EASY constructive FEEDBACK (HARVEST edition)

I'm not used to post anything, in fact this is my first post ever i believe

There is still problems with the current patch overall

HARVEST

I'm in late yellows and I still often receive no juice for a crop
this is not a matter of bulk drop as I tried to chain multiple crops of the same color with same result, as long as the mobs are not at least tier3 there is no garantee of juice dropping, resulting in no choice of color, you just pick wich crop has blueish mobs

The amount of juice is still to low, especially in white and yellow maps
this mechanic is targeted for this time period much more than red maps now, but there just is not enough juice dropping.
Coompared to before I would get lets say minimum 6 craft per crop, here often 0 or 1 craft, often 3 to 4 craft for a whole garden, and I took every single node on the atlas tree

You can remove flasks craft

Most big players are begging for reroll suffix or prefix, that's up to you

The cost relative to stack size is a bad idea, that had no effect in the past and it feels bad, or maybe the price per unit of some is just too high
Remember that now all the craft a concurrent to each others instead of side by side and free

GGG does not lack solutions, they are lacking the ability to listen

You are right in every point.

Harvest was a good introduction to crafting for newers. From maybe 12 rolls, with some chances to roll something good. Now you have 1 roll. The chances to roll something interesting is zero. The feeling for a newer is it doesn't worth the time.

You are suppose to craft your gear early on before facing yellow and red maps.

In sentinel you had 4 or 8 rolls per harvest for the mod you need. Now you have maybe 1. It is simply not worthly the time or the risk. Monster in harvest are scary, dangerous and takes time.

You don't choose to harvest, like heist or delve. You randomly find in a map and the character isn't prepared for that particular encounter or the character is close to rise to the next level and the risk is too high. So, the player might choose to skip complete. The risk reward ratio is too low.

Do your maths. If you need 30 rolls to get the mod you need, at a ratio of 1 roll for every harvest... I hate when they force players in a grinding mechanic. It is simply a wrong concept.

I think you're all gravely mistaken, and just jumping on the hate Chris bandwagon. Even though Chris has done more to make this game the best in the world, than any other person alive (to my knowledge).

He even takes the time to do several hour-long interviews a year and explain to us not just what's changed and why, but what they're planning on changing in the future. He still plays the game and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him, and people are calling for him to be fired, what is wrong with you?

Even though most people are complaining, as far as the long term vision for the game, in 3.19, almost all of the changes are good. Player sentiment is important and so GGG has had to bow to it, but Chris is absolutely right that sometimes players don't know what they want. They can claim they want a mirror to drop every map, but if that happened, few would play more than a few hours.

This all happened in 3.15, with people complaining about nerfs that admittedly went too far, and I was one of the ones who said this about the flask nerfs. But once the nerfs were made less drastic, poe became better than in 3.14 and previous versions. 3.18 was the best state of poe in all its history, and I'm confident that 3.20 will be better than 3.18 still.

Harvest has always provided the most powerful endgame crafting in the whole game, but its power was restricted by the tons of time it took to find a particular craft for your particular item, or trading for it, or keeping stash tabs upon stash tabs of items ready to be harvest-crafted if and when you found the correct craft.

In 3.19, you can just farm Harvest and every craft is ready for you when you need it, or you can just bulk-buy lifeforce and in less than a minute you can get the craft you want. You can also in effect substitute what would otherwise have been useless crafts, for the ones you actually want. This is an amazing change, but it also makes Harvest way more powerful than it used to be, so a lot of power had to be taken away to prevent it being the only mechanic in the game worth farming, and it was mostly done the right way.

The fact that you could previously use Harvest to craft levelling items as you were progressing through the campaign and early maps was a bonus, but that bonus was restricted by the fact that those crafts couldn't be used on high tier items. GGG can't just make craft cost be dependent on item level in 3.19 because some endgame items are purposefully low level (such as +1 wands) to avoid some crafting outcomes, and if you could just pay minimal amounts of lifeforce to craft those, it would be completely unfair for builds which don't have this benefit. In 3.18 and before, this was restricted by the fact that by the time you were looking to make endgame items, you typically had a build that could do higher tier content, and so if you wanted to easy-farm Harvest in low tier maps crafts for your +1 wand you could do it, but at the cost of having fewer drops through the rest of your map.

