Something Worth Remembering About Synthesis. (Harvest Nerf Conversation)

Here They go again with the Synthesis narrative.

So, in short, Synthesis Was a pretty cool pseudo crafting league that happened more than a year ago, I thought it was tremendous personally and the average player did not. We were able to combine 3 items witha crafting table and force really strong implicit modifiers on items, typically the base rolls would be random but people were mating T1 shield bases with +1 power/frenzy/endurance charges or +3 of one, rings with the same and most notably were the "Splody" weapons we all still love today.

Its freaking gone...

for a long while it really stung for me personally, I felt like the implications for long term play for players who have account lives lasting years and years, it would stand as a thing you could always come back to over a long time really tremendously elevate the potential of any and all builds in the game.

It took several leagues completely and totally devoid of synthesis content entirely, but slowly we were given back the maps with the bosses, the unique rings and the bottled faith... It felt really nice the way it sort of sprouted back up a season or so after going dormant.

and then we got harvest and from my perspective as maybe the only player in PoE that just completely loved every detail of Synthesis... That synthesis was back... but it was called harvest... and it was WAY better. It changed almost entirely but was spiritually the same concept but so much more fleshed out, matured, and refined. you guys know, and you love it. lets be real it might be the best thing to ever happen to the game since closed beta you know when they were like "come play it".

In a nutshell, the year or so it took from the complete removal of synthesis entirely, to harvest in full bloom 1 thing became very clear to me about GGG.

They will never step back from a great idea and a great system. they will only refine it until in their eyes and not our it is perfected.

I feel like it really needs to be said. What we as a collective feel we may be losing from the current iteration of Harvest may very well come back to us in a not to distant future in a new form that may not be as deterministic and reliable, but I have all the faith in the world that something will eventually fill the void.

Can we all chill out for a couple of weeks please. its pretty upsetting to see all of the inconsiderate and indiscriminate rage.

They aren't even taking away Harvest, they're nerfing the top end of stupidity and buffing its base spawn rate. Synthesis wishes it would have gotten that treatment.

What a lot of the loud complainers mean when they say 'Harvest' is 'my easy access to op gear'. Those who remain and genuinely just want to craft their own pieces without the discord trading, good for them, I hope they find the buffs satisfying.

I know, but based on the reaction you would assume they were perma banning every player who ever stepped in the grove or something silly.

"

innervation wrote:

They aren't even taking away Harvest, they're nerfing the top end of stupidity and buffing its base spawn rate. Synthesis wishes it would have gotten that treatment.

Buffing spawn chance by 3% isn't something to be happy for. I bet they're nerfing the spawn chance passives next league.

Also, the "top end of stupidity" is also what the players who don't trade or discord used to genuinely craft their own gear.

I guess things will work out just fine in the end.
It's just that there is a nagging feeling that harvest made it really easy to work out really good mid-endgame equipment that helps the average player to get into the endgame content easier and that this might be in potential danger of being not a valid option anymore.

I am absolutely not dropping this game because of a change in the harvest functionality, plus I do not need absolute godlike gear to have fun.
Let us just see how "bad" the nerfs really are before proclaiming that the balance chages are the end of the world as we know it.
Things will be fine! Things will always be fine after a while.

Synthesis was the worst league considering just the playable content

Puzzle aspect was completely incomprehensible and buggy. Even if you acquired a strategy invented by the usual autistic reddit crowd, it was still very annoying content to run due to crashes, backtracking and getting killed by invisible enemies.

The items and merging was also in a horrible spot back then, mostly because the endgame was not only T14+ back then so ALL rewards with low ilvl were basically useless and not worth using in the recipes, and with the regular rare gen, basically 99% of every league specific drop was completely useless.

IF (and big IF)

Synthesis was added today
- with Talisman like / Heist like rare item generation - it would be very very very popular league
- the tiles would be 4 entrances from the start - so you won't play for 2 weeks waiting for a good alignment to get to that boss in the corner.

So, it was horrible league for the state of game back then, but current Atlas and endgame would be more beneficial, and probably much better to play than Heist in comparison.

"

TheSaltPrincess wrote:

(OP)

Very well said, but this outrage was more or less inevitable.

Let me be clear up front: I'm 100% behind GGG's decisions here. It would be hard not to be, when back in Harvest league I specifically called out targeted annulment and influenced exalt crafting as being too overpowered.

That being said, I can borrow a quote to summarize the babyrage we've all seen in response to GGG's manifesto:

"The more crutches you have, the more it will hurt when they're kicked out from underneath you."

"

innervation wrote:

They aren't even taking away Harvest, they're nerfing the top end of stupidity and buffing its base spawn rate. Synthesis wishes it would have gotten that treatment.

What a lot of the loud complainers mean when they say 'Harvest' is 'my easy access to op gear'. Those who remain and genuinely just want to craft their own pieces without the discord trading, good for them, I hope they find the buffs satisfying.

Some guy in another thread was calling tailwind elusive boots with T1 life and move speed and good resists “medium tier” gear. Lol.

Just wait it out, the bullshit will disappear eventually. There are already less and less threads about it and most of them are trollish anyway.

"

innervation wrote:

They aren't even taking away Harvest, they're nerfing the top end of stupidity and buffing its base spawn rate. Synthesis wishes it would have gotten that treatment.

What a lot of the loud complainers mean when they say 'Harvest' is 'my easy access to op gear'. Those who remain and genuinely just want to craft their own pieces without the discord trading, good for them, I hope they find the buffs satisfying.

I had a blast crafting gear without discord, I just wish the nerfs weren't so overboard. The largest offender was targeted annulments which are better for crafting than Eternal Orbs, and those were removed for good reason.

It isn't just easy access to OP gear, it's also easy access to off-meta items that other people aren't crafting. It opened up a lot of build diversity, and I feel like the nerfs hurt that too. And they don't even address the problem that harvest is still by far the best way to craft most items, so people are going to be sitting in the TFT discord just as much in 3.14.

If they actually nerfed augments to say T3 modifiers, they wouldn't supplant exalts as the best way to add stats to gear. It would be a step up from bench crafting. You can get better mods, but there's more randomness. You could still use it to round out early-endgame influenced items.

While they upped the rates, we currently don't know how bad the seed ratio is, because they said they are reducing the number of crafting options. If they take out 70% of the meat and buff what's left by 60%, it's still a nerf. I don't like that there is a possibility you can pick a plot specifically for one type of seed, and you may not see a single craft of that type because the ratios aren't 1:1 anymore.