This league was one of the most fun leagues in awhile. Luck aside I also engaged in crafting as well as other mechanisms to progress. If they are going to nerf it back to normal GGG levels then meh. It ruins fun for individuals in my area. I played just 2 builds for all of the league. One starter and then moved to a bosser. I was able to gear them out, even without my incredible luck I would have been able to improve them, to near end game on the first and full end game on the second. Things were accessible to buy and to craft on.
It added fun to the game. I was able to do stuff i dont normally do. I know keeping at where it was is kind of a stretch but nerfing it to nothng is classic GGG.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
This league was one of the most fun leagues in awhile. Luck aside I also engaged in crafting as well as other mechanisms to progress. If they are going to nerf it back to normal GGG levels then meh. It ruins fun for individuals in my area. I played just 2 builds for all of the league. One starter and then moved to a bosser. I was able to gear them out, even without my incredible luck I would have been able to improve them, to near end game on the first and full end game on the second. Things were accessible to buy and to craft on.
It added fun to the game. I was able to do stuff i dont normally do. I know keeping at where it was is kind of a stretch but nerfing it to nothng is classic GGG.
I mean, I thought they were just removing the flat annul's and making the more common recipes only actually generate recipes at a reduced rate. The rarer recipes will still be more likely to come from the rarer seeds.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited March 2021
im not worried, still more deterministic crafting in the game than at any time other than literal harvest league so should be fine, especially with new league mechanics coming and the new orbs from maven etc
it was extremely silly as was because it was so clearly better than all other kinds of crafting, so either they decide thats the right level of power and spread it out over mechanics to make rewards more balanced or they do that. im good with it
I’ll miss the annulls, but I’m glad I can still do the adds. I’m not making godly items anyway and just want to be able to slam some life/res onto something that was almost usable and go back to playing.
The annul adds are the reason to harvest for the most part. Adds are fun but you engage with harvest for the add remove 9 times out of 10. And hey if they add it in via other means that is fine. But they havent shown that. They just showed they are removing it. So typical GGG meh.
They could make them more rare or the harvests a bit more rare. RNG for me at awakener 9 full unlock was pretty fair. I didnt see harvests all that often at all. And there were plenty of other ways to make money and just buy others add removes. You could farm alvas double corrupts at the end. You could harbinger spam. You could einhar mass sell yellows for awhile. This league had variety to sell. Harvest just added that ability to make the items to progress your char that little bit more or if you engaged in it hard make a money a different way.
It is a flat negative to the game. In all my league funtimes this go around I made 99% of my 100-200ex+ of ex outside of harvest.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
The annul adds are the reason to harvest for the most part. Adds are fun but you engage with harvest for the add remove 9 times out of 10. And hey if they add it in via other means that is fine. But they havent shown that. They just showed they are removing it. So typical GGG meh.
They could make them more rare or the harvests a bit more rare. RNG for me at awakener 9 full unlock was pretty fair. I didnt see harvests all that often at all. And there were plenty of other ways to make money and just buy others add removes. You could farm alvas double corrupts at the end. You could harbinger spam. You could einhar mass sell yellows for awhile. This league had variety to sell. Harvest just added that ability to make the items to progress your char that little bit more or if you engaged in it hard make a money a different way.
It is a flat negative to the game. In all my league funtimes this go around I made 99% of my 100-200ex+ of ex outside of harvest.
I didn't think they were removing the annul /exalt combo crafts, just flat annul crafts, but I could be wrong. I also forgot they are removing the explosion chest ez craft.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
The annul adds are the reason to harvest for the most part. Adds are fun but you engage with harvest for the add remove 9 times out of 10. And hey if they add it in via other means that is fine. But they havent shown that. They just showed they are removing it. So typical GGG meh.
They could make them more rare or the harvests a bit more rare. RNG for me at awakener 9 full unlock was pretty fair. I didnt see harvests all that often at all. And there were plenty of other ways to make money and just buy others add removes. You could farm alvas double corrupts at the end. You could harbinger spam. You could einhar mass sell yellows for awhile. This league had variety to sell. Harvest just added that ability to make the items to progress your char that little bit more or if you engaged in it hard make a money a different way.