Because of all of these factors, the new Harvest shouldn't be something that provides an early benefit, but rather, something you can choose to accumulate early, so that you have more lifeforce ready for when it matters. Harvest crafting shouldn't be used for levelling items, it should be used on the same items you would use other high tier currency on, like divine, annulment or exalted orbs. With this vision in mind, what I would do is to keep something close to the original pricing for lifeforce that was released in 3.19, not provide great benefits to lifeforce farming, and in fact make some crafts more expensive.

I believe reforge adding one mod such as fire, cold, physical or speed, should be at least 500 lifeforce if not more. These crafts provide amazing power for endgame metacrafting of items, and to have them be just another version of essence or fossil misses the opportunity to make something great out of them.

Likewise I believe the "enchant flask" crafts should be way more expensive, at 800 lifeforce a pop they make it too easy to just recraft on all your flasks, which for some builds could be too powerful. I haven't tested this myself so I could be wrong. But what made the old "enchant flask" harvest crafts not good, was that you would only find them very rarely, making it impossible to get them reliably without spending lots of time buying the crafts from other players and at great risk.

Even though many of the current harvest crafts have been reduced in price greatly, I don't believe they were priced too highly before, as some provide great benefits. The fracture item and synthesize item craft in particular will provide a massive amount of power to new Harvest that wasn't available before. I would make these crafts far more expensive than they are now after the reduction. 50,000 lifeforce seems reasonable, but I wouldn't mind seeing them at 150,000.

In return for all of this power loss that I'm suggesting, what I believe is that Harvest should get back the "reroll values" craft, but at 20,000 lifeforce or more, and it should also get back the "reforge keeping prefix/suffix" crafts, but at 50,000 or more lifeforce each. With these changes, it will be possible to make very good rare items again, but at a big cost. The reroll in particular will help a lot in reducing price pressure from Divine Orbs. When the Exalted to Divine orb crafting bench change was announced, it was claimed that the reason was to make good rolled uniques more valuable, and this was achieved beautifully, and it gave us back the Exalted Orb to use in regular crafting the way it was originally meant to be used, something that was almost always a waste of currency in 3.18 and for many leagues prior. However, I don't believe making rares unable to get access to good rerolls like they used to is a positive change, and in particular it will tend to make Divine orbs excessively pricey, so pricey in fact that for most players, even experienced players, it will not be worth it to use them.

Tested as of today

I'm eventually in red maps
Harvest 5 yellow crops thanks to some not wilting
The one with the tier 3 monster gives me most of the juice
The others no juice, sometimes 5 to 10 juice just to mock me


Total juice from 5 crop in red tier ... 196


Tadaa here's your feedback, 3 to 4 craft for a whole red tier garden
And again with full atlas passives from harvest :)

I much preferred the old (pre-3.19) harvest crafting.

@merlinbolt it's rude to accuse people of just jumping on a bandwagon when they have legitimate complaints. chris is also the one who's screwing up poe right now. It's reasonable to be angry at people when they screwup and double down on their screwup rather than fixing it.

also harvest should be useable by those still leveling; it shouldn't just be for red maps only; some people don't even reach red maps and we deserve to be able to use all the mechanics.

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zlefin_actual wrote:

I much preferred the old (pre-3.19) harvest crafting.

@merlinbolt it's rude to accuse people of just jumping on a bandwagon when they have legitimate complaints. chris is also the one who's screwing up poe right now. It's reasonable to be angry at people when they screwup and double down on their screwup rather than fixing it.

also harvest should be useable by those still leveling; it shouldn't just be for red maps only; some people don't even reach red maps and we deserve to be able to use all the mechanics.

Once I start red maps, I expect all or most of my gear prepared reasonably. Then, I just don't care much about harvest. And the reason is numbers. The time I need to make 20 or 30 rolls to create a useful item reasonable, improve that means double the time, and go further quaduple the time. If I now need quadruple the time than before, I find it no reasonable for me and no worthly the time.

