Oshabi, Syndicate, and Harvest Crafting.

Harvest crafting was violently overpowered, I don't think there's anyone who can debate this no matter how much they enjoyed it. I do feel it's fair for GGG to discard crafting system due to the sheer number of issues it caused and how powerful it was, but I feel elements of it could be integrated into Syndicate to improve some of it's worst options while completely discarding overpowered crafts like synthesis. This way good does come from Harvest having existed.

(I will not be addressing further opinions on harvest crafting, mostly because harvest crafting as a whole isn't the topic, is a heavy matter of opinion, and both parties for harvest crafting can get heated easily)

Changing other syndicate benches and rewards. It's no secret a lot of benches are raw trash *cough* Guff *cough* , so I feel it would be a decent idea to improve some of these benches via harvest crafts.

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Oshabi:
Oshabi could easily fit into the roll of a forsaken master, she's obsessed with being powerful, hostile and humanoid, she has her own well defined theme and items... she's dead as a doornail.

Oshabi's Benches:
Transportation: Harvest items.
T1: Rares rolled with random harvest crafts | T2: Chance for offerings + T1 | T3: Chance for Harvest uniques + T1 + T2

Fortification: Offerings and Scarabs
T1: Regular offerings to the goddess with a chance for greater offerings. | Offerings and one greater offering. | 1-2 greater offerings with a chance for a random winged scarab. (25% chance)

Research: Elemental Crafts.
T1: Elemental type more common chaos roll. | T2: Lucky elemental chaos roll, 1 mod. | Lucky elemental exalt.

(This would be a workbench granting elemental specific harvest mods of the same type for all 4 elements using a meter to determine max rolls, this meter would be based on Oshabi's monster level with level 82 granting 3, and level 83(forge and what not) granting 4 rolls. Exalts however would only have enough for a single use.(like having harvest juice without the farm) The reason other rolls are not included is because they range on too powerful, like being able to force assassins mark, vulnerability, etc. on rings.)

Intervention: Infused modifiers.
T1: Sacrifices a map to add a random infused modifier to the map device. | Slim chance to change map into an infused beachhead instead. | Greater, but low, chance to become an infused beachhead, always adds an infused map modifier to map device.

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Improving older syndicates

All Syndicate Scarabs:
So this one is quite simple, give all T3 scarabs rewards a 10% chance to drop a winged scarab.

Guff
Guff sucks. Timed crafting sucks. Anything made to be optimal for a bot and not a person sucks.
Idea: Remove the crafting time and use the same juice meter harvest had with regular currency. Keep options mostly the same but limit how many actions can be done with the crafting, notably for research and intervention.

Jorgin
Transportation Talismans:
So for a long time these have sucked, badly. What I would love to see is them rolled with harvest mods based on Jorgin's tier. Being the guaranteed, more common, and lucky + common for the type it rolls. It should be able to roll between life, defenses, random element, critial, attack, and caster. HOWEVER! I feel that the corrupted talismans should always at least have maximum prefixes and suffixes.

Fortification Bestiary Items:
Well that's just the perfect place for lures now isn't it? Just add a happy little lure right there.

Leo
Research slams:
Remove blessed orb; replace with lucky chaos. Divine orb with Lucky Divine Orb. Lastly Exalted orb with lucky exalted orb.

Hillock
Intervention map quality:
Yeah this is typically one of the worst ones. Allow players to use a juice like meter to enhance the quality of maps, or perform specific harvest crafts related to maps.
Rather than listing the ones that should be included, I'll list the ones that should be excluded: Map doesn't consume Sextant charges, and unique synthesis map. One is too powerful and the other would further decrease the value of a specific chase item. (it rhymes with mottled wraith, which would be a good name for a band)



Beyond all of these I feel that there's room to rework some of the other mechanics, like Alva's temples and their typically poor rare item reward mods due to lack of vaal influence.

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Vlad_Tech wrote:

Harvest crafting was violently overpowered, I don't think there's anyone who can debate this no matter how much they enjoyed it.

I actually mostly disagree. The good thing this brought is that the "mid-tier" players got closer to the "top-tier" ones, reducing the power differential. Which is good, because it makes balancing the game for all, rather than mostly for the top 1-10%, easier.

Harvest crafting is very powerful mostly due to the effects of trade, the ability for a few to amass vast amounts of currency very quickly, and the fact that then you can buy all crafts you need. If I was playing SSF, harvest crafting would be perfectly balanced for me, maybe even a bit weak.

