Path of Exile - Harvest League Preview

An Advanced Harvest Encounter

After that “illuminating” diversion we went back to talking about new league mechanics. Chris went on to discuss how “irrigation” works and discussed a typical complex encounter.

Take for example, a Tier 2 Primal monster we are growing requires irrigation from a harvest of Wild seeds, connected via pipes to the disperser. Chris discussed how you will have plants of tier one that are ready to harvest some purple life force from. We watched a video showing a player building some poles that can be connected to. You will just click on the top of the poles to hook up pipes between them.

Int the example these Tier 2 plants have “Primal Adjacency” and “Wild Irrigation” requirements. This cause for a slightly more complex layout. For example, you will have tier two plants that you want to irrigate and have to plan that they are surrounded by the tier ones that it needs for adjacency.

The fight itself is more challenging, as the monsters have more abilities and properties. And one of the cool things about this fight is due to having the requirement of adjacent plants it means the boss has some minions to go with it. This helps pace out the boss fight to have other monsters involved.

The development team’s goal with these Sacred Grove fights was that you can completely customize not only what monsters you fight, but also exactly what crafting rewards they offer. Up to 48 plants can be Harvested at once, for some totally crazy fights for players who can handle them.

It is important to note that the player is purposefully choosing every seed that they plant and fight endlessly. There's never an excuse of “I didn't want to fight that monster”, because… you chose to plant the seed! Therefore you can kind of fully customize the complexity and danger of all the encounters you have in the Sacred Grove.

The following video shows such a complex scenario and some of the beautiful effects:

Being A Resourceful Gardener

In terms of condensers, storage tanks and poles I asked where did these poles, etc. come from? Will they be drops or something else? Chris exclaimed that the question was a great question because that is one of the decisions they have pushed to the end of lead development to decide on. Currently, the plan is you buy them from an NPC, cheap, in exchange for life force. The team has not worked out whether they get more expensive if you have more or whether they get more expensive as you level up, etc.

At the end of the day, the intention is that these resources are not scarce. You are going to be able to get better and better infrastructure like getting a better condenser that holds more or a better irrigator that is going to have a longer range, etc. And some of these will probably be drops and can be traded.

Beyond that the development team does not really know the answer but they still have several weeks to release.

The Connection Between League Rewards and the Harvest Concept

Chris talked about “league rewards”. As most players know, in Path of Exile, you find items.Some of these items are rare ones, those are the yellow ones that have random properties on them. You identify them and decide if they are good for your character, if they are not, you can sell them to the vendor, maybe trade them with other players.

There is a rate that these are given out. Most players get a few in each area and that is okay. And when people play League content, they expect to get more rares than average. Why? Because the league content requires thinking and it is harder than normal, and you must engage with it. And it just feels that if you are only getting an average amount of return for it, then it is not worth it. At that point you may as well just be playing the base game.

Chris stated that the team is happy to provide good rewards via league content. GGG is always trying to avoid the worst case scenario. The scenario where when they release a new league, players do not grasp the mechanics right away, and it is understandably hard and confusing. Then eventually they play the league more efficiently, they get worse return than they did from the previous league and make complaints that it is not rewarding. They have found that gently increasing the amount of rewards players get for each league helps mitigate that. If they do not gently give more rewards each League, then people say it's unrewarding even though the actual league is just fine. And so, this has gotten to a situation now where the league rewards they are giving out are becoming silly in terms of scale.

An example Chris sited was him playing Delirium, the current league, and at one point he found 11 unique items. The realization hit that only one was a drop from a regular monster and the other 10 had come from Delirium encounters.

So, in Harvest what the team is doing is scaling that way back. They still want it to be rewarding, of course, but they wanted to do it in a way where it does not become crazy. And so, they have taken that equity of what they are giving the players and moving it into the crafting system instead.

Harvest is providing us with a crafting system where the goal is to produce good stuff, so players will still find all the power they are used to from the leagues. At the same time, the actual drops from the regular game and drops from the league monsters are more normalized. The team tried to reset expectations by pushing things onto the crafting system.

In terms of what the team wanted to achieve from crafting is along the lines of the following. A player wants to make some new boots which has run speed, fire resistance, and life stats. So, the player is going to find the seeds that do that. The player gets those seeds, plants them and they know they are going to spawn this fight. They do the fight, they craft, and they end up with something close to the boots they wanted. This is good, that sequence of events serves the purpose. Now to make some gloves. The player wants mana and attack speed on this one so they get that done. And this continues until the player needs to make new boots again, because their current ones are getting old.