I think the previous ratios where balanced with the rest of the game. I didn't see people in the previous league stop using essences or fossiles in favor or harverst. Maybe some stitch a little for the advantage that you can choose the recipe when you need it, but not complete flat it to the ground.

This is only for end gamers that after finishing all bosses their goal is now to create the perfect objects for sale for 4 or 5. Most players at the end of the game rarely see 2 or 3 exalts and cannot afford those. There is nothing wrong on that and the presumptions that harvest is overly powerful with the previous ratio is overestimated.

If players cannot juice harvest at the early stages they cannot expect them to face red maps with suboptimal gear where they can juice from harvest. The result will be players get the gear from trade and leave harvest irrelevant.

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holysmokes5018 wrote:

GGG does not lack solutions, they are lacking the ability to listen

Thank you for this enlightenment, finally I understand

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merlinbolt wrote:

He even takes the time to do several hour-long interviews a year and explain to us not just what's changed and why, but what they're planning on changing in the future.

How about... a written roadmap? You know, like a good chunk of the 'good' games out there often do.

Also there's literally games out there which do that stuff despite having only 1-2 devs. It's a common staple nowadays to do it and keep the community engaged, it's not the 'special' thing to do anymore.

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merlinbolt wrote:

He still plays the game and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him, and people are calling for him to be fired, what is wrong with you?

First of all, he always wanted to make the game basically a copy of D2 in terms of difficulty and item acquisition, this has been quickly thrown out the window with them moving into another direction.
People found out that it might be fun in a special mode specifically tailored for it. And well, all the power to them to produce it! I'll even try it out, yes, from time to time with my expectations going in there to have that, yes, it'll be enjoyable.

But enforcing it onto the mass of players is non-acceptable.
Those changes have obvious downsides any long-term player could name you in a day. Those changes have been brought up by Alpha testers that they're an issue.
Those changes aren't finished fully either, they are preparation to the future. And that's how we're given them, as is, not as should be.

So yes, whoever is responsible for that going through in this manner despite the knowledge of the existence of the issues should literally step down. Heck, I lost jobs for far less messing up then GGG did with their multi-million dollar company in the course of the last 2 years.
This is unacceptable, this shouldn't ever happen and especially not repeatedly despite the community putting emphasis on that exact point as to why it happened.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Even though most people are complaining, as far as the long term vision for the game, in 3.19, almost all of the changes are good.

Are they?
I would love an explanation then.
What warranted the removal of prefix/suffix crafts entirely from Harvest?
What warranted the upgraded versions of the crafts removed from Harvest as they were the important ones?
What warranted the jewel enchantments being removed from Harvest?
What warranted the loot being pushed into very very specific mobs instead of overall drop-rate?
What warranted allowing AN to have combined mods which make them outpace your character and one-hit you?
What warranted reducing the minion survivability for end-game builds?
What warranted creating an easier experience for minion builds early game then ever when they already had a massive head-start in that stage?
What warranted the nerfing of tainted currency?

There's surely a few more, but that should do for a start, because I literally can't see how those changes are good.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Player sentiment is important and so GGG has had to bow to it, but Chris is absolutely right that sometimes players don't know what they want.

I still find that comment fairly appalling personally spoken. I know exactly what I want out of PoE.
I want fights to matter but not be senseless. Allow my defenses to matter in any state of the game.
Don't give me too much dps during the progression, give me the right amount.
Give me something to look forward to. After an evening of playing I wanna be better off then before. More maps, more currency, not less.
Give me a deterministic way to progress my gear. This ties into the thing right above, I don't know if I'll end up with nothing or gonna have to re-do the whole expensive process 50 times more right now. The 'steps' have been removed.
Let me focus on the important stuff for a loot-based hack&slash, the actual loot, the gear on the ground. Meaning while important I don't care about small-scale currency, just auto-pick that and store it in a friggin spread-sheet, it's not worthwhile to know outside of enjoying 'a number going up' anyways.
On that notion, remove arbitrary mechanics which are a detriment for QoL. Wisdom scrolls do nothing. The feeling of excitement is the exact same when I identify an item in my inventory and it turns out great versus hovering over an already identified one on the ground. The difference is 5 clicks per item minimum though.
Give me a liiiittle bit more pickup range, just so my character doesn't crawl around on the floor scurrying up the stuff there and it actually lets me pick up items behind obstacles as that's still not fixed after years.
Make my map-tabs in Standard not be utter garbage with the broken conversion mechanic.
And many... many... many more things.

