Harvest Easy Fix Idea!

First of all, +1 to such a change, it's exactly what would be needed for Harvest after all.
Re-introduction of powerful unique crafting methods but gating them with scarcity is fine.

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Ymho wrote:

Well I do not think that we need more currency, just 2 changes:
a) Costs of crafts
b) Amount of items dropped.

True, but a wider variety of currency makes it easier to balance for the devs. Hence it's a good implementation.

The current system is limited by the low variance in that aspect.

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moonretealoud wrote:

PoE is practically a singleplayer game and you still worry about someone playing better than you and getting better gear for it?

Not even remotely the point.
Harvest allows players a way to progress smoothly, enforcing a variety of crafts onto an item which otherwise wouldn't be easily doable.

This has been vastly nerfed, especially the option to craft on influenced items as well as the option to suffix/prefix craft.
They were basically mandatory additions for a proper progression there, now lacking at that stage of the game.

You simply - personally, you alone, without anyone else taken into consideration - have less reliable options to upgrade your gear.

If people don't have the carrot tangling in front of them at a reasonable distance then the carrot isn't interesting. Simple as that.

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Char1983 wrote:

They tried making Eternal Orbs more and more rare for years, before finally realizing that in a game like this with an economy like this, that produces extremely rich and very poor players by design, this isn't possible. Then they removed Eternal Orbs.

Which still was a bad decision in my eyes.

Eternal orbs have a functionality in the game when you have players reaching the stage where they become viable. Which is for end-end-end game crafts.
At the moment there is nothing there for those, causing those players to stop playing at times rather then keeping them in.

Half the quantity of Eternal orbs compared to mirrors would already solve this, very rare but available for the really few crafts which would need them (High-tier low-weight tier combinations).

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Char1983 wrote:

Honestly, you need to make a decision - do you want deterministic crafting of very top-end items to be a thing or not?

Yes, should be a thing.

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Char1983 wrote:

If it shall be a thing, then it should be attainable for a relatively large portion of the player base (a.k.a. Harvest 3.11 / 3.13). That works. If not, then you need to remove certain crafts, or make them account-bound and not tradeable (also not through TFT).

And here it's a 'no'.
Rich players need to have a way to spent their currency too, a sink for currency is important.

Hence the 'average joe' shouldn't have full and easy access to it, but it needs to be obtainable still.

This needs to be balanced accordingly and has never been done to date actually.

As an example:
If the overall cost for a map-starter item is 5c to create then a mid-tier item has to rise to around 1 divine.
Further along an end-game item should roughly be 5 divine
And the top-tier ones 100+
God-tier hence 2000+

The current issue is that there's mid-tier items which needs 5+ divines and there's top-tier items which need 500+, as well as some only need around 10 divines to make.

This disparity between the ease of how you obtain them is the issue, not the existence itself.

GGG has never balanced that to date. This is the mistake.

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jerot wrote:

It should be removed entirely, and the worthwhile crafts should find homes in new systems or in reworking and adding them to old ones.

The current system itself is a viable one, but nonetheless not in a great spot.

Hence why remove it?

Also GGG removed the 'worthwhile' crafts to a large degree simply, that's the issue, not that Harvest itself is a problem.

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Sarganis87 wrote:

Harvest was a test run for crafting that was hugely more deterministic than the previously allowed baseline of Bench+Beasts+Essences+Fossils.

Exactly!
It showcased that the old mechanic wasn't up to par for the necessities the game enforced onto you.

Hence a good addition to solve those issues!
Especially with the removal of unique mods from Fossil-crafts, which still to date is a vast mistake. Taking away uniqueness of any mechanic leads to it being one which needs to be compared to all the others available, to make mechanics viable at all times they need to do unique things at all times. Hence removing the ability to even compare them.

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Sarganis87 wrote:

Look, I will be sad to see Harvest go. But I am sadder seeing its current state and knowing that devs will spend time on it instead of doing better things for the game.

Which 'better things' though?
Harvest was the solution for an issue.
GGG removed those solutions.

The outcome is we're left with the problems they already solved once more rather then actually adjusting the acquisition to get them in line with the situation.

They can implement 100 new mechanics and all of them will fare the same issue as long as they don't realize that their vision isn't even remotely in line with their implementations, they work actively counter at times.
This is fairly mind-boggling to happen actually.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

Harvest feels ok right now, its only rough day 1-2 of the league when you're making your push into red maps.

For a fairly vast amount of people 'pushing into red maps' is not a case of 1-2 days.
Harvest was the solution to ease this step, which was necessary.
This has been removed, which obviously is a bad state.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

I'm pretty sure they have since buffed the drops from white/yellow maps.

Doesn't solve the created issue though, especially since we basically get 5% of the former juice.

A solution would be to split the acquisition of crafts into stages, hence allowing white tier crafts only to apply to ilvl items according to it, yellow-tier juice the same and red-tier juice finally for all items available, the amount of acquired crafts adjusted accordingly.

