Why 3.13 was so great

One of the big things from the Baeclast interview was the the statement to stop saying you loved 3.13 and start saying why you loved 3.13 so I'm going to do that.

First the small thing: Ritual was okay, at not point did anything about ritual immediately make me think "Why did anyone think this was a good idea" which is unfortunately very rare in Path of Exile. Ritual was a non-offensive way to obtain the fun rewards from old content without engaging in the old content, which is mostly not that great being timer laden, having a tendency to clash with gameplay, and being overall unrewarding. It compared very favorably to heist which had generally the same goal of providing access to older content but, where ritual was clean, heist was awkward and clunky and ritual scores some points in comparison to what it follows. At the end of the day being ritual gameplay being fine, accessible, and giving players rewarding choices as a payoff just makes it one of the better leagues in the 3.x series of expansions.

Second another small thing: The Atlas passives were shiny and new and that made them cool and that probably grants them some nostalgia points too even if now they just feel kinda boring and grindy to pad out time to fun. This is probably something that felt better than it really was even if they're still better than doing it through something like scarabs.

Finally the big winner in 3.13: Harvest was powerful, accessible, and streamlined. In Harvest league interacting with the mechanics were fiddly tedious and kinda boring but the payoffs were big. In 3.13 all the boring unfun stuff was gone and I just got to experience crafting that wasn't completely awful for the first time since I started playing in open beta. Harvest was the first since I learned that picking up items wasn't getting anywhere reasonable on that first character I made almost 9 years ago I was excited to find items on the ground because if they were halfway decent they could be fixed up for progression and 3.13 was Harvest but streamlined. For the first time I felt like I was making reasonable progress on my character without having to trade constantly. For the first time crafting felt accessible without having to trade constantly. For the first time there were items that felt like they could be chased and they were worth chasing in this game instead of just hoping they fall into my lap. For the first time in this game items felt like they were actually in a good place. All of that was taken away because very few people were working together and spending thousands of combined hours to make items that trivialized the content they had already trivialized to get to that point. Now the one thing that provided something that felt like a reasonable none random goal to chase is basically the same as as crafting options now and those just kinda aren't fun to engage in because even if they're slightly less random they're still too time consuming and tedious to compete with the efficiency of trade for the slight upgrades I want.

So at the end of the day GGG did bring chase items back to being like opening MTG boosters. The first thing anyone long time MTG player will tell you about opening a booster is to buy singles instead.

TL:DR 3.13 was great because the league was simple, harvest fixed a whole bunch of longstanding problems in the game, and the streamline harvest fixed harvest's problems.

The prenerf Valdo's harbinger farm was how I spent most of my time in 3.13,and it was lots of fun.Was sad to see it take such a hit. Now it's just another zone to take Blight and Meta passives unless you are going all out with rare currency watchstones.

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j33bus wrote:

TL:DR 3.13 was great because the league was simple, harvest fixed a whole bunch of longstanding problems in the game, and the streamline harvest fixed harvest's problems.

Harvest was great for one league. But lets not kid our self, it didn't "fix" build diversity directly, it made you forget/ignore about build diversity because you could be so strong that everything worked, disregarding if the build was well thoughtout/planned or not. The requirement of actually having to plan a build out and balance your offence versus defense was gone, because you could compensate everything with crazy gear.

And by all means, crafting close-to perfect items, letting you build everything was great. But I struggle to see how anyone in their right mind would consider Harvest good for the game in the long run, as it invalidated everything else. Sure, farming Legion was fun, some Beyond nodes worked and even som Metamorph farming was cool. But if you wanted to progress your character? One thing: Harvest.

Build diversity needs to be better than it is now - through giving underused/underpowered skills a higher ceiling. But Harvest isn't the way to go here. The first step - after buffing the skills - should be to make drops matter again. You should be able to find upgrades, even late in the game. With pre-nerfed Harvest, that is close to impossible.

I loved Harvest in 3.13, and even defended it for a while. But playing the game again, without having to worry about Haewark Hamlet and the constant thought in my head that "I need remove X, I need to add Y". Just playing the game felt so much better.

That said; if they refuse to increase build diversity, and refuse to realize that some arcetypes need A LOT of work, I'll take Harvest back. But I'll rather have hope, because the thought of 'feeling' forced to run Hamlet-maps just to progress, is not a pleasant thought.

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Phrazz wrote:

That said; if they refuse to increase build diversity, and refuse to realize that some arcetypes need A LOT of work, I'll take Harvest back. But I'll rather have hope, because the thought of 'feeling' forced to run Hamlet-maps just to progress, is not a pleasant thought.

Genuine question:
Would you trade content diversity for build diversity?

Because I think if Harvest in its prime is ever going to make a comeback a lot of people will rarely if ever run maps outisde Haewark Hamlet and never get to interact with anything else but Harvest.


Another question thats keeps popping up in my mind regularly would be:
What exactly constitutes build diversity?

Are only builds viable to complete all content on that list?
And even if they can potentially do it, they wont be considered viable if the budget to get there is too high or the gameplay too clunky?

I think build diversity is for the lack of definition pretty much a meaningless buzzword. Reason being that Im assuming players are only considering builds checking a ton of boxes as viable and thus worthy to contribute towards build diversity.
Or in other words: The more checkboxes need to be ticked, the less builds are going to be viable and thus build diversity is consequently close to non-existent. If players want it all, they shouldnt be surprised the pool of eligable builds it going to be tiny.

