I have over 10,000 hours in POE1 and reached almost level 98 in POE2, reaching 97 in poe 2 is like reaching 100 in poe 1. The endgame in POE 2 is barren.

The only good juicing strategy is running breach on delirious maps and they reduce the rewards further with every patch. I think they may even be silently reducing the rewards of breach juicing between patches without saying it.

To set up the strategy, you have to clear 10-20 junk maps to scout out a zone with 5-7 overlapping towers. Then you have to run another 20+ junk maps to set up the towers.

Once you have all the towers cleared, you put in breach tablets which have the mod which says 18-20% increased quantity of items dropped. This adds breaches to remaining maps within the radius and adds quantity of items to the map, overlapping towers stack. This is the only way to get reasonable way to get increased quantity of items on a map. You can get 20% increased quantity of items dropped on a map item as a prefix or you can get 100-400% increased quantity by stacking quant towers. I suspect this will nerfed in the future.

Map item crafting in POE 1 is logical. Every prefix and suffix in POE 1 both increases the amount of loot dropped and makes the map more difficult. The more mods a map item has, the more difficult and rewarding it is. It is a simple rule, more difficult = more rewarding.

In POE 2, map item crafting is dogwater. In POE 2, rewards and difficulty are separated into prefix and suffix. Prefixes are rewards and suffixes a difficulty. Suffixes also increase quantity of more map items dropping but it doesn’t matter because I still get like 5+ t15 waystones every juiced map, even with 0 suffixes on the map. This means that prefixes matter and suffixes do not matter. There are only 2 good prefix map modifiers, “increased number of rare monsters” and “increased rarity of dropped items”. Rare monsters are the only monster that drops good loot, magic monsters are mid. Increased rarity of items on the map mod is multiplicative with rarity mod on your gear, not additive. (This was proven to be true by reducing character item rarity to 0 with ventor’s ring and then running a rarity map, you get 0 currency because multiply by 0). It is important to have high item rarity in POE 2 because item rarity affects the tier currency orb drops, unlike in POE 1 where it only affects gear rarity. High rarity means more exalted orb and divine orb drops.

Here is how I craft my waystones in POE 2. I start with a quad tab full of t15 waystones (map item in POE 2), that is 576 x t15 waystone. I alchemy orb all the normal waystones and augment/regal all the magic waystones, so that all of the waystones are rare. Then I regex search for map mods which I can not run such as burning ground and I vendor those, which is about 5% of the waystones. Then I regex search for waystones which have either of the 2 good prefix (rarity, rare monsters). I exalted orb those waystones until they have 3 prefixes. If a waystone has both good prefixes then I use it for a delirium anointed breach map. If a waystone has 3 prefixes and increased rarity, I set it aside to run on junk zones. If a waystone has 3 prefixes and none of the prefix is item rarity, then I vendor it. If a waystone has 1 prefix, then I exalted orb it to have a second prefix. If a waystone has 2 prefixes and neither prefix is rarity or rare monsters, then I vendor it. Around 70-80% of t15 waystones I sell to the vendor because they’re worthless and not worth the time running them.

So you do all that and you open your juiced breach map and there’s a 78% the map will only have 1 breach, 15% chance for 2 breaches, 5% chance for 4 breaches, and 2% chance for 11 breaches. In POE 1, you could force spawn multiple breaches in every map. 1 breach per map feels pretty bad.