It is a flat negative to the game. In all my league funtimes this go around I made 99% of my 100-200ex+ of ex outside of harvest.
I didn't think they were removing the annul /exalt combo crafts, just flat annul crafts, but I could be wrong. I also forgot they are removing the explosion chest ez craft.
I was just coming back to edit out and state that I will wait and see. What I loved about the league was it made crafting accessible to those like me that don’t engage in the crazy complex layers that traditionally were present. But allowed for the save and purchase, corrections and general improvements to the availability of core build items. I know a lot of that is a result of other aspects so I guess we will see. I used harvest to correct a lot of my gear on my starter and minor pieces of stages of the bosser. It was just very nice to be able to self farm those corrections rather than engage in the sell environment.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
Reading more it looks like they think that crafting items towards perfect turns people off to the game? For me it’s the opposite. Dying constantly means I am making no progress in the game towards being stronger. Working on items gives me a sense of progress and a reason to keep playing.
Reading more it looks like they think that crafting items towards perfect turns people off to the game? For me it’s the opposite. Dying constantly means I am making no progress in the game towards being stronger. Working on items gives me a sense of progress and a reason to keep playing.
I think it was the issue of holding out for the perfect chest to buy/drop so you have an empty slot to put [physical] on it for explosion chest ultimately results in reduced play, because you aren't making incremental gameplay advancements, because you already know how to get exactly what you want, so why waste time on middle level stuff.
I think the issue was actually putting a limit on the number of crafts storeable. I never wanted to use the crafts, because I started suffering from serious Elixir syndrome.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
One thing in that nonsense gibberish sprung out at me:
This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."
This is psychotic. The list of mods you can get by slamming a goddamn Exalted Orb into an item is far too large and varied to ever make doing so worth it. I don't personally know anyone who ever has. I can count the amount of Exalts I've even seen on a single hand.
I know "Does GGG even play their own game???" is a meme at this point, but damn if there aren't some days I wonder...
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
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AbsalonLands of Always WinterRegistered Userregular
There could be a system where you spend chaos and exalts etc. to reduce the likelihood of some mods being added or annulled, rather than relying on the fossils and essences. An alternative crafting bench where currency works a different way, maybe.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
One thing in that nonsense gibberish sprung out at me:
This sentiment was summed up by a member of our design team who recently said "We don't want to take away the feeling of closing your eyes and Exalting an item, scared to see whether you ruined it or not."
This is psychotic. The list of mods you can get by slamming a goddamn Exalted Orb into an item is far too large and varied to ever make doing so worth it. I don't personally know anyone who ever has. I can count the amount of Exalts I've even seen on a single hand.
I know "Does GGG even play their own game???" is a meme at this point, but damn if there aren't some days I wonder...
lol a guild mate once set me the task of killing shaper using a random elder 2-handed mace he found, and i could only craft it using annuls and exalts slammed raw
25 ex later it had lost all its good mods but at least it had like 200 flat fire damage
I don't get why they feel like all of their crafting systems have to be devoted to creating high-end gear. There's clearly an unfilled niche for tinkering with gear during levelling and early maps and the crafting bench doesn't fill it. They should be reframing harvest as a rng based way to fiddle with a piece of gear instead of burning it to the ground because it was too easy to make mirror tier items.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
One wonders why they're banning people for making flask macros instead of realising "there's an obvious need among the playerbase to reduce unnecessary button pressing so we should make a keybind that uses all flasks."
Also, Harvest basically felt like back when I played d2 and tried just building perfect rolls on each item with an editor, then played the character for an hour and immediately stopped because it was boring as hell (a problem ARPGs of the era constantly had). It was obviously far better for gearing (which is 90% of why people map) than any other bit of content, which is very bad. Maximising your efficiency with Haewark Hamlet + Zana missions to try and find Harvest, while ignoring all the other content because it's redundant, isn't a healthy end-game.
