Magic find bullshit stat.

Is MF not simply too good? Just nerf it, it't not that complicated. If 3% "more" loot is competing against 30% clearspeed then that is totally fine. They should do changes based on perceived FOMO? Realy?

you have always been right about the MF issue, I hate to see POE2 doing absolutely the same issue. I really cannot agree more with you on everyhting you mentioned.

They could cap it at 75% but then you still have 2 dead affixes on every build, but at least every build would get the rerity cap somehow

It's just so frustrating that they finally fixed that problem in PoE 1 after a literal decade+ and they instantly reintroduce it in PoE 2, as if the two dev teams don't even communicate, wait...

mf needs a buff

What's with the attitude on this video? I like this channel but this video, even though it makes valid points, earned a dislike from me.

Why are people clowns if they don't want MF?

Also, imagine making a video about rarity and not mentioning SSF even once. Honk honk.

I donn`t know if you read your comments ... especially 2 days later... I will give you the solution to rarrity and it`s idiot proof... it exists in resistances .. it`s called HARD CAP .... that way you don`t dumb down creativity... and you're not forced into having rarrity on all the gear slots ... you have that on resistances ... you don`t need resistances on all the gear slots to cap out ... same can be done with rarrity ... so you can invest in rarrity , you can invest in damage , you can invest in everything ,without it ever becoming a problem,and you can also make both sides happy !!

This is only true because rarity is too strong.
Just tune it down to a spot where it is actually not obvious whereas it's better to sacrifice the slot or not, and boom !
Problem solved, diversity increased.

I always loved QoL / Efficiency stats in itemization. That is what made games such as diablo 2 so great.
You truly had the choice between being a little stronger but having to spam mana potions, or having lots of rarity and getting one shot once in a while ...
It is all a matter of balance. And I think Rarity on gear is great, as long as it is well implemented / balanced because it has the potential to increase build diversity

How about fix the loot system on console. Complete trash. Hundred hours and 1 Div. WTF

Perfect point, "Yeah and I could be a clown too...*honk honk*" 🤣

In all seriousness, this is a based take all around. I think it would feel better for everyone if you earned it with power. When I found out what people were doing with rarity, I said, "Ugh...guess I'll try to find gear with it from now on." It isn't fun, it just means you know in the back of your head that no matter how powerful you are, you don't have the magic stat and are wasting your time.

Your complaints are not reciprocated. I am glad this Jonathon fella doesn't listen to you.

It's quite impressive how many lessons were learned in PoE for the mistakes to be copy pasted into PoE2. Actually, you raise an extremely good point in the fact that it's somehow WORSE. It's like the teams between the games have never communicated.

I am not convinced either way that MF is good nor bad. Something that I find to be an interesting thought experiment is to look at the points that Pal has provided on the topic and invert the terms MF and damage and look at how similar and different the resulting message becomes. If someone were to watch this video objectively with through that lens, I find it difficult to believe that they would believe that this topic clearly favors either side.

Reddit is a copium filled hell hole with people who can't take criticism because it might hurt their likes. Forums are the opposite though :D

I think this is one of the best explanations I’ve seen about why it’s not a good stat for gear.

finally someone actually understands and clarifies rarity issue

same issue on waystone suffixes why do we have rarity and quantity on them which makes non rarity/quantity waystones are worthless. just make every modifier the content higher and change the "waystone drop chance" to item rarity/quantity when i do harder content i get more loot. rarity is removed and i put stats that will make me stronger and i ran harder content get more loot.

Here is where I disagree with your analogy - movement speed is let's say mandatory to cap speed (granted there are exceptions). Rarity is never mandatory and I am ok with the tradeoff between power and extra loot. MF is a lifestyle for some people. I wouldn't want to take that away from folks even though I personally don't go into it. Your analogy only works if rarity is truly mandatory but it never is. If it is scaled incorrectly it could be, but I have never seen that with GGG. You don't go from nothing to something. You go from something to a scaleable more. Just my view and I see why some people may hate the feeling they HAVE to get it. But you really don't - and certainly not to cap it. Lastly it gives one more min-max option which is why I like POE to begin with.

Remove it ?
Transform harder content to more rewarding content
Figure a way to progress the game normally and also increase drop as you get stroger, therefore feeling good for upgrading gear
Now you feel bad, why ?, because you either get fixed stat items, including rarity, or you get white items and transmutation orbs.

Frank sucks.