What's wrong with deterministic crafting?

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Vennto wrote:

But let me understand that: Your aim and fun in the game would be to throw 1 Essence on an Item and get a perfect item? Same with fossils, you want to use one filled resonator and get the perfect item?

If your answer is no, then all we are arguing about is numbers, not wether something is supposed to be deterministic.
And if your answer is yes, then we have a different opinion about how accessible good items are supposed to be. When it literally takes 1 Essence to get the perfect item then I would end the season the Monday after the starting weekend, like in D3.

Don't mean to hijack his reply. I will answer for myself here.

I think that if trade provides with a measure of accessibility, then the other methods for obtaining gear should be comparably efficient (drops/crafting).

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Vennto wrote:

With Harvest you were able to build up items from white to 6x t1.

That is not exclusive of Harvest or made possible because of Harvest. You could do it before.

It was made easier to attain, yes. But TFT was LARGELY the reason of any surge you could see. I can speak from the experience of not trading crafts and finishing Ritual with 36 points (to give you an idea of playing time), and I had none, not one pice of gear, with all T1 crafts.

So, please, stop with the misinformation or misrepresentation.

Aside from that, we seem to conveniently forget that Harvest was not purely deterministic. There was quite a bit of RNG involved: In finding it, in the first place, of finding the craft you wanted, of it actually applying the mod you wanted, of it actually applying the tier you wanted. A finished piece (without TFT), could take months to finish. But it gave people a goal. Something to work with, even in standard.

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QuiquePoE wrote:

It was made easier to attain, yes. But TFT was LARGELY the reason of any surge you could see. I can speak from the experience of not trading crafts and finishing Ritual with 36 points (to give you an idea of playing time), and I had none, not one pice of gear, with all T1 crafts.

So, please, stop with the misinformation or misrepresentation.

I made 2 entire gearsets, one took 15 days the other took 3 weeks. In ssf. TFT has to be the biggest scapegoat ever brought up by the playerbase. And the most offensive part about harvest crafting was how you could farm yellow maps nonstop and generate these items. You aren't even forced to do actual high level content whatsoever.

And fyi, 36 challenges is like 5-6 days into the league if done efficiently. There's people that get 40 by the time I get 36.

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It was made easier to attain, yes. But TFT was LARGELY the reason of any surge you could see. I can speak from the experience of not trading crafts and finishing Ritual with 36 points (to give you an idea of playing time), and I had none, not one pice of gear, with all T1 crafts.

So, please, stop with the misinformation or misrepresentation.

Was not trying to missrepresent anything. If not mentioned - I was talking scrictly trade league SC. And in that regard, I always argue from the top-down-perspective. Why? Because when it comes to balancing (and the question of deterministic crafting is part of balancing in terms of gear-strength) I always look on the absolutely most effective and best way to utilize stuff. Simple reason for that, and it´s fine to not agree with me here, but that´s just how I see games in general: As long as YOU AS A PLAYER can improve, you can get better results without changing balancing of anything at all so balancing should be made from top to bottom.

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Aside from that, we seem to conveniently forget that Harvest was not purely deterministic. There was quite a bit of RNG involved: In finding it, in the first place, of finding the craft you wanted, of it actually applying the mod you wanted, of it actually applying the tier you wanted. A finished piece (without TFT), could take months to finish. But it gave people a goal. Something to work with, even in standard.

That is literally my point :) I can totally agree with you, and said before that Harvest also was not pure deterministic. Then again we come back to my point: Do people want deterministic? It´s kind of weird they cry about the harvest when in fact it was just "easier". It was not at all 100% deterministic, you get your item eventually after 50-100ex on it. So what is it that people are actually so sad about? That the overall quality of the items is higher and they lost that? That they felt they were able to produce items themselves? That it is now way more expensive to produce BiS-Items?

All that is argued is in that regard the perfect amount of randomness.

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Vennto wrote:

It was not at all 100% deterministic, you get your item eventually after 50-100ex on it. So what is it that people are actually so sad about?
All that is argued is in that regard the perfect amount of randomness.

Because no matter if it was less or more deterministic, it consists of this very word. Imagine.
Now back to the crafting bench with t5 mods, that's where deterministic crafting's at.

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Vennto wrote:

after it proved unhealthy for the game.

You've had many good posts in this thread, but lets be honest, you cant 'prove' it is good or bad for the game as a whole. You have an opinion on how things should be played, Chris does, each player does.

For many players, you are dead wrong and Harvest was the best thing thats existed in PoE, period. (see the complaint thread). It was finally a way that made crafting fun and approachable. For others, it was overkill and made the game too easy while making other crafting unnecessary.

No one can say, not Chris, not you, not me, that it was proven anything for the whole game.

There wouldn't be any chemists if they worked hard to get all the ingrediants to make something good, if the outcome were just left to chance and that the chance would more or less be weighted to explode in their faces. This is how I see Harvest in its current form...the hardest part getting all the ingrediants with the still good chance the outcome will blow up in your face!

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yamface wrote:

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QuiquePoE wrote:

It was made easier to attain, yes. But TFT was LARGELY the reason of any surge you could see. I can speak from the experience of not trading crafts and finishing Ritual with 36 points (to give you an idea of playing time), and I had none, not one pice of gear, with all T1 crafts.

