Somewhere out there is a Path of Exile player living in either blissful ignorance or tragic, newfound awareness. The game's developer, Grinding Gear Games, put out an official notice to inform this mystery grinder that they're wasting their time trying to farm for a weapon that literally cannot drop in the difficulty bracket they've chosen. In other words, they're looking for apples in orange trees, and they've been at it for over a month.
"To the Exile who has been farming for Oni-Goroshi for the last 6 weeks... It doesn't drop in Ruthless," the Path of Exile X/Twitter account said.
Oni-Goroshi is a unique-rarity Charan's Sword in Path of Exile, coveted for its strong and (fittingly) unique synergies. Ruthless mode is essentially a hard mode toggled at character creation that enables especially punishing modifiers and settings, including, per the PoE wiki, "extreme item scarcity."
You'll see fewer item and currency drops on Ruthless mode in general, and high-rarity items are especially rare. In the wiki footnotes for Ruthless item scarcity, you'll find the proverbial sledgehammer to the kneecaps: "Oni-Goroshi itself cannot drop."
Path of Exile players reacted to GGG's post with a mix of amusement and "oof" on Reddit.
"Doing it for the love of the game," reads the top reply.
"I guarantee you whichever GGG employee found this out was laughing their ass off," suggests another. "Poor guy."
"Lioneye's Watch's strongest defender," one user says of the doomed grinder.
I've reached out to GGG for specifics on this very important case, partly to ask if anyone at the studio has contacted this player directly because somebody, please, save them.
"He's too busy farming to read this post," one Twitter user said of the news. "Unironically send this poor soul a message in game."
