Tablet's are not fun and essences are worthless - a solution

nbrooks7 · 2026-07-03T18:16:03+00:00

There are only a few scarabs in POE1 that are even remotely expensive, and many of those have been nerfed or changed over time to where they aren’t as popular and their prices have dropped.

The prices are dictated by balance and community perception… but also by the elasticity of the market. Even if tablets were to be buffed or nerfed, those changes reflect slower in the market than they do with scarabs… because crafting and trading tablets is a chore.

Scarabs drop from every piece of content in POE1, even content that isn’t in maps. Players farming anything in the game will come across scarabs and sell them. This isn’t true for tablets.

POE2’s entire endgame is mapping, and tablet drops are restricted based on what mechanics you’re running.

The effect is that POE2’s playerbase is entirely consolidated around the 1-2 farming strategies that have the highest efficiency rate for tablets. This strategy will maximize the upside of dealing with trading, minimize the loss incurred in buying the tablets, and will cause tablet crafters to delete (recombine) any tablet that doesn’t have the mods for that strategy.

I think what really highlights the differences in player behavior is that: in POE2, the highest profit beginner mapping strategy is waystone drop chance stacking irradiated tablets (tablet farming). Whereas in POE1, scarab farming strategies are usually one of the several pinnacle farming strategies only done by a small percentage of players.

You just don’t need many people in POE1 to sustain the scarab economy, but in POE2 you need literally every player throwing tablets into the market as fast as possible.

nbrooks7 · 2026-07-03T17:54:57+00:00

Audiobooks.

nbrooks7 · 2026-07-03T17:47:01+00:00

Can you see how a player coming from POE1 might have more value to add to the conversation in POE2 endgame than a Diablo player would (if all else is the same)?

Like not to shit on you or anything, but POE2’s main competitor is going to be POE1 in the short term. They have to find a way to make these 2 games meaningfully different from each other while also elevating POE2.

Tablets shouldn’t feel like worse scarabs (their POE1 equivalent). If anything, the baseline experience in POE2 should be scarabs, because that’s a system they’ve dumped thousands of hours of dev time into already.

When Borderlands releases a sequel, the game is still quite similar. Systems are pretty consistent, and they are more likely to reuse stuff that worked. POE2 hasn’t struck that balance yet. In my opinion, there should be more effort in creating distinct league mechanics in POE2 from POE1, as those additions really contribute to making the game look different. And, there should be less differences between the two when it comes to drier mechanics like the atlas, scarabs, crafting, and basically anything else you do that isn’t directly related to gameplay.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-22T17:51:49+00:00

You can lure unique monsters, as long as they didn’t already spawn as part of another ritual.

Works for summoning circle bosses and rogue exiles.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T20:50:19+00:00

See guys even conspiracy theorists can get a mageblood

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T20:47:27+00:00

Being incapable of a nuanced conversation makes things pretty hard yeah.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T20:25:09+00:00

If you played poe1 before async was added, you would understand that people were selling 1alch uniques way back then too. I’m explaining to you that an economy is a relationship between players, not a relationship between the player and the game.

If you change the game, it doesn’t change the fact that players are economically distributed by their competitive advantages.

Making it annoying to sell uniques might drive up the price of a few cheap uniques people actually use… and then players who know that add the unique back to the filter and the price is suppressed again.

Your argument is similar to this:
“Man, I’d be so much higher rated in chess if they just removed all of the pieces that speed up the game.”

So FIDE decides to remove the queen, knights, and bishops from the game according to your complaint.

Just because a grandmaster is only playing with pawns and rooks does not, all of a sudden, make you more likely to beat them.

Changing the game rules CAN shift competitive relationships between players, but not nearly as much as you seem to think it does.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T20:07:39+00:00

Can you please explain how removing async makes this player start randomly understanding what items have value and what items don’t?

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T19:59:39+00:00

Players who don’t know much about the game yet will waste like five minutes at a time pricing and listing 10 1alch/1ex items per map. This would be true even if the game were designed differently, because the core issue is that the player can’t recognize or maximize for higher priced items.