It is overpowered compared to normal metacrafting and random item drops, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is, in general, a bad thing.

And it is not like the typical top-dog streamers got bored and found nothing to do. Even with a mirror-tier OP character, Empyrean for example still found stuff that would easily kill his character. And it didn't seem like he was bored either.

And people like Empyrean are not even who this game should be balanced for. That'd be like balancing the prices in your local pizza restaurant for people like Lionel Messi or Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James.

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Char1983 wrote:

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Vlad_Tech wrote:

Harvest crafting was violently overpowered, I don't think there's anyone who can debate this no matter how much they enjoyed it.

I actually mostly disagree. The good thing this brought is that the "mid-tier" players got closer to the "top-tier" ones, reducing the power differential. Which is good, because it makes balancing the game for all, rather than mostly for the top 1-10%, easier.

Harvest crafting is very powerful mostly due to the effects of trade, the ability for a few to amass vast amounts of currency very quickly, and the fact that then you can buy all crafts you need. If I was playing SSF, harvest crafting would be perfectly balanced for me, maybe even a bit weak.

[Removed by Support]

Crafting ridiculous gear was available to anyone that could be bothered to (a) interact with the tedious and uninteresting garden and (b) spend 10 minutes learning how to "craft" / edit items. And you weren't crafting items available to the 1-10%, you are crafting items that have never existed. This was clearly visible if you compared the top builds on poe.ninja between harvest and delirium.

The strength of harvest crafting has absolutely nothing to do with trade. You can look at the gauntlet if you want to see how harvest completely trivialised the game, even with dangerous mods on every act, map and end game boss. It wasn't balanced in SSF, or any other mode.

[Removed by Support]

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BrettLee wrote:

The strength of harvest crafting has absolutely nothing to do with trade.

Yes, it does. If you cannot trade for the crafts you need, the amount of crafts you have at your disposal is rather limited. So you might be hard pressed to do that "remove/add critical" craft 10 times in a row until you hit high-tier crit multi. That is, unless you play the game in a streamlined way for 8+ hours a day, but I don't think the game should be balanced around unhealthy behavior.

Anyways, I have a rather simple suggestion on how to limit the extreme effects of harvest crafting: Make harvest crafting (all of them, including augment, remove, and remove/add) only work on items with at most 4 modifiers. That way, you can still craft 4T1 items (with enough investment), but you can't craft 6T1 any longer.

[Removed by Support]

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BrettLee wrote:

Yes, it does. If you cannot trade for the crafts you need, the amount of crafts you have at your disposal is rather limited. So you might be hard pressed to do that "remove/add critical" craft 10 times in a row until you hit high-tier crit multi. That is, unless you play the game in a streamlined way for 8+ hours a day, but I don't think the game should be balanced around unhealthy behavior.

https://poe-racing.com/

T1/100+ life rolls on all gear or easily 10k+ ES. Max block, ailment immune, life/es on block whilst still getting damage mods on everywhere possible, 450 pdps one hand weapons, +2 wands. Face tanking A8 Sirus with dangerous mods.

Yeah, harvest was totally balanced for SSF! These guys just crafted better gear in an 8 day race than what would have been achievable in 3 months on SSF in any previous league. Keep in mind that a lot of these players even ripped their first character, so a lot of them were able to craft this gear twice over.

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Char1983 wrote:

Anyways, I have a rather simple suggestion on how to limit the extreme effects of harvest crafting: Make harvest crafting (all of them, including augment, remove, and remove/add) only work on items with at most 4 modifiers. That way, you can still craft 4T1 items (with enough investment), but you can't craft 6T1 any longer.

Deterministically crafting 4 x T1 items is still far too powerful.

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BrettLee wrote:

Yeah, harvest was totally balanced for SSF! These guys just crafted better gear in an 8 day race than what would have been achievable in 3 months on SSF in any previous league.

These guys also played more in 8 days than most players (probably 90%+) play in an entire league, so they don't really matter for balancing the game, at least in my eyes (they also have a lot more knowledge about the game than pretty much everyone else).

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BrettLee wrote:

Deterministically crafting 4 x T1 items is still far too powerful.

You think so? Cool. I don't. I think that would be fine, and make the game more enjoyable for probably the majority of players.

