Harbinger Content Integration

I doubt many will read this, but here goes anyway. My thoughts on Harbinger league:

I'll start off by saying that this was my first ever proper league. I tried previous leagues (Legacy comes to mind) but they just didn't do anything for me, but I dived into Harbinger with a new char (a spectremancer) and came out with a resounding 'meh'.
I generally had a few stacks of chaos at any one time, but I was never at the Exalted sorta-level. I bought all of the items I needed for my chars, didn't craft a single thing.

I won't say I hated Harbinger, but I was not pleased with Harbinger either.

TL:DR
Harbingers (the mob): Too Hard, take too long to kill, don't drop anything good. Will be glad they are gone. Good XP though I suppose.
Annuls: Randomness in crafting is still absurd and still punishes the majority of players whilst not really helping the 0.01% at the top these were aimed at.
Engineer's: Only useful on boxes that are far too rare for me to remember to use Engineers Orbs on...They also don't actually add that much.
Binding Orb: Don't drop at low levels where they would be useful, and useless at high levels.
Horizons/Harbinger Orbs: Not Fun and not really useful for those of us who don't fully complete the atlas.
Ancient Orbs: Only used for chase uniques, too rare/expensive/specific to use on the trash unqiues where they might actually be fun, useful, and rewarding.

Harbinger League Overall: One or two nice ideas, with quite a few more bad ones, almost none of which were implemented particularly well.
As per usual the items were aimed at the very high level of player, who already had enough currency to not need them, whereas the rest of us gained basically nothing.
As always the game is balanced around the top 0.01% and the rest of us are left to rot and wither under the nerf barrage.

Zana is, as always, a silly way of adding temp lague cotent into permanent leagues: Mods are too expensive, only last one map, and often are unrewarding. Not fun at all.

And don't even get me started on that mid-f***ing-league Desecrate distaster lest I explode with rage about it...



Full rant:

The most dissapointing thing about Harbinger league to me was the lack of new master mods for the new items.
The Annulment Orb was really interesting to me, as it allows the potential for almost great items to be saved...one sixth of the time
(since your item will most likely have 6 mods and which one gets removed is random, so you'll end up with 'the bad mod' removed one 6th of the time).
I have never wanted to craft anything in PoE due to the excessive cost and RNG that I know will frustrate me, and I was hoping that a master recipe or something of that nature that made use of Annulment orbs to provide a less random annul would be available. This would allow players like me who perhaps can't afford a perfect 6 mod item to buy/find an item with 4 or 5 decent mods and craft it into something decent. I am kinda sick of proper crafting being only available for the 0.001% due to the excessive crafting costs.
To somebody like me who thinks an Exalt is a vast sum of money they simply don't have the usage to justify the cost of crafting.
Annuls had potential, but there's still too much RNG in crafting for any large number of average players to want to do it.

I think this is sort of the same reason why Orbs of Binding are so cheap, which is also why even high level essences are cheap: randomness. an item being Rare rarity isn't actually that useful since most of the mods on a random item will be trash for you. This is especially true when you can look up decent items cheaply on places like PoE Trade in a few seconds.
What would've made Binding Orbs useful was if you had them at very low levels, yet they simply didn't drop in any great quantity there, so by the time you had enough of them you'd already outgrown them.
Perhaps an expensive currency item that you could make out of Some stacks of Binding orbs that gives a 5 linked rare item? That would've been useful. A few stacks of those for a 6 link?
That way I could pick them up and know they could eventually be useful to me. As they are they are just glorified Alchs without the value and usage for player trading.
At the very least a version of the Binding Orb that only made the item magic, at least that way I can get some decent gem slots on the item and spam alts/augs on it to get 2 decent mods - since alts/augs are comparatively cheap compared to Chaos, and you wouldn't chaos spam on a low level 4 link.

As for actual Harbingers:
To be honest I am kind of glad that Harbingers won't be added to core. It's not that I disliked them, for they usually gave good XP, and the mob drops weren't bad, and whilst the harbinger drops themselves were often underwhelming when you actually looked at them, they were fun to have drop, since it was pure currency and there was lots of them.
The problem I had with the Harbingers was that their difficulty was often massively different to the rest of the area I was in, and they took so long they often killed my pacing and sense of flow.

