Path of Exile 2 numberlord spends 16 straight days killing rare monsters to prove that a stat that makes loot better makes better loot
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.
«Here's how I think it works: Rarity should make it so you don't get any more currency; the currency you do get has a higher chance of being more valuable,» Jim said. «That's how I assumed it worked. But based on just feeling, I don't know. I'm starting to be doubtful of that.»
Comparing the data he'd gathered while running Waystones at different rarity levels, his results seemed counterintuitive. As Jim crunched the numbers from 150 Waystone clears in real time, his data seemed to show that the item rarity stat was actually decreasing the amount of currency that dropped. «That's the complete opposite of how I assumed this worked,» Jim said.
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
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