Good items are too hard to acquire in the game anyways. The game is balanced around that. Re-balance it around a better availability of items, and everything is fine. The top dogs are going to acquire 4T1+ items anyway, so why not give them to more players, makes it easier to balance the game somewhat properly for everyone. Also, gives more build options (as you can craft the gear needed for some exotic builds).

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Char1983 wrote:

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BrettLee wrote:

Yeah, harvest was totally balanced for SSF! These guys just crafted better gear in an 8 day race than what would have been achievable in 3 months on SSF in any previous league.

These guys also played more in 8 days than most players (probably 90%+) play in an entire league, so they don't really matter for balancing the game, at least in my eyes (they also have a lot more knowledge about the game than pretty much everyone else).

You don't have a clue what you are talking about.

It did not take 8 days of play time to craft this gear. And in this time frame, many were able to craft this tier of equipment more than once. Also understand that this race had the following mods applied on all content, including bosses:

-Increased Monster Damage II (Monsters deal 20% Increased Damage)
-Increased Monster Speed II (Monsters have 20% Increased Attack, Cast and Movement Speed)
-Increased Monster Elemental Damage II (Monsters Gain 30% of Physical Damage as Extra Fire, Cold and Lightning Damage)
-Additional Multiple Projectiles (Monsters fire 2 Additional Projectiles)
-Reduced Player Resistances II (Players have -40% to All Resistances)
-Increased Monster Life II (Monsters have 40% More Life)

Now try and understand that they weren't crafting gear that simply enabled them 'beat' end game content. They were able trivialise the entire game. Face tanking A8 Sirus, eating up attacks during uber elder, who cares?

Compare this to China race during Delirium. I've linked one account below (GucciCremationOrVD), but you can look at others as well if you want.
https://poe.game.qq.com/account/view-profile/GucciPradas/characters

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Char1983 wrote:

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BrettLee wrote:

Deterministically crafting 4 x T1 items is still far too powerful.

You think so? Cool. I don't. I think that would be fine, and make the game more enjoyable for probably the majority of players.

Good items are too hard to acquire in the game anyways. The game is balanced around that. Re-balance it around a better availability of items, and everything is fine. The top dogs are going to acquire 4T1+ items anyway, so why not give them to more players, makes it easier to balance the game somewhat properly for everyone. Also, gives more build options (as you can craft the gear needed for some exotic builds).

You continue to blow my mind. The game is not designed around having perfect gear. It never has been. 4 x T1 items are incredibly strong. You think that player should be able to determnistically and efficiently craft 99 Life + 144% resists on their equipment (or add a damage mod or two in place of a resist)?

And if the entire game needed to be redesigned around allowing players to easily access that kind of equipment, why would they do that in the first place?

Hey everyone, thanks for making this into your personal "Harvest did nothing wrong soapbox", hence why I said I wasn't going to be talking about people's opinions... as you all get into heated arguments about it... exactly as I mentioned

Still waiting on literally anyone to comment on the actual idea . -.

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Char1983 wrote:

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Vlad_Tech wrote:

Harvest crafting was violently overpowered, I don't think there's anyone who can debate this no matter how much they enjoyed it.

I actually mostly disagree. The good thing this brought is that the "mid-tier" players got closer to the "top-tier" ones, reducing the power differential. Which is good, because it makes balancing the game for all, rather than mostly for the top 1-10%, easier.

Harvest crafting is very powerful mostly due to the effects of trade, the ability for a few to amass vast amounts of currency very quickly, and the fact that then you can buy all crafts you need. If I was playing SSF, harvest crafting would be perfectly balanced for me, maybe even a bit weak.

It is overpowered compared to normal metacrafting and random item drops, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is, in general, a bad thing.

And it is not like the typical top-dog streamers got bored and found nothing to do. Even with a mirror-tier OP character, Empyrean for example still found stuff that would easily kill his character. And it didn't seem like he was bored either.

And people like Empyrean are not even who this game should be balanced for. That'd be like balancing the prices in your local pizza restaurant for people like Lionel Messi or Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James.

Agreed Harvest craft is a best possible direction of moving game crafting. implement it to core and with 10% chance it would be super hard to craft mirror items and very expensive as well. But I rather have opportunity to target craft item even if its require to run 1000 maps rather than have silly random crafting system.

Yeah, I really would like an extension of the syndicate.
+1