I've been running a lot of Shaped Mesa maps this league, and if a Harbinger spawned in the map it could well add 20-40% extra time on (especially if I was unlucky enough to get 3-4 or more Harbingers on the same map). The Harbingers also had a fire like degen (that you can't douse or use ignite immunity against, which I always thought was weird) that my stupid zombies always stood in and died - I think Harbingers were the only thing that ever actually killed my zombies all league, save for high damage bosses, like Uber Izaro or Atziri or etc.
So I will be glad when they are gone, every time I hit a Harbinger in a high level map I always sighed in resignation, knowing that the difficulty curve would spike for that mob alone.
It's supposed to be a difficulty curve, not a difficulty wall, not a difficulty overhang - with a barbed wire electrified fence on the top.
For reference, I ran into a double Harbinger in a T16 (Chimera) map, and they managed to kill my lvl19/20 Animate Guardian with relative ease: That thing can't have had less than 25k Life, and given all my Minion Life passives it could well have had upwards of 30-40k. It regenerated 12% of that when on low life, and had well overcapped resists, yet the degens were so absurd it still died. I think that is ridiculous.

I had never done anything above a T11 map when I tried that T16, and the hardest part by far was that dual Harbinger encounter. The actual Chimera boss was trivial by comparison.

They were also very slow to kill due to the large number of mobs required, which ruined my mapping rhythm and any sense of flow I had.
Considering how much grind there is in getting to high levels, a single Harbinger could utterly kill my motivation for grinding by breaking my flow, whereas otherwise I could go for dozens of maps.


The Orbs were mostly useless as well, and almost none of them were fun to use.
Ancient orbs were only used to gamble for chase uniques (such as HH), and they were too expensive to use to gamble on the vast swathes of trash uniques which you always have drop - if they had simply rerolled a unique to any other unique (i.e. no item class business) and had been so common as to make them like 3-5 for a chaos they would be super fun I think, since you could spam them on your trash unique pickups. As implemented they were too expensive, too rare, and too specific to use inefficiently. I think I used one for the achievement then pretty much sold the rest.

The Horizons and Harbinger's Orbs...did anybody use these? I never heard of or met anybody who did other than presumably the people who bought mine off of PoE Trade.
They were an interesting concept, and if I was the kind of person who did SSF and intended to fill my atlas then they'd probably be great for getting a variety of maps and getting rid of trash maps, otherwise they were pretty useless.

"

"The Orb of Binding and the Engineer's Orb did not resonate with players, and do not fill great enough need to be added to the core game at this stage."

I disagree, it wasn't that they didn't resonate with players, I think it's that they weren't implemented correctly.
Orbs of binding were supposed to be used for low level characters to get decent levelling equipment I think, which was a great idea, but Harbingers didn't drop enough shards for them at low levels, and at high levels they were useless.
Last I looked they were 5 Binding per Chaos, which is less than an alchemy...More useful than an alchemy, but less expensive. Just goes to show how little use people had for them.
Engineer's Orbs were a nice idea, and I can see why they would be useful, but I'd only really want to use them on say a Diviners or something useful like that. For most strongboxes I wouldn't bother. I got into the habit or rerolling strongboxes this league with alts/augs (which I've never done before), and I even kept some Engineer's orbs on my char as well in case I found some, but I used them so little I never remembered to use them on decent boxes.
Perhaps good boxes were too sparse..?
Maybe this league we should've had fewer trash boxes at higher levels and slightly more good boxes to encourage us to use them? (and to help us remember to use them...)
Given another league worth of time I could've seen Engineer's orbs being something a lot of average players carry with them in case they come across a good box.


Adding Harbingers to Zana via map mods is a silly idea.
Basically nobody ever plays the map mods I think except if they are trying for an achievement or trying to get a league exclusive chase unique.
The mods are very expensive - several chaos at least. We could at least have had a scaling cost. One alch per three map tiers or something like that.
Zana also isn't fun, and because you have to explicitly add the mods, they aren't rewarding or surprsing at all, since you know what you will get pretty much before you start.

