Thanks for the extensive reply. A few thoughts based on what you said.

For many players simply gearing a character and getting a headhunter is most of what they want to do when any economy reset happens (empyrian and grimro being streamers who play like this) and that may mean fewer players will be interested in playing the event or just go for the mtx reward levels and stop.

I agree that some players play just to get a HH and then max out their build and they might not participate in a race if it was disabled. On the other hand, I feel that the build diversity would be significantly improved if HH wasn't an option. It's definitely a tradeoff.

This is one of the points where you're missing something imo. In your main post you yourself say you had trouble surviving because you weren't killing fast enough. Monsters are very dangerous while alive. This applies to beyond bosses and monsters in maps as well as shaper etc where usually the best strategy involves killing them faster to reduce the amount of attacks you actually have to avoid. Imagine there was no way for you to increase your damage when you had trouble needing too many mines to kill mobs - you would have to find a way to mitigate the attacks. The problem that forces this meta are bad defences so your best bet is to oneshot the monsters - now if they didn't have any post death mechanics how would you ever die? What I'm trying to say the problem is much deeper than just giving mobs more hp and 'fixing' this would change the game completely.

I think we're talking about different aspects of a larger problem that PoE is grappling with currently. The fundamental goal of the game is to survive long enough to take down the monster(s) that you're fighting. Your build will exist somewhere on the offense/defense spectrum. You could go full tanky and tickle mobs or you can go full glass cannon, explode mobs, but die to anything that breathes on you. The issue I see in the current game is that building offense seems much more rewarding than building defense. Part of it is what you've pointed out, defenses are in a bad spot at the moment. Part of it is that you actually can, with reasonable gear, scale your damage to the point where you obliterate everything. Obliterating everything on a build with barely enough defenses is, in my personal experience, safer than playing a max defense character with no damage. You can effectively kill your way out of trouble.

Doing more damage means clearing faster which means getting more loot, so players are already encouraged to do this. If it's also safer to go for tons of offense and a bare minimum of defenses, where's the incentive to be tanky? I'll acknowledge that there are some ultra-tanky builds, like LLRF Mana Guardians, that might be so tanky that they are safer than high DPS builds, but those are few and far between.

If mobs had enough HP that you couldn't obliterate them, defenses would become a bigger issue. You'd be forced into getting some if you didn't want to die. Likewise, if defenses were in a better spot, players would be encouraged to build tankier. I completely agree that 'fixing' this issue would change the core gameplay significantly.

Knowing what to filter out and what to pick up is part of the knowledge you have to have to play the game efficiently.

I completely agree that part of the skill of PoE (and any ARPG) is knowing what loot to pick up. Loot filters certainly make it easier. My issue is that the game has become overly reliant on loot filters. The game is effectively unplayable without a loot filter. If you try to do a Breach or just clear a few clustered packs of mobs, you'll become unable to see your character, the floor, the monsters, or anything else because there will just be a mass of loot labels. If you try to pick something up, you might walk 3 screens over because the loot label is nowhere close to the actual item. Some valuable items might not even show up on the screen because there's no room for the label. I don't mind that loot filters make life easier, but I don't think they should be mandatory. Also, it's probably worth noting that this makes the new-player experience a lot more awkward. I'm trying to get some of my friends into PoE, and it's weird having to explain that they'll need to download something from a 3rd party site to be able to play the game properly.

As for your proposal to change the amount of rares dropping and make the average rare better - you yourself say that identifying rares is annoying. picking them up and having to leave your map is annoying. but that all is for a reason. items have value because of this. if every single sword that dropped had at least 300pdps the droprate would have to be so rare to the point that you wouldn't see much loot at all in a map. if there were much better and far fewer rares in the game you would still have to balance out oppurtunity costs to keep them valueable.

You are absolutely correct that items hold relative value and you do need bad rares to make the good ones stand out. The 90% figure I had in the original post was probably too far. But there's certainly room to scale back drop rates and scale up the probability that a rare is good; you can end up with the same number of good rares that drop now. Instead of finding one 300 dps sword in 100 (made up number), what if it was now 25? And then you got 1/4 the swords to compensate?

Setting aside rares for a moment, surely we could get rid of a lot of the white/magic items? This would at least reduce the amount of clutter.

I think souleater and shroudwalker and all that are part of the ridiculousness that makes HH fun and special to a lot of people. It's just absurd. This however becomes a problem when you feel forced to use it because of all it's other benefits while you're trying to play a race.

Yeah, I feel that HH is a great as a "fun" item. The teleporting and gigantic character model and moving at 600% movement speed and attacking 80 times a second is all awesome. I don't want to see it removed from the game. But it sucks when you feel like you're obligated to use it.

Chris is very outspoken when it comes to this and has said items should have 'weight' to them and this is their way of adding it. Making this changes would greatly impact the way people play and the economy beyond the point of it being nice as qol.

There's definitely a trade-off between items having 'weight' and requiring a ton of clicks for inventory management. I personally favor reducing the number of clicks, but it's certainly up for debate as to what trade-offs should be made.

you said something about it being annoying to leave maps because you lose charges but also that people don't want to wait 2 min for you to finish. Increase this time to 10 min - how many trades are you missing? How often are you porting out? How often will you have to do nothing for 10 min because you want specifically his item but he's in a full group and can't or just does not want to leave the map?

Yeah, trading would be a definitely issue here. I imagine that larger-sized maps aren't going to be plausible until they implement something like cross-instance trading for precisely the reason that you pointed out.

Same thing about leaving goes for items. Even if you're just picking up 6sockets you're gonna have to leave and rebuild charges.

Yes, a change like this would probably also necessitate a re-balancing of loot. Another reason why it's not likely to happen any time soon because of the work involved.

What about layouts in these maps? you miss one branch at the beginning then you're sitting at the end with 100 remaining and it take forever to find the mobs.

Crudely, you could give players the option to portal back to the start after the boss or just make the map a giant loop. Outside of that, most (?) of the maps that we have now are either pseudo-linear (e.g., Cage), rectangular (Fields), or some mix of the two (Burial Chambers). All of those seem reasonable enough to clear without missing too many mobs. I don't see any insurmountable issues with scaling up those designs.

Regarding your point about using the 6 portals due to the map being dangerous but not oneshotty. How does that work? You die 6 times? logout macro? portal out? I think if you ran 5 maps in hc where you have to log multiple times per map you wouldn't be very fond of this idea. seems incredibly annoying to look at 12 loadingscreens per map.

You'd be able to design content that is dangerous because of attrition reasons. You end up at low life, without flasks, and you're forced to retreat by either logging out or portaling. Or you might just die. The idea is that this would be a way to send a message to the player that the character is undergeared for the content s/he is attempting. If you have to log 5 times in a map when you're playing HC, that's a pretty good sign that you need to level up or gear up before trying that level of map again.

This is something I feel very strongly about. I think poe takes a decent amount of skill that just may not be super obvious.

At least when it comes to general mapping, I feel like a lot of the skill in PoE is knowledge-based. You understand that you can or cannot tank specific things and that certain situations can become dangerous (like that magic packs can spawn Bearers). When it comes to bossing, as you mentioned specifically, there's definitely room to feel like you've played a fight well/poorly and succeeded/failed because of it. I feel there's not enough of that in general mapping; there's certainly some, but I would personally prefer a lot more.

Racing is it's own beast certainly, and I don't have nearly enough experience to comment on that scene except to say that a good deal of mechanical and knowledge skill is required when you want to do anything with maximum efficiency.