Path of Exile 2 players grew increasingly desperate while developer Grinding Gear Games was away for the holidays, even resorting to apocryphal rites in hopes of summoning patches to address their early access woes. But for YouTuber Slipperyjim8, the interregnum provided just enough time to descend into a 16-day spite-fueled mania of data collection and monster killing to prove whether or not PoE 2's item rarity stat does, in fact, produce more loot.
The Slipperyjim saga began on December 23, when Jim uploaded a video called "Does Rarity give you more currency drops?" The video was, itself, an offshoot of an earlier investigation of whether Waystone rarity affects loot amounts, spurred by a perception among PoE2 players that the item rarity stat—a stat that can appear on both items and map-generating Waystones to improve the drops from enemies—is overtuned. In the video, Jim explained that, while collecting loot data from 150 Waystone clears, he began having "doubts" about how the item rarity stat functions, particularly as it relates to currency items.
The numbers seemed to cause a small crisis of faith. Worse, Jim's commenters did the cruelest thing you can do to a spreadsheet-wielding man in a precarious state: They criticized his dataset. Jim, they noted, hadn't been considering Scrolls of Wisdom as a currency item—a classic blunder! I assume!
And he was going to do the same for 500 more. And then 500 more—repeating at progressively higher item rarity stat levels to prove, definitively, what exactly the stat was doing. "There's no information in this video! Go away. There's nothing useful here," Jim said, hexing his viewers as he peeled the tinfoil from his head. "I put this out because I need positive vibes and lots of support so that I can go in and farm another 500 monsters."
To paraphrase, Jim developed an intricate process of snapshotting rare monsters and recording their ensuing loot drops, which he'd completed 500 times at escalating levels of item rarity stat—except he only killed 300 at the last one, because he'd, you know, been doing it for 16 days.
"16 days? 16 days of my life," Jim said. "And now the Sun is up!" He'd then inserted a short interlude, during which he ventured outside to take in the air, his task complete, a plate of chicken nuggets in hand. Tragically, by setting the plate down to deliberately touch grass, Jim gave a nearby bird an opportunity to run off with his food. Man is too often destroyed by his labor, even as the work is finished.
So, what did Jim's data indicate? What did each meticulously recorded item and associated rarity, each pile and respective quantity of gold, each orb, map, shard, and prism—and every resulting chart—tell us? Does item rarity give better loot?
I mean, yeah.
As Jim had originally theorized, the item rarity stat doesn't produce more loot. Instead, it gives the loot that does drop a higher chance of being a better item. As you equip items with more loot rarity affixes, monsters will drop fewer gold piles, but each gold pile will contain more gold within it and the gold piles that otherwise would have dropped are instead converted into rarer currency items. Likewise, monsters will drop progressively more magic and rare items as your rarity stat increases.
Jim's overall assessment: "This shit's fine." His read is that the sense of item rarity being a busted stat is a product of players obsessively comparing themselves to others.
"The whole reason that people are like, 'Oh my god, rarity is so broken, Breach is so broken!' is because they're looking over the fence and they're like, 'Damn, that guy looks like he's getting a lot of money,'" Jim said. "That's not how you're supposed to play this game. You're supposed to just do whatever's fun."
