Discussion about Path of Exile, a free ARPG made by Grinding Gear Games
First time I decided to try bossing and after wasting 800+ divines on Maven I'm thinking of just rage quitting the league and never doing bossing ever again. Like my man Sirus said "Why run, what's the point?". Twice I earned a heap of divines through mapping, dropped a single flask in 35 tries and burned every orb I had in the end. Where's this 12% drop rate if in 120+ tries (counting ones I did with my own fragments) I only found 3 flasks and zero good gems. It looks like the flasks should more or less sustain you with their current price but I'm only dropping shit tier jewels and conflict orbs. What a joke and a waste of time, I'd earn more doing normal t16 with empty atlas than this scam. If it's pinnacle content it should in the very least NOT be a waste of people's time and money and ideally be somewhat rewarding.
I used an online binomial distribution calculator and if flask drop rate is 0.12, you have a 1 in 5300 chance to drop 3 or less flasks across 120 attempts. Not sure if the numbers are wrong or just you being uber unlucky.
Uber bad luck, the true final boss of PoE
This so far has been the most unlucky league for me in general. I dropped my first divine on level 94, saw my first exalt in the league in Tujen's shop at 96. Lost 300 Tujens coins while getting 2 divines out of him and so on. Meanwhile my friend with less time and much less experience found 3 mirror shards in 4 days, been dropping reliquary keys and other lucky loot left and right. I feel like I spent all my luck on a random Apothecary last league lol
Welcome to Vegas
I’ve had literally one divine drop from a curio case. Probably only made 20 div so far in misc drops but jeeeez
It's not like there isn't a simple fix to this - T17s are already massive profitable without the frag drops.
Problem: Uber bosses drops are inconsistent, and the high price of invitations makes unlucky streaks common.
Solution: Uber fragments now drop at 1/10th the frequency. Profitable drops from Uber bosses are now 10 times as common.
Sure you still have massive entry price and can still get unlucky, but now the variance is way smaller and Ubers becomes more consistent.
There are already enough ways to gable away currency, the endgame pinnacle content shouldn't be another one.
flask at 120% drop chance pog
uber bosses are perfectly fine as they are right now, OP just got astronomically unlucky.
I don’t like this as it would drastically reduce accessibility to uber bosses. Imagine 100d per uber maven ATTEMPT.
no shot progenesis is 12% drop rate
It seems about right for me.
Source: did 700+ Uber mavens this league.
You got 84 progenesis flasks?
Sadly I haven't kept a record of my runs
There is another uber maven post with 800 uber mavens and 100 flask drops. So 12% is actually very reasonable, it’s just OP being unlucky AF
Isn’t it weird though, if bossing is so bad now then why wouldn’t the cost of doing the boss go down to compensate. I think when everyone catches on that bossing has worse loot then the opening costs for the boss will drop as the demand for doing it drops too. It’s new changes and uncertain right now, prices of boss opening should change in the future to reflect drops.
No because people are bad at estimating probability, variance and EV.
Progenesis is Maven's most "common" item that's profitable (compared to awakened enlighten etc.), and it's looking like it has 1/8 drop rate based on others report.
If you're buying fragments are 2 div each (10 div entry free), and Progenesis is selling for 80 div (70d profit), your EV from progenesis drops alone is 0.
So you can see how easy it is for Uber Maven to become unprofitable, if you're relying on an average luck, just to break even.
You just said your EV is 0 for progenesis alone so the rest of the drop table makes it profitable.
Well you’re basically breaking even from Progenesis alone, and praying you get a big awakened gem to profit. At which point why are you even doing Uber Maven since regular Maven is the same thing
In theory u can always get jackpot on uber with awakened enhance/enlighten/empower.
but regular maven is literally not the same thing? you cant get woke exceptional gems there
Normal maven is not the same as Uber lol. Normal maven is less profit yet more consistent than Uber
Same with all gambling..maybe..just maybe you win the next game..maybe even twice in a row, what if its thrice in a row..wow..you are rich now 🤭
The prices of invitations and of the loot kinda stabilise, but it's just completely unfun.
