State of Harbinger Mechanic

Recently Addressed Issues
- The new harbinger Scarabs allow players to encounter many more harbingers ontop of modify the type of shards being dropped.

Outstanding Issues / Concerns

- Due to the overturning of Divines having larger value than Exalts, the amount of value provided by currency drops has plummeted severely

- Harbinger Currency Fragments & currency Fragments in general are all 20 to form an orb despite the vast disparity in actual value of each currency. This really should be changed / addressed. Everyone Filters out x/20 of a transmutation orb by the time you would actually encounter harbingers.

- Harbinger exclusive uniques, despite having TWO tiers of rarity now, are fairly lackluster. The items themselves have middling values while the harbingers & buffs themselves are for the most part niche or underwhelming. The second tier is hardly chase worthy for the most part for the effort required to obtain. Even simply obtaining the uniques requires finding "multiple" parts to even begin using them.

- Harbinger Orbs are more oriented towards "progressing" maps, helpful but odd considering its the league's iconic orb item. Even more so considering you don't natively encounter harbingers to even start receive the fragments to progress maps.

- Engineer's Orb only drops from Harbingers but due to current functionality are filtered out by (ballpark guess) a majority of filters. The benefits of using them on every strongbox we see is questionable as a whole, and even saving them for specific ones would rarely see a larger or meaningful yield increase.

- Issue with "meaningful click" design philosophy.

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I believe the Engineer's Orb should be given the functionality of harbinger orbs (upgrading a map rarity), and moved to core drops.

I believe harbinger orbs should be given engineering orb functionality, but each orb adds 5% quality and 1 new "harbinger themed" modifier. This would mean at 20% quality a chest would have 4 additional harbinger themed modifiers and spawn additional harbinger themed mobs from the chest.

In my opinion the current iteration of how harbingers drop currency shards is not in line with GGG's design philosophy of "meaningful clicks", as a harbinger could drop 4 alchemy orbs (insert orb type here), but drop it in 20 stacks of shards for example. This is tedious and not meaningful, it creates a weird disconnect of a mechanic that possesses the visuals of a loot explosion without the actual value. Players would probably pickup a 4 stack of alchemy orbs, maybe even 4 individual alchemy orbs, but not if it required 20+ clicks.

Harbingers were a great mechanic back in the day, providing shards of currency of varying value. This for the most part was hard carried by exalts first and ancient orbs (GL with mirror frags). There are also a few newer / awesome shards available from this content but the scarcity of them really makes it feel negligible as a reward in my opinion. It would be great for this to have a fresh breath of air given to this content.

I personally think it would be cool for harbingers to drop special harbinger bags / sacks that contain all the fragments they would have dropped, similar to the idea stacked decks. This would help clean up the clutter of harbingers while providing more exciting engagement of "what fragments are contained". It would also I believe help adjust the value of drops with its contents and number of bags dropped by an encounter.

+1

also fractured orb should ALOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT MORE common drop!

currency fragments in general were a big mistake, except for the mirror which makes sense that it would "break" into mirror fragments.

Totally agree on the Harbinger Orb...it is a relic of the days when higher tier maps were much much MUCH harder to get. Now that t16s drop like candy, and you can actually make every single map on the atlas t16 they are 100% obsolete. Even the same tier reroll map currency is BETTER than a harbinger orb.

That being said, harbingers are extremely profitable even in their current form. You can amass a pretty huge amount of ancient and chaos orbs just by speccing into 2 harbinger wheels, not to mention the chance at fracturing orbs which are highly valuable and ALWAYS sought after. And exalts aren't exactly worthless by any stretch of the imagination.

now....beachhead maps shoudl drop WAY more frequently, and yes I totally agree that the harbinger uniques are so severely underpowered in today's PoE that it completely removed their value from running beachheads. The raw currency is still okay.