As far as end game goes, the team was careful. They can't give players the best items in the entire game in every area. But they could certainly let them make meaningful improvements to their gear, or at least have a good chance for those.

For the development team this was a big gamble for them. Because normally, retention is proportional to how hard it is to get the powerful items. If you give them all they want, then there is less reason to play the game.

Nevertheless, the team will experiment and treat this league like a big three-month thing where at the end of it, they will decide as to where they want to go with “easy crafting”. It may become a failed experiment and players get tired of it. It may be that it is really good information to know, especially with Path of Exile 2 on the horizon. Chris stated the team wants to understand what happens with powerful crafting and what are the consequences of it? How does it ruin the game and when does it ruin the game? In the end, it's an experiment.

Chris believes there is a philosophy with this, which should be quite interesting. And he’s optimistic because it's actually going forward in a way that he likes, as opposed to gradually causing inflation in the background.

Crafting the Details

Most Path of Exile challenge leagues end up flooding the player with way too many items as they play through the game, as part of the reward system. The team is trying something different with Harvest.

While monsters killed in the Sacred Grove do drop appropriate rewards for their difficulty, the core reward system comes in the form of immensely powerful crafting options that you can spend unprocessed life force on.

Different types of seeds grant different crafting options that are added to the list available after combat. So, you will want to track down rarer and more valuable seeds to get some incredibly special choices.

Each higher tier of seed generally has more powerful associated crafting options. In addition to you needing to have specific plants involved in the harvest, the crafts also have life force requirements. This encourages you to have as many other monsters involved in the combat as possible, so there is enough life force to do all the crafting you need.

The team’s philosophy here is that players will get to make very valuable items repeatedly throughout this league. These would rival or exceed the quality of what they'd find by processing the larger quantity of random rare items that were thrown at them in previous leagues.

Each of the seeds you find has a specific recipe on it, which you can see here. On the left-hand side, there is a number showing how many uses of that recipe you have. It is one use per seed that you have planted of that type, and the life force cost.

Take the top choice, for example, where you could use it three times. It takes four life force per use, but you only have 10 life force on this example. So, you could not use it three times even if you wanted to. And the solution is planting more monsters to get more life force out of them. This is what creates the pressure where users are heavily motivated to have large dangerous fights. Ideally, ones that are so dangerous, they cannot complete them. Then they complain and post on Twitch, and people laugh at them for being greedy, which is kind of the cycle that people enjoy watching.

The team wanted to create a situation where players must choose between risk and reward. And that means creating an incentive for them to tread that “too difficult place” for themselves. Remember that life force is also used for growing your garden. If there is any leftover this creates a lot of tension over usage of this resource.

So how do the level numbers on here, come into play? In the above example that player has a level 55 and level 45 choice. These are the maximum levels of that item you can craft. This allows for having good crafting results for very low-level items.

Chris sited the following example. When you are playing through the game, normally with currency items, like those you pick up and apply to your gear, the best choice is to save up for the end game. Today, if there is one that duplicates an item, e.g. Mirror of Calandra, the most valuable in the game, the correct choice was to save that then use it on the best item you can possibly find cheaply getting the most value. But if there was one that only works on items up to level 20, then you might want to use that now because you are about to leave level 20. Duplicating such an item right now gives you two of the best swords, for example, or two of the best rings which is useful. Whereas when in the end game, usually getting level 20 items does not matter. That becomes pocket change. And so, letting you have powerful crafting results that are level limited is a much better option than giving you weak crafting results that are not level limited.

Additionally, the levels will be roughly where you are level wise so that ideally it will not actually constrain you. It just means you can do some abusive stuff where you come back in the end game and try to use your low-level recipes to do some crazy things with your high-level items.

Endgame Bosses

High-level players will find that it is possible for Tier 3 Harvest monsters to drop seeds for special boss encounters. When grown and harvested, these seeds yield formidable fights with valuable rewards.

These bosses are difficult to get the seeds for, as they are above tier three, and are difficult to grow. There are also a lot of requirements that make them difficult to kill. Chris added, that honestly, they were just added and do not have their crafting results figured out just yet, but he trusts his team completely!

There are three such encounters, one for each of the types of Harvest seed: Primal, Wild and Vivid. There are also rumours of a fourth, much harder and rarer boss that you may be able to grow.

The intention here is a place that players do not encounter these bosses very often. It becomes something you work towards. And hopefully have a rather good time when you find one.

