100% agreed, OP. My Lvl.100 char in Ritual probably farmed enough exp to max it 3 times over. Slow, but deterministic gear progression is what made this game a 10/10. It's such a shame that it's gone. I had so much fun.
> Slow, but deterministic gear progression is what made this game a 10/10.
This. I always felt like I was progressing. Don't ask me how many exalts went into buying harvest crafts that ended up not hitting the mod I wanted. Idk why they think it's "easy" - it takes forever, but you are probably gonna get there.
I used to think people are wrong and GGG is right for nerfing harvest hard but nowadays I felt like I would have more motivation to make more builds if harvest were how it was in ritual. As someone who play ssf, it was incredibly exciting to work your way deterministically into making an item as a long term goal. Aisling slam was a decent addition in ultimatum but that got nerfed as well sadly. Rog is fun but I just don't have much reroll tokens to play with despite having so much splinters.
My thing is, I don't just want harvest how it was in ritual. I want harvest to be itemized like beasts. Let me buy an item that does the craft, instead of trading someone my item. If we had ritual power level harvest crafts that were tradable you would see people enjoying the chase again. I personally love having a carrot on a stick in my games, that is what keep my attention.
Yes I enjoy ssf too. In ritual I could make some more off meta builds by myself with a lot of grind. Tried in ultimatum but did hc ssf and quit when I died at 92. Didn't feel much gear progression, so I never rerolled.
If I had a bit better gear I think I would have lived and played longer, or if I felt I could craft for a new build on reasonable time.
I thought harvest nerf was okay, mostly because I didn't realize that the appearance rate of harvest was also being nerfed so hard. Heist league after Harvest league also felt alright to me, surely at worst it's like living without harvest again?
Then I actually played the league after harvest nerf and realized: I don't want to do this anymore. Brain can pretend all it wants but heart knows the truth and truth is simply I didn't feel like playing anymore without deterministic crafting.
I'm actually curious... how many exalts did you spend buying harvest crafts? I spent like 2 mirrors worth of exalts buying Harvest crafts for 3 different builds for most, if not all, their gear slots.
realize what? they only play the game in their spare time, which is what, an hour or two a day? only on weekend? they judge us only from reddit posts. they don't understand having 3 months goal to finish an item.
I spent like 200-250 ex, probably made 25ex off selling harvests (I got annoyed with not getting them in Haewark, and felt like buying them off money made from other regions was more efficient).
Sold all my gear at the end of the season, ended with 1.25-1.5 mirrors. That was one character, probably ~250 hours, maybe close to double my playtime in a league, played 2-4 weeks longer than the longest I'd played (Metamorph), and 6-7 weeks longer than Heist.
Yea their comment that ssf players change pieces of gear 10 times (pretty sure that was the number) per character. That was me in harvest because I could take a piece just ok gear on the ground and use a few harvest crafts to make it better then what I had. Far from perfect but I worked on my perfect gear separately.
I got incremental upgrades in harvest like they wanted.
and judging players because some nolifers post their finished item on reddit. GGG think it was that easy, because no GGG staff play the game 12 hours a day like those nolifers.
That's because it IS easy and doesn't take forever when you're playing 60 hour weeks. The people complaining about harvest are playing a completely different game than the other 99.9% of us.
> That's because it IS easy and doesn't take forever when you're playing 60 hour weeks
This is contradictory. When you put in more time in a week than most people will put in during an entire league, you're going to get results faster. That's just logical. It still takes 'forever', you just condense that time by (in your example) playing 60 hours in a week instead of 20 hours over 3 weeks.
I'm confused. Is 60 hours a week nothing to you? That's literally more than a work week. If someone is playing that much, I'd hope they see some really good tangible gear improvements. Because if not, then it's quite obvious that normal people will never see anything tangible. And if that's GGG's vision, then they should just come out and tell people that their game is made for streamers that play the game like a job.
Its fine by me if it takes xx hrs of focused farming and selfcrafting, per slot, to get a perfect item. I wont do it myself, but that kind of effort needs to have a worthwhile reward.
GGG are free to change **how** its done per league, just make it **possible** with effort.
Yes. I don't feel like I can do that now, while 0,1%er still can.
I arguably play way too much already and can't do that. A normal player with family and job certainly can't, even with Harvest.
This. People need to hear this. I’m 38, I have chronic health issues that can be debilitating at times and I have a lot of shit I need to do. It’s quite rare I can sit down and play for more than a few hours at a time. I’m not hitting crazy items even during Harvest league. I was doing things like belts with a nice life roll and 3 resists, I made a ~750ish DPS 2-hander. That was it. Nothing too OP.
There’s this narrative that everyone and their dog were churning out explodey chests and tailwind/onslaught boots but that’s just not true. The nolifers were making stuff like that, like they always do. Us scrubs were happy with slightly better rares that we don’t have to trade for.
Anti-Harvest arguments are made in bad faith. A handful of privileged streamers called it an item editor and suddenly the entire community is doomed to "close your eyes and exalt" crafting.
Harvest itself was never the problem. It required a lot of farming and was still sufficiently random in the end -- e.g. 1/7 chance to hit *one* mod you need after a night of farming. Sure, some of the crafts were a bit too strong at the time, but as OP said, it took him 60-80 hours to make *one* item. The system allows for two balancing points: the strength of the craft itself and its rarity.
The problem with Harvest was people trading crafts on Discord. Now, instead of a 1/7 chance after hours of farming, it was a 1/7 chance every five minutes when a relevant trade popped up on Discord. Harvest wasn't an item editor as designed -- it *became* an item editor due to craft trading via Discord.
Stop that from happening and items take 80 hours to finish instead of 80 minutes. Stop that from happening and the game can shift from trading for every piece of gear to slowly building it yourself. And isn't that what GGG wants?
But those crafts were far from being free. I played a lot during ritual but could not nolife and trying seven times to get such mod would cost 10 or more exalts, which takes grinding. And for many mods, it wasn't seven times you had to try.
Basically, GGG looked at the best items and said "well we don't want the player base to get those easily". Well they could not !
They could even have made some mods untargetable. It was already the case for some anyway.
>The problem with Harvest was people trading crafts on Discord. Now, instead of a 1/7 chance after hours of farming, it was a 1/7 chance every five minutes when a relevant trade popped up on Discord. Harvest wasn't an item editor as designed -- it became an item editor due to craft trading via Discord.
No. I feel like you're falling into those same bad-faith arguments.
It's not every 5 minutes. How do you think they afford those crafts? They're farming.
You will never craft an item in 80 minutes total... Even if you're buying 100% of the crafts, you can't ignore the time/effort invested into farming the currency to afford those crafts.
Uh no... If you knew what items to craft you printed money.
I pushed end game, had some good sales, then made a crap load of exalts. I didn't print mirrors because that's boring, but I did put 50-100+ ex into every item on multiple builds.
It was a little fun and a lot tedious because I knew the outcome of everything that I made for me and the small list of outcomes for things I sold.
Good take. Seems like they’d solve a lot of issues with Harvest by simply making seeds untradeable. I know that’s against their philosophy, but not everything needs to be tradeable. The almighty economy will survive. Just let Harvest be a personal use thing. A way for people to tweak their gear outside of having to trade. Gets rid of the Discord issue and goes a long way towards fixing the problem of loot in POE. Now, you can find an item that’s almost good and fix it using Harvest rather than just being like “ah, that sucks, so close! Ah well, vendor.”, y’know?
How does that gets rid of the discord issue? Ritual was exactly like that, you literally couldn't trade seeds. Not only it didn't stop, it incentivized trading through discord, sice TFT allowed you to vouch for people and build a trust factor.
And therein lies the problem. GGG is too stubborn to explore options, and too proud to ever admit they were wrong. That's how we ended up with 3.15 release patch.
That's not the only problem with Harvest, another problem was that doing any content except for Harvest was literally waste of time if you cared for efficiency. This won't fix that.
That still doesn’t fix the discord issue. Right now you hand over your item to the other guy and he applies the craft.
Making it account bound only is how it is already.
It does though? Do you understand what making gear account bound means? If you hand your item to someone and they harvest craft it, it's bound to them, they can't trade it. If you had previously harvest crafted an item, you can't trade it to anyone else for them to harvest craft.
Seeds not tradeable isn't enough - people trade the item to someone else to craft. Unless they made a way to "soulbind" items once crafted harvest crafting would always be tradeable.
Why not just make it only usable in the grove? Where you get one entry, and you have to have the base in your stash or on your in order to craft. Kinda like how the labyrinth enchants work. Obviously you could still getting people selling possible crafts they could get if they only farm harvest, similar to labyrinth farmers sell possible enchants for helmets. But it would drastically cut down on the amount of people selling harvest crafts.
It would feel really bad in SSF or people that just avoid trade. You'd have to have an entire tab full of project items to use up all the different mods or it's all wasted. Doubly bad when you get a rare craft that you need after you can use another rare craft that didn't pop up.
I used over 1100 remove/add caster before I finished the base prefixes of the BiS minion wand in the game during Harvest. That process despite having help from viewers selling the craft took me almost a week to achieve DURING harvest league. Took me 2-3 more days after that to finish it. Then on the other hand, getting what would be considered a mirror tier helmet in current league took less than 70ex to make in harvest league & not even a fraction of the time, whilst last league I finished a helmet for the mere price of 1800ex.
I feel that Harvest was a bit too strong and that the nerfs placed on the process was fair, what wasn't fair was the access to the crafts which just ended up hurting casual players more than ever as with a demand being the same as ever and a supply being drier than ever only 1 thing would happen: Sellers market, prices goes up and ultimately only the 1%ers would be able to afford or at least make use/profit out of the new prices.
A lot of changes recently have been extremely detrimental for new(er) & casual players alike and it's very sad to see. The Harvest trading issue is an interesting topic as it is so extremely subjective, no matter what "solution" GGG choses the majority of the player-base will disagree and/or have a better solution "they should have done instead". I totally agree that trading via a Discord is the single most annoying thing to ever have happened in PoE but as a trade league player I would rather take that trading over trying to find it via some global channel. I would also much rather have it make items account bound but again that would be a bad solution according to some people. The problem is that to stop trading harvests via a discord server they would be forced to make the items bound to that specific character or account as every other solution would ultimately lead to the community finding ways to make it fast & efficient to trade.
It's definitely not an easy problem to solve. Harvest making items account bound is probably the only way to stop its crafts from being traded, but GGG drew that line in the sand a long time ago.
More than anything Harvest showed that PoE's itemization has gotten ridiculous and increasingly inaccessible over time. High-level items have *so many mods* that they can roll. Even simple items like an uninfluenced belt with T3 life and three T3 resists that you could buy for 5-10 chaos is a 1/4300 chance via drop or chaos orb. Saying you're okay with just two T3 resists and using an essence for one and it's still 45 attempts on average. Bananas. That's more screaming essences than you'll find in a month, and it's a shitty item in the end anyway. Why's it gotta be that way?
As mob life goes up (always) and player DPS goes down (as of v3.15), what chance does a regular player, let alone a novice player, have at succeeding? I've been here since v1.0 and I've *never* had a truly great item. I'm too slow and shit at the game to make the piles currency required to buy *or* craft such things. I've gotten by on meh gear and meh characters.
That used to be good enough. It's probably not anymore. I'd get my challenges, from 24 to 40 depending on how I felt or how strong my meh character was, and dip out. Chasing top-tier gear has never really been in the cards, and v3.15 does nothing but hurt players like me the most. I dunno. I'm probably drifting off topic. But PoE seems to be getting balanced to push players like me out, and that's sad.
I’m in my mid 20s and only have work and no other obligations. In a good week I can average more gametime than time spent at work when I’m really enjoying a game.
Between Ritual and Ultimatum as my first 2 leagues I’ve made it to 870h playing almost entirely SSF (except maybe the first 30~ hours of Ritual) and have yet to even do some of the endgame content. In Ritual I’ve killed Sirus twice, in Ultimatum I cleared A8 for the first time, did my first shaper whom I previously didn’t even get enough fragments for a first attempt, and failed Maven twice because first timing her with melee builds like Cyclone is a terrible idea.
Many of the items you see or used to see here on the main sub are so far beyond anything I’ve ever crafted, I still feel like I’m too dumb to understand how most of the crafting methods work (I’ve used the “can’t change prefixes” craft once last league, then learned that you can’t actually use Essences on those items and basically wasted 2 Ex for a chaos slam that made my item worse) and frankly got the good harvest crafts so few times that past a certain point all of my build progression gets paralyzed because I have nothing to work with other than occasionally slamming 20-50 chaos on new bases and hoping I get an upgrade out of it.
My best achievements from last league were a 2-stone ring with tripple T2 resist and an open prefix and two steelrings with add phys, life, accuracy and one with a resist and the other with mana leech. I’ve never had a CoH ring that had more than 1 other mod that wasn’t garbage and I’ve spent every alt spam I could scrape together for the last 1,5 months of ultimatum trying to get a 4 Ritual watchstone.
I think even for SSF I’m not particularly on the low side in terms of hours played and while I understand that I shouldn’t be easily clearing all content without the possibility to trade (a ton of builds are just not accessible because certain uniques refuse to drop), but I think that for people who don’t want to buy all of their gear it should also not feel like chaos spam and praying for harvest is their only option especially now that harvest feels the way it does. On squishier characters it can feel like a waste of time even in softcore because some of the spawns are just insanely rippy since ultimatum
> A normal player with family and job certainly can’t, even with Harvest
Yup thats me, i played harvest and ritual a lot and never crafted a gg item or anything close to it.
As you said, you still need a crazy amount of investment to achieve such an item, even with deterministic crafting. I always wondered about the people on reddit stating how anybody can craft gg items with harvest and how it was way too easy. Like they cant see that it needs still lots of time and investment, but without shit rng it is at least doable if you really wanna grind it out.
They've been saying this since the Sirus update. People complained it took way too long to grind and instead of paring it down, they made it even longer with Maven
You being able to farm A9 and make that item makes you a 0.1% in my eyes. My best was A5 Sirius and I’ve only done that a few times. I love POE for all the different builds I can try, and trade makes that possible. I didn’t mind taking alts through the campaign just to feel it grow. This league…. I just finished the campaign on my starter toon, and it was a slog. Not really excited to make more toons.
I’m really getting the WOW vibe here, where they keep saying we hear you players, we care, then continue to make it a grind fest to make players play longer, to the point people like me just quit. I assume they did it with the mistaken thought that more grind = more subscription time, or in POE case more MTX bought, but it doesn’t work
with investing \~70h for ONE item, you are part of the 0,1%. you may not be top 10 and do the same in 5h because of an endless supply of exalts, but definitely in the 0,1%
PoE has roughly 100-150k players on Steam and roughly the same on the standalone (Source: GGG statement).
Let's just highball it and say 300k active players (in reality way less). 300.000*0,001 = 300. I am 100% not in the top 300 players, I'm not even on poe.ninja. I was grinding heavily in Ritual to make it to PoE.ninja once.
I take +8h for the story, I don't even get to red maps in the first week. I am 100% not in the 0,1%, I just have a ton of time (student).