It's equivalent to goldfarming in an MMO, where the most effective farm is found, and all other less efficient farms are abandoned, causing players to repeatedly grind a single bit of content until their brain literally crawls out of their nostrils to escape the tedium and they burn themselves out on the game.
See that is the thing Haewerk and zana is early game and was not, in my experience with the discord and people i talked with, the norm for mid and late league. It was my experience watching the discord that people spammed valdos mid to late as a primary. There were lots spamming alva, temporal and einhar mid to late as well.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
edited March 2021
Double corruptions and beastcrafting are still bringing things to the table that Harvest can't, but they're still leagues behind in terms of effective value. Any time you got a decent Aug/Annul/R+A, that was worth it either for your own items, or to sell on the Discord.
Valdo's is primarily for exp, but there's no reason to continue exp farms unless you hit/buy the "Harbinger's drop rarer shards" roll on the platinum watchstone, at which point it's a currency printer (but again, currency only has value if you can use it, and the most effective way to use it is... to buy harvest crafting from other players).
It is xp and shards. Im not saying harvest isnt strong. It did need a balance but nerfing into nothingness is stupid and bad for the game. Platinum watchstones for valdos was still over an ex when i stopped so people were still spamming it late late league. My main point is that there was variety and from what I saw people engaged in it. Throughout the whole league. It wasnt just harvest spam from what I saw in key places. Those prices plummeted so people moved on to other methods as the need for harvest lessened with the supply being so large.
That was the theme of this league. Supply heh. I loved being able to afford whatever 6L I wanted. To craft how i wanted. To do what I felt like. And I made money or progressed regardless of my choice. I would state with moderate certainty that the increased supply increased the engagement of people who would normally not in crafting by a significant margin.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
Isn't the best use of currency to buy things from other players anyways? Buying stuff is usually a ton cheaper than trying to craft it yourself, unless you have some way to narrow the huge pools of mods like with harvest.
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
I haven't looked at the subreddit but that line is pretty telling about who they design the crafting for, I can't imagine the portion of the audience who is slamming exalts is very large.
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
I mean, Exalts right now seem to have lost their purpose. Functionally in this league, they're there as currency (based on their rarity), and as the cost for certain crafting bench options so, but never used for a slam... so I can totally understand a game designer not wanting to make their own system redundant by just clearly outclassing it with another system.
Oh not buying them but on the ones I bought to get that extra suffix or the like. It is just whimsy yeah. I do agree that exalts benchcraft mats only really. But some of the most expensive items rely on it though too. Like minion wands. Or most crafted bows.
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
I mean, Exalts right now seem to have lost their purpose. Functionally in this league, they're there as currency (based on their rarity), and as the cost for certain crafting bench options so, but never used for a slam... so I can totally understand a game designer not wanting to make their own system redundant by just clearly outclassing it with another system.
I'd argue that exalts lost their purpose long ago. They're either rare enough to be a high-end currency or they're common enough to be a crafting item, but there hasn't really been room in the modern state of the game for them to be both
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
I mean, Exalts right now seem to have lost their purpose. Functionally in this league, they're there as currency (based on their rarity), and as the cost for certain crafting bench options so, but never used for a slam... so I can totally understand a game designer not wanting to make their own system redundant by just clearly outclassing it with another system.
I'd argue that exalts lost their purpose long ago. They're either rare enough to be a high-end currency or they're common enough to be a crafting item, but there hasn't really been room in the modern state of the game for them to be both
I totally agree! scheck's example from earlier is an obvious use case.
Like the fundamental issue here is that GGG uses randomness to extend the lifetime of its endgame, and Harvest has provided players with the ability to avoid that randomness, saving them time (and basically all people playing long-term games highly value changes in efficiency, even if they're not explicitly aware of it), so we have the disconnection. Players want what they're striving for as soon as possible, and GGG wants a certain amount of playtime in each season to both give people a sense of progress, and to keep them playing long enough to notice the new MTX coming out.
