Patch 0.2.0g News - The Big Loot Patch

This patch was deployed 30-Apr-2025 but failed and was rolled back, and is expected to go live 01-May-2025 (based on North American timezones)

Patch explainer on GGG site

This part is complex, here's GGG's wording which IMO is unclear. Very long quote.

Item Rarity

In order to control the items that monsters drop, they primarily have two stats added to them. Monster Item Quantity is a stat that increases the number of items that are dropped. Monster Item Rarity on the other hand determines how good the items are that drop.

In order to prevent too much item spam, in Path of Exile 2 we want to rely on Item Rarity more, and Item Quantity less. This means that the effect that Monster Item Rarity has on your item needs to be powerful, and noticeable. Currently we believe that this stat is not affecting drops enough.

For example, when a Wisp has possessed a monster, it gives the monster +2 drops and 300% more Monster Item Rarity. The rarity is further increased by each monster that the wisp affected as you were chasing it. This should in theory result in noticeably better item drops, but in practice it doesn't feel meaningful enough.

This is just one example, but this problem affects drops game wide, from all monsters and chests.

We are making some very significant changes to the way that Item Rarity affects the items you get. Here are some of the highlights:

• We modified the rarity value at which Normal Items no longer drop. This means that Unique Bosses will never drop Normal items except for a select few early in the game.
• We have halved the amount of "Rare Gold" drops. This means that if you roll a Rare item you get more Rare Equipment or Rare currency instead of gold. Rare Gold piles are now twice as large so you still get the same amount of gold as before on average.
• Gold, Magic Currency, Quality Currency, Flasks, Charms, and Runes are now much less likely to drop from monsters with high Item Rarity. These three changes generally result in around 20-30% more Rare Currency (Exalt, Alch, Regal, etc).
• Tier 2 Rares now drop 4x more often. Tiers 3 to 5 now drop 30% more often. The mods of Tiered rares have also been improved by cutting out more low level mods making them better on average than before.
• Tier 2 and higher Magic items now drop around 5x more often. The low level mod culling of Tiered Magics has been significantly improved with Tier 2 now culling 50% of the mod range, and improving from there. Tier 5 magic items will usually only roll the highest mod available for a given type. This means that Tiered Magic items should be a much better starting point for crafting or Recombination.

These changes significantly improve the effect that Item Rarity has on the quality of the items you receive. Overall you should see significantly better items when killing more challenging content.

One side effect of this change would have been to make Player Item Rarity that you get on mods on your gear more valuable also, which is not our intention. In order to counter that, we have reduced the effect that these mods have.

We have also lowered the Map Item Rarity mods on Maps as these were having too large of an effect after these changes. The overall effect of these mods will still be similar to before, but the displayed number is lower.

So what does this mean?

- Drops are MILES better on characters without 'Increased Item Rarity' as a player stat than they were before

- Each point of 'Increased Item Rarity' on your character helps LESS than it did before the patch

- Waystones (maps) having 'Increased Item Rarity' as a prefix mod helps LESS than it did before the patch

- Unidentified items with 'Tiers' on them are both more common and better than before the patch. This means you will get more rare items that are generically good, especially from rare and unique monsters.

IMPORTANT: Your loot filter will hide good items more often now as GGG have not yet allowed filters to differentiate 'Tier 2' and better unidentified rares from untiered ('Tier 1') rares.

Upon killing a rare or unique monster I recommend quickly tapping ALT to check if your filter is blocking out any T3-5 items.

These are negligible and mostly matter in Act 1 and 2. You'll get more rare items if you have awful luck on a run.

There are only minor direct changes to wisps but the rarity changes will have a big impact on these Wisp-enhanced monsters. Rares will drop loot that's notably better when Wisped... some of the time.

Mostly, T1 rare items will get upgraded to T2/T3/T4 rares ... which might be good. They often won't be.

Here's a very long patch note quote on GGG's changes:

Rare and Magic Chests

We didn't feel that Rare and Magic chests were exciting enough to find. Ideally each time you see one, you feel excited to open it.

In order to fix this, we made the following changes:

Magic chests have drastically increased Item Rarity and Quantity, and also guarantee at least a Magic item. They are approximately as rewarding as Rare chests were before.

Rare chests also have drastically increased Item Rarity and Quantity, and guarantee at least a Rare item.

In Cruel Difficulty chests get a further +50% more Item Quantity and Item Rarity, and +100% more in Endgame making them very powerful there.

We have changed the Map mods that increased the chance of finding Magic and Rare chests to instead add a fixed number of Magic or Rare chests.

We did need to lower the chance of these spawning, but you will still get a lot better items overall. This is especially true in Endgame where the number of rare / magic chests was lowered substantially, but the major increases in results from these chests more than make up for that.

Strongboxes

Strongboxes, as a baseline, have been increased to be equivalent to the new balance for Rare Chests. Specifically:

Strongboxes have increased Item Quantity and Item Rarity, guarantee a Rare item as well as getting a further +50% more Item Quantity and Item Rarity in Cruel, and +100% more in Endgame.

Researcher's Strongboxes will now have a much higher chance to drop Rare currency instead of Magic currency.

Reduced the variance in the number of items Strongboxes dropped. They should more consistently drop a good number of items.

Of course strongboxes also have mods that allow for further increasing Item Rarity. These mods were adjusted down for the same reason as the Map Item Rarity mods, they were having too much of an effect relative to other mods after the changes to Item Rarity more generally. They have the same effect as before, but show a lower value.

These changes are as yet untested by players.

There's not enough information here to say whether these will be too small to matter or big enough to change the entire game.

Delirium: Easier, better loot

Expedition: Better loot

Trials of the Sekhemas: Better end loot from the chests

Trials of Chaos: Rubbish loot replaced with middle tier currency often

That's the patch! It's a big lot of loot changes.