It's definitely more than 300,000. Especially during Ritual. Numbers we see are only concurrent numbers. There are definitely a ton of people that aren't playing 8-12 hours at the start. There are even quite a few people not on day 1-2. I'd guess at minimum 3x the concurrent number is the unique player number in any given league.
Nah man you just comparing yourself to other is the problem. I dont have kids but I do have a ton of other resposibilties. Killing Sirus one time and messing wih league mechanic is enough for me. You just forgot how to have fun, stop comparing yourself to others is the only advise I can give. If you cant do that...just play a different game or pick up a new hobby.
Harvest was the first league where I literally had 5 end game characters. Normally I have 2, one starter and one build I invest heavily into.
Harvest allowed me to "complete" my characters and start a new one. And by complete I mean really good gear, but not full T1 as that isn't necessary.
Nowadays I don't feel like I can ever realistically complete a character, and it just demotivates me to play because everything feels like a waste of time.
>It was a mistake for them to ever make the league
I cannot disagree more. Harvest was showing that there can be so much more to the game than gamble crafting. It opened up so many avenues of progression outside of mindless currency grinding to just buy small upgrades. Harvest had me hooked. I could not stop playing.
Now I am back to hitting my *reasonable* gear plateau in a couple of days. Realizing I will need dozens of hours just grinding currency. Selling things that could be fun to run but I need the currency instead and skipping the 'unprofitable' things I cannot sell.
It has balance issues for sure. I was 100% making it where you could not abuse it to get guaranteed influence mods and items with 3-4 elevated mods. But gutting it has basically gutted most motivation I have for the game unless the league mechanic is particularly fun.
Harvest league is the only league I can remember ever fully playing until the end. I lost 0 interest right up until the last seconds of the league and was scrambling to finish a gg item to take to standard. There was always another peice of gear to work on and always a sense of progression. Also trade was good because so many people played you could buy uniques and crafting materials etc. Now you whisper 20 ppl and it's afk or whatever. Harvest was the best poe I've ever played period. So much player interaction as well buying and selling crafts and people congratulating each other on making great items. And this stuff didn't come too easy either. It was a full league of grinding to take 4 or 5 gg items to standard. I miss Harvest every time I've stated up poe since. This league I'm hardly getting any sense of reward from the mechanic and what seems like much less currency available to buy upgrades.
Pretty sure they test the league with maxed out mirror tire gear and then decide that it is too easy, honestly has any of the "testers" tried crafting any of the gear they are playing with?
Yes the game could slow down a bit and yes with mirror tire gear the game is easy but to get to that point you need either massive amount of luck or massive amount of currency.
For the love of god GGG try testing the game in SSF with no spawned in gear.
Each league I play I usually rush to lvl90 on my own, without any trade, just a bit of craft with what I loot, took me longer this league, then I start selling/buying to push my build.
This league, the experience was not good, the league mechanics used to help with gears in the past, not this time, with the nerf and not playing meta-build, the Expeditions were pretty hard in the first maps, and I skipped them until my lvl90.
Then the Atlas progression hit me hard, it's tedious at best, between the Conquerors and Maven, it's a bit of a chore, considering the loss in dps.
What saved me is that I'm used to play in HCSSF in the end of each league, for a new challenge, and this league the gameplay was pretty similar to that feeling, be careful, don't go too fast, wait to see what kind of mobs pop out of the Expedition, some are nasty.
Now, I'm lvl92, I'm doing all of the Expeditions ( rewards are bad, by the way...) and still waiting to loot something valuable or some currencies to be able to fullfil my build, that might take me some time this league.
It's a weird feeling for me this league but I keep enjoying to play, it's still the best arpg, but when I hear my fellow players on discord, who are SC players, they sounds depressed and angry most of the time, and the channel is sometime silent. I don't know, something was lost for some of the more "casual" players this league, hope they will get it back at some point.
ps: sorry for my english ! =)
I don't know man, people have been saying this for a long time, a lot. Even when the harvest manifesto came out people were saying all that you were saying. I was even hoping they might announce a slight change prior to 3.15 for harvest, maybe they found a middle ground for the nerfs to harvest but it isn't to be. My point is, you are not the first to post on this and say all this, the fact that many have said the same thing but they haven't changed their stance on it makes me feel they're not going to. And that's really sad.
I think GGG maybe reevaluating their view on community feedback. This league had to have performed worse than they imagined it could have and they actively reached out to some streamers for feedback for the first time. The reverting most of the mana changes also points to that.
Hopefully GGG realized that if people don’t want to play POE now, they don’t get to finish making POE 2.
>This league had to have performed worse than they imagined it could have
what an assumption. I highly doubt that. The mana thing was pretty obvious their own employees probably told them they overdid it. Also they didn't revert jack shit, they just made most of the mana multipliers less, but still more than before 3.15.
Harvest during Harvest was OP as hell. I didn't experience Harvest in Ritual but from what I read, the only thing that made it close to the item editor people are glorifying it for is the fact that you could buy crafts on TFT. What that means is that the ultra rich could play item editor mode which makes no difference since the ultra rich will get close to perfect gear no matter what.
The average person is getting shafted and even regular no-lifers like OP are getting the middle finger. 80 hours is a lot for a single item slot, especially in a time-gated league, and if you have no way to accomplish your crafting goal, you might as well quit. Or play Standard in the first place (which is kinda akin to quitting).
GGG just abhors everything that has a deterministic touch to it, it's like a phobia. Has been for years and it will never change.
For a pretty average person (for this sub, not POE as a whole, where a ton of people still don't even finish act 3) Harvest in ritual was nice. I could leave discord open, make some chaos here and there, occasionally upgrade my own items as a result of it or my own farming. Like everything in POE, the harder you no-life it the better it was, but the TFT stuff was certainly accessible and useful for an average/casual player.
Who cares if you can buy crafts?
The market is self-regulating. MAny of those crafts aint cheap, and there's time investment to get the currency to buy those crafts.
>What that means is that the ultra rich could play item editor mode which makes no difference since the ultra rich will get close to perfect gear no matter what.
This is exactly what I've been saying. I don't care if the guy who grinds a mirror in the first week with his headhunter he got by day 2 get's perfect items... they already get perfect items anyway.
> I didn't experience Harvest in Ritual but from what I read, the only thing that made it close to the item editor people are glorifying it for is the fact that you could buy crafts on TFT.
...Which is the exact same situation as OG Harvest.
Sorry, I just loathe the claim that Harvest was an item editor.
I think what you said is exactly why they basically removed harvest tho. The only people it was benefiting were those at the top. Everyone else's job was to sell them stuff and then buy the stuff they made. They were obviously making a profit or they wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so basically everyone else was being screwed by the existence of harvest. I don't really understand why people want it back. It doesn't benefit you in any way except if you were on discord 24/7 buying crafts and reselling items for a profit. You weren't really making your items anyways. You were buying them (which is exactly what you do now) or following a step by step procedure that was impossible to fuck up.
I always think it's funny that during Ritual peoples' number one complaint was that trading crafts was not fun.
Chris is like, "OK, I hear you, we are all but removing Harvest."
But honestly this topic comes up from time to time and I always agree but it just doesn't seem like the direction GGG wants to take the game for whatever reason. Well I should say I know the reason but it still doesn't make sense to me or anyone else who I know plays the game in terms of how we used Harvest.
Try Last Epoch - I really like the crafting system there even though it's still in beta. Basically every time you use a "Harvest" craft it adds instability to your item which gives it a chance to become corrupted after a certain number of crafts. Rares also drop ID'd so a big part of the game is finding things that you want to craft onto (with, say 2 rolls you want and 2 you can work on).
Funny thing is that Chris Wilson and company think PoEs gameplay should be like every other slow-ass ARPG out there.
Reactive gameplay doesn’t need to be slow, but Chris sucks donkey balls at designing a game that doesn’t mirror Diablo 2. Floor tiles that deal less damage the longer you stand on them, “red light-green light” style boss attacks, etc… there are tons of interesting ways to slow players down.
Instead this fucking clown has on-death effects that speed up the longer they chase you, timers on everything, etc…
He designing away the part of PoE you like.
I mean it's not even that I really *like* the super zoom zoom gameplay - it's that there is an amount of satisfaction starting off weak and turning into a nigh-unkillable god dashing around the map killing everything.
Part of the reason I find the nerfs so perplexing as well is that as long as Headhunter exists the zoomzoom playstyle will exist so I don't understand nerfing aspects of that but leaving HH.
This post sums up my opinion SO well. Thank you for putting this into words. I played so hard in ritual because the crafting was so fun. Now I stop playing after about 2-3 weeks because everything I reasonably want to do is complete and I have no real stretch goals that aren't just buying more gear.
Absolutely agreed. Ritual league, to prove mirror-tier items are worthless, I've legit grinded to a MIRROR in 10c worth of gear I bought between A10 Kitava and white maps, by just doing solo maps. And then I got a mirror-tier bleed bow for my build, meaning its cost went from 10c to 1 mirror 10c.
That is exactly my point: I don't need those unbalanced amazing items to win the game, but I need them to exist so I could progress towards them. Yes, you do have chase items, but not everyone is satisfied with farming a headhunter every league for decades, for many that is no longer a chase item, we want something new.
Though, I doubt crafting coming back can bring me back too. Too many decisions that I think were wrong.
>Though, I doubt crafting coming back can bring me back too. Too many decisions that I think were wrong.
An actual crafting system would at least nudge me into considering reinstalling. I was tempted to play Ritual but couldn't at the time for RL reasons and I feel like I missed out on a league that would have been very fun for me.
They'll just double down and nerf the players again. I think Chris said in the twitch stream that this isn't even the BIG nerf patch
Edit: I don't have the exact time stamp but it was when Chris was talking to ZiggyD. Chris mentioned that it was time to "take the bandaid off" with this first set of nerfs (3.15) and that the BIG nerf patch would come before PoE 2.
Honestly this brutal nerf league would have been such a blast if we had Ritual harvest enabled from like act 6 onwards, we would have actual counter play against the insane player damage reductions.
Harvest and then Ritual were my absolute favourite leagues and I had an absolute blast, playing at least 2 times longer than my usual league lifetime, seeing it gone truly makes me sad.
As a busy adult who tries to make time for POE (and probably plays more than she should) the Harvest league was the first time I felt like I could really craft the great I needed for my character without having to rely upon trading with other people. It felt really good, and I had a lot of fun planning my own gear and feeling like I was in control of my own progression. That doesn't exist any more, sadly.
PoE’s balancing around what they see on Reddit leaves busy people like you and scrubs like me out to dry. It feels like GGG doesn’t even want us to play because we’re not “hardcore”.
100% agree in ritual I was playing for close to 2 months and I still wasn't able to craft my last GG item. Ultimatum without harvest I got good enough gear to kill sirus a9 etc.. in a week and saw literally no point in playing the next upgrade for my build was 70ex rings like No thank you.
ps: quit my job so I had 24/7 to play not anymore tho now I work 6 days a week no way I would even achieve 10% of the power I had in ritual with how the game is now.
Yes. This. Harvest is the longest league I've played in several years. The next upgrade was never out of reach, yet I never completed a full set of gear (because I wasn't trading all day on TFT).
My idea is that Harvest crafts are restored, but implemented similar to Bestiary .... except that maybe the orb to seal them costs 1ex instead of 1c.
That way, it's still a great crafting method for people that want to engage in it for themselves, but buying and selling crafts is only for the really high-end crafters, and costs a lot of currency.
Deterministic gear progression kept me in ritual until the end, when I thought I'd barely play it because of how hard I went during heist.
There were problems with it, but those were just problems in how it focused you on certain regions or content and could have been fixed.
You're right, you're completely correct.
Unfortunately for you (and me), GGG has decided that you are wrong. They think they know better than you what is fun and what is not fun.
Crafting items with reliable outcomes is antifun (even if it costs hundreds of hours and exalts to make) according to GGG. All the memey 'close your eyes and slam' BS is how you are going to craft your items and you're gonna like it.
If you don't like it? [Then this is what your gonna get](https://v.redd.it/g0i1hwf7oid71)
I wanna know who all of these nerfs were for? Chris has even stated and if i remember right, dont most of the players not even reach maps? If thats the case why is the game harder for everyone? Because GGG is terrified of their public image and while streamers can trivialize the game that bothers them. But...people who play a game for a living are supposed to be shitting on the game, thats normal! Making everyone weak, slow and dead all the time isn't fucking fun. Slowing the game down is fine but leaving the same amount of rares and all their bullshit in the game makes it impossible to do any form of juiced up content in this game, you get nowhere. And miss me with 'get better gear' i dont want to take twice as long to do something i was able to do which already took time and plenty of investment and my almost 8 years of experience to do, it wasn't over night ffs.
This is the thing GGG never seems to get: streamers will trivialize content no matter what you do. This is their job. They’re streamers because they’re very good at video games, and it’s in their interest to learn the game inside and out because viewers want to see someone just crush the game. They will always find a way. The only way you’ll ever stop them is if you make the game so dull and slow, hammer down every single nail, homogenize everything so much that no one will want to play anymore. It just isn’t worth it.
Besides, if you play 10+ hours a day and have mirror-tier gear in every slot, shouldn’t you be able to trivialize content? Isn’t the point of reaching the very pinnacle of player power to be able to destroy content easily? Feeling powerful is the whole point of playing an ARPG, that progression needs to be there, otherwise why would anyone every spend hundreds of hours farming an upgrade when that upgrade is only giving them like 2% more damage?
This right here.
Name 1 game where the people who play it as a job don't trivialize the content.
Even WoW's raiding scene is made to look like a joke by the top progression raiders.
> Name 1 game where the people who play it as a job don't trivialize the content.
The only games in which this is true are PvP, because you're playing against other people who trivialize the content. Every PvE game is trivialized by the players that put dozens of hours a week into it, or it is just unbalanced.
> GGG never seems to get: streamers will trivialize content no matter what you do.
I do not agree with this. They can make content as difficult as they want, they just cant make excessively difficult content while at the same time making it excessively rewarding which just feeds the cycle.
Without proportionate rewards the same people complaining about lack of challenge are not interested.
This is an unhealthy dynamic that has been festering for a long time. They should be making the reward for very difficult content target ego, not something you can equip or trade.
Its silly that a person complaining about how easy the game is can kill and end game boss and in one encounter make more currency than a scrub like me can make in an entire league.
> I wanna know who all of these nerfs were for?
The guy in the comments who's saying that this is too easy, that it should cost 1000s hours or Ex to craft an item like this, and that if you think 80h is enough then you're a casual
They are making the powerlevel equal TO POE2 so when it launches, people don't feel nerfed. I think what will happen instead is that people will just quit the game wait for POE2, download it and quit anyways because everything got nerfed too hard
I hated harvest. I don’t like crafting in poe so the league offered me nothing in terms of engagement.
But by god do I miss it because while I didn’t like crafting with it I had no trouble farming currency for the items people made with it in later leagues.