And something being unfun should get GGG's attention.
I'm confused, you're making the decision to overpay invites, how is that gggs fault?
The way you have to kill an uber dozens and dozens of time to maybe get a good piece of loot is unfun. You've read something I didnt say.
Don't do it if it's not for you. I know exactly what I read. Maybe go play something you find fun.
If the drops are low, but the demand for boss items is high, the prices would go up, not down. The harder the items are to get, the more expensive those items become, and so the ticket to those items increase. I find it wierd that you can farm many of those "boss exclusive" unique items as div cards in t17 maps, like watchers eye and progenesis, and that is also where you farm the best T16 div cards, basically pulling all exclusive content into t17 maps. At least scarabs are not also farmed in t17 maps, otherwise what would the point be in doing anything except t17 maps..
Got bad news for ya....theres a more scarabs mod implicit in t17 maps. So yes t17 is where everythings at rn
The dropped rare(rare uniques) items would go up but the cost of running them would stabilise to the point of just above money per average run. It’s a player driven economy so it will fix itself soon. The drop rates aren’t fully known by the masses right now and when they are the price will fit.
The prices are also changing a lot.
No they won't because there's going to be a gambling tax applied. Mageblood cards are worth more than a mageblood itself. The same applies to uber bossing
Really? I knew it was true for the mirror card, but I remember 5 Apothecaries being within range of a single MB
There is no progenesis div card. And Watchers eye drops from regular Uber elder too, with a 35% drop rate to boot, its not exactly rare.
Theres no card for progenesis, but its exists in valdo maps reward pool which makes GGG decision to remove some boss drops from divcards - items existing without boss being killed in league - silly. I guess design decisions get thrown out of the window when theres 400+$ supporter pack involved.
im literally farming scarabs in t17s as its a lot better than t16s lol
Oh boy... I have some bad news for you but just today alone saw 3 videos in this subreddit about farming Scarabs in T17s... not to mention that's been the to-go way of farming them for 2 weeks already.
I think that's true to an extent, but there will always be some amount of "extra" demand for boss fragments driven by people wanting to test their character's strength, grind challenges, or just see if they can get a lucky drop or two.
There's just so much wrong with economy this league. The reality is the Maven's price on paper should be pretty much compensated by Progenesis price and then you profit from other drops like awakened gems, top rolled Progenesis, good Impossible Escapes and maybe Awakened Empower if you're lucky. In reality the price of fragments is so crazy that if you're fucked by luck like me and first drop a flask after 32 tries and then no flask for 43+ tries then you're quitting the league. You need like 10 mirror investment for this to be surely profitable and I'm not exaggerating.
I basically only remember times when bossing was sup-bar and it lagged behind doing a decent mapping strat. However I didn't ever really super focus on bossing and skipped a lot of Leagues in the last couple years. So I might just be really off.
The only thing that comes to mind to give this League the fault for is that perhaps the boss entries are in too low supply. But even then, it remains true that bossers are overpaying for entries and perhaps there's too many people bossing.
The better way to do things is probably to just mainly give unique shards on boss kills and reserve the full drop as a super jackpot, i.e. 1/20 of a progenesis always drops (be it div card or whatever), and the more common loot drops alongside it. With a 1 in 50 chance to get the full flask drop or something. Idk how bossers would feel about this though - it'd make sense to me for bossing to be a pretty good and stable profit, but GGG makes it a gamba and I assume people who do it League after League enjoy the gamba(?)
But the probably more important part is for bosses just being too easy (in SC), so there's nothing special about nuking down a boss. From that perspective, it makes sense that boss loot is less profit than mapping. Doesn't have to be a gamba, but I feel like some bossers don't care too much about the money and they'll keep buying entries at a dumb price because they indeed do like the gamba. And that I'd assume is the more important reason as to why bosses aren't lucrative. People who lowkey don't care about the avg profit and want to do gambas buy them. Also - you get a winning streak, you may keep buying. Even when it turns unprofitable.
All in all idk, GGG should listen to bosser feedback, yea. But for the most part, the bossing economy being shit is the players being dumb.
