PoE peaked in 3.13 and I am afraid that it may never go back up again... version:2

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jsuslak313 wrote:

@tinfoil: maybe you remember back in the day when currency crafting was actually a thing? Exalting, ETERNALLING (because there were no Annul orbs), exalting, ad insanitum.

Mirror-grade all t1 rolls, or even 3/4 out of 6 t1 rolls on an item should be almost as rare as a mirror drop (not a div card mirror, an actual mirror) imo. Completely and realistically UNcraftable...BUT I would like to have a deterministic crafting system like Harvest or something that would cater exclusively to the mid-game. Something that would give the average player access to the bare minimum to cut their teeth on red maps without too much trouble or currency needed.

Precisely what im saying. All deterministic crafting should be kept to lower tier grades. Like T3 equivalent.

Back in the day it was Alteration + Regal spam until you get something, then Exalt. If you could hit the exalt you start over. If you hit the exalt youd generally Eternal it and repeat until you had a 6T1 item. Ironically, they literally removed Eternal Orbs because their power yet many Harvest crafts are essentially Eternal Orbs + x Deterministic mod outcome or change.

Lets say you have a chest with 3T1 prefixes and dogshit for the suffixes. Reforge rare item while keeping all prefixes and rerolling the suffixes is a harvest craft.

That is soo much easier than previous crafting methods including eternal orbs which costed a shit ton of currency to have. It costs you nothing even remotely close to the cost of an eternal to use that harvest craft.

Theres also directly changing the resists without changing any other mods, with extremely high likely hood of the same tier rolling. Not even an eternal could do that easily.

Edit - the topper to this is. Crafting modifiers which are rare do not require a high level bench. If you spam farm ilvl 74-76 content you can use those bench mods on virtually every single top end piece except for the double influence modifiers which require ilvl 96. Soo there isnt even a crafting game. I learned about this after making my scepter which is unfortunate.

I was originally under the impression that ilvl bench locked it to that item level of item. So if you had a 72 bench you can only craft ilvl 72 pieces. This was false, theres a +10 ilvl to the bench which is pretty craft considering the IDs you can get in higher maps.



So if i knew what i knew now, prior, id be sitting on a 5T1 scepter. Now the other arguement there too is, if it was a higher Ilvl and could roll certain t1s, i could also use the reforge that keeps all the rolls but changes their tier with lucky modifier, this means id eternally be able to hold these stats and use that reforge until i hit full T1 without dealing with any of the headaches of actually re-entering the crafting cycle.

TL;DR - Harvest still isnt balanced and is currently being balanced on the fact that they simply only made rare reforges and augs rare and nothing else. Nothing else has changed about it pretty much. Theres a reason why it requires virtually full map completion in order to unlock the actual zana harvest mod.

yep agreed.

To bring it back to the OP: many many players thoroughly enjoyed Harvest/Synthesis/3.13 because it was easier to gain OP equipment and blaze through the game. That is true, and those players got hit extremely hard due to sudden ENORMOUS nerfs after a long period of overpowered crafting and items.

However, there is a huge part of the playerbase that exists outside of echo chambers that very much preferred the old school, overall less power, less craftable insanity that had been the game for far longer than Harvest had been in existence. It appears that the devs also favor this type of game and are making strong moves to return to it.

I can't speak in generalizations, and neither can the OP nor anyone posting here by saying "most players want this" or "most players are upset by that" because there are no polls or data to support this. The data we do have is Steam player numbers league to league. No change GGG has made in the last 3-4 years has seen a significant drop in players to support "people are leaving the game". In fact, this league has seen the second highest, if not the highest spike in players in POE history. An argument could be made that the game is more popular than ever with the majority of players, regardless of nerfs, changes, or feelings. Harvest league, by comparison, had almost half the number of active players.

Going purely by the numbers of players, Harvest league at its onset actually greatly hurt the game lowering the total players by almost 25% from the previous league. Meaning that the Harvest mechanic was unpopular enough to warrant 25% of the players quitting from the very beginning. Even 3.13 which the OP describes as the best POE season saw the biggest drop in players EVER in a league within 2 months. That is useful data to use when determining if a game mechanic was actually popular or not outside of our own sphere of knowledge.

not saying specifically that the OP said any of my "" statements, but that those statements keep coming up again and again in threads like these with players that love to speak for other players

Ok dude nobody who wants the old harvest back is going to be rational like that though. None of the performance metrics from steam support the "game is dying" sentiment. So they won't use it. In fact I brought up a statistical analysis that showed harvest having the single poorest week 1 in recorded steam history, with sources linked and everything, and someone actually came up to me and said I was "lying". You aren't going to have an actual, rational discussion with these people. They will use "alternative" facts and twist things into their narrative if they need to.

damn Yam, lvl 100 SSF Hardcore...

