Balancing Harvest Suggestions

Harvest as it is is disgustingly broken and overpowered. However, this is mostly due to the fact that there exists a communities to trade harvest crafts and this allows people to use them en masse. I acknowledge that the mechanic is while strong still acceptable if only selffound crafts are used. The current situation of ridiculously strong all Elevated or Tier 1 modifier items being trivial to create completely ruins the PoE crafting scene, which is largely the soul of the game.


Here are two suggestions from me on how to fix the issue:

1) Incubator-like mechanic that freezes tradeability of an item after it receives an Augment, Remove, Remove/Add or Remove Non-X/Add-X harvest craft.

Incubators are already implemented in the game as counters attached to items then triggering an event once the conditions are fulfilled. Make the strongest harvest crafts that are exploited the most apply such a counter - that may be for example 48 hours of time or 50k of m68+ monster kills, etc. - that prevents the item from being traded to other players during its effect, like a quest item. The effect should stack/grow with further uses but only to some reasonable maximum cap.

Another way to implement this would be to limit the spammability of Harvest crafting instead of trading by making the Incubator-like counter prevent uses of new Harvest crafts while in effect instead of preventing trade. Either should work.


2) Limit the maximum Tier of item affixes achievable by Harvest Augment and Remove/Add mechanics. Very simply make it impossible to add a Tier 1 modifier by using Harvest crafts to add a tagged mod. Items that have six Tier 2 affixes are still ridiculously strong and making items that have several Tier 1 affixes from fossils, etc. and have Tier 2 mods added via Harvest will still be easily achievable. It will however make an important distinction nonetheless where the *BEST* possible items are far harder to create and adds suitable difficulty to creating truly perfect items.


I think if either one of these two approaches is implemented or some fusion of both is used then Harvest can safely remain in the game an allow players a measure of precision crafting methods to improve their gear, but not be completely gamebreaking as it is now. The ability to simply force 100% perfect Mirror-tier items with little effort is just something that should have never appeared in the game in the first place let alone remain in it.


On another note, if the issue of exploiting trading Harvest crafts is handled properly it should not be impossible to increase the number of storable slots in the Horticrafting station to 20, 25 or 30, making self use of the mechanic more sensible. This could be for example tied to Oshabi, the Harvest boss, whose appearance is currently only negative as she can drop nothing good and only represents the loss of harvest seeds instead. Add a 'Horticrating orb' or the like that allows players to upgrade the Horticrafting station maximum lots by +1 up to some maximum?

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Boganist wrote:

2) Limit the maximum Tier of item affixes achievable by Harvest Augment and Remove/Add mechanics.

If GGG would also remove adding influenced mods, this could work.

It would depend on the mod. Plenty of influence mods have pretty stark differences in strength between affix Tier since they usually only have 1-3, so allowing Harvest to add T2 at most Influence mods isn't too horrible. The problem is of course those Influence affixes that only have one Tier but are incredibly strong - like the Crusader's Explosion Body Armour mod, or Unnerve on gloves, etc. Maybe they should just be unable to be added at all then, as they'd always be Tier 1 since that's the only Tier they have.

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Boganist wrote:

It would depend on the mod. Plenty of influence mods have pretty stark differences in strength between affix Tier since they usually only have 1-3, so allowing Harvest to add T2 at most Influence mods isn't too horrible. The problem is of course those Influence affixes that only have one Tier but are incredibly strong - like the Crusader's Explosion Body Armour mod, or Unnerve on gloves, etc. Maybe they should just be unable to be added at all then, as they'd always be Tier 1 since that's the only Tier they have.

That would be perfect

Just leave is as it is now.

Trade Softcore exists for a reason. If you don't want items to be traded, play SSF, of even better play SSFHC if you want more challenge. Everything should be tradeable in Trade Softcore.

So no, it's bad idea.

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The ability to simply force 100% perfect Mirror-tier items with little effort is just something that should have never appeared in the game in the first place let alone remain in it.

Yes, it's better when only super rich people who abuse system has access to that gear, right? Also Harvest craft of 6T1 worth like 50-100ex, which is much more healthy for the game.

It should stay as it is, even if traders are salty.

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_Daybit_ wrote:

Yes, it's better when only super rich people who abuse system has access to that gear, right? Also Harvest craft of 6T1 worth like 50-100ex, which is much more healthy for the game.

It should stay as it is, even if traders are salty.