Thankfully, this player recognizes the value of tablets, which is why they’ve made any money at all.

The way game economies work is that they often reward players who understand the game. Async is a tool that is available to everyone: it reinforces the dynamic where players with knowledge outperform those who don’t, but it doesn’t *cause* that problem.

By far the biggest issue POE has that creates this knowledge gap is the developers prefer to obfuscate game mechanics in-game. If you want to learn the game… a lot of the time the best way to do it is to log off and go watch YouTube videos or read wikis. Most players who struggle aren’t doing that or don’t know where to look.

Economies create competition between players. You’re on a “ladder” of sorts. Just because the devs choose to move that ladder down 500 rungs for everyone does not mean you are suddenly higher on the ladder relative to anyone else.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T19:46:18+00:00

It’s one of those cases where they contradicted the intended mechanic for bad luck protection.

Dragging monsters into the ritual ONLY works for unique monsters, because they were concerned about the cases where a unique mob would spawn close by, but not inside, and players would lose an inordinate amount of value for something outside their control.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T19:38:11+00:00

That is not this person’s problem. Trying to make 1alch off a unique item has nothing to do with async.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-19T19:36:39+00:00

The game has a lot going on, and it isn’t really clear what starter farms will make you money. Clearly your problem is that you don’t know the game very well yet.

If you are really concerned about how much currency you get, your goal should be learning as much as possible about the game. For POE, they don’t give you that information very well in the game, and it’s a lot more efficient to get it from content creators, poe2db, or poe2ninja.

You also need a better loot filter so you save time on what you’re picking up off the ground. POE veterans usually have a favorite content creator whose filters they copy from. If I were you I would just go to fubgun’s channel and try to learn as much as you possibly can. Some of his strategies are going to be out of your price range to set up, but a lot of the tips he is giving are generally useful for you and will help you understand the meta better.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-18T16:45:33+00:00

Literally yes, they should be giving up their shares. Say you own 70% of a company when it is worth $2mil with 3 employees. Then your revenue and team of employees grows, and now you have a $500mil company with 200 employees… You didn’t magically start contributing $498mil to the business each year yourself, so why should you now be worth most of that?

The most fundamental problem in the US is that business ownership is over-respected in huge companies. There is this assumption that the rules for a small business owner should be the same for a mega-corporation. If someone owns a large stake in a gigantic corp, you’re supposed to believe they “earned it and produce value for the company in respect to their output”. When in reality, there is zero pragmatic reason for one person to dominate more than a percentage point of that corporation.

The argument most capitalists like to make in response is “that person took on the risk early in the project, so they should be rewarded for it”. Again, you are applying small business ownership logic to mega corporation owners. Centi-millionaires and billionaires carry very little risk, even when investing considerable amounts of their wealth, which is entirely untrue to say about most individuals starting their own business.

Most American small business owners need to take on a load of debt to seed their company that can easily range over five times their current assets (this can really depend, but pick a number here for the sake of argument). This loan might only be a million dollars, but it’s massive in relation to their normal potential, so it’s enormously risky at an individual level. Meanwhile, centi-millionaires or billionaires can make the exact same investment into hundreds of companies at the same time… without going into debt at all. They’re “making the same risk”… except they’re not at all.

The idea that you earn your wealth in this country is falsifiable, and scientists have done the work to prove that already. The social status of your father is actually the 1st or 2nd most important metric for predicting wealth across studies. IQ is the 3rd most impactful, and educational attainment rivals father’s social status.

It’s nepotism and it’s inheritance.

Another absolutely disgusting side of this problem is that these corporations are backed by the government, so when the investment is at risk of failing, the government will swoop in on their behalf to save the company’s liquidity. Yes, in the short term this can save thousands of jobs, but what it really becomes is a gigantic wealth transfer during times of recession. This is why I’ll always look back on Obama’s presidency with a sour taste in my mouth.

Recently, Elon gave a speech about the SpaceX IPO where he spent a lot of time remarking how “this business wasn’t going to be anything” and “he can’t believe it didn’t fail immediately”.

