Valuable Ground Loot vs. Player Agency vs. Crafting

Hello GGG,

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Bottom Line Upfront - More Target Farming!


I keep hearing from the directors that they want ground loot to be valuable in POE2. They don't want crafting to get too carried away. They want the player to be excited to pick up something and ID it.

Players want more agency to have smoother gear progression. They want to pick up a piece of gear and have a clear set of goals to hit so that they can equip it. Such as gather enough harvest life force and switch the resistances on it.

I think an interesting solution that can appease both audiences - the creators and the players - is target farming. I am reminded of the delve rooms that contain items with certain mods. Finding a fire mod room when playing an RF build was always exciting for example.

It would be interesting to explore the use of Biomes in endgame to enable some more passive target farming. I'd also like more agency by using the towers to target farm as well. I think there could be really interesting interactions with a system like that. The fragments/scarabs/tablets that affected this could have a variety of rarity with a variety of strengths. Starting from the simple "items dropped in affected maps have a high chance of fire/caster/projectile mods" and etc. There could be very powerful ones that change the weights of highly desired mods or that limit the tiers of mods on items "Items dropped in affected maps cannot have mods with tiers lower than teir 5."

I would love the ability to target farm. It doesn't fix the current rough nature of gear progression but it definitely gives a solid axis for character growth while maintaining the integrity of "valuable ground drops."

This feedback was inspired by the recent interview between Jonathan and Tri between 48:00 - 53:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01eP5vTQMvI&t=489s&ab_channel=TalkativeTri

More target farming = agreed. Didnt even read the rest

This feels really similar to the new orb that locks an affix on your gear. Now your target farming for an affix instead of using an orb to make sure it stays. Which is also similar to the essences we have. Roll am affix from a smaller pool and hopefully get what you want. It sounds cool more stuff is always good. This doesn't solve the problem for players that want a real crafting system so everything isn't rng. If the goal for ggg is to make loot matter tie it to ground loot somehow.
1. Make an affix that is craftable
2. Make it so you can only craft one mod on blues and two on yellows. For dropped six affix yellows you can change only 2 affixes or something.
3. Make crafting a new system seperate from the rng currency. Like runes where its in addition to everything else.
I don't know if adding in different rng systems will make anyone happy that wants a crafting system. Let me know if this makes sense or if I missed your point.