Harvest could be worst league ever?

"

kuciol wrote:

"

j33bus wrote:

It does come up every league which is frankly a giant problem that needs fixing too. However Harvest is being shown to be worse, it's not this bad every league.

I would say its more of a confirmation bias. Also its impossible to fix something like this. Players have different tastes, you cant by any means make everyone happy. For example i hated delirium with passion more then any other league. I got to lvl58 in it and got bored, too much loot, too much grey. It made me not care about drops at all. Poeple tend to forget that its ARPG, for that we also need that RPG part, we have plenty of A.

I don`t think PoE can even be considered an "ARPG" anymore, if i was to classify it today i would say it`s a MMO Touhou Shooter/hack and slash hybrid RPG.

It added so many things into it`s core that it doesn`t ressemble an "standard ARPG" anymore.

We have a lot of side content unrelated time consuming things (MMO).

We have crazy amounts of trash monster density ( even more than most hack and slash games lol)

We have a lot of bullet hell of sparkling colored particles, where if a single particle touchs you, it`s certain death. (touhou shooter)

We have a lot of character customization (RPG).

I dont think its just the boring/tedious league mechanic. To me, it seems like GGG forgot what makes the game fun to play.

There are simply way too many unfun or tedious mechanics added to the game over the last 5-6 leagues. Atlas changes, horrible boss mechanics, inventory management which is too time consuming, on death effects, trade that is full of scammers... Just so many annoying things you need to deal with.

Whats really disappointing is that, this is clearly how they want the game to be played, so these issues will stay in POE2.

"

ArisFuser wrote:

One thing is for sure. Even Synthesis, Delirium, Blight were considered bad leagues and later regarded as great after 1 month of patches,even some of them amongst the all time favorites. Something that doesn't happen and surely wont, no matter what, with Harvest. It wasn´t that broken, Chris,... it wasn't that fun GGG.

nah, i doubt that. above mentioned leagues are about killing more monsters while harvest is just a crafting dialogue and an additional pack per collector. i think harvest has fundamental mechanical problems that aren't fixed with "more loot". the drop off in player numbers is also so significant that i doubt it's recoverable. the 60k number on steam concurrent users will fall off a cliff on monday when a lot fewer players log in.

"

madrize wrote:

I dont think its just the boring/tedious league mechanic. To me, it seems like GGG forgot what makes the game fun to play.

There are simply way too many unfun or tedious mechanics added to the game over the last 5-6 leagues. Atlas changes, horrible boss mechanics, inventory management which is too time consuming, on death effects, trade that is full of scammers... Just so many annoying things you need to deal with.

Whats really disappointing is that, this is clearly how they want the game to be played, so these issues will stay in POE2.

i think blizzard pass ball to GGG when d3 release with bad thinks

now GGG going to pass back to blizzard when d4 release

Been playing since start and there has been something new and fun to do in every league. Even delirium, torment etc. This is like playing in standard.

Not interested in raising a farm. Better games out there.

Sorry but GGG just jumped the shark, I'm done.

Yea the problem with harvest is that it only really starts being something to engage with once you have already finished all the content, and are running really high tier maps constantly.

"

madrize wrote:

I dont think its just the boring/tedious league mechanic. To me, it seems like GGG forgot what makes the game fun to play.

There are simply way too many unfun or tedious mechanics added to the game over the last 5-6 leagues. Atlas changes, horrible boss mechanics, inventory management which is too time consuming, on death effects, trade that is full of scammers... Just so many annoying things you need to deal with.

Whats really disappointing is that, this is clearly how they want the game to be played, so these issues will stay in POE2.

Yeah Poe has a interesting problem where most of their core ideas are actually pretty good, but they always implement it in the most shittiest way, i don`t know if it`s a communication issue or lack of time to properly implement their ideas, but it shows.

Let`s take a peek at some league mechanics:

1- Beastiary:

Core idea: You find beasts in maps and after defeating them you can use them in interesting ways;

Implementation: You had to control your DPS while using a clunky item to actually capture them. Which made it one of the most hated leagues of all times.

Fix: Beasts are captured when they die.

2- Betrayal:

Core idea: You find masters, defeat them, progress towards a bigger a fight. Masters drops the "recipes" for crafting.