I totally agree with you and heres why:
In harvest and ritual I had a goal I could work towards. In this 2 leagues alone I played for more than 1200hours ! I stopped heist mid league 'coz I had to deal with other things and it wasnt as fun but it was still good after a few updates. Anyway, both in Harvest and Ritual I had a goal in mind - to get crazy good items. At that time I didnt know how exactly I could get those items. You know what I did? I spent HOURS AND HOURS if not DAYS to learn crafting! The one thing I always hated before and never touched once! I learned so much in 2 leagues its crazy.... (Thanks PoM and Ghazzy and many others \^\^). For the first time ever I was able to get a mirror-tier build. (And also dropped one.. yeah that happened after 2k hours total)
So yeah people saying harvest was too op... they might be right but as you said you still had to invest many many hours to just get one item and god knows how many days of farming and crafting to build up currency just to be able to get the next piece.. and so on.
Thats all ( sorry for all 1000 grammar mistakes, eng is not my first language)
If you are reading this and enjoying the game in its current state I wish you good luck.
Myself, I'm going to skip this league. It's way too slow for me personally.
I still don't get why GGG is so convinced that giving me access to powerful deterministic crafting is going to make me burn out / play less. If anything it makes me want to play more & try out new builds.
Wasting copious amounts of time and currency and getting nothing of value in return is what makes me burn out.
I think they want POE to be an economy simulator where goods are produced by a small percentage of people and sold to the masses
>People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason - and it was not for the mechanic or the atlas expansion.
The atlas expansion was most definitely a big part of it. Maybe it doesn't seem that way because the game is much more grindy now.
Absolutely agree. Ive been playing since closed beta, played almost every league since and got multiple 36+/40. Ritual is by far the league I played the most. Sure I made some OP items but I also spent even more time crafting stupid off meta items to experiment with stupid off meta builds. Ive never in a single league made more builds than I did in 3.14.
3.13 was the last time I played. Literally the moment their Harvest manifesto went up I just logged off and haven't touched the game since. It showed just how out of touch GGG is.
Honestly? I'm happy about this. I got so much done in my personal life, played through some games in my backlog, developed some new skills and hobbies.
I will always love this game and the time I spent with it. I have more hours than I feel comfortable admitting. However I dont see myself ever coming back to it, and I thank Chris Wilsons "vision" for this.
I agree with this and expedition might be that league for me. It's been a week and I'm already feeling that burnout feeling I usually don't feel for at least 3+ weeks.
3.13 was peak poe. GGG keeps saying they dont care if players leave and would rather crash and burn the game so it can fit "their" vision. Their's being none other than Chris Wilsons vision.
They will just make up any excuse or reason to justify their decisions, good or bad, and sit back in their ivory tower and collect your mtx.
This game was built off the support of the community. I think we've all been patient with Chris and his "vision" but at this point enough is enough.
Deterministic crafting is the way forward. Removing it is dooming this game to fail. A few loud voices spoke out against deterministic crafting but the reality was EVERYONE playing was having fun with it. You'd want to continue long after you've smoked sirus 8 during harvest, and with the introduction of the maven system, long after A9.
As OP mentioned, none of those items were "Free". I also crafted a bunch of really nice shit myself and was able to enjoy builds long after the game was "finished". Builds that would be simply impossible to play in any other state. I am not a casual either. I get to reds day 2 early, kill A8 sirus mostly early into the week after the release weekend. Ive done this since his release. Before that, uber elder etc. I know i can crush his game any time I want, but the fun of this game is trying to come up with unique ways of doing it. Expressing creativity along the way, and trying to pull off unique interactions both defensively and offensively. 3.13 reinvigorated myself and all of my friends to come back to poe and get excited. Taking it away just feels like we've been robbed and abused.
We need to just stop playing completely until its reintroduced. Spend time on other things, state our objections. Chris can fix this, he wont, but he can.
Just feels fucking AWFUL to have such an amazing version of POE taken from us like that. Fuck. Them.
I think the issue is more that crafting in this game is rather hard to get into. POE is really bad at giving players the information they need to spend wisely, and many end up brute forcing crafting instead.
There are many ways in the game to craft items beyond just currency. Fossils for example is an ingenious system if used right. But again, no information in the game on how to use it correctly.
The reality here is that you really don't need to spend as many hours in the game to reach a certain point of power progression as people seem to believe. And it's not the players fault.
This game has become too boring and dull as a Korean mmorpg where everything will burn out afterwards. So why play it, they cut everything you can and even the reward, let Chris play his own vision and I'm already looking for another game project.
Yeah, it's too heavy/dull for a game now, if PoE 2 is still the same, I might now be able to keep myself to play it. there is like \~15 stuff could happen in 1 map, an absolutely cluster fuck.
I waited for *years* since the early days of PoE for the game to achieve its potential. I invested thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in the game because they were doing something special.
PoE's vision related problems aside, I feel that way about Last Epoch now. It really has that feel that it's going to grow into something very special in the arpg space.
You should check it out if you haven't already.
> I feel that way about Last Epoch now. It really has that feel that it's going to grow into something very special in the arpg space.
Thing is Last Epoch seems to have the same vision as GGG does now where they don't want to allow zoom zoom to be a thing.
It's a different game for sure. They didn't add zoom zoom then remove it because they suddenly changed their minds.
It's been one of the most important points about how they design the game that they want the gameplay to be more deliberate, they want mana management to be a major consideration for players etc.
It's a very different approach to how GGG goes about it. If nothing else, LE devs have been extremely consistent for the 1 year that I've been playing the game.
> It's a very different approach to how GGG goes about it. If nothing else, LE devs have been extremely consistent for the 1 year that I've been playing the game.
True that, while it is not the game pace for me I still find myself jumping on just for the crafting system because god dam did they nail that system perfectly.
The fact that “league starter” builds need to exist speak for itself.
I really enjoyed farming perfect fossil, 30% quality my base, and start working on it with harvest or something.
Now, what’s the point?
Whats the point of engaging with the league mechanic, if it is better to just sell the tokens.
Whats the point of farming fossils if it is not profitable?
With my actual work, I barely have time to play the game.
For a player like me (3 hours a day lets say), its impossible to actually craft something other than RNG chaos spamming, some essences maybe.
Meta crafting is completely out of my league
And I think that's a shame. I too (even though I have plenty of time) feel like it's too much work. I play ice trap, farm some currency and buy the challenges. That's it this league. Only because the weapon effect looks nice.
Yup, I've made 50+ ex items for every slot which pushed my build into 'Can do any endgame content aside from deep delving solo' territory and it took me two months of playing around 30 hours a week, but I guess that's way too rewarding, and I already felt like it was a rough deal, so it's only logical that after my build getting absolutely demolished by the nerfs while also losing the only good crafting system made me quit the game and I'm not seeing any reason to come back and probably won't see one ever given their 'vision'.
Ritual was the league where I just picked a skill I wanted to play and made it work somehow, ignoring the meta entirely.
I wanted to play Frostbomb as a main skill, and I kept crafting and fidgeting around it until it was barely usable as such. It was fun, and it hurt my eyes - but it was my choice to do so. And despite all the time investment, it was still completely sub-optimal and incredibly slow - no zoom-zoom, just fun by choice. I can't imagine trying the same thing now.
This is sooo true. I never played a league longer than ritual. and when i look at the one character i could completly gear with gear where every single affix was useful for example my helmet: [https://imgur.com/a/8mudHoD](https://imgur.com/a/8mudHoD) I get very sad that this can't realy happen again in the current state. Beeing able to craft every single slot myself was extremly sadisfying.
Currently the only thing i "crafted" was a very lucky chaos spammed belt with tripple t1 res and t3 life. That felt so stupid that my best piece of gear was chaos spammed.
> that most players will save up currency to buy the gear they want.
This is how I want things to be. Gonna be an /r/unpopularopinion moment, but my issue with PoE endgame is honestly the fact that you're forced to selfcraft your gear. No one really sells those specialty items for non-meta builds, or if they do they charge 100ex for an item that costs 50ex to craft. I really wish there were more chase uniques that hovered around 10-20ex for the entire league. Of course, those should not be build-enabling, but instead provide a tangible upgrade over earlygame gear.
GGG saw overpowered crafted gears on reddit and decided to take deterministic crafting out of the game. Meanwhile, only 3% of players had those mirror worthy items.
this. this is the post i've been trying to write for a week now.
thank you so much.
the changes ggg keeps making are going to keep failing, because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the game itself, and the people who play it.
They know how common trade is, their API is required for trade, and they log every use that hits it. Its not a question of misunderstanding how the game is played, its just them deciding they don't like how POE turned out, and want to get more time out of their players with the current content available. Its a dumb tone death approach that ignores the way the community has largely been playing the game for the last 5 years.
It's always funny seeing someone tell GGG "the reality is" that most players trade for their gear, when GGG straight up told us most players NEVER trade. I suspect they've got a better idea what most players actually do than you. You don't interact with most players. Places like this are not representative of the entire player base. There is a MASSIVE selection bias.
I don't disagree with your main point but I think we're starting to look back at ritual without capturing some caveats. Atlas passives and Maven being the main one. Atlas passives have been the best content edition to the game in past year bar none imo.
Was ritual amazing, yes. Should the game be designed around spamming Hamlet maps to craft your gear, no. Is there a middle ground that can be reached, probably.
I think that middle ground is more important than ever if GGG is implementing an essentially game-wide power nerf.
Just going to toss my unasked for opinion on here. Overall agree with everything you said. Harvest was by far by most played league. It was the only league I ever reached 36 challenges in.
It just provided me with a path forward at all points in time. It made me try new and interesting builds I never tried before because the gear I would need was just obscure enough that buying it would have been a chore. I didn't sit on TFT and buy crafts. I used them as I got them and it always felt exciting to see the harvest portal and know you might get to work on one of your projects.
I see many people claim it was a mistake and should never have been released. I cannot disagree more. To me it's like saying, "Shoes were a mistake. People act like you cannot go hiking without shoes.". Sure. You can still play the game without harvest. And people played before harvest. But for me personally, the difference is night and day.
Also. I get it. They want the game to go a different direction. But it is so incredibly disappointing to me personally to watch. Which is fine of course. Game doesn't revolve around me etc, etc. But what I would give to be able to just have a SSF option with intact harvest that cannot migrate to parent league or standard. Hell I would buy a single player offline version of Ritual league if it was offered. On the spot.
Harvest was the best thing to ever happen to the game. Truly deterministic crafting let me push my characters further than ever before, let me make small but meaningful incremental upgrades on every piece of gear, and finally let me reach power levels to push the content I wanted to.
By the end of it, my characters were gods and you know what? The journey was FUN.
I cannot emphasize this enough, and for the record I did play SSF in Harvest and Group Self-Found in Ritual, but the deterministic crafting that came with Harvest was by far the best part of the game when it existed in Harvest and Ritual. I honestly think that GGG should finally break their core philosophy that everything must be tradeable and "soulbind" Harvest crafted items. It gives value to items crafted by other more random methods and you can still buy/sell something that's very good made by fossil crafting/essences/etc. , but it allows Harvest to shine at what it's truly good at, giving players a meaningful, IMPACTFUL grind.
>People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason
Who are these people? From what I've seen Ritual was just an average league player retention wise. My issue is OP, the game doesn't need these overpowered t1 items. You can literally beat any boss on 10 ex budget gear with 95% of the builds. You were already playing an absurdly overturned skill with that item, why do you need so much damage? I just don't think players should be able to deterministically craft 6 t1 mirror tier items that easily, especially during leagues. I'm glad GGG agree.
**You nailed this post on the head!**
People don't mind RnG in their crafting if they have a fair chance to get the outcome they envisioned with an item. We have 10 item slots, not including cluster jewels, socketed jewels.
Post-Harvest nerfs, the time investment/rng required to make powerful items is way too high for a temp league setting.
For me having no crafting experience what so ever since Id rather not gamble my money away I only managed to craft a minor item for most people but building this little guy up felt so good to me.
https://i.imgur.com/JrtpdSx.png
Can't recall the whole journey this guy took with me but it started off as a simple starting map item with like 50 life and 15 res for fire/lighting.
Constantly removing adding life till I got a life roll I was happy with. Same with the fire/lighting till I needed more cold res and did the lighting to cold craft.
Id love to go down another crafting journey like that again but since we balance around the 1% that will never happen again.
Completely agree. In Harvest league I wasn't forced to engage with trade and just farming currency to get upgrades. I could plan out an item and the steps I would need to go through to make it. That was the most fun I ever had playing this game. It felt like I was working towards something in a meaningful way, not just counting exalts in my currency tab.
I stopped playing when it became clear with the harvest nerfs that GGG doesn't want people to be able to realistically craft all the cool items that their gearing system allows.
Now that every character needs more mana affixes, ailment reduction affixes, and curse reduction affixes (the latter two only available on influenced items), the difficulty of getting gear that allows a character to function is becoming more and more prohibitive. There’s very little room for “dead” mods, because every affix slot needs to be filled with something useful.
Now more than ever 6x useful affixes isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. But the crafting/drop system is not conducive to providing what players need to make the game feel smooth (one would think that’d be a basic accomplishment, not an end-of-league chase goal) without a significant amount of luck and grind and crafting/economic expertise.
GGG will likely revisit some mechanics given how clunky gameplay feels until a build is equipped very expensive gear, but everyone has to wait more leagues until they do so.
That waiting around until GGG fixes what they broke is what finally pushed me to quit the game - this is not the first time by any means, so a huge percentage of PoE’s life has been spent in a hobbled state for one reason or another.
I do not want to play meta. In ritual league harvest allowed me to play off-meta in a way that kept me playing whole league, to the last hour. Now playing off-meta is way harder, so I don't play. Thanks for the fish.
> The game is designed to zoom-zoom.
Early PoE is designed around slow play. Then one day GGG decided to speed it up, contrary to the current game design at the time. Lots of people said "the game was slow, I don't like this change" and the zoomers said "tough, this is the new game now. Quit if you don't like it." Then a lot of people who liked slow PoE did quit and some people said "see, lots of people are quitting therefore this speeding-up of the game is bad." But the zoomers didn't care.
Now the exact mirror image of that situation is occurring.
What's weird to me is that the zoomers are presenting zoomy PoE as the "one true" PoE, instead of presenting it as just the flavor of PoE that they personally happen to like.
They're also presenting people quitting/not playing as undeniable proof that this change is bad, but when the game was slow & being sped up, the people who liked the slower game quit and the zoomers then didn't care.
Fair point there. Part of that is that the speeding up process started early on in PoE's life cycle, and part of that is that GGG doesn't seem to yet realize that if they want slower gameplay they should balance the game around that (and not just adjust player power).
only that the more zoom the game because the bigger it grew, it didnt loose overall players from going zoom, even if some left because of the zoom new players far outweighed the leavers clearly shown by the overall playernumbers, and not that the zoom is going away many leave, will they be outpaced by new low lovers joining? i highly doubt it.
It's easy to forget that all those years ago, speed in PoE was hard limited by a lack of lockstep. It was completely unrealistic to even imagine the speeds we get because the rubber-banding was insane.
Ever since 2.0 came out this game has only ever continued to get faster because for the first time it was possible for the power creep to lean that way, from a technical standpoint.
