Harvest Might Be One Of my Favorite Leagues in a While

During some of the other leagues, I found myself kind of stopping playing as much/often as I usually do in the beginning, but with Harvest, I look forward to actually logging on every single day because I know that if I get enough of certain seeds or even save up enough currency to plant certain seeds, I can possibly make each one of my individual gear better than what it already is. I never really understood or even bothered with crafting before this league. Now with Harvest, crafting is actually intuitive for me for once with the help of Poe DB that explains the suffixes and prefixes for items as well as outlines all of the possible prefix/suffix possibilities and what they are tagged as. Like seriously, I never bothered with crafting before this league and I would just buy all the items I needed instead. Now, I can focus on actually saving up for maybe a base I need and craft it myself if I want AND have an option of buying the item instead. So I have options now.

I cannot remember grinding this hard and looking forward to playing a game since I used to have to grind to complete certain quests on Runescape just to wield certain items. Every day with harvest there is potential to get certain rare seeds from seed caches in maps and with certain seeds and the flowers or blossoms (I love the interaction between the flowers/blossoms you can use on your grown seeds), there is a chance to get the right crafts that I need and use them on my gear to make as good of a character as possible. I mean the bosses too, incredible. You can literally set what type of difficulty you want for yourself with the t3-t4 seeds. Some characters can only handle fighting one t4 seed boss at a time. Other ridiculously OP characters can choose to play against 4-5+ t4 seeds in one plantation for a real challenge to see if they can do it, in combination with say 5 delirium orb maps.

The only people I have seen actually complain about Harvest are the people who literally have no idea what they are doing in the game or can't take 2 seconds out of their day to figure out an intuitive system and it is apparent by them having zero to very little challenges completed, meaning they did not even bother to engage with the Harvest mechanics or the elitists in the grey market who want to hoard all of the op items and gear to themselves without giving players a chance of crafting a good item for themselves for once without dishing out an absurd amount of currency for their items.

It's so fun honestly. I love the boss fights as well, especially the blue t4 seed boss that makes your character experience a flashbang/stun grenade effect that deafens you for a moment, slightly even disorienting your senses for a second during the fight, very, very cool. I also really like the 24 challenge harvest cloak, one of the best looking challenge reward mtx I have seen in a while. I love the building aspect of Harvest as well, really reminds me of Factorio and I love optimizing my grove in a way that makes the collectors with certain seeds as close to me as possible and having the most efficient harvest setups for t4 and even just regular t1 seed layouts. I enjoy the Oshabi boss fight mechanic as well and always look forward to fighting Oshabi every 200 maps. I love the new infused labs especially with the belt enchants as well as the new infused beachheads that give you the new upgraded versions of the harbingers uniques (Immortal Will is my favourite). There is so much more that I think I am forgetting to mention, but there is just so much with this league that is so good tbh. Overall, I think Harvest is a very fun and addicting league in my opinion and I hope that it will be here to stay in the future.

Posting a random agreement reply because of the 'New' decision haha

I have had the same personal experience as the OP. However, for top players who have always been good at crafting, Harvest has simply made the game far too easy. The economy has become flooded with insane items; prices for really good stuff have dropped tremendously. GGG would have to once again buff the game’s difficulty in order to keep up with this powercreep for players.

The thing is, nobody is against deterministic crafting in some form - not I, not GGG, not elite streamers. But it simply cannot go core as-is. Instead, a balance must be found between crafts that engage players like us in a system we never bothered with before (due to its complexity, risk, expensive buy-in, and time-consumption) while not breaking the game for people who know how to abuse it (and therefore for everyone who isn’t ssf).

I’m glad GGG made the decision they did. I’m less glad that deterministic crafting is yet another solution to a very old problem that we have to perpetually hope will come in some future league or PoE 2. Wish they solved this stuff years ago.