Implementation: you couldn`t "pass" a turn which lead to you bricking further encounters or bricking your board. There is also Catharina fight wiping all your board progress if you decide to fight her, which makes fighting her a wrong move if you want to play the mechanic efficiently.
Furthermore they introduced an unveil system, in which you have to pick up rares and give them to jun, the problem is when you have to repeat this every league, since its boring and not fun.

fix: Killing catharina doesn`t completely wipes your board (connections, masters etc), making unveiling less boring (for example unlocking unveils as you interrogate them (one interrogate = 1 craft unveiled).


3- Blight:

Core idea: You have to defeat monsters that come in waves while building structures to help you out and keeping your pump alive

Implementation: Portals could spam too near of the pump, building the towers is clunky because of the UI, requires cassia to be near the tower(when there is walls she can fail), towers are severely lackluster and you don`t even have time to build them since if you stop killing the monsters the pump will fall in a second.

Fix: Making so blights in maps already comes with random towers pre-built. And making blighted maps work in waves with intervals between them (you can skip the interval if you want). Not requiring Cassia to be near a tower for it to be built.

4- Metamorph:

Core idea: You build your own boss using pieces that drop from monsters, then collect those bosses pieces to create an even crazier boss.

Implementation: you had to pick up one per one from tagged monsters, there was no indication of which pieces on the ground were valuable or not. The "final bosses" were completely lackluster (being always weaker than their map versions lol).

Fix: auto pick organs. Making the laboratory boss fight more interesting.


5- Synthesis:

Core idea: You run a map with a timer, collect pieces and connect your pieces to reach rewards far away. It also allow you to combine certain items to generate new implicts.

Implementation: The decay "aggressiveness" was completely random, leading to frustration. You had a really small limit of pieces, and could not rotate them. Random islands could spam in the middle of a run and ruin all your progress. Boss fights went from fine to be heavily influenced by affixes RNG. And most all nodes buffs were bugged (lol).
The synthesizer required a 3rd party site to data mine the outcomes (too obscure).

Fix: Allow rotating pieces(or moving them like they did), increase pieces "bank", make the decay slower).

6- Harvest:

Core idea: You collect seeds, plant them and harvest them, killing monsters and getting fluid that can be used to craft or to grow high tier seeds.

Implementation: You need first to put crops, then connect those crops to pylons then connect those pylons to storages, tanks and horticraft stations. Furthermore to grow high tier seeds you will also need to setup dispersers which also must be connected by pylons and must be within range of your collectors. And all that must be done with a really clunky UI. Even more each seed requires different fluids and adjacent seeds. You acquire seeds by just interacting with a chest within a map.

Fix: remove the building/maintenance aspect, add monsters to the seed stashes.


Anyway my point is, that GGG despite all my criticism has a lot of really cool ideas, unfortunately they seem to always miss at the implementation which lead to this types of posts.

The game doesnt need more crafting.

It's already Craft of Exile. How about instead of crafting we can modify map drops to target items instead?

Its more exciting to get good drops than crafting that only a very very small % can really get into. People dont like to gamble away their hard earned currency unless you got a shit ton of it and just can gamble away, which very very few can do.

If we can target map drops to have certain things like.

- Modify a map drops to have physical modifiers with lucky values.
- Modify map drops to have an increased chance to have fire modifiers

Then you can have top tier ones like:
- Double influenced items with physical mods

etc etc.

This would be so much better than just pure crafting imo.

I don't even know what to say. This is only my 5th League. I was pretty convinced that League mechanics won't bother me one bit even if it's the worst League in PoE history. After all I haven't defeated Sirius yet (had one failed attempt last League), and never gotten to Elder/Shaper.

But somehow I'm still dissapointed. I'm not into crafting, and after all this game is advertised as a trading game. The micro-management gives me a headache. Grove structures seem like they don't even fit into the clunky UI of the game.

Today I've logged in. Run about 15 maps with minimal drops and zero encounters. Then spent an hour staring at my very empty currency tab, staring at my empty grove, and switching between YT video to see how others have set their farms, forums and reddit. Then I sighed, logged out and launched another game. At this point I'm not sure I'll log into PoE again this League.

I get that Delirium was overtuned in terms of drops, but no other League I've played seemed this empty.

HC player who is having a stellar time with the Harvest league. I really enjoy the random unique reroll craft in the Grove.

My only gripe with the league is an ongoing issue that transcends Harvest mechanics: lack of ice shot MTX.


In summation, thank you infinitely, GGG, for all the fun years and content.
You all are the best of the best.