State of Harbinger Mechanic ~ 3.25 Updated

Good Changes
- Harbinger Scarabs allow players to encounter many more harbingers ontop of potentially force every harbinger in the map to be a powerful harbinger boss

Lost Benefits
- Scarabs used to let us target rarer shards

Outstanding Issues / Concerns

- Divines overtook Exalted Orbs, Exalted shards are still somewhat rare even from this mechanic

- 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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Thoughts, Opinions & Feedback

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 (adding strongbox quality), 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 with harbinger themed loot rewards.

I believe currency fragments for the lowest Orb categories should be removed the harbinger mechanic, if not also from the game entirely. There is already far too much bloat in currency and at the very least should not be present in harbingers to artificially reduce the value of drops.

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.

Finally as a solution to the shard issue, 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". At the very least Harbingers need to have their MEANINGFUL clicks issue addressed in some fashion.

I agree about the orbs: harbinger league was 7 years ago and the only change that was made to the loot pool was.....fracturing orbs. While this was a good addition and added value, they DIDN'T update the rest of the items which are completely obsolete by today's standards. Anyone who runs strongboxes are running the corrupted rare node, so engineer's orbs are even more useless now than they already were upon release.

Harbinger's orbs are totally worthless too, because they are too rare and maps have undergone massive changes making it incredibly easy to find t16 maps (their literal only use). Changing a t15 map into a beachhead is so rare that, when combined with the rarity of harbinger orbs, makes it seem a LOT more valuable than it really is. Now...if we could use harbinger orbs on t16s to make infused beachheads....

Harbingers are STILL a great mechanic for currency even without the "rarer shards" node: just from adding tons of them via the rest of the scarabs, this essentially still exists because you drop so many more shards than you ever used to so the chances of valuable shards is significantly increased. But we DO need divine shards added to the drop pool.



But my real problem with harbingers are....ALL SHARDS SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE GAME. They are unnecessary clutter in an already cluttered orb system. Mirror shards sorta make sense because they are super rare and because mirrors break. But the rest of the "shards" are completely pointless. Harbingers should drop full orbs, with a complete adjustment on the "special" orbs they provide to bring them more in line with actual modern PoE. Seriously....TRANSMUTATION SHARDS?!?!?!! ALTERATION SHARDS?!?!?!? Monsters are dropping full stacks of these currencies on a regular basis now, yet harbingers are dropping fractions of ONE. And think about the first time you actually encounter a harbinger lol....you need something like 10+ atlas points to force a harbinger onto a map, you DON'T need 90% of the shards they drop at that point. It needs adjustments, just like what they did with Simulacrums.

Yeah.

Harbingers are rly outdated now.
It even shows on BeachHead map.

What it worth now, 5c?
I remember times BH was 80c up to 170.
It was maps to go get good exp and awesome loot. Rotas were running those.

Now noone runs.

Harbingers while giving awesome currency (at least for me i've been very lucky), most of it is worthless.

Literally the only thing you have show up in your filter in endgame from harbingers that are worth money are: Chaos shards (just for recoup a bit the cost of running the map), exalted shards, anull shards, ancient shards and fracturing shards(and respective orbs that drop instead of shards).

The whole shard thing feels bad, fracturing and mirror shards (havent even seen those in 1000+ harbinger maps) feel good to drop, everything else feels so lackluster and only worth to recoup/profit a bit, the cost of running maps by selling them in bulk.

But at least isn't like legion where you get tendinitis looting the entire map.

Come on, guys, you still need chaos orbs? I've managed to hoard 32 thousand in my stash and I can probably whip out 10 times more if I wanted to. Loot filter should remove everything that is not worth at least 20c and above

OP put way too much effort into this. I'm not saying your ideas are invalid or anything but there's exactly one reason why Harbinger isn't worth running to any reasonable person:

TOO. MUCH. CLICKING.

Looting a Harbinger Boss literally takes me more clicks than looting the rest of the map combined. I'm not going to do that, no sane person is going to do that, cicking is not fun. So until GGG find a way to make a single click collect all identical stackable currency within a radius this will continue to be F-tier content regardless of how rewarding it is.

What are you talking about, everyone loves clicking on breach splinters. And what about that one time when Delirium was introduced when we had to click on splinters 300 times for a simulacrum?

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

OP put way too much effort into this. I'm not saying your ideas are invalid or anything but there's exactly one reason why Harbinger isn't worth running to any reasonable person:

TOO. MUCH. CLICKING.

Looting a Harbinger Boss literally takes me more clicks than looting the rest of the map combined. I'm not going to do that, no sane person is going to do that, cicking is not fun. So until GGG find a way to make a single click collect all identical stackable currency within a radius this will continue to be F-tier content regardless of how rewarding it is.

Yea, the first time I did a juiced harbinger map I discovered it literally DOUBLED my time in the map simply picking up the shards harbingers provide. The existence of currency shards really should be reserved for currencies that are RARE & HIGHLY VALUABLE, not a dime a dozen on every currency. I've easily gotten over 3k alteration orbs lategame WHILE donating some to guild bank for crafting.

Let's also not forget that every orb with shards is unified X/20 for some reason.

Alteration & Transmutation orbs should not have shards at all and should not drop in Harbinger. The rest of the "shards" that are dropped from this mechanic need to either:

A) Be auto picked up like gold, just make that affliction bag into a currency shard bag & Remove only. It only fills with shards & auto completes orbs when enough shards are obtained. At least then shards would be tolerable.
B) Drop condensed currency instead of fragmented

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Johny_Snow wrote:

What are you talking about, everyone loves clicking on breach splinters. And what about that one time when Delirium was introduced when we had to click on splinters 300 times for a simulacrum?

The irony is they said they want our clicks to "hold weight" and "pick and choose" but THOSE pieces of content you really don't have a choice on picking them up if you want to do the mechanic, its literally forced upon you. Doubly so in SSF context. There is no choice in picking up those fragments when you want to participate in the content.

Trans/alt/alch shards are very useful at lvl <10, I'd definitely not like to see them removed. That said, they shouldn't drop from harbingers at all.

I sincerely believe Harbinger is the worst farm strat in terms of profit (I rotate through almost every single farm strat every league) - either you hit it big with a frac shard or mirror shard or you end up at a negative (unless you're willing to pick up all the chaos shards, which I am not)

Ancient orbs are the only vaguely valuable thing that regularly drops, but you don't get enough to justify Harbs as a farming strat. It's definitely outdated and a lot of things should be changed. I mostly agree with OP's suggestions, although I'm not that sold on the Engineer/Harbinger orbs thing. I think these should be altogether replaced with something interesting that could still be somewhat valuable (like Ancient orbs are)

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Felix44 wrote:

Trans/alt/alch shards are very useful at lvl <10, I'd definitely not like to see them removed.

I think you're thoughts are backwards on their existences. It would be better if players were given better access to orbs early on & given WHOLE orbs for trading gear to vendors. There really isn't a benefit to shards for these shards except to SLOW DOWN orb progression

Imagine selling magic items to vendor and ID magic items to vendor and obtaining entire orbs to start crafting ACTUALLY DESIRABLE starting items instead of collecting 5-10 to obtain only 1 orb. It's honestly more practical.

At the very least, the shards themselves should by X/5 like wisdom scroll scraps. It's quite ludicrous for every single currency beyond scraps of wisdom to be X/20