Not sure, i’ve farmed ubers every league since release and don’t have a problem money wise, I just adjust what bosses I do depending on the economy. The Maven problem is her entry cost is a meme, I ain’t gonna farm that. I’ve ran a couple dozen but that was purely for a gamble. However, other uber bosses are very easy to make pretty stupid money.
Hasn't it mostly been feared or bust for a while?
Eater/Exarch are super gamba due to jewels. Maven is super gamba due to Gems and - depending on economy - flask.
Elders I assume are somewhat consistent but also aren't big profits(?), Chayuubi I assume is a loss or tiny gain without Feared most times. Sirus I imagine can be really good early or when Crown is popular, but gamba outside of that. Cortex hasn't been a worthwhile farm in a while without feared as well(?)
All I see is Feared as being the overall best, U Elder or UU Elder as a more consistent farm, and the other ones are for a big gamba unless economy really really favors them.
That about right? If so, I'd stick to my point that bossing is mostly a gamba fiesta. If someone comes around with a "results from 100 X pinnacle boss" I expect it to be either a super bust or a super gain. They just do have those swings. And they're also vulnerable to someone going "okay, time to farm some woke enlightens, liquidating 5m for day 1 for Maven entries right here right now" and heavily impacting the market. Because their profit calc will include a woke enlighten, unless they give up before getting it or actually go broke doing it (which at that # is unlikely).
I really just don't see an angle on which to blame GGG. Like, looking at the graphs - Progenesis seems to have rather low demand for the past week or so, going from 100d to 70d in 4 days. (19th to 23rd)
Same time, Fragments only dropped around 10% from 235ish to 215ish.
This is tied to divines for the most part > they went 140ish to 100ish. So more or less, Fragments seem to be less tied to divine price, Progenesis is tied to them a lot. So Divines got cheaper, entries stayed the same, and people didn't bump up their prices on Progenesis.
So the first hypothesis about less demand might not be true, it might just be that the listings at 70d have become too cheap. But that's just something people will have to get used to, probably. If t17s stick around as currency sinks, and divines are likely to devalue mid league, then you'll have to adjust your big ticket items which were priced in divines to counteract their deflation (or the inflation of chaos orbs, however you wanna spin it).
But that's an economy thing and people catching onto that rather slowly. Doesn't really have much to do with Bossing per se imo.
What other Uber bosses you been doing? I’ve been a big Uber sirus fan, did 500 last league but they butchered my boy. Uber and non Uber seem absolutely shit now
They removed the only tuning lever ubers had, that is, invitation affixes.
Maybe(and I shudder to think) allow people to alch their fragments so that you can pump the Ubers with up to 40 mods.
Just farm your own fragments and don’t be buying fragment at brain dead prices. It’s like how mageblood cards are more expensive than the mageblood itself. At some point you’re just paying for a gambling fee.
The same thing happened to the guy who ran 100+ Uber Mavens and made 4.9 div profit per Uber Maven. Barely any profit when he was bull buying fragments at 2.2 div. Insane profit when he bought fragments at 1.7-1.9
If farming fragments is mandatory to make it profitable, you should just farm the fragments instead of trying it no? Uber Maven is truly disgusting rn because dry streaks are absolutely destroying you and with 10% Progenesis drop rate, it will inevitably have some gamblers tax included into price of fragments. It's insane for me that Sirus has no Awakened gems in his loot table because it would alleviate the issue ever so slightly.
Progenesis gonna be a mirror soon 😆
Actually, the price is still trending downwards, even if only slightly.
It used to be significantly more expensive after the initial divine printing strategies that were patched out.
Last league on the ps it was 180 divines.
Top rolled ones peaked at like 280 on PC (mirrors were 1200+ tho)
True but i think they just stay expensive cuz there always a chance of hitting big lol
The price of regular invitations are way down because they can't run over versions. I used to be able to get a couple div off of just two or three guardian/elder Slayer/etc invitations on just a writ. Now it's what, 60c?
Guardian maps are so low value.