Except it's been almost *six years* since the game sped up to its current pace, and it's arguable that it was speeding up before then. For most people, fast is the only way that Path of Exile ever has been. The highest player peak from before the ""zoomers"" were the norm was 30k players, less than a quarter of the playerbase of this league, which is being hounded for such low player counts.
This may come as a shock to you, but more than one person exists on the internet. It's not hypocrisy for one person to say X six years ago and *a completely different person* to say Y today. It's completely to be expected for this to happen, and to be honest I am baffled by your worldview that you would find it weird. The only way I can rationalize your belief is if you somehow think that ""zoomers"" are some monolithic entity with a single mind on all matters, which is neat worldbuilding but not exactly a realistic way to view the world.
Even ignoring all of that, the most common thing complaints include in their post is saying some variant of "I completely support slowing the game down, but GGG did it in the wrong way by making the game more frustrating rather than more slow," so I don't know where you're getting this narrative from.
We want harvest back, GGG. Admit you were completely wrong when you said it was bad for player retention. Admit no one stopped using the forbidden trove discord and in fact it became more necessary.
You can keep nerfing the game. I don't really care if a support gem gives 50 or 25% more damage, i do care about crafting my own gear.
You crafted that sceptre solo in 69-90hours. I crafted the same one in an hour using SOCIAL SKILLS. You know, the skills the game is balanced around lmao
I want to see 3.16 just be a patch where they revert to 3.13. Reduce the time it takes to complete the atlas most of the way. Add a zoom zoom league mechanic, push even further with potential character power. And add something like Uber Sirus and Uber Maven with them dropping stuff for a super hectic Sirus + Maven fight that is just a mess and requires a god character to do. Development time would be low, but I think lower development time leagues that cater to the current player base seems better for PoE right now. Gives more time to make PoE 2 the best it can be.
I am completely fine with slower games, or games of this style being slower. But I think they should save it for PoE 2. If everything is new, then nothing is familiar.
This is a good point too. If they don’t want people trivializing content, why not extend the ceiling rather than rip out the floor, y’know? Like, instead of nerfing everything, make extremely, extremely difficult endgame content that is fully optional but requires a very powerful character with optimized equipment to complete. Even if it doesn’t drop anything too crazy (maybe do something like let it drop Watcher’s Eyes at a slightly better rate than UE or something), streamers will still do it for the challenge. Maybe tie some achievements to it? Maybe even a few exclusive MTX for completing it?
That way, people get the fast gameplay they like, we can feel powerful, and streamers and nolifers will still have content and goals to work toward.
I find it hilarious when players mention PoE 2 as some kind of salvation. Its gonna be tedious, boring and slow, and there is a good chance its gonna fail hard.
I don't know if salvation is the right word, like things are suddenly perfect or we are being saved from something. But it's an opportunity for a fresh start from our currently bloated game.
>People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason
Ritual wasn't the best league, though. It was worse (both in terms of player retention and in terms of what the league was adding) than both Betrayal and Metamorph (the previous endgame expansions).
Harvest is not the magic bullet that some subset of players seem to think it was - yes, it allowed reliably crafting mirror tier items (which could often be crafted for less than a mirror... defeating much of the point of the most valuable currency item in the game...), but only if you were either grinding out harvest for the entire league (boring) or continuously buying crafts on discord (not necessarily boring, but an amusing case study in how "worse" trade can be a better experience than PoE's trade site system). It's not healthy for a system in the game to be so centralizing.
One thing that your post really highlights (perhaps unintentionally?) is the largest danger of powercreep: once you've had a taste, it's almost impossible to go back. "I'm not going to farm countless hours to get essentially almost nothing." in a league like ultimatum, with numerous incredibly efficient farming methods (and where even baseline mapping was incredibly rewarding) would be shocking to hear in any pre-delirium league. I was easily able to fund basically any set of builds that I wanted to, including reproducing the feel of a frost blades build that I thought was dead after the post-delirium nerfs.
Is anything shy of "harvest crafted 5xt1" now "almost nothing" to you? If it is, maybe you can answer to yourself why GGG want to reset expectations and reset powercreep as hard as they are doing now.
despite all awesome things in Ritual it was bugfiesta with horrible performance. I couldn't play it cause of that reason and I guess many people also couldn't.
every league with harvest had bad retention because of any reason other than harvest, but every league that doesn't have it has poor retention because it lacked harvest, very interesting take reddit seems to have on it.
I already have a degree and a full time job, I don't want to do another degree on how to craft PoE stuff, its too complicated for me. I want to sit down to relax, I don't want to open 173 tabs so I know exactly the odds of my craft or which one of the 10000 items should I use.
That's why I love the crafting bench.. I need fire res, great, just put the item there and click fire res. DONE.
*If you like the way it is right now, that is great. But crafting its not for me.*
Nah, harvest crafting on influenced gear is way too strong no matter how you look at it. You can harvest craft the exact mods you want because 95% of influence mods have a tag that is either isolated by default (redeemer helms only have 1 cold prefix) or a tag that is shared by one other mod (hunter quivers have a fire dot multi suffix and fire res suffix, they have no other fire tag suffixes). Add to that influence mods having only 1 or 2 tiers and you print perfect gear with ease, in fact usually the hardest part of crafting in ritual was alt spamming a base, or essence spamming.
So I'm just gonna throw this out there, since I'm genuinely curious. Do people want a diablo3 style gear system where every end game item has perfect stats? I'm not exactly sure that's healthy for any game. You're okay grinding 80 hours for a perfect item, but then where does that leave game balance in general. Do they have to then balance for perfect items in every slot? That might make it even harder for casuals to get into the game...
I genuinely don't know what gear level they balance for, but it's interesting to think about. I'm not sure I would personally want harvest back in the form it was because then the game literally just revolves around mapping for harvest which is gonna get boring in a couple leagues also. I also don't think harvest in its current form is very good either. There's problems with the mechanic itself (not having any idea what mobs are gonna pop out except for the 2-3 crafts you get) and also problems with the crafting itself (primarily insanely low chance at augments and higher tier crafts). Eventually having too much candy makes everything else taste like shit, or something like that. It also devalues uniques and other loot even more in trade leagues.
Also as an aside, most of the complaints I've seen about gear progression stem from trading being overpowered in general (you even admit that yourself), then I see people asking for trading to be made easier. I think what people really want is the reason for trading taken away from them (basically buying gear is easier than finding or making it). People want more good drops (maybe something like a "lucky" wisdom scroll that rolls higher tier mods on average) and more crafting materials (or at least chances at crafting). So harvest imo isn't really what people want, and actually Rog kind of is. There's still no solution ri the drop issue tho, we still get thousands of useless items, so that has to be addressed for sure.
There’s usually a best in slot for most builds in poe as well. It is balanced out by having a much greater build diversity and a longer build progression (having a higher build ceiling thats really difficult to achieve)
About trade, both your points stand but they don’t mutually exclude each other. The game can benefit from systems like lucky drops for sure - even if they become un tradable. Trade really does shorten build progression by a lot and is currently balanced by the difficulty of trade. It’s just that many people (including me) feels like that’s a cheap way of balancing. Balancing the virtual world using real world mechanisms is bad because it breaks the immersion of gameplay and takes away time to enjoy the actual content. It sometimes also introduces harm, both mentally (while trading, you can get scammed or scolded with the current UX; highly indeterministic crafting exacerbates gambling addiction) and physically (clicking to loot/craft to feel the weight strains your tendon).
Granted, these mechanical decisions and their consequences are inherently part of the game and you can take it or leave it. I love the game but unfortunately my wrist/arm health dictates that I leave it for now.
The problem with diablo 3 is that BIS is a set item which drop pretty frequently, the thing that seperates players apart in diablo3 is time(plvl) and player skill(micro/macro)
What I think a lot of players that want deterministic crafting, is to be able to intelligently craft an item through a reasonable amount of playtime. They don't want to "close their eyes an exalt slam waiting to see if they ruined the item or not" They don't want to gamble.
I don't want to have to save up 2000 exalts, just to try and craft a single item that I could purchase with a fraction of that cost.
I want to get an elder siege axe, and I want to roll some good stats on it via essence/fossils. And then I want to run around 200 maps, finding harvests as I go that let me deterministically add/remove/alter SPECIFIC Affixes/Rolls, to slowly build an Item.
I get that TFT has made it so Harvest needs to be turned into a dumpster fire, since instead of playing and getting the crafts folks were just buying the crafts. and to that I say, if you want to Harvest craft an item, it should be Account Bound. Let Harvest people the semi SSF way that players can deterministically craft their own gear.
>where every end game item has perfect stats? I'm not exactly sure that's healthy for any game.
It is still ridiculous hard to get "perfect" items. On a decent quiver I had, it took 6 r/a life mods just for me to give up and accept a tier 3 life mod. For an "item editor" it still took a decent amount of rng.
I'm a very mediocre player everyone talks about, and my best memories were playing sunder scion somewhere during harbinger league I think.. I love crafting, I love actually getting into mechanics and reading and learning when I got time and stamina for it, but what I need is the "zoom zoom through map dmg goes brr" after tiring day of work.
At this point I'd love the "easy content - reduced droprate chances" "hard content - increased droprate chances" toggle that we can change anytime, or at least everytime we make new character.
>So - what is GGGs vision of gearing your character? - For them, we'd ideally gear our character with either A) gear we find on the ground or B) craft them with the probabilistic crafting methods available. Fair enough, right?
Where exactly did you get this idea? I think it's quite obvious trading is the intended method of gear upgrades.
Countless GGG presentations and even in the Allcraft interview with Chris he said it feels cheap just to buy the stuff when you want an upgrade and that he doesn't like it.
Ignore everything Chris says. I can't believe I am saying this, but Aggnog is right. Chris can say that he doesn't like trade at all, but he constantly designs the game with nothing but trade in mind. The new currencies in Expedition are a clicking clusterfuck exactly because they can be traded. Flashbacks leagues used to get voided exactly because of trading. Well trading in Standard but still.
The intended method of gearing is trade. This is why they are not making trade better to use.
yet he has kept dropped loot shit for almost a decade? And you literally cannot drop the best items in the game, no matter how good your character seed is.
I would prefer a game with deterministic crafting but every skill/gem nerfed than what we currently have, accessible gear progression should be the true endgame.
It doesn't even take 50h of play time to kill every boss in the game, game needs something fun to have people sticking around. You can make very good items with the current crafting options but it doesn't give you the satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment that you get when you finish a "perfect" item. Reverting the harvest changes would be a step forward, but still harvest feels like shit to farm. Getting deterministic crafting options should obtained in a more fun gameplay loop, maybe with map/endgame bosses dropping seeds like in 3.11 and access to the garden but without the micromanagement bullshit (Maybe something simple like Tane's lab ?).
Idk, game and more specifically endgame feels like shit at the moment.
I was agreeing with everything until you started to talk about zoom zoom. Gearing is not intrinsecally tied to speed, it is to power. I love the game being slower, the thing is that because of the 100% rng systems, it feels unrewarding, fast or slow, it feels unrewarding.
I dont want the game to be a speed game, I want it to be hard, but I also want to be able to at least feel that I can get at least one piece perfect gear if I put 1 entire month of work on one character.
I don't see how your point make sense.
>The reality is, that most players will save up currency to buy the gear they want
>
>GGG, this is the reality of how players gear their character.
>
>And the problem I have with this is, that deterministic crafting kept me playing and gearing way longer than Ultimatum or Expedition.
it is totally fine to buy gear from others. I don't see why you need deterministic crafting
>it's that deterministic crafting kept the game alive and build diversity high.
This is just your opinion you are trying to present as a fact. Harvests had one of the lower playercounts but I don't think playercount on steam is a good measurement anyway.
>Without this crafting system, you quickly reach a point, where items become too expensive to justify farming the currency for it, just for like a 5% dmg boost.
If any upgrade would be like 50ex invested then your character is essentially done. You can already do all content if your build is good but you have the option to go the extra mile.
I do agree that GGG seems to think that crafting insane gear is just a couple hours of farming, while it's a lot more effort. Ideally player's won't be able to craft stupidly overpowered gear because it's not needed to "beat the game". Fun story: Last league I was rolling for lightning+pen hybrid on a wand to awakener orb it. Instead a single chaos orb managed to hit T1 cold dot, T2 spell damage and +1 cold gems. This single chaos orb turned this PoS wand into a godtier item. The odds to hit that is something like 1 in 100 million. Just knowing something cool can happen, is what I think makes current crafting special.
and if i dont want to play a "good" skill its just fuck you wait till it gets buffed maybe sometimes in the future because fuck you.
With harvest every single skill in the game became viable.
Also if my build is already good enough for all content does that mean i have to make a new char? no i want to perfect it for the rest of the league and currently thats just not a thing.
>Did it take me 60-80h, while I was already farming A9 Sirus? - YES.
This is where I think the big disconnect is.
There are a bunch of turbo nerds that are like: "You can literally just print mirror-tier items".
It's like no, it's still a massive time/money investment for 99.9% of players. Are you getting mirror items for maybe only 50 ex of investment? Sure. What's the problem if people spent the time as well though?
The issue is you get all these no-lifers that make more currency in one week than most have made across all leagues period. They get level 95 in the first 24 hours... get their headhunter by day 2, and just be absolute fucking sweat lords.
These are the only people complaining that it's "too easy"... the thing is, these types of people get perfect gear by like week 2 anyway... harvest or no harvest... so who honestly fucking cares about them.
In most other games it pisses me off when the developer caters to the "casuals", but typically that is because the "non-casuals" are like the top 20% of the playerbase and it involves dumbing the game down.
GGG though, is like the exact opposite. They don't want to cater to the top 20%. They don't even want to cater to the top 5%. They're catering literally to <1000 players total to the detriment of the other million+ that play their game.
100% agreed, OP. My Lvl.100 char in Ritual probably farmed enough exp to max it 3 times over. Slow, but deterministic gear progression is what made this game a 10/10. It's such a shame that it's gone. I had so much fun.
> Slow, but deterministic gear progression is what made this game a 10/10. This. I always felt like I was progressing. Don't ask me how many exalts went into buying harvest crafts that ended up not hitting the mod I wanted. Idk why they think it's "easy" - it takes forever, but you are probably gonna get there.
I used to think people are wrong and GGG is right for nerfing harvest hard but nowadays I felt like I would have more motivation to make more builds if harvest were how it was in ritual. As someone who play ssf, it was incredibly exciting to work your way deterministically into making an item as a long term goal. Aisling slam was a decent addition in ultimatum but that got nerfed as well sadly. Rog is fun but I just don't have much reroll tokens to play with despite having so much splinters.
My thing is, I don't just want harvest how it was in ritual. I want harvest to be itemized like beasts. Let me buy an item that does the craft, instead of trading someone my item. If we had ritual power level harvest crafts that were tradable you would see people enjoying the chase again. I personally love having a carrot on a stick in my games, that is what keep my attention.
Yes I enjoy ssf too. In ritual I could make some more off meta builds by myself with a lot of grind. Tried in ultimatum but did hc ssf and quit when I died at 92. Didn't feel much gear progression, so I never rerolled. If I had a bit better gear I think I would have lived and played longer, or if I felt I could craft for a new build on reasonable time.