Comparing Harvest with Prior Leagues

There were three things the development team were going for. First, an interesting garden behavior, which is fun for the people who do not like gardening. They set their sights on a system that people will be able to engage with it even if it is not something they normally enjoy. Second, the team wanted fights to be fully customizable, and lastly have the crafting be a big experiment, which is hopefully quite powerful.

Harvest introduces farm planning as a new gameplay element which may appeal to players who like city building games. But it is also designed to be easy and low maintenance for players who don't want to engage with it.

GGG often does pure-combat leagues like Breach (or for example their last league, Delirium). The team has found that it is good to space these out with more-involved creative leagues that encourage behaviour other than just pure clear speed.

Harvest encounters have the "build your own fight" aspect of the Metamorph league, but for an entire group of monsters rather than just one. There's complete control over exactly which monsters you choose to fight and what crafting rewards you are going to be rewarded with.

Seeds, which are the foundation for the “fight” and “crafting” aspects, are fully tradeable.

Some of the monsters were made by the Path of Exile 2 team internally, so these have a significantly higher quality and detail level than most assets in Path of Exile 1.

The crafting system is the most advanced one the team has added to a league before and is going to create quite a different gameplay experience than what players normally find. There is a lot less emphasis on being flooded with random items, and more on controlling exactly what you are trying to obtain.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

We raised the question of how big a Sacred Grove could expand in any direction. Chris guessed that a garden could expand out like six or eight screens past what we saw in the videos, making it quite big. The intention was to make it big so there's room to make mistakes and subtly so that you do not need to do it for every area. So, what you could end up doing is only go to your garden every 10 maps, with a giant pile of seeds. You plant all of them filling up the whole garden all at the same time. So, the bigger it is, the more forgiving it is for you not wanting to go and play with your garden constantly. This is important because if you are playing with your friends and you're not really thinking about the garden, you can pick up the seeds and attend to them later. Like when you go to bed, you might do some gardening very quickly before you get off your computer. It is that kind of thing the team was trying to make, so that it's not mandatory to immediately go to the portal and plant your seeds for fear of missing out on stuff.

So how do we get to this Sacred Grove area on a whim? Through a portal or through our hideout or what? Chris stated, through a portal. A player finds a seed cache and Oshabi steps through a portal and says, “Do you want to come plant some stuff”? The player can either say no, I am taking these seeds, and I am going to keep playing or the player can go through the portal and do the gardening thing.

Additionally, access will also be available through your hideout if you want to go back there. Chris mentioned that it's worth noting that because time only passes when you find a seed cache in the real world, i.e. the main game. Consequently, if you go through your portal via your hideout, nothing will have changed compared to what it was last time.

Doryani's Prototype Unique Armour

Harvest introduces 12 new unique items, some of which are rewards from the league. The purpose of unique items is to enable unusual play styles that would otherwise not be possible.

Doryani's Prototype starts by saying you “deal no non-lightning damage”. That does not mean it converts your damage to lightning, it means you only do lightning damage and the rest of it is thrown away. That's fine as a restriction but what are the benefits? Nearby enemies inherit your lightning resistance, so that means if you have bad lightning resistance, the nearby enemies will take a lot of extra lightning damage. But then how do you stay alive if you have bad lightning resistance? The answer is armor which makes your armor values, like the physical mitigation from plate armor, affect your lightning as well as physical damage.

So now it is a big puzzle. How do you, as a lightning character who is a spellcaster specced to do pure lightning damage, get big plate armor, e.g. Murata armor, to work? If you can solve that mystery you get a character that is defensive as well as very offensive.

Chris says, and the best part about it, which he really likes is if players do not solve it, then this item sits there in the game just waiting. Waiting for the day where there is enough other stuff that is suddenly good, because it's waiting to be solved later as well, which is something he enjoys.

Storm Secret Unique Ring

This new unique is a bit more direct. Storm Secret pairs well with Herald of Thunder, a common skill which people use as a utility skill and a passive boost to lightning damage - it also creates a lightning bolt when enemies die. Now it triggers all the time when you shock enemies and just a lot more frequent.

So, the net effect is Storm Secret allows you to use Herald of Thunder as a primary source of damage which makes it more versatile. This is because Storm Secret causes Herald of Thunder to trigger its lightning bolts when an enemy is shocked instead of only when it is slain.

There are many potential uses for Storm Secret but it may be of particular interest to people who enjoy the historically popular 'Herald Bomber' build.

One application usage with Herald of Thunder is to create frequent lightning bolts from the sky as a powerful source of damage. The character could then use Orb of Storms to shock and kill enemies which activates Herald of Thunder's lightning bolts. Herald of Thunder has also been used alongside Herald of Ice to make enemies shatter.