Uber fragments should hold a base amount of value just by virtue of where they drop, though. Like if 100 people want to only run Uber Maven, that means 500 fragments every 5-10 minutes are getting burned. That means there's gotta be a few thousand people farming fragments for trade to support that, and t17s have a pretty drastic barrier to entry compared to previous fragments, not even considering the cost of the map itself, which people will run for other reasons than to bulk sell fragments, so the cost is a factor because t17s can be profitable otherwise. You're more likely to see the price of chase boss drops go up rather than the price of the fragments go down, is what I'm saying.
That's pretty much what has already happened though. Abomination was a massively spammed map because boss rushing for reality fragments was so profitable. Now that the barrel strategy was released, more people have gone to fortress though
Right, so my point wasn't that this is some future thing- This is happening now. The prices are relatively stable and they will (probably) stay that way as more people acquire t17 capable characters and people naturally churn out of the league. The supply should remain fairly constant simply because there will never be enough people farming t17s for it to become a supply surplus- Until the boss rushers decide it's not worth it to farm, then it will drop the price, until enough of them decide the price is low enough, and the cycle repeats. You don't have general access to it like Divine or Chaos orbs and there's supply coming in from the entire community, you have a very, very small subset, less than 5% of the playerbase in endgame, that actually provide the fragments because of the gearing requirements.
Have you seen this post? https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1carcvh/loot_from_817_uber_maven_62_mirror_profit_and_400/ Maybe that's why it's not as profitable anymore.
Posts like that would certainly have an impact on the fragment price.
The top comment in there is literally this thread.
The prices are like that because people sell challenges
challenges have barely any impact on the price.
Ultimatum last League tho...
99% of gamblers quit right before the big win
haha, there's only one way to know if Progenesis is in the next set of fragments
I agree, bossing is in a very lame state right now. They have been like that for a while and I hope something changes. Bossing should be profitable for good players, not a slot machine where you can just lose money bossing... it's such a weird concept to kill bosses in a video game and actively lose money. I really don't understand it.
It's weird how they keep changing it for the worse too. They did a huge overhaul this league and everything about bossing got even worse than it already was.
Their design choices dosent matter as long as they keep boss drops in valdo pools. Whole idea with div card changes was to stop boss items existing without actually boss being killed. But we still had progenesis on the market without Uber Maven even being attempted.
I guess design dosent matter when theres 400+$ pack involved. Same with voidborn reliquary keys.
How do we know that was the idea behind the change? The change itself doesn't indicate as much, or they would have made boss drop div cards come exclusively from bosses. It was just a nerf to stacked decks.
Interview with mark.
it was literally a positive change and made bossing not only better, but also more approachable for the average player.
last league you had to gamble 4 div entry for a 2% drop (progenesis) now you gamble 8 div for a 12% drop (progenesis again)
theres literally no difference.
It was like that before the changes as well though. I always do bosses because I just enjoy it, but some leagues I just go broke on it while in other leagues I get insanely rich. I'm not defending it, just saying that it's been like that for years. Selling bossing fragments is a more consistent kind of income.
I've always killed bosses as I find frags and it's been great extra income
It's always a gamble. Some times you'll get rich, some times you would have been better off selling fragments. Last couple of leagues I got obscenely wealthy of bossing, this one I have not found a drop worth more than 30c. I could have sold some Watchers Eye's unidentified for good money though, but I identified them all.
Oh for sure, no way I could sell unidentified!
I did 38 shapers until I dropped a single flask
I did like 70 shapers it was like the 5th shaper i got dying sun, and never seen it after that. Got 4 orb of dominance also. I wonder what are the odds
I did 2 shapers so far and I got Dying Sun on my second try. I almost just banked it never to look again because usually the prices are super low. Was shocked at the prices. Didn't realize it was that rare because of the boss changes.
Has GGG ever commented on why they don't do raid-style content? I think the invitation model where you just go straight to the boss is not economically viable. The ratio of time to do the invitation to time to farm the invitation is too low, so inevitably someone is just going to drive invitation prices up to breakeven. It worked in a simpler era when nobody tracked divs/hr so this logic never really manifested itself, but those days are long gone.