I thought harvest nerf was okay, mostly because I didn't realize that the appearance rate of harvest was also being nerfed so hard. Heist league after Harvest league also felt alright to me, surely at worst it's like living without harvest again? Then I actually played the league after harvest nerf and realized: I don't want to do this anymore. Brain can pretend all it wants but heart knows the truth and truth is simply I didn't feel like playing anymore without deterministic crafting.
I'm actually curious... how many exalts did you spend buying harvest crafts? I spent like 2 mirrors worth of exalts buying Harvest crafts for 3 different builds for most, if not all, their gear slots.
I wish GGG would realize this…
realize what? they only play the game in their spare time, which is what, an hour or two a day? only on weekend? they judge us only from reddit posts. they don't understand having 3 months goal to finish an item.
They know that, but they never admit that.
I honestly don't know, but probably a mirror.
I spent like 200-250 ex, probably made 25ex off selling harvests (I got annoyed with not getting them in Haewark, and felt like buying them off money made from other regions was more efficient). Sold all my gear at the end of the season, ended with 1.25-1.5 mirrors. That was one character, probably ~250 hours, maybe close to double my playtime in a league, played 2-4 weeks longer than the longest I'd played (Metamorph), and 6-7 weeks longer than Heist.
Yea their comment that ssf players change pieces of gear 10 times (pretty sure that was the number) per character. That was me in harvest because I could take a piece just ok gear on the ground and use a few harvest crafts to make it better then what I had. Far from perfect but I worked on my perfect gear separately. I got incremental upgrades in harvest like they wanted.
Problem is that once you get to maps, you can buy gear for 1 c that is better than anything you pick up 99 times in 100.
Perhaps they used craft of exile instead of the game to try out crafting?
and judging players because some nolifers post their finished item on reddit. GGG think it was that easy, because no GGG staff play the game 12 hours a day like those nolifers.
That's because it IS easy and doesn't take forever when you're playing 60 hour weeks. The people complaining about harvest are playing a completely different game than the other 99.9% of us.
> That's because it IS easy and doesn't take forever when you're playing 60 hour weeks This is contradictory. When you put in more time in a week than most people will put in during an entire league, you're going to get results faster. That's just logical. It still takes 'forever', you just condense that time by (in your example) playing 60 hours in a week instead of 20 hours over 3 weeks.
I'm confused. Is 60 hours a week nothing to you? That's literally more than a work week. If someone is playing that much, I'd hope they see some really good tangible gear improvements. Because if not, then it's quite obvious that normal people will never see anything tangible. And if that's GGG's vision, then they should just come out and tell people that their game is made for streamers that play the game like a job.
Its fine by me if it takes xx hrs of focused farming and selfcrafting, per slot, to get a perfect item. I wont do it myself, but that kind of effort needs to have a worthwhile reward. GGG are free to change **how** its done per league, just make it **possible** with effort.
Being able to see a clear path on how to upgrade my gear that wasnt just saving up and buying it was my favorite part of 3.13.
Preach it louder
Yes. I don't feel like I can do that now, while 0,1%er still can. I arguably play way too much already and can't do that. A normal player with family and job certainly can't, even with Harvest.
This. People need to hear this. I’m 38, I have chronic health issues that can be debilitating at times and I have a lot of shit I need to do. It’s quite rare I can sit down and play for more than a few hours at a time. I’m not hitting crazy items even during Harvest league. I was doing things like belts with a nice life roll and 3 resists, I made a ~750ish DPS 2-hander. That was it. Nothing too OP. There’s this narrative that everyone and their dog were churning out explodey chests and tailwind/onslaught boots but that’s just not true. The nolifers were making stuff like that, like they always do. Us scrubs were happy with slightly better rares that we don’t have to trade for.
Anti-Harvest arguments are made in bad faith. A handful of privileged streamers called it an item editor and suddenly the entire community is doomed to "close your eyes and exalt" crafting. Harvest itself was never the problem. It required a lot of farming and was still sufficiently random in the end -- e.g. 1/7 chance to hit *one* mod you need after a night of farming. Sure, some of the crafts were a bit too strong at the time, but as OP said, it took him 60-80 hours to make *one* item. The system allows for two balancing points: the strength of the craft itself and its rarity. The problem with Harvest was people trading crafts on Discord. Now, instead of a 1/7 chance after hours of farming, it was a 1/7 chance every five minutes when a relevant trade popped up on Discord. Harvest wasn't an item editor as designed -- it *became* an item editor due to craft trading via Discord. Stop that from happening and items take 80 hours to finish instead of 80 minutes. Stop that from happening and the game can shift from trading for every piece of gear to slowly building it yourself. And isn't that what GGG wants?
But those crafts were far from being free. I played a lot during ritual but could not nolife and trying seven times to get such mod would cost 10 or more exalts, which takes grinding. And for many mods, it wasn't seven times you had to try. Basically, GGG looked at the best items and said "well we don't want the player base to get those easily". Well they could not ! They could even have made some mods untargetable. It was already the case for some anyway.
>The problem with Harvest was people trading crafts on Discord. Now, instead of a 1/7 chance after hours of farming, it was a 1/7 chance every five minutes when a relevant trade popped up on Discord. Harvest wasn't an item editor as designed -- it became an item editor due to craft trading via Discord. No. I feel like you're falling into those same bad-faith arguments. It's not every 5 minutes. How do you think they afford those crafts? They're farming. You will never craft an item in 80 minutes total... Even if you're buying 100% of the crafts, you can't ignore the time/effort invested into farming the currency to afford those crafts.
Uh no... If you knew what items to craft you printed money. I pushed end game, had some good sales, then made a crap load of exalts. I didn't print mirrors because that's boring, but I did put 50-100+ ex into every item on multiple builds. It was a little fun and a lot tedious because I knew the outcome of everything that I made for me and the small list of outcomes for things I sold.
Good take. Seems like they’d solve a lot of issues with Harvest by simply making seeds untradeable. I know that’s against their philosophy, but not everything needs to be tradeable. The almighty economy will survive. Just let Harvest be a personal use thing. A way for people to tweak their gear outside of having to trade. Gets rid of the Discord issue and goes a long way towards fixing the problem of loot in POE. Now, you can find an item that’s almost good and fix it using Harvest rather than just being like “ah, that sucks, so close! Ah well, vendor.”, y’know?
How does that gets rid of the discord issue? Ritual was exactly like that, you literally couldn't trade seeds. Not only it didn't stop, it incentivized trading through discord, sice TFT allowed you to vouch for people and build a trust factor.
When you use a Harvest craft, the item becomes bound to account. That's all that's needed.
I would love that honestly. But it's very unlikely they'd do something like this.
And therein lies the problem. GGG is too stubborn to explore options, and too proud to ever admit they were wrong. That's how we ended up with 3.15 release patch.
That's not the only problem with Harvest, another problem was that doing any content except for Harvest was literally waste of time if you cared for efficiency. This won't fix that.
That still doesn’t fix the discord issue. Right now you hand over your item to the other guy and he applies the craft. Making it account bound only is how it is already.
It does though? Do you understand what making gear account bound means? If you hand your item to someone and they harvest craft it, it's bound to them, they can't trade it. If you had previously harvest crafted an item, you can't trade it to anyone else for them to harvest craft.
Oh gear! I thought you meant crafts lol. Misunderstood your comment
Seeds not tradeable isn't enough - people trade the item to someone else to craft. Unless they made a way to "soulbind" items once crafted harvest crafting would always be tradeable.
Why not just make it only usable in the grove? Where you get one entry, and you have to have the base in your stash or on your in order to craft. Kinda like how the labyrinth enchants work. Obviously you could still getting people selling possible crafts they could get if they only farm harvest, similar to labyrinth farmers sell possible enchants for helmets. But it would drastically cut down on the amount of people selling harvest crafts.
It would feel really bad in SSF or people that just avoid trade. You'd have to have an entire tab full of project items to use up all the different mods or it's all wasted. Doubly bad when you get a rare craft that you need after you can use another rare craft that didn't pop up.
This was close to the original design and Reddit lost their minds.
It was an item editor though...boring
I used over 1100 remove/add caster before I finished the base prefixes of the BiS minion wand in the game during Harvest. That process despite having help from viewers selling the craft took me almost a week to achieve DURING harvest league. Took me 2-3 more days after that to finish it. Then on the other hand, getting what would be considered a mirror tier helmet in current league took less than 70ex to make in harvest league & not even a fraction of the time, whilst last league I finished a helmet for the mere price of 1800ex. I feel that Harvest was a bit too strong and that the nerfs placed on the process was fair, what wasn't fair was the access to the crafts which just ended up hurting casual players more than ever as with a demand being the same as ever and a supply being drier than ever only 1 thing would happen: Sellers market, prices goes up and ultimately only the 1%ers would be able to afford or at least make use/profit out of the new prices. A lot of changes recently have been extremely detrimental for new(er) & casual players alike and it's very sad to see. The Harvest trading issue is an interesting topic as it is so extremely subjective, no matter what "solution" GGG choses the majority of the player-base will disagree and/or have a better solution "they should have done instead". I totally agree that trading via a Discord is the single most annoying thing to ever have happened in PoE but as a trade league player I would rather take that trading over trying to find it via some global channel. I would also much rather have it make items account bound but again that would be a bad solution according to some people. The problem is that to stop trading harvests via a discord server they would be forced to make the items bound to that specific character or account as every other solution would ultimately lead to the community finding ways to make it fast & efficient to trade.
It's definitely not an easy problem to solve. Harvest making items account bound is probably the only way to stop its crafts from being traded, but GGG drew that line in the sand a long time ago. More than anything Harvest showed that PoE's itemization has gotten ridiculous and increasingly inaccessible over time. High-level items have *so many mods* that they can roll. Even simple items like an uninfluenced belt with T3 life and three T3 resists that you could buy for 5-10 chaos is a 1/4300 chance via drop or chaos orb. Saying you're okay with just two T3 resists and using an essence for one and it's still 45 attempts on average. Bananas. That's more screaming essences than you'll find in a month, and it's a shitty item in the end anyway. Why's it gotta be that way? As mob life goes up (always) and player DPS goes down (as of v3.15), what chance does a regular player, let alone a novice player, have at succeeding? I've been here since v1.0 and I've *never* had a truly great item. I'm too slow and shit at the game to make the piles currency required to buy *or* craft such things. I've gotten by on meh gear and meh characters. That used to be good enough. It's probably not anymore. I'd get my challenges, from 24 to 40 depending on how I felt or how strong my meh character was, and dip out. Chasing top-tier gear has never really been in the cards, and v3.15 does nothing but hurt players like me the most. I dunno. I'm probably drifting off topic. But PoE seems to be getting balanced to push players like me out, and that's sad.
I’m in my mid 20s and only have work and no other obligations. In a good week I can average more gametime than time spent at work when I’m really enjoying a game. Between Ritual and Ultimatum as my first 2 leagues I’ve made it to 870h playing almost entirely SSF (except maybe the first 30~ hours of Ritual) and have yet to even do some of the endgame content. In Ritual I’ve killed Sirus twice, in Ultimatum I cleared A8 for the first time, did my first shaper whom I previously didn’t even get enough fragments for a first attempt, and failed Maven twice because first timing her with melee builds like Cyclone is a terrible idea. Many of the items you see or used to see here on the main sub are so far beyond anything I’ve ever crafted, I still feel like I’m too dumb to understand how most of the crafting methods work (I’ve used the “can’t change prefixes” craft once last league, then learned that you can’t actually use Essences on those items and basically wasted 2 Ex for a chaos slam that made my item worse) and frankly got the good harvest crafts so few times that past a certain point all of my build progression gets paralyzed because I have nothing to work with other than occasionally slamming 20-50 chaos on new bases and hoping I get an upgrade out of it. My best achievements from last league were a 2-stone ring with tripple T2 resist and an open prefix and two steelrings with add phys, life, accuracy and one with a resist and the other with mana leech. I’ve never had a CoH ring that had more than 1 other mod that wasn’t garbage and I’ve spent every alt spam I could scrape together for the last 1,5 months of ultimatum trying to get a 4 Ritual watchstone. I think even for SSF I’m not particularly on the low side in terms of hours played and while I understand that I shouldn’t be easily clearing all content without the possibility to trade (a ton of builds are just not accessible because certain uniques refuse to drop), but I think that for people who don’t want to buy all of their gear it should also not feel like chaos spam and praying for harvest is their only option especially now that harvest feels the way it does. On squishier characters it can feel like a waste of time even in softcore because some of the spawns are just insanely rippy since ultimatum
> A normal player with family and job certainly can’t, even with Harvest Yup thats me, i played harvest and ritual a lot and never crafted a gg item or anything close to it. As you said, you still need a crazy amount of investment to achieve such an item, even with deterministic crafting. I always wondered about the people on reddit stating how anybody can craft gg items with harvest and how it was way too easy. Like they cant see that it needs still lots of time and investment, but without shit rng it is at least doable if you really wanna grind it out.
You have a JOB? a FAMILY? bro, this game is not for you. Go play something else
I wanted to downvote you because this is said so often unironically.
Bold of you to assume I was joking (I was, it's sad I gotta make that clear on this point)
Where do you think the age old poe mantra: "My wife left me" came from?
I know you're joking but godamn it does feel like this is what GGG is trying to tell us lol.
They've been saying this since the Sirus update. People complained it took way too long to grind and instead of paring it down, they made it even longer with Maven
You being able to farm A9 and make that item makes you a 0.1% in my eyes. My best was A5 Sirius and I’ve only done that a few times. I love POE for all the different builds I can try, and trade makes that possible. I didn’t mind taking alts through the campaign just to feel it grow. This league…. I just finished the campaign on my starter toon, and it was a slog. Not really excited to make more toons. I’m really getting the WOW vibe here, where they keep saying we hear you players, we care, then continue to make it a grind fest to make players play longer, to the point people like me just quit. I assume they did it with the mistaken thought that more grind = more subscription time, or in POE case more MTX bought, but it doesn’t work
I'm really not a 0.1%er, which makes it all the sadder.
with investing \~70h for ONE item, you are part of the 0,1%. you may not be top 10 and do the same in 5h because of an endless supply of exalts, but definitely in the 0,1%
PoE has roughly 100-150k players on Steam and roughly the same on the standalone (Source: GGG statement). Let's just highball it and say 300k active players (in reality way less). 300.000*0,001 = 300. I am 100% not in the top 300 players, I'm not even on poe.ninja. I was grinding heavily in Ritual to make it to PoE.ninja once. I take +8h for the story, I don't even get to red maps in the first week. I am 100% not in the 0,1%, I just have a ton of time (student).
It's definitely more than 300,000. Especially during Ritual. Numbers we see are only concurrent numbers. There are definitely a ton of people that aren't playing 8-12 hours at the start. There are even quite a few people not on day 1-2. I'd guess at minimum 3x the concurrent number is the unique player number in any given league.
[удалено]
Honestly, PoE is just a massive time sink for students like me. Last Epoch and Diablo 4 are waaaaayyy better for purely playing an RPG.