So, please, stop with the misinformation or misrepresentation.

I made 2 entire gearsets, one took 15 days the other took 3 weeks. In ssf. TFT has to be the biggest scapegoat ever brought up by the playerbase. And the most offensive part about harvest crafting was how you could farm yellow maps nonstop and generate these items. You aren't even forced to do actual high level content whatsoever.

Were your pieces T1's, like Vennto claims we were all easily obtaining? Because if not, I could also make them (and did), and that provided a much welcome alternative to having to buy these pieces through trade.

And I have never implied it was perfectly implemented. Or have we forgotten, for example, how people farmed, not maps, but the actual campaing acts during Betrayal? And then it was corrected.

I wonder, though, did you hate that you were able to complete those sets in such a short time? Was your league experience worse for it?

TFT was a decisive factor in how efficiently you could craft your gear. FOR SURE! Just watching a few streamers, and you could clearly see the difference with me playing alone and not trading.

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yamface wrote:

And fyi, 36 challenges is like 5-6 days into the league if done efficiently. There's people that get 40 by the time I get 36.

Maybe that was a bad example, and I'll admit it. I don't persue challenges, really. Most just come as I play. But that was just me saying a played a long time in Ritual. Stopped after the manifesto was released, like a month before it ended.

Just to clear things up, this is not another "HARVEST" discussion, but i guess it can't be helped since it made crafting a little bit easier.

For people who didn't play harvest league and only experienced it in heist, you would need to have something like this before you can farm your craft.

I did not make this diagram but this was the base garden that i followed.



GGG made it easier in heist because a lot of people were put off with "farmville" creation and it wasn't really the core of the league.

For me it was part of the fun, but it's not for everyone, like many other parts of the game, not everyone will be pleased.

I'm pretty sure they learned something from harvest league, are they going to bring back "deterministic crafting" next league? Maybe.

Is Ultimatum the testing ground? Probably, but i definitely didn't waste my exalts slamming items with my eyes closed LOL!!

They were almost all t1 mods. The second set of gear is full t1 mods.

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Vennto wrote:

But let me understand that: Your aim and fun in the game would be to throw 1 Essence on an Item and get a perfect item? Same with fossils, you want to use one filled resonator and get the perfect item?

No, i just want some means to improve my gear beyond barely midtier level without having to play casino royal or wallstreet all the time. I don't really care how that is done but as a matter of fact, it's not done at all. The chances of dropping decent items is close to zero, actual good items dropping borders on being impossible. With how little deterministic the remaining crafting options are they are hardly better than chaos spamming. As an anecdotal evidence, i actually got more decent items out of chaosspamming then i got from essence and fossil usage. Being able to gradually improve your items was so incredibly important in a game that has the most horrible loot system ever introduced in an ARPG and now it's gone.

Yes, the combination of harvest and TFT was bad for the game and had to be broken somehow but the way they did it was literally the worst one imaginable. They could have limited the tiers you can get via Harvest crafting to tier 5 or something, similar to the bench. They could have limited the amount of times you can harvest craft an item to prevent people to just R/A mods until they have 6x T1 mods, they could have made havest crafted gear account bound, there would have been so many better ways. Hell, i would've been even fine with it if they just did what they announced in the Harvest manifesto, with those changes alone it would still have been useful. But on top of that they reduced the spawn rates of useful crafts by what seems to be factor 1 million to the point where even heavily invested streamers like Ziz and Path of Math say that augments have essentially been removed from the game. Aside from a few utility crafts harvest is now just another gambling hall, like we didn't have enough of those yet.

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With Harvest you were able to build up items from white to 6x t1. Having the fun of using dropped items and develop them is a fairly biased idea how people used it. It was an item-editor.

I'd say it's how 99,9% of the playerbase used it. Only the rich as fuck 0,01% of the playerbase that could afford buying crafts on TFT for hundreds of exalts could actually turn a white item into a 6 x T1 item. And they can still do it today, the only once who suffered from those nerfs are the other 99,9% who couldn't do it back then and are now fucked for good with "trade or gtfo". Not only is the collateral damage of those nerfs beyond ridiculous, it didn't even solve the problem at hand. It's a balancing failure of epic magnitude.

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I don´t feel like this is a fair representation of the current state as well. You might forget, Harvest is still in the game. Reforge keeping prefixes/suffixes giving a 100% chance to keep certain mods, other reforges do also respect metamods, therefore can be used to further upgrade and improve items. On top of that, veiled chaos orbs also respect metamods. It might be a bit harder, but it is still very possible, even in SSF, to craft good items without the exaggeration of spending "hundreds of exalts" on items.

You won't get good gear out of harvest reforges, at least not without using literally hundreds of them. Good luck doing that in SSF with the reduced spawnrates. I literally haven't seen a single fucking "Reforge and keep prefixes/suffixes" craft since 3.14. NOT A SINGLE ONE. In dozens of groves. They murdered the spawnrates a million times over. Without TFT harvest ist worthless at this point. Even in the 1 in a billion chance that you get a useful craft, you're probably better of selling it because chances are it will be the only one you see for the next months. I guess they gave us T4 Aisling which is something but it still feels horrible beyond compare.