That argument holds less water when there is still rng in harvest crafting and with them speeding up the rotation of new leagues.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited March 2021
to me the core problem is that random item generation in poe doesnt give u good items
crafting is so important because the average dropped rares value is so low its simply not worth picking it up, and moreover the way that these items would be valuable is through specific values of purely better/worse stats rather than interesting combinations of effects or mods
one of the high level design goals for poe2 is to massively reduce drop spam but increase average value of dropped items thru various intelligent item generation methods (eg the specific rare type chests in recent leagues are prototypical examples of it). in that context the existing currency items actually producing better results as a consequence of not just rolling a totally unbiased table of everything is an obvious first step
but i broadly dont bother with the systems anyway, i just pick up random shit, buy build defining items and pretend trade doesnt exist. numerical optimisation on items is staggeringly boring to me - the behavioural elements of character design are mostly sequestered on specific uniques / classes / gems now so its not too bothersome if u are interested in what ur character does rather than the numbers
one of my pipe dream hopes has always been that they add every single mod in the game, including entirely unique or influence mods, into the basic rare drop pool but at a super low rate. so u always have the chance of finding some completely batshit 1 in a lifetime combination of 2 bizarre effects and look at it and go... "this is completely unique, but what the fuck do i do with it?". its funny to me that the casino of item generation has high end results chopped off: an ordinary rare literally cannot roll interesting mods. like, u know that before u even id it. nobody plays at a casino if they cant win big
specific rare types and uniques would still be extremely important because the distribution of crafting outcomes or ease of finding would be so dramatically different. i cant imagine it ever happening tho
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
That argument holds less water when there is still rng in harvest crafting and with them speeding up the rotation of new leagues.
You can mitigate the RNG significantly through careful ordering of your desired modifiers and crafting methods though. The jewel example above where I aug life on a viridian jewel for a 50% is an obvious example, where instead I could've been buying a 2 stat + life jewel, and then trying to roll for the third stat with a wider pool (crit or fire for example), but it would take significantly more tries and be harder to fix if it missed. Plenty of content creators have been showing off specific crafting orders to massively increase the odds in your favour to have items that essentially complete/trivialise the game through Harvest.
For perspective, I firmly believe the previous crafting system was bad because it was too random, whereas Harvest is bad because it isn't random enough and is the best crafting option at every stage of crafting (or would be if Trade didn't exist). If people can just almost directly buy their items, that breaks your item lottery game. If people can barely get better than 3-4 desired stats on their gear, that severely which builds are possible. You don't want either of those things.
(this also isn't just a problem for today's league, but also for adding new league mechanics where they have to compete for legitimate use and desire among the playerbase with Harvest)
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I wonder what would happen if ilvl cut off lower tier rolls as it went up, so that a ilvl 80 item or w/e couldn't roll mods with an ilvl lower than 40 or 50 or w/e, if that makes any sense?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
not sure what the high level thonking is yet
some of it presumably is going to be removal of boring mods (eg damage reflect) that used to exist as "spam" to differentiate items but less important now the base mod count is larger, some of it is going to be looking at reducing value ranges (i presume) to make variance less of a problem, some of it is going to be on the end of having more complex generation processes for the items as with the ritual rares, probably in combination (eg stuff like biasing rates of synergistic mods in certain situations), etc etc
I agree you can block. But there is still rng. The explode chest is an outlier. Life rolls are easy and would fit under the correction paradigm. Crafting the +1+1 amulets though... and other of the items that are of value have more randomness associated with them.
The sheer disconnect shown by that line about slamming exalts seems to be the main fuel for the fire on the subreddit, more than the specifics of the changes.
I mean, Exalts right now seem to have lost their purpose. Functionally in this league, they're there as currency (based on their rarity), and as the cost for certain crafting bench options so, but never used for a slam... so I can totally understand a game designer not wanting to make their own system redundant by just clearly outclassing it with another system.