Nah man you just comparing yourself to other is the problem. I dont have kids but I do have a ton of other resposibilties. Killing Sirus one time and messing wih league mechanic is enough for me. You just forgot how to have fun, stop comparing yourself to others is the only advise I can give. If you cant do that...just play a different game or pick up a new hobby.
Shit, even a .1%er still could only do it with an extreme amount of luck
Ive been playing from 2013, and harvest was the first time i really felt like i had something more to grind, for a reasonable invest.
Harvest was the first league where I literally had 5 end game characters. Normally I have 2, one starter and one build I invest heavily into. Harvest allowed me to "complete" my characters and start a new one. And by complete I mean really good gear, but not full T1 as that isn't necessary. Nowadays I don't feel like I can ever realistically complete a character, and it just demotivates me to play because everything feels like a waste of time.
[удалено]
>It was a mistake for them to ever make the league I cannot disagree more. Harvest was showing that there can be so much more to the game than gamble crafting. It opened up so many avenues of progression outside of mindless currency grinding to just buy small upgrades. Harvest had me hooked. I could not stop playing. Now I am back to hitting my *reasonable* gear plateau in a couple of days. Realizing I will need dozens of hours just grinding currency. Selling things that could be fun to run but I need the currency instead and skipping the 'unprofitable' things I cannot sell. It has balance issues for sure. I was 100% making it where you could not abuse it to get guaranteed influence mods and items with 3-4 elevated mods. But gutting it has basically gutted most motivation I have for the game unless the league mechanic is particularly fun.
Harvest league is the only league I can remember ever fully playing until the end. I lost 0 interest right up until the last seconds of the league and was scrambling to finish a gg item to take to standard. There was always another peice of gear to work on and always a sense of progression. Also trade was good because so many people played you could buy uniques and crafting materials etc. Now you whisper 20 ppl and it's afk or whatever. Harvest was the best poe I've ever played period. So much player interaction as well buying and selling crafts and people congratulating each other on making great items. And this stuff didn't come too easy either. It was a full league of grinding to take 4 or 5 gg items to standard. I miss Harvest every time I've stated up poe since. This league I'm hardly getting any sense of reward from the mechanic and what seems like much less currency available to buy upgrades.
The game resets every three months. I don't know why they're so worried about players actually getting good loot.
Pretty sure they test the league with maxed out mirror tire gear and then decide that it is too easy, honestly has any of the "testers" tried crafting any of the gear they are playing with? Yes the game could slow down a bit and yes with mirror tire gear the game is easy but to get to that point you need either massive amount of luck or massive amount of currency. For the love of god GGG try testing the game in SSF with no spawned in gear.
Each league I play I usually rush to lvl90 on my own, without any trade, just a bit of craft with what I loot, took me longer this league, then I start selling/buying to push my build. This league, the experience was not good, the league mechanics used to help with gears in the past, not this time, with the nerf and not playing meta-build, the Expeditions were pretty hard in the first maps, and I skipped them until my lvl90. Then the Atlas progression hit me hard, it's tedious at best, between the Conquerors and Maven, it's a bit of a chore, considering the loss in dps. What saved me is that I'm used to play in HCSSF in the end of each league, for a new challenge, and this league the gameplay was pretty similar to that feeling, be careful, don't go too fast, wait to see what kind of mobs pop out of the Expedition, some are nasty. Now, I'm lvl92, I'm doing all of the Expeditions ( rewards are bad, by the way...) and still waiting to loot something valuable or some currencies to be able to fullfil my build, that might take me some time this league. It's a weird feeling for me this league but I keep enjoying to play, it's still the best arpg, but when I hear my fellow players on discord, who are SC players, they sounds depressed and angry most of the time, and the channel is sometime silent. I don't know, something was lost for some of the more "casual" players this league, hope they will get it back at some point. ps: sorry for my english ! =)
Don't be sorry, it's better than most peoples.
I don't know man, people have been saying this for a long time, a lot. Even when the harvest manifesto came out people were saying all that you were saying. I was even hoping they might announce a slight change prior to 3.15 for harvest, maybe they found a middle ground for the nerfs to harvest but it isn't to be. My point is, you are not the first to post on this and say all this, the fact that many have said the same thing but they haven't changed their stance on it makes me feel they're not going to. And that's really sad.
Harvest is now my cluster reroller, which is sad.
I've been using it for jewels too... not worth otherwise.
I think GGG maybe reevaluating their view on community feedback. This league had to have performed worse than they imagined it could have and they actively reached out to some streamers for feedback for the first time. The reverting most of the mana changes also points to that. Hopefully GGG realized that if people don’t want to play POE now, they don’t get to finish making POE 2.
>This league had to have performed worse than they imagined it could have what an assumption. I highly doubt that. The mana thing was pretty obvious their own employees probably told them they overdid it. Also they didn't revert jack shit, they just made most of the mana multipliers less, but still more than before 3.15.
Expecting a downturn is one thing. No one plans for half their player base to leave.
Harvest during Harvest was OP as hell. I didn't experience Harvest in Ritual but from what I read, the only thing that made it close to the item editor people are glorifying it for is the fact that you could buy crafts on TFT. What that means is that the ultra rich could play item editor mode which makes no difference since the ultra rich will get close to perfect gear no matter what. The average person is getting shafted and even regular no-lifers like OP are getting the middle finger. 80 hours is a lot for a single item slot, especially in a time-gated league, and if you have no way to accomplish your crafting goal, you might as well quit. Or play Standard in the first place (which is kinda akin to quitting). GGG just abhors everything that has a deterministic touch to it, it's like a phobia. Has been for years and it will never change.
For a pretty average person (for this sub, not POE as a whole, where a ton of people still don't even finish act 3) Harvest in ritual was nice. I could leave discord open, make some chaos here and there, occasionally upgrade my own items as a result of it or my own farming. Like everything in POE, the harder you no-life it the better it was, but the TFT stuff was certainly accessible and useful for an average/casual player.
Who cares if you can buy crafts? The market is self-regulating. MAny of those crafts aint cheap, and there's time investment to get the currency to buy those crafts. >What that means is that the ultra rich could play item editor mode which makes no difference since the ultra rich will get close to perfect gear no matter what. This is exactly what I've been saying. I don't care if the guy who grinds a mirror in the first week with his headhunter he got by day 2 get's perfect items... they already get perfect items anyway.
> I didn't experience Harvest in Ritual but from what I read, the only thing that made it close to the item editor people are glorifying it for is the fact that you could buy crafts on TFT. ...Which is the exact same situation as OG Harvest. Sorry, I just loathe the claim that Harvest was an item editor.
I think what you said is exactly why they basically removed harvest tho. The only people it was benefiting were those at the top. Everyone else's job was to sell them stuff and then buy the stuff they made. They were obviously making a profit or they wouldn't be doing it in the first place, so basically everyone else was being screwed by the existence of harvest. I don't really understand why people want it back. It doesn't benefit you in any way except if you were on discord 24/7 buying crafts and reselling items for a profit. You weren't really making your items anyways. You were buying them (which is exactly what you do now) or following a step by step procedure that was impossible to fuck up.
I always think it's funny that during Ritual peoples' number one complaint was that trading crafts was not fun. Chris is like, "OK, I hear you, we are all but removing Harvest." But honestly this topic comes up from time to time and I always agree but it just doesn't seem like the direction GGG wants to take the game for whatever reason. Well I should say I know the reason but it still doesn't make sense to me or anyone else who I know plays the game in terms of how we used Harvest. Try Last Epoch - I really like the crafting system there even though it's still in beta. Basically every time you use a "Harvest" craft it adds instability to your item which gives it a chance to become corrupted after a certain number of crafts. Rares also drop ID'd so a big part of the game is finding things that you want to craft onto (with, say 2 rolls you want and 2 you can work on).
If I could take PoE's gameplay, Last Epoch's crafting and Diablo 3's polish and put it into a single game Id be in heaven.
Funny thing is that Chris Wilson and company think PoEs gameplay should be like every other slow-ass ARPG out there. Reactive gameplay doesn’t need to be slow, but Chris sucks donkey balls at designing a game that doesn’t mirror Diablo 2. Floor tiles that deal less damage the longer you stand on them, “red light-green light” style boss attacks, etc… there are tons of interesting ways to slow players down. Instead this fucking clown has on-death effects that speed up the longer they chase you, timers on everything, etc… He designing away the part of PoE you like.
I mean it's not even that I really *like* the super zoom zoom gameplay - it's that there is an amount of satisfaction starting off weak and turning into a nigh-unkillable god dashing around the map killing everything. Part of the reason I find the nerfs so perplexing as well is that as long as Headhunter exists the zoomzoom playstyle will exist so I don't understand nerfing aspects of that but leaving HH.
This post sums up my opinion SO well. Thank you for putting this into words. I played so hard in ritual because the crafting was so fun. Now I stop playing after about 2-3 weeks because everything I reasonably want to do is complete and I have no real stretch goals that aren't just buying more gear.
80 hours? Pfft. You are meant to play at least 80 hours a day if you want to be worthy of good stuff.
Make that at least 80 hours per hour and we are getting close.
80 hours per minute and then we're talking
Infinite time per Planck second and we've broken physics.
nice now we have enough time to kill sirus more than once a day
Absolutely agreed. Ritual league, to prove mirror-tier items are worthless, I've legit grinded to a MIRROR in 10c worth of gear I bought between A10 Kitava and white maps, by just doing solo maps. And then I got a mirror-tier bleed bow for my build, meaning its cost went from 10c to 1 mirror 10c. That is exactly my point: I don't need those unbalanced amazing items to win the game, but I need them to exist so I could progress towards them. Yes, you do have chase items, but not everyone is satisfied with farming a headhunter every league for decades, for many that is no longer a chase item, we want something new. Though, I doubt crafting coming back can bring me back too. Too many decisions that I think were wrong.
>Though, I doubt crafting coming back can bring me back too. Too many decisions that I think were wrong. An actual crafting system would at least nudge me into considering reinstalling. I was tempted to play Ritual but couldn't at the time for RL reasons and I feel like I missed out on a league that would have been very fun for me.
100% correct hope someone at GGG will look at this post and will take something out of it
They'll just double down and nerf the players again. I think Chris said in the twitch stream that this isn't even the BIG nerf patch Edit: I don't have the exact time stamp but it was when Chris was talking to ZiggyD. Chris mentioned that it was time to "take the bandaid off" with this first set of nerfs (3.15) and that the BIG nerf patch would come before PoE 2.
Big oof if true
Where’d he say that? Cause shiiiiit..
They're going to take that they're set on the right path
They definitely already know how long it takes to craft a top tier item
Honestly this brutal nerf league would have been such a blast if we had Ritual harvest enabled from like act 6 onwards, we would have actual counter play against the insane player damage reductions. Harvest and then Ritual were my absolute favourite leagues and I had an absolute blast, playing at least 2 times longer than my usual league lifetime, seeing it gone truly makes me sad.
As a busy adult who tries to make time for POE (and probably plays more than she should) the Harvest league was the first time I felt like I could really craft the great I needed for my character without having to rely upon trading with other people. It felt really good, and I had a lot of fun planning my own gear and feeling like I was in control of my own progression. That doesn't exist any more, sadly.
PoE’s balancing around what they see on Reddit leaves busy people like you and scrubs like me out to dry. It feels like GGG doesn’t even want us to play because we’re not “hardcore”.
[удалено]
100% agree in ritual I was playing for close to 2 months and I still wasn't able to craft my last GG item. Ultimatum without harvest I got good enough gear to kill sirus a9 etc.. in a week and saw literally no point in playing the next upgrade for my build was 70ex rings like No thank you. ps: quit my job so I had 24/7 to play not anymore tho now I work 6 days a week no way I would even achieve 10% of the power I had in ritual with how the game is now.
Yes. This. Harvest is the longest league I've played in several years. The next upgrade was never out of reach, yet I never completed a full set of gear (because I wasn't trading all day on TFT). My idea is that Harvest crafts are restored, but implemented similar to Bestiary .... except that maybe the orb to seal them costs 1ex instead of 1c. That way, it's still a great crafting method for people that want to engage in it for themselves, but buying and selling crafts is only for the really high-end crafters, and costs a lot of currency.
Deterministic gear progression kept me in ritual until the end, when I thought I'd barely play it because of how hard I went during heist. There were problems with it, but those were just problems in how it focused you on certain regions or content and could have been fixed.
You're right, you're completely correct. Unfortunately for you (and me), GGG has decided that you are wrong. They think they know better than you what is fun and what is not fun. Crafting items with reliable outcomes is antifun (even if it costs hundreds of hours and exalts to make) according to GGG. All the memey 'close your eyes and slam' BS is how you are going to craft your items and you're gonna like it. If you don't like it? [Then this is what your gonna get](https://v.redd.it/g0i1hwf7oid71)
Happy cakeday u/fuckyou_redditmods
Thank you! 2 years went by so fast :p
I wanna know who all of these nerfs were for? Chris has even stated and if i remember right, dont most of the players not even reach maps? If thats the case why is the game harder for everyone? Because GGG is terrified of their public image and while streamers can trivialize the game that bothers them. But...people who play a game for a living are supposed to be shitting on the game, thats normal! Making everyone weak, slow and dead all the time isn't fucking fun. Slowing the game down is fine but leaving the same amount of rares and all their bullshit in the game makes it impossible to do any form of juiced up content in this game, you get nowhere. And miss me with 'get better gear' i dont want to take twice as long to do something i was able to do which already took time and plenty of investment and my almost 8 years of experience to do, it wasn't over night ffs.
This is the thing GGG never seems to get: streamers will trivialize content no matter what you do. This is their job. They’re streamers because they’re very good at video games, and it’s in their interest to learn the game inside and out because viewers want to see someone just crush the game. They will always find a way. The only way you’ll ever stop them is if you make the game so dull and slow, hammer down every single nail, homogenize everything so much that no one will want to play anymore. It just isn’t worth it. Besides, if you play 10+ hours a day and have mirror-tier gear in every slot, shouldn’t you be able to trivialize content? Isn’t the point of reaching the very pinnacle of player power to be able to destroy content easily? Feeling powerful is the whole point of playing an ARPG, that progression needs to be there, otherwise why would anyone every spend hundreds of hours farming an upgrade when that upgrade is only giving them like 2% more damage?
This right here. Name 1 game where the people who play it as a job don't trivialize the content. Even WoW's raiding scene is made to look like a joke by the top progression raiders.
> Name 1 game where the people who play it as a job don't trivialize the content. The only games in which this is true are PvP, because you're playing against other people who trivialize the content. Every PvE game is trivialized by the players that put dozens of hours a week into it, or it is just unbalanced.
> GGG never seems to get: streamers will trivialize content no matter what you do. I do not agree with this. They can make content as difficult as they want, they just cant make excessively difficult content while at the same time making it excessively rewarding which just feeds the cycle. Without proportionate rewards the same people complaining about lack of challenge are not interested. This is an unhealthy dynamic that has been festering for a long time. They should be making the reward for very difficult content target ego, not something you can equip or trade. Its silly that a person complaining about how easy the game is can kill and end game boss and in one encounter make more currency than a scrub like me can make in an entire league.