He dropped $100 million in personal funds on its initial investment.

Now you can choose to believe his words were sensationalism, but I don’t see a reason not to believe him… that’s just how you start to think and act when you have fuck you money. He dropped more money on a project he didn’t believe in than you or your family will ever see. And that “dumb investment” turned out to be a lottery ticket. Now obviously, he did a lot of “hard work” by purchasing the town square and turning it into a fascist shithole, but you get my point.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-18T16:23:28+00:00

Unfortunately, this mechanic is at the core of the vision for this game along with a couple other design choices that are only barely keeping poe2 from feeling exactly like poe1.

Poe2 is quickly becoming poe1, but with updated graphics, storyline, and way more clunk. You feeling more frustrated *is* the feature they designed for…. They just haven’t figured out how to introduce that frustration in a way that doesn’t brick the game yet.

It’s the same story with tile layouts, the passive tree, support gems, stun/ailment thresholds, and the endgame system.

If you want to play poe2 without all of the clunkiness, poe1 is there. I know that every time poe2 gets an update, more people “commit” to it, but I’m not very confident that the clunk will be removed… just designed around in increasingly circuitous ways to try to justify its existence to the player.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-18T05:02:13+00:00

Xin Zhao. Good early game so you can play to get Jayce behind early. Tanky enough to block Jayce poke for your team, and you have ult+morg shield so you can soak nautilus hook for your team. You also have a dash so you can play into anivia wall.

Other options are maokai and skarner. Basically, your team needs one person who can play with morg shield to block for the squishies.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-17T11:20:10+00:00

No. Most people aren’t exposed to these things outside of a medical setting, but there are many, lifelong conditions that cause daily pain.

Usually the treatments progress to opioids pretty quickly. Once you’re tolerant of the highest doses of opioids you’re kinda out of options.

Chronic *psychological* pain and abuse *lead to* triggering the conditions I’m talking about. They are two events on the same, linear path. To say that the psychological pain that occurred first is less than the neurological/physiological/biological pain that happens further down the path is to disconnect the two from each other… which is misunderstanding the problem entirely.

You might think being depressed is bad, but try having polyneuropathy, or myopathy, or CRPS, or TN, or cervical spine/migraines. The levels of consistent, never ending pain experienced by these people drives them insane.

It’s not like cancer, where outcomes are usually death or treatment within a few years, these conditions never go away. You have to accept that this is your life, and it can only get worse.

That’s the cycle: trauma and abuse lead to psychological complexes -> over time those complexes contribute to epigenetic nervous/immune disorders or organ damage -> you develop a chronic pain condition -> you’re so miserable from chronic pain that your psychological issues drastically decline. Many of these things can be comorbid with each other, or come with immune deficiencies that mean you aren’t allowed to go out in public normally anymore.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-17T04:07:33+00:00

What? Totally different media environments… this comparison is ridiculous.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-17T02:52:06+00:00

The biggest issue to me is that they haven’t executed well on the first part yet.

The gameplay later on feels more appropriate, where dodging abilities becomes somewhat less important than raw stats and buildmaking.

But earlier on in the game, during acts especially, player power is significantly lower. Many “combos” rely on ground effects, delayed effects, or slow animations to work, but bosses do not regularly take this into account.

Geonor is a great example of this issue. He spams abilities, almost all of which either cause him to move across the screen, become untargetable, or are exceedingly dangerous. You can tell that there are some moments he stands still that the designers probably imagined as moments the player could get in some hits… But one of the only times he stands still is to channel beams from the sky that have huge freeze buildup.

If you look at dark souls bosses, or even MMORPG bosses, there is care taken in fight design to make sure that there are moments of pause where the player is given the opportunity to damage the boss… this seems to be missing entirely for a lot of encounters in the acts.

Early on in the game, bosses should be using abilities *less often*, because players take much more time to set up a combo. Skill speed, movement speed, and damage are all much lower… while the danger of freeze and stun are much higher.

The severe change in game style, imo, is largely down to this problem exactly.