That's what I want. My fights to be balanced and my loot to be exciting and not tedious.
Yes, I want the ability to become god-like when I push my character.
No, I don't want to needlessly struggle in the core-content from intentionally frustrating mechanics put in.

This doesn't mean give it to me on the journey, the power is supposed to be the end-result. That's not achievable for me for any content now. Formerly I at least had maps for that.

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merlinbolt wrote:

They can claim they want a mirror to drop every map, but if that happened, few would play more than a few hours.

That's quite hyperbolic though. It's the argument 'Too much loot is bad' which yes, it is, agreed. But it adds the notion of 'Hence we're going to reduce the amount you get now'
That last part opens the question though. Was the amount of currency an average player got too much? Or was it badly balanced in another place rather? What is too much currency? What is too little currency?

I would say to the last 2 questions there is actually an answer:

Too much currency is when you can ignore trading to push a character into post end-game in 2 weeks as an average player.

Too little currency is when the average player has struggles to use it for their basic experience or to start using on their gear.


That's my take on the last 2 questions, the most important ones. So, fell the former status into one of those? Because right now we're in the second.

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merlinbolt wrote:

This all happened in 3.15, with people complaining about nerfs that admittedly went too far, and I was one of the ones who said this about the flask nerfs. But once the nerfs were made less drastic, poe became better than in 3.14 and previous versions. 3.18 was the best state of poe in all its history, and I'm confident that 3.20 will be better than 3.18 still.

Exactly! You got the point there completely!
This though shows their testing is sub-par! It shouldn't release in such utterly broken states in the first place.
If and only IF they manage to actually bring in things with proper testing and later then it's by far better then what happens at the moment.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Harvest has always provided the most powerful endgame crafting in the whole game, but its power was restricted by the tons of time it took to find a particular craft for your particular item, or trading for it, or keeping stash tabs upon stash tabs of items ready to be harvest-crafted if and when you found the correct craft.

Or you used Discord and circumvented all those issues, creating a paradise for scammers and power-gamers having an unfair advantage compared to other players.

The amount of available crafts would have risen with the simple implementation of the current Harvest system. Keeping the crafts the same simply. Sure, more available... but not game-breaking so like in 3.11 or 3.13. The ability available still.

Now that's gone.

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merlinbolt wrote:

In 3.19, you can just farm Harvest and every craft is ready for you when you need it, or you can just bulk-buy lifeforce and in less than a minute you can get the craft you want.

No, since those crafts don't exist anymore. I can farm it until the end of my days and I won't get it hence.

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merlinbolt wrote:

You can also in effect substitute what would otherwise have been useless crafts, for the ones you actually want.

There were never many 'useless' crafts. 75% you could use immediately to make some pretty usable gear at least. But it was tedious simply.
Now it's gone. By the time you get those crafts they are useless. The others are mostly flavor crafts which are very very very case-specific or utterly unneeded in the first place.

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merlinbolt wrote:

This is an amazing change, but it also makes Harvest way more powerful than it used to be, so a lot of power had to be taken away to prevent it being the only mechanic in the game worth farming, and it was mostly done the right way.

It was the worst decision outside of the removal of Bestiary crafts as well as the removal of the unique fossil mods the game has seen to date in regards to crafting.
The only reason Harvest was OP was because the other options already had been removed.

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merlinbolt wrote:

The fact that you could previously use Harvest to craft levelling items as you were progressing through the campaign and early maps was a bonus, but that bonus was restricted by the fact that those crafts couldn't be used on high tier items.

They could and were actually, so that part is not true in the first place.
Secondly it was to alleviate the former 80 hour end-game grind (from start to finish) for a 'mediocre player' that needed 10+ hours for the campaign which has been increased to 200+ hours nowadays.

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merlinbolt wrote:

GGG can't just make craft cost be dependent on item level in 3.19 because some endgame items are purposefully low level (such as +1 wands) to avoid some crafting outcomes, and if you could just pay minimal amounts of lifeforce to craft those, it would be completely unfair for builds which don't have this benefit.