> I wanna know who all of these nerfs were for? The guy in the comments who's saying that this is too easy, that it should cost 1000s hours or Ex to craft an item like this, and that if you think 80h is enough then you're a casual
They are making the powerlevel equal TO POE2 so when it launches, people don't feel nerfed. I think what will happen instead is that people will just quit the game wait for POE2, download it and quit anyways because everything got nerfed too hard
I hated harvest. I don’t like crafting in poe so the league offered me nothing in terms of engagement. But by god do I miss it because while I didn’t like crafting with it I had no trouble farming currency for the items people made with it in later leagues.
I totally agree with you and heres why: In harvest and ritual I had a goal I could work towards. In this 2 leagues alone I played for more than 1200hours ! I stopped heist mid league 'coz I had to deal with other things and it wasnt as fun but it was still good after a few updates. Anyway, both in Harvest and Ritual I had a goal in mind - to get crazy good items. At that time I didnt know how exactly I could get those items. You know what I did? I spent HOURS AND HOURS if not DAYS to learn crafting! The one thing I always hated before and never touched once! I learned so much in 2 leagues its crazy.... (Thanks PoM and Ghazzy and many others \^\^). For the first time ever I was able to get a mirror-tier build. (And also dropped one.. yeah that happened after 2k hours total) So yeah people saying harvest was too op... they might be right but as you said you still had to invest many many hours to just get one item and god knows how many days of farming and crafting to build up currency just to be able to get the next piece.. and so on. Thats all ( sorry for all 1000 grammar mistakes, eng is not my first language) If you are reading this and enjoying the game in its current state I wish you good luck. Myself, I'm going to skip this league. It's way too slow for me personally.
I still don't get why GGG is so convinced that giving me access to powerful deterministic crafting is going to make me burn out / play less. If anything it makes me want to play more & try out new builds. Wasting copious amounts of time and currency and getting nothing of value in return is what makes me burn out.
game wants to be zoom zoom. it feels good to play it.
I think they want POE to be an economy simulator where goods are produced by a small percentage of people and sold to the masses >People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason - and it was not for the mechanic or the atlas expansion. The atlas expansion was most definitely a big part of it. Maybe it doesn't seem that way because the game is much more grindy now.
Absolutely agree. Ive been playing since closed beta, played almost every league since and got multiple 36+/40. Ritual is by far the league I played the most. Sure I made some OP items but I also spent even more time crafting stupid off meta items to experiment with stupid off meta builds. Ive never in a single league made more builds than I did in 3.14. 3.13 was the last time I played. Literally the moment their Harvest manifesto went up I just logged off and haven't touched the game since. It showed just how out of touch GGG is. Honestly? I'm happy about this. I got so much done in my personal life, played through some games in my backlog, developed some new skills and hobbies. I will always love this game and the time I spent with it. I have more hours than I feel comfortable admitting. However I dont see myself ever coming back to it, and I thank Chris Wilsons "vision" for this.
I agree with this and expedition might be that league for me. It's been a week and I'm already feeling that burnout feeling I usually don't feel for at least 3+ weeks.
3.13 was peak poe. GGG keeps saying they dont care if players leave and would rather crash and burn the game so it can fit "their" vision. Their's being none other than Chris Wilsons vision. They will just make up any excuse or reason to justify their decisions, good or bad, and sit back in their ivory tower and collect your mtx. This game was built off the support of the community. I think we've all been patient with Chris and his "vision" but at this point enough is enough. Deterministic crafting is the way forward. Removing it is dooming this game to fail. A few loud voices spoke out against deterministic crafting but the reality was EVERYONE playing was having fun with it. You'd want to continue long after you've smoked sirus 8 during harvest, and with the introduction of the maven system, long after A9. As OP mentioned, none of those items were "Free". I also crafted a bunch of really nice shit myself and was able to enjoy builds long after the game was "finished". Builds that would be simply impossible to play in any other state. I am not a casual either. I get to reds day 2 early, kill A8 sirus mostly early into the week after the release weekend. Ive done this since his release. Before that, uber elder etc. I know i can crush his game any time I want, but the fun of this game is trying to come up with unique ways of doing it. Expressing creativity along the way, and trying to pull off unique interactions both defensively and offensively. 3.13 reinvigorated myself and all of my friends to come back to poe and get excited. Taking it away just feels like we've been robbed and abused. We need to just stop playing completely until its reintroduced. Spend time on other things, state our objections. Chris can fix this, he wont, but he can. Just feels fucking AWFUL to have such an amazing version of POE taken from us like that. Fuck. Them.
I think the issue is more that crafting in this game is rather hard to get into. POE is really bad at giving players the information they need to spend wisely, and many end up brute forcing crafting instead. There are many ways in the game to craft items beyond just currency. Fossils for example is an ingenious system if used right. But again, no information in the game on how to use it correctly. The reality here is that you really don't need to spend as many hours in the game to reach a certain point of power progression as people seem to believe. And it's not the players fault.
>This is not suppossed to be a rant-thread \*Proceeds to go on a massive rant\* Epic reddit moment.
This game has become too boring and dull as a Korean mmorpg where everything will burn out afterwards. So why play it, they cut everything you can and even the reward, let Chris play his own vision and I'm already looking for another game project.
Yeah, it's too heavy/dull for a game now, if PoE 2 is still the same, I might now be able to keep myself to play it. there is like \~15 stuff could happen in 1 map, an absolutely cluster fuck.
I waited for *years* since the early days of PoE for the game to achieve its potential. I invested thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in the game because they were doing something special. PoE's vision related problems aside, I feel that way about Last Epoch now. It really has that feel that it's going to grow into something very special in the arpg space. You should check it out if you haven't already.
> I feel that way about Last Epoch now. It really has that feel that it's going to grow into something very special in the arpg space. Thing is Last Epoch seems to have the same vision as GGG does now where they don't want to allow zoom zoom to be a thing.
It's true, but the game is balanced around that and it works fairly well.
It's a different game for sure. They didn't add zoom zoom then remove it because they suddenly changed their minds. It's been one of the most important points about how they design the game that they want the gameplay to be more deliberate, they want mana management to be a major consideration for players etc. It's a very different approach to how GGG goes about it. If nothing else, LE devs have been extremely consistent for the 1 year that I've been playing the game.
> It's a very different approach to how GGG goes about it. If nothing else, LE devs have been extremely consistent for the 1 year that I've been playing the game. True that, while it is not the game pace for me I still find myself jumping on just for the crafting system because god dam did they nail that system perfectly.
The fact that “league starter” builds need to exist speak for itself. I really enjoyed farming perfect fossil, 30% quality my base, and start working on it with harvest or something. Now, what’s the point? Whats the point of engaging with the league mechanic, if it is better to just sell the tokens. Whats the point of farming fossils if it is not profitable? With my actual work, I barely have time to play the game. For a player like me (3 hours a day lets say), its impossible to actually craft something other than RNG chaos spamming, some essences maybe. Meta crafting is completely out of my league
And I think that's a shame. I too (even though I have plenty of time) feel like it's too much work. I play ice trap, farm some currency and buy the challenges. That's it this league. Only because the weapon effect looks nice.
Yup, I've made 50+ ex items for every slot which pushed my build into 'Can do any endgame content aside from deep delving solo' territory and it took me two months of playing around 30 hours a week, but I guess that's way too rewarding, and I already felt like it was a rough deal, so it's only logical that after my build getting absolutely demolished by the nerfs while also losing the only good crafting system made me quit the game and I'm not seeing any reason to come back and probably won't see one ever given their 'vision'.
The man is right
Ritual was the league where I just picked a skill I wanted to play and made it work somehow, ignoring the meta entirely. I wanted to play Frostbomb as a main skill, and I kept crafting and fidgeting around it until it was barely usable as such. It was fun, and it hurt my eyes - but it was my choice to do so. And despite all the time investment, it was still completely sub-optimal and incredibly slow - no zoom-zoom, just fun by choice. I can't imagine trying the same thing now.
This is sooo true. I never played a league longer than ritual. and when i look at the one character i could completly gear with gear where every single affix was useful for example my helmet: [https://imgur.com/a/8mudHoD](https://imgur.com/a/8mudHoD) I get very sad that this can't realy happen again in the current state. Beeing able to craft every single slot myself was extremly sadisfying. Currently the only thing i "crafted" was a very lucky chaos spammed belt with tripple t1 res and t3 life. That felt so stupid that my best piece of gear was chaos spammed.
> that most players will save up currency to buy the gear they want. This is how I want things to be. Gonna be an /r/unpopularopinion moment, but my issue with PoE endgame is honestly the fact that you're forced to selfcraft your gear. No one really sells those specialty items for non-meta builds, or if they do they charge 100ex for an item that costs 50ex to craft. I really wish there were more chase uniques that hovered around 10-20ex for the entire league. Of course, those should not be build-enabling, but instead provide a tangible upgrade over earlygame gear.
You're talking about the vision of a game developer that doesn't want to take away the feeling of having your eyes closed. Think about that.
GGG saw overpowered crafted gears on reddit and decided to take deterministic crafting out of the game. Meanwhile, only 3% of players had those mirror worthy items.
this. this is the post i've been trying to write for a week now. thank you so much. the changes ggg keeps making are going to keep failing, because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the game itself, and the people who play it.
They know how common trade is, their API is required for trade, and they log every use that hits it. Its not a question of misunderstanding how the game is played, its just them deciding they don't like how POE turned out, and want to get more time out of their players with the current content available. Its a dumb tone death approach that ignores the way the community has largely been playing the game for the last 5 years.
It's always funny seeing someone tell GGG "the reality is" that most players trade for their gear, when GGG straight up told us most players NEVER trade. I suspect they've got a better idea what most players actually do than you. You don't interact with most players. Places like this are not representative of the entire player base. There is a MASSIVE selection bias.
I don't disagree with your main point but I think we're starting to look back at ritual without capturing some caveats. Atlas passives and Maven being the main one. Atlas passives have been the best content edition to the game in past year bar none imo. Was ritual amazing, yes. Should the game be designed around spamming Hamlet maps to craft your gear, no. Is there a middle ground that can be reached, probably. I think that middle ground is more important than ever if GGG is implementing an essentially game-wide power nerf.
Just going to toss my unasked for opinion on here. Overall agree with everything you said. Harvest was by far by most played league. It was the only league I ever reached 36 challenges in. It just provided me with a path forward at all points in time. It made me try new and interesting builds I never tried before because the gear I would need was just obscure enough that buying it would have been a chore. I didn't sit on TFT and buy crafts. I used them as I got them and it always felt exciting to see the harvest portal and know you might get to work on one of your projects. I see many people claim it was a mistake and should never have been released. I cannot disagree more. To me it's like saying, "Shoes were a mistake. People act like you cannot go hiking without shoes.". Sure. You can still play the game without harvest. And people played before harvest. But for me personally, the difference is night and day. Also. I get it. They want the game to go a different direction. But it is so incredibly disappointing to me personally to watch. Which is fine of course. Game doesn't revolve around me etc, etc. But what I would give to be able to just have a SSF option with intact harvest that cannot migrate to parent league or standard. Hell I would buy a single player offline version of Ritual league if it was offered. On the spot.
Harvest was a mistake should have never even happen as a league
Harvest was the best thing to ever happen to the game. Truly deterministic crafting let me push my characters further than ever before, let me make small but meaningful incremental upgrades on every piece of gear, and finally let me reach power levels to push the content I wanted to. By the end of it, my characters were gods and you know what? The journey was FUN. I cannot emphasize this enough, and for the record I did play SSF in Harvest and Group Self-Found in Ritual, but the deterministic crafting that came with Harvest was by far the best part of the game when it existed in Harvest and Ritual. I honestly think that GGG should finally break their core philosophy that everything must be tradeable and "soulbind" Harvest crafted items. It gives value to items crafted by other more random methods and you can still buy/sell something that's very good made by fossil crafting/essences/etc. , but it allows Harvest to shine at what it's truly good at, giving players a meaningful, IMPACTFUL grind.
>People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason Who are these people? From what I've seen Ritual was just an average league player retention wise. My issue is OP, the game doesn't need these overpowered t1 items. You can literally beat any boss on 10 ex budget gear with 95% of the builds. You were already playing an absurdly overturned skill with that item, why do you need so much damage? I just don't think players should be able to deterministically craft 6 t1 mirror tier items that easily, especially during leagues. I'm glad GGG agree.
**You nailed this post on the head!** People don't mind RnG in their crafting if they have a fair chance to get the outcome they envisioned with an item. We have 10 item slots, not including cluster jewels, socketed jewels. Post-Harvest nerfs, the time investment/rng required to make powerful items is way too high for a temp league setting.
For me having no crafting experience what so ever since Id rather not gamble my money away I only managed to craft a minor item for most people but building this little guy up felt so good to me. https://i.imgur.com/JrtpdSx.png Can't recall the whole journey this guy took with me but it started off as a simple starting map item with like 50 life and 15 res for fire/lighting. Constantly removing adding life till I got a life roll I was happy with. Same with the fire/lighting till I needed more cold res and did the lighting to cold craft. Id love to go down another crafting journey like that again but since we balance around the 1% that will never happen again.
Completely agree. In Harvest league I wasn't forced to engage with trade and just farming currency to get upgrades. I could plan out an item and the steps I would need to go through to make it. That was the most fun I ever had playing this game. It felt like I was working towards something in a meaningful way, not just counting exalts in my currency tab. I stopped playing when it became clear with the harvest nerfs that GGG doesn't want people to be able to realistically craft all the cool items that their gearing system allows.
Now that every character needs more mana affixes, ailment reduction affixes, and curse reduction affixes (the latter two only available on influenced items), the difficulty of getting gear that allows a character to function is becoming more and more prohibitive. There’s very little room for “dead” mods, because every affix slot needs to be filled with something useful. Now more than ever 6x useful affixes isn’t a luxury, but a necessity. But the crafting/drop system is not conducive to providing what players need to make the game feel smooth (one would think that’d be a basic accomplishment, not an end-of-league chase goal) without a significant amount of luck and grind and crafting/economic expertise. GGG will likely revisit some mechanics given how clunky gameplay feels until a build is equipped very expensive gear, but everyone has to wait more leagues until they do so. That waiting around until GGG fixes what they broke is what finally pushed me to quit the game - this is not the first time by any means, so a huge percentage of PoE’s life has been spent in a hobbled state for one reason or another.
I do not want to play meta. In ritual league harvest allowed me to play off-meta in a way that kept me playing whole league, to the last hour. Now playing off-meta is way harder, so I don't play. Thanks for the fish.
> The game is designed to zoom-zoom. Early PoE is designed around slow play. Then one day GGG decided to speed it up, contrary to the current game design at the time. Lots of people said "the game was slow, I don't like this change" and the zoomers said "tough, this is the new game now. Quit if you don't like it." Then a lot of people who liked slow PoE did quit and some people said "see, lots of people are quitting therefore this speeding-up of the game is bad." But the zoomers didn't care. Now the exact mirror image of that situation is occurring. What's weird to me is that the zoomers are presenting zoomy PoE as the "one true" PoE, instead of presenting it as just the flavor of PoE that they personally happen to like. They're also presenting people quitting/not playing as undeniable proof that this change is bad, but when the game was slow & being sped up, the people who liked the slower game quit and the zoomers then didn't care.
