Harvest - A statistical analysis, Too reliant on TFT

Harvest is a waste of time and pixels on my screen these days and at least they should have given us free atlas respec to clear all the Harvest points in HH and LP... GGG stole my orbs of unmaking!!!

Any updates Anntari?

I'm honestly depressed when I get a Harvest spawn now. Seeing *6* crafting options on a red tier Harvest - 4 of which are 'upgrade normal/magic to rare' - is demoralizing. Free chaos and alchs are great, but I'm not even using it to craft my gear. I'm using it on maps. Because chaos spamming items when you only have 3-6 chaos feels awful. I'm not even picking plots based on upgrading my gear anymore. If one plot says '4 Defence / 2 Lightning' and the other says '3 Fire / 3 Life / 1 Implicit,' I'm going to take the life/phys plot just for the implicit EVEN THOUGH I'M TRYING TO PLAY LOW-LIFE STORM BRAND! It's depressing.

100+ maps in, yet to find a single reforge prefix/suffix from harvest. I'm not even expecting augments, but reforges were pretty common in the past

NOTE: This post is my OP. I have replaced the OP with a new message due to the results from my experiment.

The results were too dramatic of a difference to edit it in, and I didn't want to open a new thread.

For those interested in seeing the original post that was being replied to before this one was made:

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TL;DR: Please increase the frequency of Keep Prefix/Suffix. It's a critical craft for casual players that doesn't print out mirror tier gear left and right.
I'm averaging 1 craft per 20 maps(including zana maps, harvest forced on all of them)
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I've now run 30 harvests since 3.14 came out.

I have gotten:
0 tier 4 seeds
0 augments
0 remove non-add
0 six sockets
0 six links
1 keep suffix
1 keep prefix
3 reroll value of prefix or suffix
5 jewel implicits

This is around 40 maps run(including zana maps), with using my 20 free harvest crafts on the map device I had as well as forcing Zana on every map. All but 3 were in Haewark Hamlet with the atlas ascendency.

This nerf seems a bit overkill, especially when you consider that forcing 20 harvests on maps would cost 240 chaos.

It is a more efficient use of my currency to farm something like harbingers and to go to TFT to buy the craft I need. This is coming from a player who didn't buy many crafts last league, preferring to farm up my own harvests.

This reliance on TFT is precisely what was trying to be avoided by the nerfs, but for a player like me without much time or currency, reliance on it seems to have only increased since I'm incapable of farming up my own crafts now.

Reforge Keeping Prefix/Suffix was my one salvation. I am sad to see this craft being so astronomically rarer than before.
I could either find or buy something with a good set of prefixes/suffixes, and reforge the bad half until it landed something decent.
People are not going to be crafting flawless gear off reforge keep prefix/suffix(jewels maybe, but not gear, although it's not like people use mirrors on non-legacy jewels), so I'm not sure why it was made so much rarer.

Please consider increasing the frequency of this craft if nothing else.
It is a tool that allows casual players to get better gear than they otherwise could, and won't cause a huge flood of mirror-tier items.


I break down some numbers below:
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I cannot afford perfect or even near perfect gear pre-made, and I will never be able to because I'm often not able to stay online long enough to sell things. If I do want to sell I have to go to TFT to find a middleman. This is typical for a casual player.

Fractures:
I also cannot afford to 'craft' gear.
The best I can do to make great gear is buy a few fossils and hope I get lucky, and then try a fracture craft.
By my results this would take an average of over 120 maps to get, since there's 3 tier four seeds and I've run 40 without getting a single one.

And that's assuming one has 720 chaos to throw away on forcing harvest for 60 maps... but 720 chaos is way more than enough to just buy fracture prefix on TFT, so that's a better use of the currency.

If one instead runs the maps without forcing harvest, at an 18% chance to appear(rounded up to 20 for easy math)...120maps x 5 = 600 maps. At 2.5 minutes per map(which is quite fast for a casual player), that comes out to 25 hours of nonstop mapping.
At 3 hours per day that's 8.5 days of nothing but non-stop Haewark mapping while playing, for a casual player to get a single fracture harvest. And that's minimum, because it's based on 40 maps to get a T4 seed, which I currently am at 0 tier 4 seeds in 40 maps.

Only fracture is a 1/3 chance of success, so multiply this by 3.
1800 maps, 75 hours of playtime, or 25 days at 3h/day for a single successful fracture.

And that's not accounting for bad luck. I failed 8 fractures in a row last league. No player should have to spend literally over 50 days playing during what time they have and have literally nothing to show for it.

Reforge Keep Prefix/Suffix:
I put:
-over 80 reforge keep prefix into a shield I was working on, and never got what I was after(avg of 40 tries according to craft of exile)
-over 30 reforge keep prefix into a cluster jewel I was working on, it's still not done
-over 15 keep prefix into a ring that only needed removable suffixes before hitting it
-over 20 keep prefix into a helmet I was working on before hitting Conc effect

Keep Prefix/Suffix is very unreliable.
If we say I get 1 every 20 maps, and need 20 for a project, that's 400 maps with harvest forced on 200(2400c)
If harvest isn't forced on them, that's 1000 maps(which works out to 14 days at 3h/day of nothing but non-stop haewark)

Considering this craft goes for 1ex on TFT, it's far cheaper to simply buy it there from people who don't need it.


Needless to say, there's better uses of time for players like me.
I'll be doing other mechanics this league when I play at all, and be buying every craft I need from TFT when I have the currency to do so. It is both cheaper and a better use of my time that way.


I also remain resolute on not spending a single dollar on this game until more thought is given to the casual player who cannot no-life this game.

"

DarkJen wrote:

Its purpose completely defeated now.

Its not a crafting anymore.
Just another rng driven casino gimmick.

Trade dependency and elites upset nobody's buying their toys is why we can't have nice things.

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

"

DarkJen wrote:

Its purpose completely defeated now.

Its not a crafting anymore.
Just another rng driven casino gimmick.

Trade dependency and elites upset nobody's buying their toys is why we can't have nice things.

So.. where is ex drop so we can buy some nice things then?

I saw inky one from the very league start.
And I played alot, actually.
More than half of my huge friendlist not saw even single drop..

Harvest this horrible, in addition to removing the remove / add, there is almost no mods.

Too bad to pay dearly for weak items again.

Thanks so much for the work! You know I called that tft would be used even more in the harvest nerf thread. Its simply because you need so many reforging to do what one or two augs used to.
Like 10 crit reforges on a explody/%life chest to get double crit suffix.. Jun cost 20ex...

anyway...

Little did I know they'd nerf the hell out of spawns rates too making TFT even more necessary. SSF??? forgetaboutit... looks like I'll never get remove non influence since you got none with all those runs not to mention at 12c a pop I wont be doing nearly as many.

This has to be the worst nerf in history. Not only does it make people use TFT more which was a reason for nerf it's completely useless for all but elite traders.

Guess I'll be farming HH this league instead of all hamlet all the time. Wont even pick harvest nodes on atlas tree. Looks dead to me Jim.

In other news some Exiles are turning 75c worth of essences into 3-4ex all day long.