What would you do with this bow?

I bought this during the last week of scourge league as a 1-mod fractured bow for 2ex, and nearly soiled myself. I know Harbinger Bows aren't the shit any more after Synthesis league - Spine Bows are, but they still are to me. They were the first bow I ever became fixated on, many years ago. I invested about 10ex into crafting this one, including links, sockets, quality, essences & bench crafts.


Even if I could afford TFT prices I don't want to do that, I don't care how many vouches someone has. It's nothing personal, it's just that if anybody's going to do something to my bow that bricks it, I want it to be me.

So what would you do if you were me? I have some bows in the 20-50ex range that might sell for crafting purposes, an IIQ gem, and a few other random things I could sell, but "hundreds of exalts" is likely outside my budget.

I've done a few experiments with crafting emulators, and not only did I get really lucky with the essence slam, if I want to exalt slam t2 attack speed on this thing, I'm looking at "hundreds of exalts" potentially. I've tried it several times in said emulator, and @3EX per try I've gotten it in less than 200ex only one time. ...And that's just 1 suffix.

I had saved up tons of Essences of Contempt (flat physical damage), and spent @5ex on more. I was going to try for t1 hybrid phys, but I told myself that if I got t1 elemental I was going to keep it, because the chance of getting it is almost as bad as t1 hybrid %phys, and after flat elemental damage was de-nerfed on bows, it became more viable to go hybrid damage. I have never been able to craft (or afford) an all-phys endgame bow anyway - always having to settle for hybrid damage, and thought this might be my chance, but I got over the disappointment quickly when I realized this thing has DPS of 1,060. This is why I always wind up with a hybrid damage bow, but anyway...

At that point I kinda ran out of currency and wound up just scouring the suffixes and multi-modding it.

Would you:
A - Leave it like it is, at least until they announce the changes to Harvest crafting - and probably even after
B - Wait until you have at least 200ex, then scour the bench crafts and exalt slam until you get t2 attack speed
C - Something else? I can't give it influence, and won't use a recombinator on it, synthesize it or corrupt it, so what am I missing, beast crafting?

I really just want crit chance and crit multi on there, and I'm definitely okay with bench-crafting one or the other. I'm even okay with just bench-crafting crit multi on there with the t2 attack speed. If I do that maybe I'll get my first post-league harvest crit augment to use on it? Sigh... It doesn't look promising, but I don't need 1 extra arrow, let alone 2 - just crit chance/multi is fine by me.

The bow has no special implicits, doesn't have fractured +2 arrows or anything else you could build around. You're very limited.





Now here's the issue with all of this:
It's not worth it. Yes, the chance of hitting that stuff is quite high but the bow is subpar to begin with when compared to stuff that's possible nowadays. You'd be way better of using the currency on gearing an entire character and build with proper damage scaling instead.

"

Scarletsword wrote:

The bow has no special implicits, doesn't have fractured +2 arrows or anything else you could build around. You're very limited.

...

First off THANK YOU very much for putting that together for me, you reminded me of a lot of options I had forgotten about. Meta-mods don't work with essences, but I forget that harvest reforge crafts do, also veiled chaos!

Well honestly the toon I was building it for was using split arrow, which means that adding 2 arrows doesn't work the same way for them anyway, so the added expense of crafting it isn't worth it. Don't get me wrong, I WON'T roll over +2 arrows on purpose, ever, but people that are going for that will roll over t1 crit chance/multi to get it, and I won't. I'll just stop because I'll be happy.

I'm not really looking for a mirror tier bow, I'm one of those freaks that craft because they want to use the items, not because they want something top-tier to sell, or just show off. It's not a cheap cop-out to go for less rare mods sometimes (+2 arrows is the rarest mod that a bow can have, I believe), sometimes you really don't need that as much as crit chance/multi.

But it's not like "cheap" really matters. It's still going to be expensive, even though I have rather lax requirements in comparison, and there are no guarantees.

Especially since there's risk of having to start all over if I reforge 3 junk suffixes and have to risk an annul to get "prefixes cannot be changed" put back on it. I don't think your calculations included that possibility, but it's a real one for me.

...But you've helped me way more than you probably realize, so thanks again. :)

Do you value the Lightning prefix? If not, I would honestly get a pile of Deafening Contempts and slam till you get a strong prefix (Phys hybrid most likely, T3 or higher) to start.

"

Obright wrote:

Especially since there's risk of having to start all over if I reforge 3 junk suffixes and have to risk an annul to get "prefixes cannot be changed" put back on it. I don't think your calculations included that possibility, but it's a real one for me.

I didn't include it since there is no reason to annul in a situation like that with harvest in the game:



You'd just use reforge keep prefixes until you'd have an open suffix again.

"

Scarletsword wrote:

You'd just use reforge keep prefixes until you'd have an open suffix again.

Can I ask you a question?

Since harvest league ended, how many reforge prefixes/suffixes have you found? I've found exactly one, and like I said I don't do TFT.

Looks like I'll be crafting this thing until they turn the servers off.

The "reforge keep prefixes" mod is quite rare but still common enough to be farmable. It will take some time but you can always store them for later if you find one. You won't need many anyway.
You can increase your odds of getting it by using the purple sextant if you're really desperate for it.



The targeted reforges like crit and speed are very common. Most harvests should have one or the other if you spec into the atlas passives.

It will likely be arduous for an under-achiever like myself, not to mention time-consuming, but I'm doing this in standard league, so I really can't complain. I have a clear battle plan now, and that's what I was looking for.

Thank you very much again!

HURRRF
t2 Attack Speed...
...AND 2 JUNK MODS. :(

This was my third and last attempt until I can sell some crap.

Should I use a remove non-attack/add attack (if I ever find one) and then a remove non-crit/add crit (if I ever find one), or should I use a reforge suffixes/keep prefixes (if I ever find one)?

I guess I should just keep farming harvests until I get one of them, and just use whichever one I find first (if I actually ever see any of them again)?

GOD I miss OG harvest crafting... This feels so wasteful to me.

I have a really strong feeling harvest is about to get yanked out with the next patch, which will leave me with no option but to annul the damn thing and probably have to start all over again.

I was impatient after not being able to find any harvest crafts that I needed, and wound up annulling that bow.

...

...

I got lucky and got rid of one of the 2 junk suffixes - not the one I would have preferred, but no complaints.

And now it seems that I'll soon be able to farm for any harvest craft by collecting life force (unless I'm misunderstanding), so hopefully I'll soon(ish) be able to do a remove non-crit/add crit, and get a decent tier crit chance...? Experiments in an emulator were encouraging...

It's going to add crit chance at the cost of either the lightning resistance, or the attack speed. If it replaces the attack speed then I'll have to reforge the suffixes again, but at least the prefixes will be intact.

If it replaces the lightning resistance with ANY tier of crit chance it will be an improvement, but naturally I'd like t3-1.

Then at some later point maybe I can save up life force for an augment crit, to replace the crafted crit multi? That would be risky, but VERY worthwhile if it paid off. If it replaced the +28% crit multi with 15% as a hard explicit I will cry. :p