I will pipe up with my support for the unification of Zana and Sextants in her own GUI system, where I can say add a certain number of slottable passive mods to my tree for all my maps (like Jewels) so I can run map without ruining my sextants. Or/and then pay for mods for the next 'X' maps that I run, again with scaling cost. Or pay something random, like a Chaos orb, for a random mod for my next map.
As she stands Zana mods are cumbersome, dull, and a very bad way of adding temp league content to the perm leagues.
and maybe whilst you are there you could make some kind of system that allows me to complete my atlas and still get lots of good maps drop by blocking off bad maps from dropping.

"

Nosferat wrote:

"

gubaguy wrote:

Horizon orbs helped SSF fill atlas and made mapping fun, so we removed them.

Harbinger orbs allowd players to get to endgame faster and have more fun, so we removed them.

Players liked the new harbinger uniques and found new endgame builds with them and had fun with them, so we removed them.

Players who were unable to farm up currency to get GG items like kaoms or headhunter enjoyed ancients, so we removed them.

Players were too stupid to figure out that engineers orbs were OP, so we removed them.

Players were too stupid to use Bindings as alchs and for leveling, so we are removing them.


Streamers have figured out how to make even more GG items using annulments as eternals so they can continue to run mirror servies to hoard massive quantities of currencies for their RMT sales so they never have to work a day in their life, so becuase of streamer pressure we are keeping them in, and making sure to point out very publicly how they are in fact just eternals, but only for streamers, who RMT, and we know it, but do nothign about it, becuase they pay us lots of money to make 'custom uniques', and not bribe us to continue their illegal practices.

+1 to those points.

+1 to the +1

[deleted]

Why would you remove the map reroll currencies? Those were the best part of this league. Finally you could complete or at least get closer to completing your atlas without just buying everything in the auction house.
Nothing feels cheaper than completing challenges or atlas notes by buying them of other players. That was the only half reliable way to get the maps you were missing. If the harbingers orb was too powerful than remove them why also remove Orb of Horizon?
And if you remove everything in this league except Orb of annulment please just take that too, never used one of them, don't see any reason to do so, not without eternal orbs. More crappy Orbs no one needs and removing the good ones, what's the point.

"

chainsawKiller wrote:

Why would you remove the map reroll currencies? Those were the best part of this league. Finally you could complete or at least get closer to completing your atlas without just buying everything in the auction house.

auction house?...

"

Akymo86 wrote:

I'm confused here, you are adding Orb of Annulment to the core game basis, but also you are planning on removing it's slots in currency tabs? What is the sense of that?

Ahh, sorry, we'll definitely keep the slow of the Orb of Annulment.

So, when we run Zana Harbinger mod, what drops we will get from it? Is there any way to get Harbinger uniques or all new orbs from Zana mod?

After you add Zana mod to get Harbinger unique we must run The Beachhead Harbinger Map or they will drop from monsters?

What will happen to the new Shards? Mirror shards, ex, etc after you add Zana mod? They will drop or not from Zana mod?

sounds good so far the only thing what i dont Like and hope you will cahge also with some other mods are

on zana lets say Breach mod you can pay for it to get it but you dont need you get a rare time free breaches in your maps so why not also every 5 -10 maps you get free harbingers??? why you make them zana pay exclusive?

i started Poe around 1.5 month ago because a friend helped me with guidelines and builds etc.

so i hear from him that perandus league also it was a free thing and now you get it only if you pay?? why the most things you get only if you pay for it? why not a rare chance to get theese mod free in a map?

sry for my bad english.

i hope you will change some of your things and make it like breaches a rare chance to get the mods in your map just without paying for it some PPL dont play this game so hardcore or dont have the skill to get at this point that they can pay easy for mods for running them..

"

and made jumping up map tiers too easy.

Exquisite. So now we have to buy 70%+ of the Atlas again because good game mechanic <3

"

Hunter1989 wrote:

so i hear from him that perandus league also it was a free thing and now you get it only if you pay?? why the most things you get only if you pay for it? why not a rare chance to get theese mod free in a map?

sry for my bad english.

i hope you will change some of your things and make it like breaches a rare chance to get the mods in your map just without paying for it some PPL dont play this game so hardcore or dont have the skill to get at this point that they can pay easy for mods for running them..

Yea there was this fun thing called leaguestones, but people were having fun, so sheep hobbits had to remove it. Also, it was making cancer Zana grinding somewhat obsolete, so instead of trying to figure something out, sheep hobbits were like "People are having fun instead of cancer grinding, that is a big, big problem."