Harvest is my favourite league ever

I've been playing PoE since Beyond, and Harvest gave me the best experience of any league since then. For context, I usually get at least one character to mid-90s, clear all major league content, and accumulate somewhere between 20 to 50ex net worth.

This is the first time I've been able to experience getting truly GG gear, and the best part was that I made it all myself. I didn't even buy or sell harvest crafts, I just played the game (sometimes target farming seeds), and made my items as the crafts became available. It's also the first time I got a level 100 character, and 40/40 challenges to boot. My net worth is also much higher than usual, probably around 400 or 500ex. All of this came off the back of Harvest's fantastic deterministic crafting mechanics. ...And perhaps some extra gaming time in quarantine.

To be frank, I don't know if I'll even want to play next league if harvest crafting isn't included in some form. It just feels so rewarding to plan out a complex crafting plan for an item that's perfect for my build, and then build it out while playing the rest of the game. That's a much better experience than farming currency and buying the item I want. Crafting items is SO MUCH FUN, and previously it just wasn't viable for any players below the top 0.001% to do a lot of your own major crafting projects. The way the PoE economy tends to progress over the course of a league typically made it even worse, since as the bleeding edge players upgraded items and sold their old gear, or found a niche and mass crafted something, buying those items became a more economical choice over crafting them yourself.

That said, Harvest certainly does have its flaws. None of what I mention here is going to be some new insight that hasn't already been discussed, but I want to include it anyways to paint a fair picture of the league. The actual gardening mechanic was not great. Setting up a garden was a pain in the ass. Lifeforce storage was horrendous. Managing and planting seeds is annoying. Worst of all, the mechanic implicitly encouraged people to buy and sell crafts (which as I mentioned earlier, I stayed away from, very intentionally). Trading crafts relied upon 3rd party sites, getting started early to build up vouches, and opened up buyers and sellers alike to scams.

Another problem is how easy it is to get incredibly rare mods like explode chests. I think it was OK for this league and actually pretty cool that these things became accessible to the average player. However, if we want this mechanic to go core, I believe it would be better to find a solution to all those cases where a single aug can guarantee you a historically extremely valuable and rare mod, like elusive / tailwind on boots. I'd still like it to be possible to target craft those sorts of things, but they certainly shouldn't be easier and cheaper to get than something like T1 life or mana. Speaking of mana, I played a mana based character and nearly all of my crafts were about figuring out how to get high tiers of one or more mana type stats, while also being able to plant craft on all the other typical stuff a good item has. I believe this was a good thing, because it's much less interesting if you can easily target craft every affix on your item.

Despite all the issues I've talked about, Harvest still allowed me to experience PoE crafting at a significant scale for the first time ever, and it was a truly fantastic experience. Here's to hoping the crafting goes core in some form, or at least shows up again in PoE 2! And thanks to GGG for a great league!

"

Harvest is my favourite league ever

Same for me.

If Harvest would replace Standard I'd play that sort of Standard for at least few years more.

yes, harvest heavily rewards players who are able to play alot.

so, what do you say: if you played ssf, how many ex would you gained from the league?

"

cronus wrote:

yes, harvest heavily rewards players who are able to play alot.

so, what do you say: if you played ssf, how many ex would you gained from the league?

ssf and caring about exalts....

"

cronus wrote:

yes, harvest heavily rewards players who are able to play alot.

so, what do you say: if you played ssf, how many ex would you gained from the league?

The obvious answer to that is, however many dropped for me directly. But if you're in SSF it doesn't really matter - you just need enough to cover the costs of your meta-crafts. Even in trade league my wealth isn't what I care about directly, what matters to me is the gear and character I was able to create for myself and by myself. I've heard only good things about harvest from my SSF friends as well, since plant crafting made it possible for them to create gear that would previously have almost never been seen outside of trade leagues.

It should be noted that this is an appreciation of crafting being made more available - not to be confused with appreciation for harvest gameplay which in fact was pointed out to be "not great".

Surprise surprise, feature creep and farming game is not making the arpg better. Surprise surprise.

Same. During some of the other leagues I found myself kind of stopping playing as much/often as I usually do in the beginning, but with Harvest, I look forward to actually logging on every single day because I know that if I get enough of certain seeds or even save up enough currency to plant certain seeds, I can possibly make each one of my individual gear better than what it already is. I never really understood or even bothered with crafting before this league. Now with Harvest, crafting is actually intuitive for me for once with the help of Poe DB that explains the suffixes and prefixes for items as well as outlines all of the possible prefix/suffix possibilities and what they are tagged as. Like seriously, I never bothered with crafting before this league and I would just buy all the items I needed instead. Now, I can focus on actually saving up for maybe a base I need and craft it myself if I want AND have an option of buying the item instead. So I have options now.

I cannot remember grinding this hard and looking forward to playing a game since I used to have to grind to complete certain quests on Runescape just to wield certain items. Every day with harvest there is potential to get certain rare seeds from seed caches in maps and with certain seeds and the flowers or blossoms (I love the interaction between the flowers/blossoms you can use on your grown seeds), there is a chance to get the right crafts that I need and use them on my gear to make as good of a character as possible. I mean the bosses too, incredible. You can literally set what type of difficulty you want for yourself with the t3-t4 seeds. Some characters can only handle fighting one t4 seed boss at a time. Other ridiculously OP characters can choose to play against 4-5+ t4 seeds in one plantation for a real challenge to see if they can do it, in combination with say 5 delirium orb maps.

It's so fun honestly. I love the boss fights as well, especially the blue t4 seed boss that makes your character experience a flashbang/stun grenade effect that deafens you for a moment, slightly even disorienting your senses for a second during the fight, very, very cool. I also really like the 24 challenge harvest cloak, one of the best looking challenge reward mtx I have seen in a while. I love the building aspect of Harvest as well, really reminds me of Factorio and I love optimizing my grove in a way that makes the collectors with certain seeds as close to me as possible and having the most efficient harvest setups for t4 and even just regular t1 seed layouts. Overall, I think Harvest is a very fun and addicting league in my opinion and I hope that it will be here to stay in the future.

+1

It is the Best League ever. So fun to be able to "target craft".