That's for "Good" items or "Great" items, NOT perfect or Mirror-tier. An amount of 50-100ex to reach it just absolutely laughable. What it is right now is the kind of stupid casualization that has killed tons of big games over the years, where it offers accessibility to the highest tier endgame mechanics to newbies and casual players but makes the game absolutely uninteresting to the core players that have stuck around for long because even the hardest things are completely trivial.

And don't even pretend GGG has ever balanced anything around SSF, that's just an afterthought that ends up being more or less viable by chance whenever they change something.

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Boganist wrote:

That's for "Good" items or "Great" items, NOT perfect or Mirror-tier. An amount of 50-100ex to reach it just absolutely laughable. What it is right now is the kind of stupid casualization that has killed tons of big games over the years, where it offers accessibility to the highest tier endgame mechanics to newbies and casual players but makes the game absolutely uninteresting to the core players that have stuck around for long because even the hardest things are completely trivial.

And don't even pretend GGG has ever balanced anything around SSF, that's just an afterthought that ends up being more or less viable by chance whenever they change something.

100ex is not something easily accessible to "newbies" and "casuals". I am middle tier player and it takes me 2 days of 12 hours playing to get 100ex.

24 hours to get single perfect item is much more healthy than 3 month of playing non-stop to get single perfect item. Realistically such crafting is accessible only to people who abuse something, which is bad.

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_Daybit_ wrote:

24 hours to get single perfect item is much more healthy than 3 month of playing non-stop to get single perfect item. Realistically such crafting is accessible only to people who abuse something, which is bad.

I would agree if you said a great item. The difference is perfect. Perfect should never be something you can just easily farm, it's enough that there's only a handful of perfect items of each type per league and if you really want that then you'll save up for a Mirror of Kalandra to mirror service a copy of such an item. Being able to craft one yourself with little effort is stupid and completely undermines the purpose and use Mirrors to start with.

Would you not be satisfied with going by the #2 suggestion I made and limiting only the maximum tier of Harvest craftable mods? An item With a few T1 mods via fossil/alterion/etc and then rest T2 is still incredibly strong and there will be only a slight difference in performance but that little gap will be enough to keep the fully T1 version as a chase target.

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Nomancs wrote:

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Boganist wrote:

2) Limit the maximum Tier of item affixes achievable by Harvest Augment and Remove/Add mechanics.

If GGG would also remove adding influenced mods, this could work.

It would also work if they don't remove adding influenced mods.

To be honest, it worked perfectly fine in the full-blown form, people had lots of fun in Harvest league.

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Boganist wrote:

That's for "Good" items or "Great" items, NOT perfect or Mirror-tier. An amount of 50-100ex to reach it just absolutely laughable. What it is right now is the kind of stupid casualization that has killed tons of big games over the years, where it offers accessibility to the highest tier endgame mechanics to newbies and casual players but makes the game absolutely uninteresting to the core players that have stuck around for long because even the hardest things are completely trivial.

At least you offer an explanation why mirror-tier items should not be craftable that "easily" (I have never crafted a mirror-tier item myself, not even during Harvest league, where I invested a lot of time into the game, so much for it being easy). I don't agree with it, but at least you offer one, and don't state it as a generally-accepted fact, like lots of people do, so kudos to you there.

However, Harvest doesn't make the true end-game easily accessible to casual players, let alone newbies. How many casuals did you see farming 100% delirious maps during Harvest league? How many newbies did you see doing that? Probably very few.

What makes the game uninteresting to the "core" players, which at this point aren't even the core of the audience anymore (the majority of players never reach maps, according to Chris Wilson), is breaking the game through trade. That is the real conundrum of PoE - they want to be hardcore, but they allow trade. Trade in games, just like in the real world, has the effect that the wealth accumulates with a few that are good at trade. In terms of gear progression, it is more efficient to play the trade game than to play the game itself. So trade is a very non-hardcore aspect in a supposedly hardcore game (it also makes zero sense in terms of lore).

So the "core", "hardcore" audience you are speaking of has moved to SSFHC already, or they found other goals (Mathil: Make weird builds work, Empyrian: Break the game as hard as possible and min-max beyond any sensibility). They seem to have fun.

If you are an "elite", "core", "hardcore" or "particularly good" player, or whatever you want to call it, and you are not having fun in this game, that's on you. There are plenty of ways to make the game more challenging for you (but very few to make it easier). Worst case, play SSFHC private leagues with all mods turned to the max. I am sure you will find plenty of challenge there.

Now, if you need to have trade in the game, because you need to abuse it to make you stronger than most other players to feel good and have fun, if you need the mirror market because it benefits you, then well, I just have no sympathy for you. Whoever derives pleasure out of the misery of others shouldn't make game design decisions.