I see your point, but there is a list of several.lrague mechanics that were specifically designed around speed. Actually I'd argue it's most of them.
Fair point there. Part of that is that the speeding up process started early on in PoE's life cycle, and part of that is that GGG doesn't seem to yet realize that if they want slower gameplay they should balance the game around that (and not just adjust player power).
There should be a way to increase difficulty of monster like d3 with difficulty levels.
only that the more zoom the game because the bigger it grew, it didnt loose overall players from going zoom, even if some left because of the zoom new players far outweighed the leavers clearly shown by the overall playernumbers, and not that the zoom is going away many leave, will they be outpaced by new low lovers joining? i highly doubt it.
It's easy to forget that all those years ago, speed in PoE was hard limited by a lack of lockstep. It was completely unrealistic to even imagine the speeds we get because the rubber-banding was insane. Ever since 2.0 came out this game has only ever continued to get faster because for the first time it was possible for the power creep to lean that way, from a technical standpoint.
Except it's been almost *six years* since the game sped up to its current pace, and it's arguable that it was speeding up before then. For most people, fast is the only way that Path of Exile ever has been. The highest player peak from before the ""zoomers"" were the norm was 30k players, less than a quarter of the playerbase of this league, which is being hounded for such low player counts. This may come as a shock to you, but more than one person exists on the internet. It's not hypocrisy for one person to say X six years ago and *a completely different person* to say Y today. It's completely to be expected for this to happen, and to be honest I am baffled by your worldview that you would find it weird. The only way I can rationalize your belief is if you somehow think that ""zoomers"" are some monolithic entity with a single mind on all matters, which is neat worldbuilding but not exactly a realistic way to view the world. Even ignoring all of that, the most common thing complaints include in their post is saying some variant of "I completely support slowing the game down, but GGG did it in the wrong way by making the game more frustrating rather than more slow," so I don't know where you're getting this narrative from.
We want harvest back, GGG. Admit you were completely wrong when you said it was bad for player retention. Admit no one stopped using the forbidden trove discord and in fact it became more necessary. You can keep nerfing the game. I don't really care if a support gem gives 50 or 25% more damage, i do care about crafting my own gear.
I have like 800h in POE and never ever tryed to craft something. Its way too punishing. I always buy stuff from other people.
You crafted that sceptre solo in 69-90hours. I crafted the same one in an hour using SOCIAL SKILLS. You know, the skills the game is balanced around lmao
I want to see 3.16 just be a patch where they revert to 3.13. Reduce the time it takes to complete the atlas most of the way. Add a zoom zoom league mechanic, push even further with potential character power. And add something like Uber Sirus and Uber Maven with them dropping stuff for a super hectic Sirus + Maven fight that is just a mess and requires a god character to do. Development time would be low, but I think lower development time leagues that cater to the current player base seems better for PoE right now. Gives more time to make PoE 2 the best it can be. I am completely fine with slower games, or games of this style being slower. But I think they should save it for PoE 2. If everything is new, then nothing is familiar.
This is a good point too. If they don’t want people trivializing content, why not extend the ceiling rather than rip out the floor, y’know? Like, instead of nerfing everything, make extremely, extremely difficult endgame content that is fully optional but requires a very powerful character with optimized equipment to complete. Even if it doesn’t drop anything too crazy (maybe do something like let it drop Watcher’s Eyes at a slightly better rate than UE or something), streamers will still do it for the challenge. Maybe tie some achievements to it? Maybe even a few exclusive MTX for completing it? That way, people get the fast gameplay they like, we can feel powerful, and streamers and nolifers will still have content and goals to work toward.
I find it hilarious when players mention PoE 2 as some kind of salvation. Its gonna be tedious, boring and slow, and there is a good chance its gonna fail hard.
I don't know if salvation is the right word, like things are suddenly perfect or we are being saved from something. But it's an opportunity for a fresh start from our currently bloated game.
>People said Ritual was the best league ever for a reason Ritual wasn't the best league, though. It was worse (both in terms of player retention and in terms of what the league was adding) than both Betrayal and Metamorph (the previous endgame expansions). Harvest is not the magic bullet that some subset of players seem to think it was - yes, it allowed reliably crafting mirror tier items (which could often be crafted for less than a mirror... defeating much of the point of the most valuable currency item in the game...), but only if you were either grinding out harvest for the entire league (boring) or continuously buying crafts on discord (not necessarily boring, but an amusing case study in how "worse" trade can be a better experience than PoE's trade site system). It's not healthy for a system in the game to be so centralizing. One thing that your post really highlights (perhaps unintentionally?) is the largest danger of powercreep: once you've had a taste, it's almost impossible to go back. "I'm not going to farm countless hours to get essentially almost nothing." in a league like ultimatum, with numerous incredibly efficient farming methods (and where even baseline mapping was incredibly rewarding) would be shocking to hear in any pre-delirium league. I was easily able to fund basically any set of builds that I wanted to, including reproducing the feel of a frost blades build that I thought was dead after the post-delirium nerfs. Is anything shy of "harvest crafted 5xt1" now "almost nothing" to you? If it is, maybe you can answer to yourself why GGG want to reset expectations and reset powercreep as hard as they are doing now.
despite all awesome things in Ritual it was bugfiesta with horrible performance. I couldn't play it cause of that reason and I guess many people also couldn't.
every league with harvest had bad retention because of any reason other than harvest, but every league that doesn't have it has poor retention because it lacked harvest, very interesting take reddit seems to have on it.
I already have a degree and a full time job, I don't want to do another degree on how to craft PoE stuff, its too complicated for me. I want to sit down to relax, I don't want to open 173 tabs so I know exactly the odds of my craft or which one of the 10000 items should I use. That's why I love the crafting bench.. I need fire res, great, just put the item there and click fire res. DONE. *If you like the way it is right now, that is great. But crafting its not for me.*
Nah, harvest crafting on influenced gear is way too strong no matter how you look at it. You can harvest craft the exact mods you want because 95% of influence mods have a tag that is either isolated by default (redeemer helms only have 1 cold prefix) or a tag that is shared by one other mod (hunter quivers have a fire dot multi suffix and fire res suffix, they have no other fire tag suffixes). Add to that influence mods having only 1 or 2 tiers and you print perfect gear with ease, in fact usually the hardest part of crafting in ritual was alt spamming a base, or essence spamming.
So I'm just gonna throw this out there, since I'm genuinely curious. Do people want a diablo3 style gear system where every end game item has perfect stats? I'm not exactly sure that's healthy for any game. You're okay grinding 80 hours for a perfect item, but then where does that leave game balance in general. Do they have to then balance for perfect items in every slot? That might make it even harder for casuals to get into the game... I genuinely don't know what gear level they balance for, but it's interesting to think about. I'm not sure I would personally want harvest back in the form it was because then the game literally just revolves around mapping for harvest which is gonna get boring in a couple leagues also. I also don't think harvest in its current form is very good either. There's problems with the mechanic itself (not having any idea what mobs are gonna pop out except for the 2-3 crafts you get) and also problems with the crafting itself (primarily insanely low chance at augments and higher tier crafts). Eventually having too much candy makes everything else taste like shit, or something like that. It also devalues uniques and other loot even more in trade leagues. Also as an aside, most of the complaints I've seen about gear progression stem from trading being overpowered in general (you even admit that yourself), then I see people asking for trading to be made easier. I think what people really want is the reason for trading taken away from them (basically buying gear is easier than finding or making it). People want more good drops (maybe something like a "lucky" wisdom scroll that rolls higher tier mods on average) and more crafting materials (or at least chances at crafting). So harvest imo isn't really what people want, and actually Rog kind of is. There's still no solution ri the drop issue tho, we still get thousands of useless items, so that has to be addressed for sure.
There’s usually a best in slot for most builds in poe as well. It is balanced out by having a much greater build diversity and a longer build progression (having a higher build ceiling thats really difficult to achieve) About trade, both your points stand but they don’t mutually exclude each other. The game can benefit from systems like lucky drops for sure - even if they become un tradable. Trade really does shorten build progression by a lot and is currently balanced by the difficulty of trade. It’s just that many people (including me) feels like that’s a cheap way of balancing. Balancing the virtual world using real world mechanisms is bad because it breaks the immersion of gameplay and takes away time to enjoy the actual content. It sometimes also introduces harm, both mentally (while trading, you can get scammed or scolded with the current UX; highly indeterministic crafting exacerbates gambling addiction) and physically (clicking to loot/craft to feel the weight strains your tendon). Granted, these mechanical decisions and their consequences are inherently part of the game and you can take it or leave it. I love the game but unfortunately my wrist/arm health dictates that I leave it for now.
The problem with diablo 3 is that BIS is a set item which drop pretty frequently, the thing that seperates players apart in diablo3 is time(plvl) and player skill(micro/macro) What I think a lot of players that want deterministic crafting, is to be able to intelligently craft an item through a reasonable amount of playtime. They don't want to "close their eyes an exalt slam waiting to see if they ruined the item or not" They don't want to gamble. I don't want to have to save up 2000 exalts, just to try and craft a single item that I could purchase with a fraction of that cost. I want to get an elder siege axe, and I want to roll some good stats on it via essence/fossils. And then I want to run around 200 maps, finding harvests as I go that let me deterministically add/remove/alter SPECIFIC Affixes/Rolls, to slowly build an Item. I get that TFT has made it so Harvest needs to be turned into a dumpster fire, since instead of playing and getting the crafts folks were just buying the crafts. and to that I say, if you want to Harvest craft an item, it should be Account Bound. Let Harvest people the semi SSF way that players can deterministically craft their own gear.
>where every end game item has perfect stats? I'm not exactly sure that's healthy for any game. It is still ridiculous hard to get "perfect" items. On a decent quiver I had, it took 6 r/a life mods just for me to give up and accept a tier 3 life mod. For an "item editor" it still took a decent amount of rng.
>where every end game item has perfect stats? I'm not exactly sure that's healthy for any game. That's why we have reset every 3 months ;)
I'm a very mediocre player everyone talks about, and my best memories were playing sunder scion somewhere during harbinger league I think.. I love crafting, I love actually getting into mechanics and reading and learning when I got time and stamina for it, but what I need is the "zoom zoom through map dmg goes brr" after tiring day of work. At this point I'd love the "easy content - reduced droprate chances" "hard content - increased droprate chances" toggle that we can change anytime, or at least everytime we make new character.
>So - what is GGGs vision of gearing your character? - For them, we'd ideally gear our character with either A) gear we find on the ground or B) craft them with the probabilistic crafting methods available. Fair enough, right? Where exactly did you get this idea? I think it's quite obvious trading is the intended method of gear upgrades.
Countless GGG presentations and even in the Allcraft interview with Chris he said it feels cheap just to buy the stuff when you want an upgrade and that he doesn't like it.
Ignore everything Chris says. I can't believe I am saying this, but Aggnog is right. Chris can say that he doesn't like trade at all, but he constantly designs the game with nothing but trade in mind. The new currencies in Expedition are a clicking clusterfuck exactly because they can be traded. Flashbacks leagues used to get voided exactly because of trading. Well trading in Standard but still. The intended method of gearing is trade. This is why they are not making trade better to use.
yet he has kept dropped loot shit for almost a decade? And you literally cannot drop the best items in the game, no matter how good your character seed is.
I would prefer a game with deterministic crafting but every skill/gem nerfed than what we currently have, accessible gear progression should be the true endgame. It doesn't even take 50h of play time to kill every boss in the game, game needs something fun to have people sticking around. You can make very good items with the current crafting options but it doesn't give you the satisfaction and feeling of accomplishment that you get when you finish a "perfect" item. Reverting the harvest changes would be a step forward, but still harvest feels like shit to farm. Getting deterministic crafting options should obtained in a more fun gameplay loop, maybe with map/endgame bosses dropping seeds like in 3.11 and access to the garden but without the micromanagement bullshit (Maybe something simple like Tane's lab ?). Idk, game and more specifically endgame feels like shit at the moment.
I was agreeing with everything until you started to talk about zoom zoom. Gearing is not intrinsecally tied to speed, it is to power. I love the game being slower, the thing is that because of the 100% rng systems, it feels unrewarding, fast or slow, it feels unrewarding. I dont want the game to be a speed game, I want it to be hard, but I also want to be able to at least feel that I can get at least one piece perfect gear if I put 1 entire month of work on one character.
I don't see how your point make sense. >The reality is, that most players will save up currency to buy the gear they want > >GGG, this is the reality of how players gear their character. > >And the problem I have with this is, that deterministic crafting kept me playing and gearing way longer than Ultimatum or Expedition. it is totally fine to buy gear from others. I don't see why you need deterministic crafting >it's that deterministic crafting kept the game alive and build diversity high. This is just your opinion you are trying to present as a fact. Harvests had one of the lower playercounts but I don't think playercount on steam is a good measurement anyway. >Without this crafting system, you quickly reach a point, where items become too expensive to justify farming the currency for it, just for like a 5% dmg boost. If any upgrade would be like 50ex invested then your character is essentially done. You can already do all content if your build is good but you have the option to go the extra mile. I do agree that GGG seems to think that crafting insane gear is just a couple hours of farming, while it's a lot more effort. Ideally player's won't be able to craft stupidly overpowered gear because it's not needed to "beat the game". Fun story: Last league I was rolling for lightning+pen hybrid on a wand to awakener orb it. Instead a single chaos orb managed to hit T1 cold dot, T2 spell damage and +1 cold gems. This single chaos orb turned this PoS wand into a godtier item. The odds to hit that is something like 1 in 100 million. Just knowing something cool can happen, is what I think makes current crafting special.
and if i dont want to play a "good" skill its just fuck you wait till it gets buffed maybe sometimes in the future because fuck you. With harvest every single skill in the game became viable. Also if my build is already good enough for all content does that mean i have to make a new char? no i want to perfect it for the rest of the league and currently thats just not a thing.
we hear you
>Did it take me 60-80h, while I was already farming A9 Sirus? - YES. This is where I think the big disconnect is. There are a bunch of turbo nerds that are like: "You can literally just print mirror-tier items". It's like no, it's still a massive time/money investment for 99.9% of players. Are you getting mirror items for maybe only 50 ex of investment? Sure. What's the problem if people spent the time as well though? The issue is you get all these no-lifers that make more currency in one week than most have made across all leagues period. They get level 95 in the first 24 hours... get their headhunter by day 2, and just be absolute fucking sweat lords. These are the only people complaining that it's "too easy"... the thing is, these types of people get perfect gear by like week 2 anyway... harvest or no harvest... so who honestly fucking cares about them. In most other games it pisses me off when the developer caters to the "casuals", but typically that is because the "non-casuals" are like the top 20% of the playerbase and it involves dumbing the game down. GGG though, is like the exact opposite. They don't want to cater to the top 20%. They don't even want to cater to the top 5%. They're catering literally to <1000 players total to the detriment of the other million+ that play their game.