Path of Exile ‘loot goblins’ shines a light on the woes of RPG magical discovery

Path of Exile “Loot Goblins” are currently the talk of the ARPG gaming community – a description for gamers who spend hours and hours farming with minimal rewards in search of a hugely profitable enemy. Many fans say this phenomenon, which has become the focus of many endgame games in the PoE 3.19 patch, is emblematic of both major problems with the magic-seeking system and lingering frustrations with Path of Path mods. Exile Archnemesis.

To put it in simple terms, “magic find” is a phrase Path of Exile players use to refer to the “increased rarity of found items” and “increased amount of found items” gear stats (though the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘quantity’ for clarity). The term is derived from the equivalent stat in Diablo and basically boils down to your chance of finding rare items and currencies. The higher your magic find, the more goodies you will get and the better likely it will be.

The Magic Find has long been a popular thing to build, because who doesn’t want more good loot to drop? However, you have to make sacrifices to include Magic Find in your build, as it takes up space on your gear. The more Magic Discovery you have, the weaker the rest of your build is likely to be – a fair trade-off, all things considered. However, this has recently combined with the recently introduced extra-difficult Archnemesis mods to dramatic effect.

A series of special Archnemesis modifiers called “god-touched” (each tied to a different god in Path of Exile’s pantheon) transform monsters into much more dangerous versions of their usual form, but with their dropped items converted into currency valuable and other rare end-game items such as cards and divination cards. These creatures can drop a wealth of high level PoE currency when defeated – and this is only exacerbated by defeating them using a character with a high Magical Seek stat.

So what does all this mean? Basically, Path of Exile players spend hours trying to spawn these precious monsters – clearing dozens or, in some cases, even hundreds of endgame cards to do so. To do this effectively, they use a build designed for high damage and fast map clear times, which means they’re probably not rolling around with a lot of magical finds. Instead, when they find the Special Enemy, they enlist the services of a monstrous mercenary known in the community as “MF Culler”.

The MF Cullers get their name from a build focused almost entirely on magical discovery – to the point where they’re almost useless for general map clearing – and the Culling Strike ability they use which allows them to instantly kill any enemy. with less than 10% health remaining (to compensate for their usual inability to fight). An MF Culler’s job is to show up just for the one God-touched enemy, wait for their health to dwindle, then blast them down in a shower of incredibly valuable rewards – so much so, in the end. , that it usually more than compensates for all the hours of prior grinding.

Some players who work in multiplayer groups include someone on an MF Culler build; others will hire one from the in-game chat or Discords as needed, usually handing over a percentage of their bounty in return for services rendered. However they go about it, however, the community seems to almost universally agree – spending hours and hours cultivating enemies who are extremely unlikely to drop anything worthwhile just to getting a big but very rare payday is an incredibly unsatisfying way to play.

A longtime PoE Reddit player said, “You might as well remove regular mobs from maps altogether, because you won’t find any of them. It’s really sad and annoying how years and years of a system we had where general mob loot felt good is now gone in favor of a few mobs leaving X expensive or whatever. Another says that after finally encountering their first god-touched rare after hours of farming and being unable to kill it, “I just quit the game and started watching Netflix. I don’t want to cultivate anymore, or even try to play.

At the other end of the scale, one particularly lucky player shared their loot – one of the largest posted on the subreddit so far – leaving players stunned by a single encounter losing “more currency than I know.” ‘wins in a whole league’. One new player even asked why the game’s usual “very positive” Steam user rating dropped to “mostly negative” in the recent reviews section. The responses reassured them that the majority of the game is still fun, and that “you’ll need several hundred hours even to recognize the issues.” For newcomers, the game is 100% dope and totally worth it.

Still, for a game like Path of Exile that has long been driven by its most dedicated fans and rich endgame experience, this kind of widespread dissatisfaction is certainly not going to be taken lightly. Grinding Gear Games hopes to win over Path of Exile fans with the upcoming 3.20 patch and the road to 4.0, when the game transitions to Path of Exile 2. In the meantime, the Diablo 4 release date is getting closer and closer. , then the competition for the title of the best RPG game on PC will probably be abundant in 2023.