So in white you get loads of re-rolls and have no access to actual powerful crafts and the further up you go the less the crafts in general become but the more unique and powerful they can turn the outcome.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

As well as the drops with no investment. If you're doing 200%+ quant maps with harvest you will get 1k-1.5k lifeforce and thats plenty imo.

At this stage of the game the raw lifeforce is useless though. You only need crafts rarely when you reached that far, you need specific ones, some of them not available anymore at all.

By the time you reach there the functionality has already passed.

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Kulze wrote:

First of all, +1 to such a change, it's exactly what would be needed for Harvest after all.
Re-introduction of powerful unique crafting methods but gating them with scarcity is fine.

"

Ymho wrote:

Well I do not think that we need more currency, just 2 changes:
a) Costs of crafts
b) Amount of items dropped.

True, but a wider variety of currency makes it easier to balance for the devs. Hence it's a good implementation.

The current system is limited by the low variance in that aspect.

Well I think 1 currency is much easier, but it's basicly up to devs ...

But now amount of life force you get and you can use for crafts is bad. It's too insane nerf ...


Also well not every1 is in endgame yet, f.x. I play for fun and was 14 days away ... for me there is still hope that Harvest will be worth it :-)

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Ymho wrote:

Well I think 1 currency is much easier, but it's basicly up to devs ...

Yes, it seems at the first glance, until you look into it a bit more in depth.

1 currency means you tie everything to 1 single aspect, for example... buying things with 'gold' in other games.
You get gold at level 1, you get gold at level 100, just a different amount of it, the source is all the same though.

Hence, someone can decide 'I'll farm only low-tier content to achieve the amount of gold' and this is currently actually done. Which is bad.

Breaking it down into several currencies which can only be achieved in different stages of the game puts a simulated 'hard-cap' on it. Like getting specific bases only at some respective stage in the game, or mod-tiers when reaching a specific stage.

Should 're-roll suffix/prefix' be available at T1 maps? Plainly spoken, no, it shouldn't. It's a vastly powerful craft, that's why GGG removed it. So to take care of that issue it needs to be in top-tier content only, and rarely at that.

Hence it means it can't be tied to either yellow, blue or... purple juice as all of them can be obtained easily in T1 maps as well with enough time taken. That's a bad design choice, you can't limit the accessibility of it accordingly.

Instead it need to be detached from the current 3 currencies, also from the current boss-drop.
Let's say... green life-force. Only obtainable in T14-16, happens 1 in every 100 harvests, giving a fixed value (no matter the quantity or rarity of drops) between... 50-100 when getting it.
The craft costing 1000 green lifeforce.

This would be a viable approach (ignore the numbers please) to making such powerful crafts rare and keep it that way, as GGG mentioned 'tying it to rarity'.

It's similar to specific uniques only dropping at specific content, and that content should also be the only place it drops, period.
GGG though went with introducing those as well into the core loot-pool, which is a vast mistake from their side.
Overall it makes the game more 'generic', getting the same results from whatever you do causes the outcomes to be comparable to each other. The less comparable mechanics are to each other because they provide unique outcomes the more viable each separate mechanic becomes.

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Ymho wrote:

But now amount of life force you get and you can use for crafts is bad. It's too insane nerf ...

That as well, since they attached the high-tier crafts to the low-tier lifeforce this is the result.
It's very badly implemented and could've been easily done in better ways, they just failed at their task and towards the community, simply said.
By the time you get the respective juice needed you'll not need it anymore most likely, having passed the stage at which it would be viable.

Hence why my suggestion was to 'split' the lifeforce into segments. For example white maps give 'whitering' lifeforce, yellow maps give 'sprouting' lifeforce and red maps 'blooming' lifeforce. They can only be used on the respective ilvl in their range and below, each stage having a separate balancing for their costs.

Since it's already too few different currencies it causes the underlying issue we have right now, reducing the amount isn't viable hence, the other way around is though. Not to speak of lifeforce should be stored automatically inside the horticraft station and not the currency tab, as well as it nonetheless kept trade-able.

First of all,

Special thanks to you Kulze for taking the time to support the idea of fixing Harvest and for being more active than me when it comes to replying to some of the people. I was going to reply to them by myself, but didn't have the time to do so.

Second of all,

another thank you to the rest of you for participating.


And let me say I really like this idea too from Kulze:

Hence why my suggestion was to 'split' the lifeforce into segments. For example white maps give 'whitering' lifeforce, yellow maps give 'sprouting' lifeforce and red maps 'blooming' lifeforce. They can only be used on the respective ilvl in their range and below, each stage having a separate balancing for their costs.

Specially if it's mixed with my idea of categorizing crafts by rarity + adding the new currencies which has the same rarity % to represent a every craft category to make sure it's controlled by rarity as GGG wants it to be, and to make sure those insane crafts are scarce and not available in abundance because of how strong they are.

Because if GGG doesn't do so then mirror gear will be easy to craft and it would be the same as if GGG just start giving away 10 mirrors of kalandra at the start of every league to every player. it will basically make the game pointless and way too easy to play.