I'd argue that exalts lost their purpose long ago. They're either rare enough to be a high-end currency or they're common enough to be a crafting item, but there hasn't really been room in the modern state of the game for them to be both
I totally agree! scheck's example from earlier is an obvious use case.
Like the fundamental issue here is that GGG uses randomness to extend the lifetime of its endgame, and Harvest has provided players with the ability to avoid that randomness, saving them time (and basically all people playing long-term games highly value changes in efficiency, even if they're not explicitly aware of it), so we have the disconnection. Players want what they're striving for as soon as possible, and GGG wants a certain amount of playtime in each season to both give people a sense of progress, and to keep them playing long enough to notice the new MTX coming out.
I'm not sure I'm going to get this from my mind to the page correctly but here goes: it seems they've inadvertently recreated the vanilla D3 AH scenario. They're so invested in balancing the crafting systems for people who invest huge amounts of time (or money) that people who don't invest those resources can't really clear the bar to even begin to meaningful engage with them and just get dumped to trade. It's compounded by their seeming decision that most crafting systems have to be able to create top tier gear because that's what the high-end players want to do. Which means that any system that's accessible will end up with a glut of top tier gear and then get nerfed.
Reading more it looks like they think that crafting items towards perfect turns people off to the game? For me it’s the opposite. Dying constantly means I am making no progress in the game towards being stronger. Working on items gives me a sense of progress and a reason to keep playing.
I would state that Harvest crafting allows you to consistently craft best in slot items, using a somewhat deterministic process. This is bad, because the game is all about incrementally getting better and better items, so if you can just buy/craft the theoretically perfect item for non-mirror prices, that breaks the upgrade cycle.
The problem is that this isn't something the majority of the player base is touching. Their problems are an inability to gear for content without resorting to trade, and "trade" suddenly including participation on a certain Discord server. Neither issue is properly addressed here, so of course everyone is mad.
To be fair, if GGG also included various nerfs to content so that people could survive endgame stuff with less than perfect gear, that would be one thing, but I don't trust them to do so. Rather, I expect the next league to require even more power than the last, as every single league before has done. Thus, the only way to handle endgame content will be, once again, to buy items from someone who knows what they're doing.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
edited March 2021
Thinking on it more, I think perhaps the solution is just a fundamental shake-up of trade and its role for the game.
Trade in games like these always makes things degenerate. You can't help it, the economic mindset is rough enough IRL, but worse in a video game you play for fun. Seasons at least prevent the worst hoarding psychologies and super-traders dominating MMO markets (every MMO after 4 years of someone playing it purely to make money ends up with some awful results whenever they introduce rare tradeable desirables). Being able to buy good items is essentially nothing more than a pity timer on RNG, and since the base PoE RNG system gives an awful wheat/chaff ratio, currently highly desirable. But if you change the wheat/chaff ratio, the necessity of trade diminishes.
I suspect the ideal paradigm is that the game works well in SSF, and trade is either adding gravy to certain items or slightly speeding things up for those with less time to invest. Currently, from what I've read at least, this is the first season where SSF has really been bearable in terms of time investment, directly as a result of Harvest.
That probably means making it much, much easier to get good basics rolls (tank/dps basic stats) on all your gear, but the 5th and 6th mods on all gear should be the weird ones and require much more variable rolling. That probably means that your alts/augs/regals can be modified somehow (almost certainly change rolling to be like fossils, where you are inputting multiple things onto a crafting bench along with the item) for specificity, while exalting 5th and 6th slot cannot be, but can only roll Cool Stuff. Get rid of annulment completely, so instead item rolling is buying/crafting a lot of good bases cheaply (so you can 'brick' items with unlucky exalts that don't hit what you want but the base stats aren't so irreplaceable that it takes hours of farming to have another go). Influenced stuff all lives in the 5/6th slot, so you can't focus hard on it first with alts, you've got to roll at the casino to get it.