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Tainted_Fate wrote:

so ggg listened "elitist" players (unemployed individuals who play the game 14h+/day or streamers) that were telling that the game was "too easy". well, anything will become easy if you are doing it 14h+/day for years, [Removed by Support].

so ggg nerfed the shit wild enough that now even that kind of players are becoming frustrated or qutting (even two popular streamers have quit in last week).

i quit day 3 because i value my time, the game became a huge chore, mobile casino, failed wanna-be-dark souls chinese arpg, zero qol, bait bait bait league hype (REWORKED REWARDS, NO SHIT).

etc etc

Nah just a trend of GGG of making huge pushes to extend player time per league. Masters recipes used to be quick do you dailies w/ friends and have a nice day. Now it's locked behind many mechanisms - the tedious troll Jun who doesnt even give you a recipe 99% of time on unveil, Maps, lab, Prophecies, delve, etc. Same goes for trade and why we have no AH. Adding all these leagues to core so game is so bloated pros try and skip everything but META but regular joes are like WTF, etc. I feel like this "tedium strategy" has crippled GGGs growth compared to what coulda been. It's also why I 100% disagree with OP - gen 3 in general has been tedium on purpose and I dont appreciate being played. Harvest as implemented in Ritual was tedious by stopping for 15 minutes to craft or on TFT in the middle of fun mapping because of 10 storage limit. Total buzz kill.

Notice they didnt address the "elitist's" complaints like TFT or storage limit in that infamous reddit thread. No instead they kept that and just made crafts worse and non-existent in case of t4 and augs.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

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Tainted_Fate wrote:

so ggg listened "elitist" players (unemployed individuals who play the game 14h+/day or streamers) that were telling that the game was "too easy". well, anything will become easy if you are doing it 14h+/day for years, [Removed by Support].

so ggg nerfed the shit wild enough that now even that kind of players are becoming frustrated or qutting (even two popular streamers have quit in last week).

i quit day 3 because i value my time, the game became a huge chore, mobile casino, failed wanna-be-dark souls chinese arpg, zero qol, bait bait bait league hype (REWORKED REWARDS, NO SHIT).

etc etc

Nah just a trend of GGG of making huge pushes to extend player time per league. Masters recipes used to be quick do you dailies w/ friends and have a nice day. Now it's locked behind many mechanisms - the tedious troll Jun who doesnt even give you a recipe 99% of time on unveil, Maps, lab, Prophecies, delve, etc. Same goes for trade and why we have no AH. Adding all these leagues to core so game is so bloated, etc. I feel like this "tedium strategy" has crippled GGGs growth compared to what coulda been. It's also why I 100% disagree with OP. Harvest itself was tedious by stopping for 15 minutes to craft or on TFT in the middle of fun mapping. Total buzz kill.

See thats something i can agree on too in that sense.

I have to go to 1084237 places for recipes on regular bench. That was my first slap in the face coming back and having to read where to get each one. THAT is definitely tedious by comparison of daily missions if you personally ask me. Outside of the more rare ones being easier to obtain, gathering them all is pretty much on par to the tediousness of farming master REP. It used to be you got level 6 super easy and then if you wanted 7 youd just eventually get it outside of Zana 7. Zana 7 you def had to get groups for but back then you had the option simply not to go past 6 and you had access to everything but the top tier craft modifiers (prefixes cannot be change/multimod/etc).

That being said, i love the new crafts and the new master missions and such, but target farming the recipes every league when they are scattered all over the place ? Yikes. Masters would just show up, youd do their missions and youd get their crafts, all in one place. So while you definitely get more power with these crafts, its for sure more tedious. I have mixed feeling but over all i think its positive but it also doesnt help because it does speed up the game if you look at it from the speed runner perspective.

While mastercrafting slowed the game down because gradual rep progression you can now get the top mods target farmed way faster than rep unlocks.

3.13 was my first league and I was in love with this game. Played it constantly and brought 4 different builds to endgame.

I was so excited for this league to start, but now I cannot even begin to describe my disappointment. This league feels absolutely terrible. The league mechanic is not interesting and the loot in general is incredibly lackluster. The game just feels gutted. I have no desire to keep playing.

The ultimatum mechanic feels like a worse, lazy version of Ritual. The gear it general is way worse and there is no excitement for drops. I'm assuming GGG wants us to craft everything, but that is just not viable for anyone except the 1%.

GGG, I don't know what you are thinking, but you need to drastically re-asses your priorities. This league is not the right direction. Good luck keeping your player base with updates like this.

Harvest, 100%Delirious Fractured maps, and Deep Delve were the most fun things in the game.

I dream of having 3.13 back. :(

Whilst I played 3.13 more than ever, harvest should have never been put back as part of the core game.

Yeah I would like to craft my items and keep improving them wherever possible. However harvest in 3.13 was too impactful where you were basically playing the game wrong if you weren't farming harvest. They nerfed it much more than expected from the manifesto though.

I feel it's now in a place where you might get something useful from it, like more master missions, upgrading/converting fragments, oils, breachstones, etc. So it's not OP where you feel forced to run it all the time. It's now on par with other league mechanics where you may make a few chaos for your time, but not an absurd amount. If they buff it and make some crafts more common, I'm only going to do harvest again and that's not good for the game. Where you always have FOMO if you're not focusing on one part of the game.