Will Harvest Become Core Path of Exile Content?

I hate the gardening part, so glad it doesn't go core (played 4 days only :((( )

I get the idea of not wanting end-game to be easy on players that don't have time to grind. However, this following idea also makes no sense to me.

"When we designed Harvest, we wanted to experiment with a more deterministic crafting system that would enable players to access powerful items earlier in their character progression."

What counts as early character progression. These days you get lvl 90-92 in 2 days tops with crap gear in a new league and the build is done. I don't have time or need to craft lvl 50-60 items, not in a trade league anyway.

All that matters in this game is end-game crafting and end-game progression not early game. And at least the way I look at it, lvl 1-80 is early game in POE, and not the kind of early game when you want/need to spend time crafting when you could just easily push for the final levels and skill points to finish up a build.

End-game crafting, or any kind of crafting worth doing in this game, is about min-maxing and that's just what Harvest crafting allowed us to do.

A simple fix for the crafting system is to have seeds tradeable but not horticrafting stations. Or maybe go as far as make seeds non-tradeable too.

As easy as crafting was in Harvest, the seed drops and GG crafting options were still very much RNG-based. I avoided trading for seeds and barely saw some of the good crafting options (chaos for ex.) from high ilvl seeds. So while it may have been game-breaking for some, it wasn't for everyone.

Of course if you can spend 10ex on seeds and keep spamming all the GG crafting options, it kinda sounds like crafting is a joke. But is it all that different from farming 10ex and just buying the items you needed in previous leagues?

I think it really just comes down to a matter of how easy should the game be for players that can't spend 8+ hours and farm consistently on a daily basis. Should end-game content be more open to the average players too, or not? Because that's the only thing that Delirium and Harvest content did in temporary leagues.

Delirium allowed players to farm currency/scarabs easier and eventually buy items they previously couldn't in another league. Harvest offered the other approach of farming and deterministic crafting with a great deal of trading too, in order to get the crafting options that mattered.

good news...

Just spawn fully grown gardens on maps randomly. Same as how BLight league works. You kill the monsters and you have a chance to craft. We don't need the boring garden farming part.

Yay No more this Dam harvest! =) , TBH this crafting mechanic just ruined market , since (normal mirror tear) items cost 10-20 exalts ^^ ,and that's literally broken , hope GGG wont return harvest crafting system , and make next league much harder =)

One thing I don't hear anyone mention in all of these discussions is that harvest crafting is an amazing TEACHING tool for crafting. I can guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that most of the people that engaged with harvest crafting that only minimally crafted before now have a much more comprehensive understanding of the ins and outs of the system.

I personally don't think that removing something like this is adding much meaningful difficulty to the game, and I think many people would agree with that. Actual solutions I would propose if it's really insisted on that random rolls should be the gateway to upgrades would be increasing the mod pools on problematic crafts, make it slightly harder for people to get the exact craft they want. Add a physical mod to (crusader) chest pieces, give boots a few more crit rolls, stuff like that. More than that though, I would prefer fights where gear isn't the biggest gateway to success, but rather where properly interacting with the mechanics is what gets you ahead. Easier said than done, I am aware.

On people complaining that getting their characters geared too quickly is boring, it may just be me, but that feels like an absolutely riddiculous argument. There are so many possible builds, if I were to only count 1 build per ascendancy that would already be 18 (being generous and not counting scion). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that in every angle you can approach that from, someone is failing in some aspect. Either the game that markets itself on the variability of its builds is failing to get you to play more builds, or you look at all the builds that you can make and go, "naaaah". Either way, I don't really see how crafting is the culprit there.

That last thing I would like to also relate to the low retention at the start of the league. Harvest craft is being blamed for making things to easy to achieve, but I highly doubt that most of the people who quit that early in got to near maxed out builds, rolled another character and near maxed out again, and then decided, "Fuck it, this is too easy." My money would be on the opposite, that people went to craft, didn't get much of anything, and then gave up because the system seemed utterly unrewarding with no loot explosions to compensate.

To people already engrossed in crafting before this league the system seems asinine and exploitable. To much more people it's just the first step to understanding how to actually make items. A lot of people are pretending that large swabs of players are walking around with full T1 rolled items with perfect stats and explodey chests and massive DPS foils when for most players they barely understand how to get more out of the system than maxing out their life and resists, and then maybe a few more stats. And I'm using maxing out a little loosely there because most people don't keep rolling until they have all tier 1 stats, they stop at "good enough to work".

In summary, I think that harvest crafting raises the floor of the game without raising the cieling, which could be a healthy way to lower the desparity a bit because it would allow for ballancing the encounters at the lower levels to be a bit harder in expectation that people now have the tools to deal with it.

Will we be able to take our hortistations/crafts to standard?

Yes, the crafting got a lot easier, but it is still not easy for some users who play about 2-3 hours a day like me (even I think I play a lot!). Please do not put your standard based on what comes from the people who play 10 hours a day. Please let more people enjoy deeper area of this excellent game, not leaving them just scratching the surface every season with their shitty gears limiting their creativity. I do believe the better gears, the more diverse builds, the more fun.

Well, I'm not sure playing next league if I have to repeat damn alter+regal+multicraft, seriously.

Harvest is the dumbest thing ever added to a video game period. So bad I went from building a PC just for PoE the last few seasons to moving on and not planning on ever playing again.

The crafting part is ok...The harvest mechanic is not...