The catch is that you cannot trade items with 5/6 mods. You can trade items that have good rolls as bases for exalt crafting, and crafting materials, maybe even sell crafts if you set up the UI for it, but you cannot sell people bespoke perfect items, which is where trading/gold farming turns the game into the worst sort of grind where you know exactly what item you want and just need the cash to buy it, a la D3 AH.
You reduce the chances from 1 in a million or worse to get good 6 mod items, to 1 in a 500 or so, but deny access to trading that spreads those chances across 50k players and essentially smoothes them out.
The issue is that GGG seems allergic to account-bound items, and you need some form of this in order to create a trade barrier. Making SSF the core game mode instead of trade seems like a very good first step.
An autoroller would be rather nice, while not breaking the core tradability of items. I'm thinking something like the crafting bench's socketing and linking capabilities, where you can specify a mod you want, and have it cost X alts/chaos to get it. One of the worst bits of PoE crafting is the roll/check loop; if you need something that only shows up 1% of the time, that's really annoying, not just expensive. Essences feel like they were trying to be this, but they're too rare to roll dozens of items if you need more than one mod, and they don't have a wide enough variety.
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Id be more fine with it if they let me horde more crafts.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
It added fun to the game. I was able to do stuff i dont normally do. I know keeping at where it was is kind of a stretch but nerfing it to nothng is classic GGG.
I mean, I thought they were just removing the flat annul's and making the more common recipes only actually generate recipes at a reduced rate. The rarer recipes will still be more likely to come from the rarer seeds.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
it was extremely silly as was because it was so clearly better than all other kinds of crafting, so either they decide thats the right level of power and spread it out over mechanics to make rewards more balanced or they do that. im good with it
They could make them more rare or the harvests a bit more rare. RNG for me at awakener 9 full unlock was pretty fair. I didnt see harvests all that often at all. And there were plenty of other ways to make money and just buy others add removes. You could farm alvas double corrupts at the end. You could harbinger spam. You could einhar mass sell yellows for awhile. This league had variety to sell. Harvest just added that ability to make the items to progress your char that little bit more or if you engaged in it hard make a money a different way.
It is a flat negative to the game. In all my league funtimes this go around I made 99% of my 100-200ex+ of ex outside of harvest.
I didn't think they were removing the annul /exalt combo crafts, just flat annul crafts, but I could be wrong. I also forgot they are removing the explosion chest ez craft.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I was just coming back to edit out and state that I will wait and see. What I loved about the league was it made crafting accessible to those like me that don’t engage in the crazy complex layers that traditionally were present. But allowed for the save and purchase, corrections and general improvements to the availability of core build items. I know a lot of that is a result of other aspects so I guess we will see. I used harvest to correct a lot of my gear on my starter and minor pieces of stages of the bosser. It was just very nice to be able to self farm those corrections rather than engage in the sell environment.
I think it was the issue of holding out for the perfect chest to buy/drop so you have an empty slot to put [physical] on it for explosion chest ultimately results in reduced play, because you aren't making incremental gameplay advancements, because you already know how to get exactly what you want, so why waste time on middle level stuff.
I think the issue was actually putting a limit on the number of crafts storeable. I never wanted to use the crafts, because I started suffering from serious Elixir syndrome.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
This is psychotic. The list of mods you can get by slamming a goddamn Exalted Orb into an item is far too large and varied to ever make doing so worth it. I don't personally know anyone who ever has. I can count the amount of Exalts I've even seen on a single hand.
I know "Does GGG even play their own game???" is a meme at this point, but damn if there aren't some days I wonder...
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
lol a guild mate once set me the task of killing shaper using a random elder 2-handed mace he found, and i could only craft it using annuls and exalts slammed raw
25 ex later it had lost all its good mods but at least it had like 200 flat fire damage
Also, Harvest basically felt like back when I played d2 and tried just building perfect rolls on each item with an editor, then played the character for an hour and immediately stopped because it was boring as hell (a problem ARPGs of the era constantly had). It was obviously far better for gearing (which is 90% of why people map) than any other bit of content, which is very bad. Maximising your efficiency with Haewark Hamlet + Zana missions to try and find Harvest, while ignoring all the other content because it's redundant, isn't a healthy end-game.