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Orbaal wrote:

Genuine question:
Would you trade content diversity for build diversity?

I did trade content diversity for build diversity in 3.11 and 3.13. While it felt good there and then, I would probably not do it in the long run, as I more or less said in earlier paragraphs than the one you quoted.

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What exactly constitutes build diversity?

You are right; "build diversity" and a "viable skill" are rather vague terms. But I think it would be safe to define it as "the time, effort and investment it takes for a skill/build to beat the game". Now, "time, effort and investment" are all very subjective terms, and so may "beat the game" be.

We have strong skills and not-so-strong skills in the game. For better or worse, this is how GGG want their game to be like. Finding/choosing a "good" skill over a "bad" skill makes your choices and knowledge matter. But regardless if that philosophy is good, the distance between the "bad" skills and the "good" skills are way to long now, and the ceiling of a lot of skills are too low.

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Phrazz wrote:

Harvest was great for one league. But lets not kid our self, it didn't "fix" build diversity directly, it made you forget/ignore about build diversity because you could be so strong that everything worked, disregarding if the build was well thoughtout/planned or not. The requirement of actually having to plan a build out and balance your offence versus defense was gone, because you could compensate everything with crazy gear.

Now to be fair, I didn't say anything about build diversity, that was never the problem. For the most part build diversity is fine, has always been fine, and will always be fine as long as they don't do something to destroy it intentionally. "Build diversity" is usually code for the thing I want to do is slightly less efficient than the best thing to be doing. Harvest did make it slightly easier to do whatever you want but honestly I don't care. What harvest did was make incrementally progressing your items a reasonable experience.

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And by all means, crafting close-to perfect items, letting you build everything was great. But I struggle to see how anyone in their right mind would consider Harvest good for the game in the long run, as it invalidated everything else. Sure, farming Legion was fun, some Beyond nodes worked and even som Metamorph farming was cool. But if you wanted to progress your character? One thing: Harvest.

Again kinda sure, but Harvest replaced trading for that and that's the big win.

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Build diversity needs to be better than it is now - through giving underused/underpowered skills a higher ceiling. But Harvest isn't the way to go here. The first step - after buffing the skills - should be to make drops matter again. You should be able to find upgrades, even late in the game. With pre-nerfed Harvest, that is close to impossible.

Strong disagree here pre-nerf harvest allowed close to upgrade items to be fixable in a reasonable manner, that's a huge win. Currently with post nerf harvest and for all the leagues before harvest fixing items was basically impossible unless it could be done with one master craft. Even then it usually cost you more trade resources to fix up an item to equipable status while also juggling around all of your resistances.

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I loved Harvest in 3.13, and even defended it for a while. But playing the game again, without having to worry about Haewark Hamlet and the constant thought in my head that "I need remove X, I need to add Y". Just playing the game felt so much better.

Yea having to run Haewark sucked but that's sort of an adjacent issue. PoE's content presentation has always be poor. The Atlas has always had that exact problem in every iteration, there's always basically one map that you should just be doing. That Atlas regions are just another compounding problem here, it's really no different in post nerf world. Now I'm just looking to do other regions to maximize returns.

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Orbaal wrote:

Genuine question:
Would you trade content diversity for build diversity?

I think that build diversity is generally content diversity. All maps are more or less the same, the deviation you get from running one map to another is minimal.

The reason I want to be more powerful, the goal of using harvest is so I can do the other content that comes from the other regions. It's so I can do the end encounters of leagues that are more interesting. It opens up the ability to do the aspirational content that they always talk about.

The big thing is that Harvest doesn't need to be presented the same way, in fact the entire endgame could really use a presentation overhaul because it's generally not presented that great. Harvest just needs to be powerful and plentiful because it increases that range of items that can be picked up and considered for use because you can fix items. It was plentiful and useful enough to compete with trade while rewarding you for actually playing the game. Sure some people made extremely powerful items with it but if that's what it takes for the ability to continually make slightly better items, well I'll take it. Those items were mostly used for post-endgame vanity reasons anyway.

What was good about Harvest despite it making you "powerful" was that you could literally play any skill/spell you wanted and make it work, thus allowing you to play something you liked without being hindered. In my opinion that allows build diversity.

If harvest ever came back the way it was before all the nerfs, if they wanted to make aquiring harvest crafted items a bit more challenging they can literally make any Harvest crafted item untradable and disable the possibility of mirroring it, forcing players who used a Harvest craft on an item to have to craft it themselves to how they want it as they cant buy Harvest items off other players.

These are the reasons we all know OP. Shiny new endgame + endgame toys and Harvest item editing. The same folks who were getting moist over Maven update and skill trees are the same ones saying it's too much of a slog and a grind now even though the grind didn't get any longer these last two patches.

Except that Chris explicitly told us to stop saying that 3.13 was great and start telling him why. So apparently he doesn't know.

We also know slogs are kinda fun the first time and not so much the second, it's why nobody wants to do acts anymore but were hyped for that first run in 3.0. This is a game and thing put in that don't add value to it just gating get recognized as that quickly.

I hated it. Harvest ruined the experience for me.

Having to deal with TFT.

Godly items running around in trade which devaluate anything that the game dropped.

Being forced to run harvest region over anything else in order to stay competitive in the market.

That felt so terrible.

Many peoples felt like me but were not nearly as vocal as all the harvest nerfs crybabies.