Then the tags need to be adjusted accordingly as step 1.
And a +1 wand is not the gear level which is talked about. That's 'basic' end-game gear. It's about the whole massive range of gear beyond that which as side-results created the items people buy from the market. Gone.

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merlinbolt wrote:

In 3.18 and before, this was restricted by the fact that by the time you were looking to make endgame items, you typically had a build that could do higher tier content, and so if you wanted to easy-farm Harvest in low tier maps crafts for your +1 wand you could do it, but at the cost of having fewer drops through the rest of your map.

Or I could just run Essences for a quick buck and buy the respective craft.
I could double-corrupt an item at any level with a temple.
I could fossil farm in Delve to create the currency to acquire such a craft.
I could do heist to acquire the currency for it.
I could do low level expedition to get enough artifacts to actually create a decent item from that mechanic to progress to end-game.

All of those allowed me secondary measures to actually get to that 'starting line' for the powerful crafts. Now it ends with it, everything beyond is gone.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Because of all of these factors, the new Harvest shouldn't be something that provides an early benefit, but rather, something you can choose to accumulate early, so that you have more lifeforce ready for when it matters.

Early Harvest literally gives no lifeforce. It's utterly broken. Yes, would be great! But the notion is moot since it's not existing.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Harvest crafting shouldn't be used for levelling items, it should be used on the same items you would use other high tier currency on, like divine, annulment or exalted orbs.

They are useless for that now though? Name a single viable craft to use on those.
Re-craft is a worse option of fossils.
Changing currency type (fossils, essences, catalysts and so on) has an inherent cost by reducing the amount now, inherent besides actually paying the cost of the craft.
Chance modifier is well used, that one is the last viable one... which you need fairly rarely now as it's solely to fix resistances once with a change in gear.
Flask enchants? Useless.
Div-gamble? Gamble, not crafting.
Enchant Armour/weapon? Useless outside of very very few fringe situations.

So that leaves the boss modifiers, which already have an inherent cost with the sacred lifeforce. This one is a gamble now which can brick your item permanently. Double nerf hence as the cost is utterly obscene.

Fracture? That one is still ok, that one can work.
Synthesis? Ok... eh, that one is probably the last viable craft available in proper respective costs.
Reforge influence is achieved easier with fossils and also is useless since you can't suffix/prefix anymore anyways.

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merlinbolt wrote:

With this vision in mind, what I would do is to keep something close to the original pricing for lifeforce that was released in 3.19, not provide great benefits to lifeforce farming, and in fact make some crafts more expensive.

Which ones? All of them have been vastly downgraded anyways. They are beyond the price-tag attached to them anyways.

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merlinbolt wrote:

I believe reforge adding one mod such as fire, cold, physical or speed, should be at least 500 lifeforce if not more. These crafts provide amazing power for endgame metacrafting of items, and to have them be just another version of essence or fossil misses the opportunity to make something great out of them.

And have a 10% chance of bricking your item on top, which formerly wasn't the case.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Likewise I believe the "enchant flask" crafts should be way more expensive, at 800 lifeforce a pop they make it too easy to just recraft on all your flasks, which for some builds could be too powerful.

For the amount of tedium it's rather fair.

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merlinbolt wrote:

I haven't tested this myself so I could be wrong. But what made the old "enchant flask" harvest crafts not good, was that you would only find them very rarely, making it impossible to get them reliably without spending lots of time buying the crafts from other players and at great risk.

I threw them all away, they were worthless most of the time. And they existed in every 3-4 harvests. Now you need manyfold of those harvests to even get the juice, they are more rare then ever.

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merlinbolt wrote:

Even though many of the current harvest crafts have been reduced in price greatly, I don't believe they were priced too highly before, as some provide great benefits.

They have been nerfed in functionality, obviously they don't need a high price anymore.

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merlinbolt wrote:

The fracture item and synthesize item craft in particular will provide a massive amount of power to new Harvest that wasn't available before.

That's actually the first one I can fully agree on! The first point!

I'll leave it at that since it's just cost-related talk anyways and not anything to point out beyond.