I'm a long time player of POE 1 and I just hit level 97 in POE 2. I have not had any problems with sustaining maps.

I suspect that you are not crafting your maps. To sustain maps, you have to invest in your maps. A general rule of Path of Exile is that the more currency you spend into your maps, the more rewards you get out of it. If you invest nothing into a map, you might not get anything back. Currently I'm investing up to a divine in value into my juiced maps and I get multiple divine orbs dropping in 1 maps, my highest was 4 raw divines and around 60 exalted orbs.

A waystone/map item has 6 mods, which is 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. The prefixes are loot rewards and the suffixes are difficulty and waystone quantity. You always want to have the map to have 3 prefixes and sometimes want it to have 3 suffixes. Suffixes will up the difficulty but give you more waystones back.

If you have a normal/white map, use alchemy orb to get 4 mods, then use 2 exalted orbs. You will find 2 more exalted orbs in the map. The cost sustains itself. If you have a magic map, augment to 2 mods and then regal for the 3rd, then exalted slam 3 times. If you reach a suffix that you can't run at any stage in this process, vendor the map for like 10k gold, you can gamble a ring at Alva.

The best 2 prefixes are "increased rare monsters" and "increased rarity of items found". If you get a t15 map with these 2 mods, people will pay upwards of 50 exalted orbs for it.

Once you have a map with 3 good prefixes, you can run it or you can craft it even further for more rewards. You can use a vaal orb on the map and it will either add more mods to the map, +/- tier of the map, change the map to all prefix or all suffix. All suffix is the worst outcome because it removes the prefix rewards. Second worst outcome is reduce tier. Extra mods and all prefix will give you extra rewards.

Another option for crafting your maps is to use "distilled emotions" fka oils. The 3 cheapest oils are Ire, Guilt, Greed. Ire gives increased magic monsters in the map, Guilt gives increase pack size, Greed gives increased Item Rarity. You can apply up to 3 oils to the map which will increase the map loot by ~25% and also make the map about ~25% more difficult. Guilt is probably the best one price wise for you. This will also make splinters drop in your maps that you can sell to recoup the costs of the oils. I currently use 3 Paranoia oils on my maps, which costs around 5 exalted orbs each.

I don't recommend corrupting oiled maps but it's possible if you are brave.

The next thing you can do is to utilize the towers on your atlas. You get these things called "precursor tablets" which you can put into the towers to buff your maps. I only use tablets which say "increased quantity of items dropped". You take the tablets that you already have and transmute + augment all of them for 2 mods. If it doesn't say "quantity of items dropped", then I put 3 to 1 in the reforge bench, until all of them have that modifier. I look for zones on my atlas which have 4+ towers close together so that the quantity stacks. Combined with the right atlas nodes, I've had maps with +300% quantity of items drop.

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Without increasing stones drops? That's crazy, you can put every map perk point in more waystones drops and they still don't drop enough. Though if bosses are to appear in 1/4th maps it might help.

Are you dying a lot in maps? I have no issues at all with map sustain, I'm filling up stash tabs with maps myself. Mark also said in the interview that people seem to have wildly different experiences with map sustain. There will be more map drops, though. That's part of the 30% more rewarding maps bit.

To expedition what? Calling it "crafting" is an insult to crafting in every similar game. Also they should first make expedition vendors to actually refresh sometimes instead of using very rare currency to do it.

The current expedition system is getting a buff this patch but in the future they said they will implement a new, more rewarding system for expedition.

Fuck the fucker, this is so petty and shitty change comparing to PoE1, PoE2 was supposed to be better than PoE1, not worse.

They said they want to adjust it so that it is less punishing to die, like reducing the exp loss. They're also adding multiple respawn attempts to pinnacle bosses. They don't want to budge on the 1 portal for normal maps, though, they want dying to matter.

They talk about increasing the difficulty of Pinnacle Bosses.

Motherfuckers

The way I understood it is they want to nerf op builds that melt bosses, not actually make bosses more difficult.

It seems you and I have had very different experiences with the game so far. I'm personally really excited after watching this interview.

Ah, got it. Thanks! I've been feeling a tinge in my thumb joint recently. I wonder if it's something similar from typing on my phone and playing my PS5 a lot.