If the invitations themselves took longer to run, and prevented hyper-efficient glass cannons by just throwing more challenges at them that require a better rounded build, invitations wouldn't instantly reach equilibrium at drop cost * drop probability. Right now the way they prevent the equilibrium is basically just gambling, make the drops super rare so there's more variance and all of the sudden long-term div/hr becomes irrelevant
I mean, Shaper is kind of like that
What do you mean by this? If you mean an area you have to fight through to get to the boss fight, you're describing T17s
raids are more of a curated experience than random rares that are harder than the boss.
the only thing that really defines raids in games I've played is that they require a large amount of people
I think the issue they are highlighting is you can just spam the bosses in very short times so a dedicated bosser churns through a lot of fragments. Supply is low since bossing has a lower barrier to entry than t17.
The boss itself is a pure dps race so people who have no business doing pinnacle content, can in fact do it with pure dps build.
I think he means a fight that looks like a mmo raid boss fight... Whatever that means, because I don't actually play MMOs to know.
I think the biggest problem with having proper balancing of pinnacle content is either rares are too weak on average or you can find some archnemesis modifiers that destroy you and rares that are in fact more dangerous than bosses. And bosses are hard to balance without throwing in random shit
In general PoE isn't conductive to using the full potential of bosses. They have to rely on gimmicks to make them challenging. just jacking up the numbers overall makes some too rng unless you're Ben level of cracked and just matrix dodge everything with pure movement. And rares don't even have real clear animations you can outplay. So it's not clear how you can curate the experience to achieve a good balance over the whole raid
The biggest limitation is that they have very bad animation rigs so they can't really add mobs with custom animations, especially melee, so they can just throw what they already have at us. A curated raid where everything is tuned properly is not really achievable without a big amount of work for limited rewards
PoE2 might achieve a better balance of difficulty between bosses, monster packs and adds since they have way better rigs, at least for humanoids and a certain amount of monster shapes, and can add interestimg abilities at the common to rare level
Tbh its fine.
Ppl are already whining about not being able to do ubers.
If they were also super profitable theyd cry harder. I think they should be there as pinnacle of progression that you do for the fun of the fight when other shit is trivial.
If you wanna make money bossing you need to sell the kills to ppl.
Okay but (I admit this is second hand knowledge as I haven't had a lot of time this league), it seems like most people say T17s are harder than Ubers, which goes back to the question of what's the point of doing Ubers
Thats mainly because they juice the everliving shit out of them via back to basics.
And because t17s are a design failure as a whole
Regular ass t17s with no juice and running niko/shrines to make it easier are definitely not as hard as ubers
T17's are really freaking annoying to run. Mainly because GGG, in their infinite wisdom, added a ton of modifiers previously only found in Valdo's maps, which is optional content, to T17's, which they implicitly stated to be a part of a character's progression (gateway to ubers). And note that at lot of these are affected by Map Modifier Effect on your Atlas.
I run a ET Trickster (Suppress Cap, Res Cap, 88% Chance to Avoid, 2.3k HP and 1.9k ES) and here's a small sampling of the mods I had to avoid:
Player has 50% Less Defences
Rares and Uniques are in Union of Souls
Monsters have increased Attack/Movement/Cast Speed
Monsters have increased Area of Effect (this one's particularly bad because it affects bosses as well. Their AoE attacks now cover the entire arena)
Cannot deal ANY damage for 4 seconds every 10 seconds
Less Action Speed for Each Action Performed Recently
Cannot Regenerate Energy Shield
Cannot Regenerate Life, Mana, or Energy Shield
Less Regen
And these are just the singular auto-avoids. If some combination of "Monsters have 100% Chance to Suppress" and extra resistance, that's also an avoid. AND ALL THAT, on top of the Lantern. There's a reason I Vermin and Go'd so I can finish the Challenge in a timely manner.
Do you not take one step ahead?
you don't remember the days of killing mephisto 30k times or baal 50k times or pindle runs?
that is the precedence
I've never played the old diablo games, did you lose money doing those? Or could you just kill that guy for free?