Harvest Is My New Favorite League. Here's Why:

I've played a lot of Path of Exile. I started in Prophecy league and have since put thousands of hours into the game. Due to health issues, I have a lot of free time; I am one of the "no lifers" who puts 8+ hours into PoE every day.

I hear a lot of people complaining that the garden is a mess, that Harvest League burnt them out too quickly, and that Harvest crafting makes the game too easy. There is some amount of merit to all of these claims, but none of these have been my experience.

I posted weeks ago that the visuals in the garden gave me a vicious bout of sensory overload (which resulted in anxiety, hallucinations, and general stupor). I decided that I would not engage in the Harvest mechanic due to the many overlapping colors and grid areas of collectors/dispersers.

Well, after a two-week break from the game, I gave it another go. I built my own garden with clean, organized infrastructure and eventually got used to it. And you know what? Harvest crafting is AMAZING.

I understand that the game isn't built around players having ready access to 100% mirror-tier items, that Chris said 70% tier items are enough to do all content in the game... well, I did all the content in the game on 70% gear, and THEN I started crafting.

There has been no greater high for me in all my time playing Path of Exile than completing a 100% perfect item. All rolls tier 1, perfectly divined values, with handpicked mods planned from the very start. The first item I completed had me so giddy with excitement that I was hopping up and down for days.

This league has been the opposite of burnout for me. This league has given me goals: I want to create a perfect character. I want to hit level 100 for the first time. I want to craft crazy, 100% mirror-tier gear, and have a sense of completeness that would otherwise be impossible for me.

And even though I play 8+ hours a day, that still hasn't happened yet. I'm constantly making tweaks and optimizations. I decided that dual-wielding wands on my golemancer may be wrong so I crafted a shield. I'm buying 100% perfect Primordial Jewels and giving them 10% chance to Avoid Stun implcits. The cieling for this character is so insanely high that I'm not sure I can reach it before the end of the league.

This is so much better for me than other leagues where I buy gear that's "good enough" and just play until I get tired of playing. I feel driven. Motivated. Even at the highest echelons of play and with more wealth than I've ever had in PoE, I still have goals to chase on one single character

Rather than nerfing items, I want to see more endgame difficulty scaling like Delve and Delirium. I've been running 100% delirious fractured Caldera (my favorite map) with as much juice as I can handle. I'm learning and pushing the limits of my build beyond what the game could reasonably offer until last league.

I don't want to see gear nerfed, though I know the game's item economy isn't designed around this level of power. I want to see the game scale higher than players can go with gear alone. I understand that many players feel like they need perfect gear to start endgame because it's so accessible, but I personally want perfect gear for my completionist tendencies. I don't just clear the story in RPGs. I 100% them. All the side quests, all the hidden items, all the best-in-slot endgame gear, etc.

Path of Exile hasn't been a game I felt like I could do that in... until now. Chris Wilson said in an interview with ZiggyD that Harvest might ruin Path of Exile and that Standard will be very jealous, but I might decide to play in Standard once Harvest ends, at least until I get my 100% perfect Primordial Chain and The Stampede. (And no, I am NOT vaaling my gear. I value the aesthetics of perfectly rolled items over the additional power of corrupted implicits. This just shows that there is yet ANOTHER layer of depth with crafting truly perfect items - you can always vaal it and try to go nuts)

So that's been my experience with Harvest league, and why I have had more fun in these last two months than in any other I've played the game. Harvest has its issues, certainly, but what it does well and what it has to offer perfectly suit what I want out of the game. I am very grateful for the opportunity to experience it.

Sincerely,
~Eyks272

Nice feedback. I like this League a lot, too.

Like you said, crafting an all-T1 item feels great. I've only managed one so far, but I'm very pleased with it:

Harvest is my favorite league too! This is the second time I crafted something beside potions. The first time was in races (short temporary leagues) where you can average 3 or 4 exalted orbs by level 17. Unfortunately those races only lasted 2 hours.

Does Harvest make the game "too easy" like GGG said? Diablo 2 was easy, and it did pretty well. It was easy to reach level 70 in 1 hour. It was easy to get almost perfect equipment. When I finished a character, I made a new one. I stopped playing because I ran out of characters to play with, not because it was too easy.

Yet another post praising harvest for its crafting.

They really should have just went with a more normal crafting system instead of RNG pure + way too expensive for regular players to brute force through rng.

Also they should be smart and realize what this really means on a deeper level. It means they should stop with their pure and way too unlikely rng systems of everything, make more systems where player has more control and predictability and dial back their extremely low chances of getting what anyone wants with current rng atm.

Ofc, we told them that over and over throughout the years. But yea. They wanted to play on less than 10% of their potential playerbase, they wanted to make a game for addicts, a game not good for a healthy life unless you are living off gaming. And so they were ignoring it. Same with current death penalty - it's an absolute garbage system that ruins far more than it does good for the vast majority of the potential playerbase. But GGG never saw any problem there. Their tons of decisions of the kind let them where they are now, they could have had far more players than they have if they had opened their eyes to healthy game design years ago. Started polishing the game, make a good realistic and rewarding player experience. Improve on social aspects, guilds etc.

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Mouu wrote:

Harvest is my favorite league too! This is the second time I crafted something beside potions. The first time was in races (short temporary leagues) where you can average 3 or 4 exalted orbs by level 17. Unfortunately those races only lasted 2 hours.

Does Harvest make the game "too easy" like GGG said? Diablo 2 was easy, and it did pretty well. It was easy to reach level 70 in 1 hour. It was easy to get almost perfect equipment. When I finished a character, I made a new one. I stopped playing because I ran out of characters to play with, not because it was too easy.

Its kinda true I dont even finish maxing out a single character per league
If crafting was easier people could do 5+ characters and not just play a meta build

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MasterTBC wrote:

If crafting was easier people could do 5+ characters and not just play a meta build

And thats why i played dual strike up to lvl 98 this league, and i enjoyed it a lot given i could push for everything it needs to feel decent for mapping.

This league was perfect to get the itch of playing a certain build go away. Next league it's probably back to some more meta build variant, which i don't really care about as long as the skill is enjoyable to me. I will surely miss the wider option this league had to actually play and properly min-max yourself most builds.

The crafting carried my interest hard this league, but in the end it wasn't enough given harvest itself added nothing in maps except a feeling of being forced to do maps for further "sustaining" seeds. All the time i hit delve i felt bad regardless of currency gained.