Slam Skills

The development team has put a significant focus on rebalancing two-handed melee weapons, improving the base item types themselves, buffing various related skills and adding better passive skill tree support.

They've recategorized several melee skills into 'Slams' to enable further support for this playstyle. Slam Skills have also received individual reworks to make them more compelling and competitive.

Chris talked about one-handed versus two-handed weapons. Saying people gravitate to using one-handed weapons because the damage difference was not that much. One-handed weapons are faster and faster is fun and you can wear a shield, or you can use your wielding for example. There is a lot of reasons to use one-handed weapons.

The team wanted to give reasons to use two-handed weapons as well. In addition to making two-handed weapons do more damage the team has also pulled out the concept of slam skills being a specific category. Basically, they are giving you more incentive reasons to use two-handed weapons and slam skills are basically cases where you hit the ground with a big stick.

The Fist of War Support Gem

This is the Fist Of War support gem. It is a support gem that causes an ancestor to appear above your head and to use, in unison with you, whatever slam skill you have slotted every few seconds on a cooldown. It essentially supercharges your slam attack.

It's relevant for the two-hand versus one-hand argument. If you're using this gem with a one-handed weapon, the ancestor is going to be using a very small attack every few seconds versus doing a big attack every few seconds along side your slam. If you can get into unison with him, the slower the better because it is making better use of the time. Both you and him will be doing more damage.

Following is a video of the Fist Of War in action:

Tectonic Slam

This classic Path of Exile skill has been reworked and received impressive new visual effects.

Historically, it was difficult to reliably maintain the Endurance Charges that enhance this skill, making it difficult to use as a primary source of damage. It still requires you to invest in endurance charges but now only removes a charge every three uses, making the charges easier to maintain.

Tectonic Slam's area of effect now increases per endurance charge, resulting in a wider spread of damage.

These changes make it a much more effective melee skill and encourages investment into Area of Effect and Endurance Charge generation.

Warcry Skills

The team added four new Warcry Skills and reworked three existing ones.

Warcry Skills have existed in Path of Exile since 2015 and fell out of favour in recent times. They basically are where your character does a big shout and taunts the monsters and has some positive effects for you and negative effects for them This category of skills has been revamped by giving them significantly more power, more passive tree support, improved functionality, and improved visuals.

All Warcry Skills cast a wave that taunts nearby enemies and has various defensive and offensive effects on enemies or allies.

Several Warcry Skills now also 'exert' your attacks, making them more powerful for a limited time. This is great for slower attacks, like Slams and Two-Handed Weapons.

In the past, Warcry Skills would scale based on the number of nearby enemies without concern for the power of that enemy. This created a poor experience when fighting against singular bosses. It now uses a 'monster power' system which scales based on the surrounding enemies’ power and appropriately increases the Warcry's effectiveness when near more difficult monsters.

Seismic Cry

Seismic Cry is a new Warcry Skill. Its shockwave pushes enemies back a short distance and taunts them to attack the user. It grants a buff that makes it easier to stun enemies and causes your next few Slam attacks to be exerted. These exerted attacks deal more damage and area of effect than normal attacks. These exerted attacks also become progressively more powerful with each attack.

In the following video you can see it being used alongside the reworked Tectonic Slam, creating an even larger spread of damage.

Rallying Cry

Rallying Cry is one of the reworked Warcry Skills. It was previously used to increase mana regeneration for you and your allies as well as your damage against enemies. It will now no longer regenerate mana but now grants a percentage of your weapon damage to each of your allies based on the power of nearby enemies.

It also causes your next few attacks to become exerted, granting a bonus to your damage based on the number of your nearby allies.

This also means because two-handed weapons obviously have more damage, than these numbers will be even bigger, giving players another incentive to use two-handed weapons.

In the video we saw you can see Rallying Cry alongside the Herald of Purity skill which summons sentinels when you kill an enemy. These sentinels can take advantage of the benefits of your Warcry and wield empowered attacks!

Brand Skills

Brands are placed on the ground and then attach to the nearest enemy, making them the target of the Brand's damage. When the enemy dies, the Brand drops to the ground.

The team added three new Brand skills, one new Brand support and revamped existing Brands. They also improved the functionality of this type of skill and are altering the role they play within the game.

In the process of making these changes, the most popular (abusive) Brand build has been rebalanced to be substantially weaker and there are many new powerful options.