It's equivalent to goldfarming in an MMO, where the most effective farm is found, and all other less efficient farms are abandoned, causing players to repeatedly grind a single bit of content until their brain literally crawls out of their nostrils to escape the tedium and they burn themselves out on the game.
Valdo's is primarily for exp, but there's no reason to continue exp farms unless you hit/buy the "Harbinger's drop rarer shards" roll on the platinum watchstone, at which point it's a currency printer (but again, currency only has value if you can use it, and the most effective way to use it is... to buy harvest crafting from other players).
That was the theme of this league. Supply heh. I loved being able to afford whatever 6L I wanted. To craft how i wanted. To do what I felt like. And I made money or progressed regardless of my choice. I would state with moderate certainty that the increased supply increased the engagement of people who would normally not in crafting by a significant margin.
I haven't looked at the subreddit but that line is pretty telling about who they design the crafting for, I can't imagine the portion of the audience who is slamming exalts is very large.
I'd argue that exalts lost their purpose long ago. They're either rare enough to be a high-end currency or they're common enough to be a crafting item, but there hasn't really been room in the modern state of the game for them to be both
Like the fundamental issue here is that GGG uses randomness to extend the lifetime of its endgame, and Harvest has provided players with the ability to avoid that randomness, saving them time (and basically all people playing long-term games highly value changes in efficiency, even if they're not explicitly aware of it), so we have the disconnection. Players want what they're striving for as soon as possible, and GGG wants a certain amount of playtime in each season to both give people a sense of progress, and to keep them playing long enough to notice the new MTX coming out.
crafting is so important because the average dropped rares value is so low its simply not worth picking it up, and moreover the way that these items would be valuable is through specific values of purely better/worse stats rather than interesting combinations of effects or mods
one of the high level design goals for poe2 is to massively reduce drop spam but increase average value of dropped items thru various intelligent item generation methods (eg the specific rare type chests in recent leagues are prototypical examples of it). in that context the existing currency items actually producing better results as a consequence of not just rolling a totally unbiased table of everything is an obvious first step
but i broadly dont bother with the systems anyway, i just pick up random shit, buy build defining items and pretend trade doesnt exist. numerical optimisation on items is staggeringly boring to me - the behavioural elements of character design are mostly sequestered on specific uniques / classes / gems now so its not too bothersome if u are interested in what ur character does rather than the numbers
one of my pipe dream hopes has always been that they add every single mod in the game, including entirely unique or influence mods, into the basic rare drop pool but at a super low rate. so u always have the chance of finding some completely batshit 1 in a lifetime combination of 2 bizarre effects and look at it and go... "this is completely unique, but what the fuck do i do with it?". its funny to me that the casino of item generation has high end results chopped off: an ordinary rare literally cannot roll interesting mods. like, u know that before u even id it. nobody plays at a casino if they cant win big
specific rare types and uniques would still be extremely important because the distribution of crafting outcomes or ease of finding would be so dramatically different. i cant imagine it ever happening tho
For perspective, I firmly believe the previous crafting system was bad because it was too random, whereas Harvest is bad because it isn't random enough and is the best crafting option at every stage of crafting (or would be if Trade didn't exist). If people can just almost directly buy their items, that breaks your item lottery game. If people can barely get better than 3-4 desired stats on their gear, that severely which builds are possible. You don't want either of those things.
