Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Not much a fan of how overwhelming these changes are. Harvest in its current state rendered endgame gear attainable.

Part of the reason Harvest is so powerful is because of its deterministic nature. It gives you a high level of control. And I'm saddened that in the face of this, the answer settled on was not "Let's diversify endgame crafting options to enable more accessible crafting" and instead was "Let's kneecap the thing that made endgame crafting the most accessible it's ever been."

I've been playing since Metamorph. This league was the one where I actually felt in-control. Like my challenging endgame content wasn't just possible, but also reasonable. This has happened in part due to Harvest.

Suffice to say, I'll be experimenting with how Harvest is next league. I imagine I'll be disappointed.

+1

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iyauchun wrote:

Thank you GGG for letting me go.
I was a new player who joined in 3.12, and I've been playing 8-10 hrs non-stop every day for 2 leagues. Since I invested a large amount of time, crafting was not a big deal to me. But I have to study also, was planning to play much less(2-4hrs) to focus on my work. Thanks for the nerfs, now I know there's 0 chance I can get the crazy gear in future leagues anymore, I can stop playing.
Thanks!!!

The terrible thing here is not the nerfs itself but the fact that the game is being balanced around people that exploit harvest through discord.
Just like how tormented spirits used to be pretty good until people started ghostbusting and GGG nerfed them to the point that a normal player will never see anything good drop from them.
That's not the majority of your players.
There's always going to be people that are going to break the game, but you shouldn't take away the fun for the casual or ssf players that are affected by this.

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Kairuto2020 wrote:

Not sure why many says the changes are only good for the ultra wealthy. The top 1% will not be using Harvest if there is no targeted annul or target add mod into influenced items. It is this ultra wealthy that is abusing TFT to get their mirror tier items. With this new changes, they will have to play the same RNG as everyone else. They cannot be doing multiples Rem/Add using TFT anymore.

In addition, those beginners or mid level players will continue to use Harvest ( which will appear more regularly now ) since their items will not be influenced yet. Chances are also they will only add mod and not Rem/Add ( until the specific ones they looking for ).

So basically GGG wants Harvest to be used very early in the progression stage ie white and yellow maps. It is a nerf definitely but I don't think it benefit the top 1% at all. They will have to continue their crafting non-Harvest way while newer players can still use Harvest on their non influenced items.

Those who are very unhappy of are those who wants very good items with minimal grinding for currencies so that they can finish all content. POE is not a game for everyone to finish all content. GGG has repeatedly say this. POE is meant to be finished by only top 5% of the player base.

Nice strawman.

+1001 to this.

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Miraille wrote:

Mods, you're still reading this, we know you are. We watch you handle your jobs, so here's a request from us players. Make Chris sit down and read this. Every page of it. Make him do it. Don't ask him, don't plead with him. TELL him to sit down and read. Let him see what the base really wants.

I want well for this game. I have since it began. However, casino gambling is not crafting by any definition. Yes, you are making items, but by rerolling them randomly, augmenting them randomly, etc. It's literally all one big casino gamble.

Harvest fixed that for me. Harvest removed the one detail from the game that plagued me most. So I'll chill around here and see how this plays out, my only hope being that somebody actually does tell Chris to sit down and read this feedback.

So surely, since players are not intended to be able to reach these extreme levels of power that we apparently can with harvest, you plan on making the content possible to complete without these levels of power?

Right now, good luck doing anything past t13 maps without t3+ life rolls on every single piece of your gear and devoting 2 suffixes per item just to capping out your resists.

For reference, getting an item with those properties only just by spamming chaos is going to run you around 1000 chaos... Per slot. Obviously, nobody is doing that.

I totally agree that there needs to be a high gear ceiling to keep people trying to get just a bit better.

Right now though, the game is set up in such a way that having high quality gear is entirely mandatory unless you run one of a handful of totally broken cookie-cutter builds.


My personal suggestions:
Prevent harvest crafting from giving any influenced mods unless specifically using the one that is labeled for influence, but still allow using harvest crafts on influenced items.

Delete the targeted remove + add crafting options completely. These are the main problem. Having a single craft that removes the thing you don't want, and gives you the thing you do want is what people are abusing.

Do not get rid of the purely remove crafts, and make them have a meaningful cost. My main use case (and I imagine a lot of other people who aren't abusing the discord to circumvent the rarity of the craft options) is removing a single spell damage mod that doesn't fit my build, and using that open slot to add in some extra life at the normal crafting bench. I can't even imagine what it is like to have enough exalted orbs lying around that I would spend them on even the harvest crafting options, let alone normal usage of them.

Some more general things that I think could help a ton:
Life and resistance mods are just too important. It's not possible to have a realistic build without basically the same mandatory mods on every piece of gear. Not only does this raise the bar for entry to post act content, it also makes pretty much every build need the same mods on their gear and causes a ton of global value disparity between rolls.

To combat this, maybe cut the overall magnitude of all resistance and life mods on gear in half, and then increase the base life gained from levels, and decrease the resist debuffs from kitava kills to compensate for it?



Anyway, the main thing that irks me (you know... aside from the implication that somehow I should be using my tiny stock of 20 exalted orbs adding random modifiers to my gear in hopes of getting that 0.1% of outcomes that doesn't effectively brick my character and force me to start over from t1 maps again) is the removal of the pure targeted modifier removal options. That change alone makes harvest entirely useless to me as a player. Instead, next league I'm most likely just going to be alteration spamming to get good influenced mods, and then crafting the multiple crafted modifier to get gear that can at least function. I can't be bothered spending thousands of chaos that I don't have just to get the bare minimum quality gear to clear most of the game's content.

I understand that currency has it's crafting uses but the post makes it sound like they have no use if the entire craft part of it is taken away. If that was true then the price of exalts/alterations would not be where they are... 100c and 1/3c but worthless...

An example of currency being worthless was back in Heist,

We saw exalts down at like 40-30c with the duplication bs (fenumal arachnid), which got fixed along with some other drop nerfs. Which was reasonable because it ruined the value of currency all together.

I think this nerf for 3.14 is a bit overboard and should have been incrementally changed not just slammed into the ground like this. But I guess it's the boss' decision (it's not the player's game ??? I guess???)

Guess we'll have to wait and see


Oh well : \

Addressing the changes, my biggest issue by far is that the change to influence slams really disproportionately hits certain builds more than others. For example: Bleed and Poison Bow characters absolutely have to use Elder influenced bows to scale through maps well, while someone crafting a PDPs bow is more or less unharmed by this. I understand wanting to gate GG influenced items more, but shooting some builds in the foot about it is a bad time.

Look at all those TFT spammers malding ! Ah, what a sight to behold.

Are you serious?
.
The same as with the initial harvest & synthesis league?
Those discord "teams" already HAVE crafted the most valuable items, offering them for mirror service, partly for real money trade. With this change the rest of the Players loosd their chance to craft something equal for the same invest and are forced to pay the prices of These mirror Service Teams if they want to keep up. this change is just strengthening of their market position.
Saving their position by removing the chance for potential competitors.
...