Arcanist Brand

After you place Arcanist Brand on the ground, it will attach to an enemy and trigger any spells linked to this skill in a sequence. It works in a similar fashion to a few popular existing mechanisms like Poet's Pen and other trigger skills.

This one is basically a “build your own brand” thing. You basically put any other skill gems wherever you want, and it will use these spells

This opens a huge range of options for player's builds, letting you use almost any spell as if it was a Brand. In the following video, you can see Arcanist Brand used alongside Magma Orb, Shock Nova and Purifying Flame

Penance Brand

After placing Penance Brand on the ground, it will attach to a nearby enemy and become active. Its energy builds up and spreads to an additional nearby enemy each time it activates, quickly dividing and spreading between enemies. When the brand is removed through recall or from an enemy dying, the energy on each enemy is rapidly released in an explosion.

Placing multiple Penance Brands can build up additional energy on the enemies they spread to.

The following video shows Penance Brand in action:

Passive Skill Tree Revamp

The Passive Skill Tree is at the core of all character builds in Path of Exile. While the last league, Delirium, introduced Cluster Jewels which allowed you to expand your passive tree, the core tree has not received any significant changes for some time.

The team added many new keystone passives and notable passives to the passive tree. They added passive tree support for mechanics that have been introduced recently but do not currently have any passive tree options to allow you to enhance those playstyles.

As part of the rebalance of two-handed weapons, they also created more ways on the passive skill tree to support these characters and improve the existing options.

They are also taking some popular keystone passives from Legion's Timeless Jewels and making them available on the main tree.

The Agnostic Keystone above is a good example of a keystone passive that was originally only accessible by socketing Timeless Jewels in your tree. The Agnostic prevents players from utilizing Energy Shield as a defense but allows players to use mana as an essential life-saving tactic. Basically, there are a lot of these key stones on the tree. Chris mentioned that they Photoshop’d out five of them in the screenshot just to focus on this one, so the players don't start speculating too much.

Rebalanced Unique Items

The team also rebalanced over 50 unique items. There are currently around 900 unique items available in Path of Exile. While creating new unique items is great for keeping things new, revisiting old unique items, and making them relevant again is also important (and more efficient in terms of resources). Two such revamped uniques follow.

Rebalanced Moonbender's Wing Unique Axe

This axe provides a boost to your attacks through various means but most notably it causes your hits to gain up to 100% of your physical damage as extra cold or lightning damage. It will randomly pick between cold and lightning damage and potentially double your damage with each hit.

What really makes this axe unique is that it triggers the Lightning Warp movement skill when you attack. If you attack an enemy in the distance with a long-range skill, you will also be teleported to the location of that enemy once they have been hit. This combination creates a satisfying and efficient way to combine two essential actions - attacking and moving.

Previously, it granted the Lightning Warp skill but did not actually trigger it automatically. It also converted your damage from physical to elemental rather than adding new damage.

Instead of giving you the lightning warp skill it now casts the lightning warp skill, targeting whichever enemy you hit with the axe. Now you may think, “Okay, Chris, this is an axe so you're hitting someone next to you. It caused the lightning warp skill to teleport you… to, well, next to you, which is kind of pointless”. And that is true.

But Chris believes the trick is thinking outside the box, which Path of Exile players are getting trained to do. Having it so that you use a skill which can cause hits on monsters that are far away somehow like lightning strikes, until you hit the monster next to you, and these projectiles come out and technically hit the monsters that are behind you. This, in effect, will teleport you forward to these monsters in a way that is kind of pulling you through the level as you fight.

Rebalanced Wake of Destruction Unique Boots

The Wake of Destruction boots are one of the first unique items introduced to Path of Exile and have remained relatively unchanged since then, until now.

The old "Chance to cause monsters to flee" property has been removed and replaced with a trail of shocked ground beneath your feet while your character is moving. Enemies that stand within your shocked ground take more damage.

In the following video you can see Wake of Destruction and Moonbender's Wing used together. The patches of shocked ground that follow the character are caused by Wake of Destruction. The attacks used are a combination of Lightning Strike and Moonbender's Wing. Lightning Strike is a long-range lightning attack that forks out toward enemies, when it hits the enemy, the character is teleported to its location.

Delirium Core Game Integration

The current league, Delirium, will be added to the game as a core game feature. Usually if Grinding Gear Games adds a league into the core game, there's a 10% chance to encounter it. The current plan is that the chance of it being encountered in an area is proportional to the amount of other additional content in the area, because it synergises with it so well. So if players put effort into doing tricks to add extra content to areas they play, then they are more likely to encounter Delirium.