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Let's Find A Better Use for Sextants in Path of Exile

I'm glad that sextant blocking is no longer going to be a thing, but this isn't really what I had in mind when they're saying "Preventing the Sextant spam and extreme Sextant blocking was the one of the most requested change requests we received this year". To me it was more about "let's find a better use for sextants" rather than just simply not allowing people to abuse it...

1) Increases the wealth gap early on between players who abuse these mechanics and those that don't, effectively allowing those players to purchase chase uniques and rares at a higher value. Items are worth whatever they sell for, so if people can afford it and are willing to pay that much, then those items will sit at those values for longer. Fortunately this is economics and the aforementioned point is offset by...

2) Supply. More people running the loot pi?ata's that are sextanted maps will be rolling that RNG far more than those running regular maps (I don't know about that 3000% value that Chris proposed, but it certainly is a significant influx of items). This means a larger pool of your favourite chase items, meaning as a player that's walking through maps, you have access to insane items, that due to the supply, are easily affordable. That's great! However...

Number 1 allows players to amass the wealth early to buy the PoE items to accumulate and push the tougher maps harder. This in turn leads them to mass supply those Path of Exile items back into the market, making you're super exciting drops worthless in the now overpopulated market of "chase" items. You are now earning far less currency at a slower rate then what you could be in an "even playing field", making those top tier builds you may have wanted to try out, far more of a grind to reach. For your hardcore 10 hour a day player this is fine. But for those that can only manage 10 to 15 hours a week, this can really suck.

Finally, this whole change will make those infrequent sextant drops a bit more appetizing to actually use as your average player. Previously, if you weren't using sextants optimally, it was far more valuable to simply sell them off to a player that DID use them to optimize their atlas through sextant-blocking. Now the value of the sextants will drop to balance out their value, and create a lower margin of profit for those that wish to chain them all day every day (most likely for XP).

For what it's worth, my personal opinion is like yours; I'm not too phased one way or the other. However, I know I wasn't really using them much before where as now I might just add them on when mapping with friends just for a laugh.