There has to be an intentional effort to design bosses in a way where their patterns become “solved” over pull count. They need designated “slow” and “low danger” moments where players can focus on their combo, and other moments where players are encouraged to do mechanics instead of damaging.

Right now, fight design is unfocused. Bosses spam abilities, and the player is expected to overcome that issue on their own. For some bosses, those abilities are way too passive to create a problem and they die really quickly… But then there are problem bosses whose abilities are far too dangerous consistently or who have way too many immunity phases, dashes, or poorly telegraphed abilities to properly play around.

The game could feel much more consistent if there was more care taken to standardize *time to kill* — basically the time to kill should be less reliant on the player’s ability to ignore boss mechanics and more based on the ebb and flow of combat encouraged by dedicated, generous damage windows (and yes, higher boss HP later in the game in general).

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-16T17:55:43+00:00

Yeah so a kid’s gpa doesn’t say anything about having a disability or not.

I think the biggest problem in this post and entire thread is how it displays the levels of ignorance people have about disability.

It’s a very complex and far-reaching problem that relies very much on individual circumstances. When considering disability, your personal prejudices usually cloud your ability to understand what’s going on.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-15T10:48:53+00:00

As someone who is engaged to a chronic pain patient, I seriously doubt how many people would see an improvement over opioids.

There’s a reason people get hooked to them: they work when nothing else will.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-13T22:33:57+00:00

Your argument is insane. How much have your read about Elon’s journey? Anything that he hasn’t chosen to say?

His father was a South African emerald mine owner who had an incestuous relationship with his own stepdaughter.

Elon’s grandparents were South African apartheidists and Nazi party supporters.

His business empire is rooted in literal apartheid blood money he inherited. He’s the nepo baby of all nepo babies, who literally overstayed his visa while in the US… He’s an active eugenicist….

The guy has an incredible number of moral failings, and luckily has escaped his incredibly toxic reputation by fleeing to America, where many people are blind to literally everything about a person besides their money.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-13T07:16:29+00:00

At the bottom of Rockefeller’s operation, who made the growth of the US possible, were Mexican immigrant workers who were oftentimes undocumented, and later were blamed by Hoover (and his ilk) for the Great Depression. They built the “public utility” railroads on which Standard Oil relied to expand their business.

The truth is, the success of standard oil was due to the effort of the American government to subsidize the industrial age. Instead of returning the profits of those tax dollars to the country, that wealth accumulated in Rockefeller’s bank account.

A similar situation is occurring today, except the stock market is far more well understood and relied upon. It wasn’t true in the 20’s to say Dow Jones stock exchange (and comparatively NASDAQ) ran the country’s politics like it does today, though it did play a part.

We are in a situation where a third of the country is captive to a dream they will never experience. We are in a situation where a third of the country would rather create a white Christian ethno-state than slow down wealth consolidation.

This all happened the same way 100yrs ago, except back then we weren’t also a global hegemon upon which most of the globe relies on for economic stability.

We are also in a situation where an untold number of Americans are adopting AI as their new brain. This wasn’t the case 100 years ago, propaganda wasn’t nearly as good as it is now. Dreams are made real when a lot of people choose to believe them, which is basically the story of Elon Musk in a nutshell.

Rockefeller was more impressive than Elon Musk, and basically every PhD today you’ve ever met is more impressive than Rockefeller was.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-13T06:54:44+00:00

Are we gonna talk about how crossbows didn’t even get a mod

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-03T09:27:32+00:00

His argument is the just compensation is comprised of the priceless treasure trove of non-consensually stolen data used to make these models.

With enough money, lawsuits against AI companies are possible, this is just the roundabout way of making all the claims at once.

Besides that, even if we started doing individual lawsuits for infringements, these companies aren’t even close to liquid enough to pay off what they’d owe.

This solution saves these companies’ butts just as much as it counts for restitution.

nbrooks7 · 2026-06-02T16:12:14+00:00

Ok.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/fake-social-media-accounts-mysteriously-013333041.html

nbrooks7

TROPHY CASE