Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting

Ty for ruin the game, now the game its 200% harder again for new and intermedium players...
or maybe u guys want only empyrians and other youtubers doing the 100% endgame

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Rene_2706 wrote:

Last Epoch getting so much attention lately.

coincidence?

Certainly not. If you search the Manifesto Subforum for "Epoch" you get 6 pages full of hits. I bought the early access myself in reaction to the Harvest changes. The guys at Eleventh Hour Games must be very grateful for the Harvest changes, that's for sure.

To be fair, I have to note, that although I like the game, I am not really hooked yet. There is something special about the pace of PoE and the skill effect, especially with MTX, that I just miss. Then again, it is still in beta and shows a huge amount of promise.

Competition is always good. It remains to be seen how the potential rise of Last Epoch will reflect on PoE. If GGG is honestly about conserving RNG as THE major philosophy of the game, they shouldn't be concerned about Last Epoch, because that game follows a diametrically different approach.

What I really, really like about Last Epoch is the boss fights. Bosses generally have more HP and the game adapts elements from modern MMORPGS and overall it is much more about dodging and skill than raw dps. Boss fights in general are just much more fun.

At the end of the day, however, GGG is an enterprise and I personally hope, they reconsider - economically and/or philosophically - whether it is a good approach, to force that extreme RNG approach on a playerbase, whose vast majority is actually annoyed by it and craves for a little determinism.

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Spurnshadow wrote:

This is super slow going and incredibly boring. As such, I just don't want to play. Progress in making my gear better is bad enough as it is. Taking this crafting away (and we all know with the proposed changes it'll be useless) is giving me no incentive to play beyond my usual skill cap. Right now, I'm only pulling about 12M dps and I've yet to kill Maven (I know, right?). I can't get past the final stage. I haven't been able to complete the Breach invitation and I die half the time on the elder / shaper guardian invitations. I NEED a build with like 30M+ dps if you guys put out content like this.

That's actually the most disturbing part. It should be noted, that there are some huge inconsistencies in GGGs argument when you consider the introduction of the Maven Orb and the Awakener's Orb before hat. The foundation of both these items rests on stacking influenced modifiers. Of course this comes with the potential for insane items, but the whole endgame content ist designed on that potential.

At the beginning of the league, once I get past let's say level 90 I usually rely on boss carry services for Sirus. If you are still lacking the dps to kill him off quickly, the risk is just too high. Or as someone else asked rethorically in another thread: "You go to Sirus with xp?!".

As someone to do so, it is astonishing to see, how some people are able to pretty much instant kill Sirus on the 4th day of the league. This is a perfect example of the huge gap between the average player and the top 1%.

Once my build actually took off, I started offering boss carry myself this league. It is stunning how many requests you get. And this is with Harvest, which is rumored to make overpowered gear easily accessible to everyone. Well if after two month into the league so many people can't beat Sirus, let alone the new Maven content, this rises some doubts.

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Shafirion wrote:

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Rene_2706 wrote:

Last Epoch getting so much attention lately.

coincidence?

Certainly not. If you search the Manifesto Subforum for "Epoch" you get 6 pages full of hits. I bought the early access myself in reaction to the Harvest changes. The guys at Eleventh Hour Games must be very grateful for the Harvest changes, that's for sure.

To be fair, I have to note, that although I like the game, I am not really hooked yet. There is something special about the pace of PoE and the skill effect, especially with MTX, that I just miss. Then again, it is still in beta and shows a huge amount of promise.

Competition is always good. It remains to be seen how the potential rise of Last Epoch will reflect on PoE. If GGG is honestly about conserving RNG as THE major philosophy of the game, they shouldn't be concerned about Last Epoch, because that game follows a diametrically different approach.

What I really, really like about Last Epoch is the boss fights. Bosses generally have more HP and the game adapts elements from modern MMORPGS and overall it is much more about dodging and skill than raw dps. Boss fights in general are just much more fun.

At the end of the day, however, GGG is an enterprise and I personally hope, they reconsider - economically and/or philosophically - whether it is a good approach, to force that extreme RNG approach on a playerbase, whose vast majority is actually annoyed by it and craves for a little determinism.

100% agree on all the above. I said to myself that due to the lack of response from GGG I will not spend any more money on POE next league but will buy Last Epoch and I did and it is great.