(this also isn't just a problem for today's league, but also for adding new league mechanics where they have to compete for legitimate use and desire among the playerbase with Harvest)
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
some of it presumably is going to be removal of boring mods (eg damage reflect) that used to exist as "spam" to differentiate items but less important now the base mod count is larger, some of it is going to be looking at reducing value ranges (i presume) to make variance less of a problem, some of it is going to be on the end of having more complex generation processes for the items as with the ritual rares, probably in combination (eg stuff like biasing rates of synergistic mods in certain situations), etc etc
but it is a mystery (tm)
I'm not sure I'm going to get this from my mind to the page correctly but here goes: it seems they've inadvertently recreated the vanilla D3 AH scenario. They're so invested in balancing the crafting systems for people who invest huge amounts of time (or money) that people who don't invest those resources can't really clear the bar to even begin to meaningful engage with them and just get dumped to trade. It's compounded by their seeming decision that most crafting systems have to be able to create top tier gear because that's what the high-end players want to do. Which means that any system that's accessible will end up with a glut of top tier gear and then get nerfed.
I would state that Harvest crafting allows you to consistently craft best in slot items, using a somewhat deterministic process. This is bad, because the game is all about incrementally getting better and better items, so if you can just buy/craft the theoretically perfect item for non-mirror prices, that breaks the upgrade cycle.
The problem is that this isn't something the majority of the player base is touching. Their problems are an inability to gear for content without resorting to trade, and "trade" suddenly including participation on a certain Discord server. Neither issue is properly addressed here, so of course everyone is mad.
To be fair, if GGG also included various nerfs to content so that people could survive endgame stuff with less than perfect gear, that would be one thing, but I don't trust them to do so. Rather, I expect the next league to require even more power than the last, as every single league before has done. Thus, the only way to handle endgame content will be, once again, to buy items from someone who knows what they're doing.
Trade in games like these always makes things degenerate. You can't help it, the economic mindset is rough enough IRL, but worse in a video game you play for fun. Seasons at least prevent the worst hoarding psychologies and super-traders dominating MMO markets (every MMO after 4 years of someone playing it purely to make money ends up with some awful results whenever they introduce rare tradeable desirables). Being able to buy good items is essentially nothing more than a pity timer on RNG, and since the base PoE RNG system gives an awful wheat/chaff ratio, currently highly desirable. But if you change the wheat/chaff ratio, the necessity of trade diminishes.
I suspect the ideal paradigm is that the game works well in SSF, and trade is either adding gravy to certain items or slightly speeding things up for those with less time to invest. Currently, from what I've read at least, this is the first season where SSF has really been bearable in terms of time investment, directly as a result of Harvest.
That probably means making it much, much easier to get good basics rolls (tank/dps basic stats) on all your gear, but the 5th and 6th mods on all gear should be the weird ones and require much more variable rolling. That probably means that your alts/augs/regals can be modified somehow (almost certainly change rolling to be like fossils, where you are inputting multiple things onto a crafting bench along with the item) for specificity, while exalting 5th and 6th slot cannot be, but can only roll Cool Stuff. Get rid of annulment completely, so instead item rolling is buying/crafting a lot of good bases cheaply (so you can 'brick' items with unlucky exalts that don't hit what you want but the base stats aren't so irreplaceable that it takes hours of farming to have another go). Influenced stuff all lives in the 5/6th slot, so you can't focus hard on it first with alts, you've got to roll at the casino to get it.
The catch is that you cannot trade items with 5/6 mods. You can trade items that have good rolls as bases for exalt crafting, and crafting materials, maybe even sell crafts if you set up the UI for it, but you cannot sell people bespoke perfect items, which is where trading/gold farming turns the game into the worst sort of grind where you know exactly what item you want and just need the cash to buy it, a la D3 AH.
You reduce the chances from 1 in a million or worse to get good 6 mod items, to 1 in a 500 or so, but deny access to trading that spreads those chances across 50k players and essentially smoothes them out.
An autoroller would be rather nice, while not breaking the core tradability of items. I'm thinking something like the crafting bench's socketing and linking capabilities, where you can specify a mod you want, and have it cost X alts/chaos to get it. One of the worst bits of PoE crafting is the roll/check loop; if you need something that only shows up 1% of the time, that's really annoying, not just expensive. Essences feel like they were trying to be this, but they're too rare to roll dozens of items if you need more than one mod, and they don't have a wide enough variety.