In the Hack’n’Slay Path of Exile (Steam), strange things are happening since developer Grinding Gear Games tweaked the loot system with patch 3.1.9: Players have found a way to optimize it. But it looks almost grotesque: Players clear the maps as quickly as possible to spawn certain enemies. But when the loot goblins appear, the players don’t kill them themselves, no. They call in the “Culling Specialist”.
What is the situation?
- Path of Exile has long been an outstandingly well-reviewed Hack’n’Slay on Steam – it was considered the “better version of Diablo 3” and was set to become a serious competitor for Diablo 4 with a big expansion, Path of Exile 2.
- But due to a series of changes, Steam reviews have now plummeted. From 87% it has dropped to 26%.
- Players complained: The game has become much harder, but the mobs are now being stingy with loot.
What is the trick now? The site PCGameN describes the new circumstances under which players ensure maximum loot:
- “Normal mobs” in Path of Exile practically drop no items anymore and are ruthlessly crushed – with an optimized build. Players design their characters to clear as many maps in a short time as possible.
- It’s all about bringing certain mobs to spawn. The community calls them “Loot Goblins”: They are “god touched enemies” according to the new system “Archnemesis”. These overpowered versions of normal enemies have a chance to drop especially valuable and much loot.
However, players do not kill these beings themselves, but invite in specialists, the “Magic Find Cullers”, who take over the kill.
Players build almost useless heroes with extremely high “Magic Find” values
What kind of specialists are these? “Magic Find Cullers” are people who have geared their equipment for two item stats:
- One value increases the rarity of found items
- Another value increases the number of found items
This is summarized under the term “Magic Find”, a value known from Diablo.
The “Magic Culler” has geared their equipment to maximize practically only these two values and is therefore relatively useless otherwise.
But they use the ability “Culling Strike” to kill enemies with under 10% health points. They are thus only there to join a game and wait until the loot goblin drops under 10%, to then deliver the killing blow.
The actual player, meanwhile, optimizes their build to clear as many maps as possible in the shortest time, hoping that finally this loot goblin will show up.
New meta apparently creates a poor gaming experience
How is the mood currently? Not so great.
A player wrote on reddit that they finally found the first loot goblin, but it was standing in a poison puddle and therefore couldn’t be killed. The player tried it 6 times and it brought nothing. At the thought of now having to kill another 300,000 mobs to spawn one, they had enough. They would rather watch Netflix.
However, if they succeed in killing such a creature, huge loot fountains erupt.
The loot system is an extremely important part of any game. If that fails, games quickly go down the drain.
An example of how developers suffer from a weak loot system can be seen here:
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