It wont replace POE right now but maybe it will in the future if GGG continue on this journey of silence when regular people want an answer.

I wonder would this silence also exist if all the top 1% and Youtubers and Twitch streamers would be as unhappy as many of the normal folks.

We wont know as all the Twitch and Youtubers are afraid to get banned for arbitrary reasons like PathofMath did. You just have to fake some discord discussions and woala. A ban is here.

So I used to play a lot of MMORPGS back in the day but with being a dad etc, simply don't have time for that.
Played some PoE back in Betrayal and picked up the game again with Heist. Bought a supporter pack for the first time, thinking this would be a good game to invest in, long term as the perfect game I can sink a lot of hours in when my life allows it and just play casually when it doesn't.
Had fun with both Heist and Ritual, managing to get 36 challenges done in both. Harvest adding some extra oomph to my builds definitely made Ritual that much more exciting as a somewhat casual player (say 5-15 hrs/week).

That said, these proposed harvest changes/nerfs have me seriously questioning the decision making process behind this game with regards to players like me. It seems like the devs want to cater to players who can play 30+ hours/week and beat rng by sheer volume while everyone else, well, tough shit we don't care about you.

So now I find myself looking at Last Epoch and Grim Dawn while also wondering if it's maybe worth waiting for D4. If you had asked me about this 2 months ago, I would have told you that I wasn't going to give a single cent to Activision Blizzard anymore...

Interesting that this hread is still going!! Can we make it to the 500 pages? :D

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Overmind29 wrote:

Interesting that this hread is still going!! Can we make it to the 500 pages? :D

This thread would be over 500 pages if comments would not be getting deleted.

I purchased Last Epoch a couple of days ago. Never heard of it before the Harvest nerfs were announced and wouldn't have bought it had PoE not just made it clear they expect everyone to close their eyes and Exalt spam to craft. Joined PoE in January 2013 and I'm sad to see them choose the 1% over the rest of their player base.

The main draw for the current implementation of Harvest in 3.13 was that it did engage me with the crafting system for the first time since I started back when...
A lot of systems are pretty convoluted in PoE anyway and without Wiki, Youtube etc., I would never figure them out myself.

It was a gateway to crafting and opened up new possibilities. Instead of just following forums build guides and gear recommendations, I could figure out my own improvements and forge my own (side)path.
Like I said, it kept me busy and playing.

I realy hopped that GGG would see reason and revise the changes scheduled for Harvest, buy I guess not, which is simply mind buggling.

So, we have Harvest, deterministic crafting but has layers of RNG with no real issue other than mid range players being able to craft better items, not mirror tier in any case.

But let's see what makes Harvest OP, the fact that you can use TFT to buy any craft you want and craft any gear you want - but that in it self does not make Harvest OP, because crafts are fairly expensive and it can take 100ex+ to craft a mirror tier item. Most of the players don't have that much currency, especially the start of the league.

But let's see who has that kind of currency, and how they make it:

6 WAY BEAST FARM - yep, this the thing where just 1 player has 5 virtual machines on his computer running POE + their own account and farms maps with Einhar (main account kills beasts, rest of the account are AFK at the start of the map), and guess what, instead of getting 4-5 beasts per map, he gets 25-30 beasts/map - easily fixable by requiring all players to be in a certain range of the beast or better yet, only the player that opened the map receives the beast reward, but nop, this is perfectly fine in GGG's opinion.

6 WAY THE FEARED - probably the reason Bottled Faith is like 1.5ex this league, because the same guys that farm beasts with 6 accounts, farm The Feared invitation with 6 accounts, and what do you know, they get 6 times the reward, so, instead of 1 Bottled Faith they get 6, instead of 1 Maven invitation, well.. 6 again. Buy hey, GGG is fine with this, not OP by any means.

ITEM DUPPING - 1 crafted magic item with T1 rolls that gets duplicated over and over again with beasts, OP as hell but again, GGG thiks this is ok, cause it's in the game for a lot of time.

So, this are the guys that are able to craft tons of mirror tier items because they have the currency to buy all the crafts they need,and.. what can I say, thumbs up to them for having the time to take advantage of these broken mechanics.

Harvest is OP because of these broken mechanics, it's a consequence rather than an issue. The root cause of the issue is 6 way farming, item dupping and other mechanics that players take advantage of to make tons of currency and then Harvest craft to their heart desire.