Fuck man I can’t really comprehend crafting without harvest to be honest, and I couldn’t justify it before this league for that reason. I couldn’t understand how people had enough money to throw for YOLO and fail over and over. You can get a decent base pretty easily but it seemed like before this league it was a colossal money and time sink in the hands of RNG Gods after that. There’s little tricks and methods to alleviate some of it and I understand that, but Jesus man I still feel like I’m gambling half the time even with harvest shit. Targeted annuls are definitely the ‘easiest’ part of it, aside from blocking things to get a guaranteed mod or whatever. Outside of that though, I sunk tons of ex into my bow, chest piece and multiple other projects because the harvest crafts I was going for were expensive and I got terrible fucking rolls over and over. Even that felt better and cheaper and easier on my sanity though than the process before. Even when I found crafts myself, it was nice, but only if I hit something usable which only happened a couple times (outside of the currency exchange/other stuff obviously). And even after all that time and money, there are probably easily two dozen more crafts I could do (about 10, maybe more just on the gear I’m wearing) just to finish them up and I’m not even close.
Granted I don’t have the play time of a college kid like I used to and I understand there’s always a pretty big chasm between the ‘average’ players and the hardcore base, but holy fuck it is absolutely staggering in this game. That doesn’t usually intimidate me or make me one of the whiners or anything, but it’s really crazy how much of this entire game is a roll of the dice down to just making an OKAY piece of gear. I’m not even talking about the insanity and expensive process of a mirror tier item.
I guess the thing is I don’t really have an issue with them changing or nerfing harvest, but I wish some of the other methods in crafting would change slightly to make up for it. Like if I had to combine the usage of an essence or fossils/resonators with bench crafting and currency or whatever other league methods for more targeted results (or something similar) then that’d be fine. Or really if there was just a more targeted way of guaranteeing certain classes of mods and annulling some but not others, I don’t know, fucking anything. But it really seems to all come down to crossing your fingers almost* the entire process, where one wrong mod or something along the way bricks your entire efforts. Then there’s also the issue of straight up running out of currency. I know that seems out of view for a lot of high end players, but I can’t fathom just dumping stacks of exalts and annuls or whatever else into something and still be left with an absolute dogshit item, like what the fuck? Doesn’t feel good man.
That being said I understand how powerful harvest is like this, but I didn’t really understand the issue it ‘caused’. Lots of people have lots of more powerful items? Ok. If one decent crafting method that supplies results that are considered too strong simply because they allow for more targeted crafts, then that tells me they will probably never have or want a system that allows it and it will always be mostly (and in some cases 100%) RNG. Which sucks to me and is a pretty huge put off. On the flip side, you can just grind out the currency and buy shit but it is a million times more fun and satisfying to make something yourself (to me) and the amount of grinding the fill slots on a character is mind numbing when you’re doing it with shit gear.
Another point that brings up is that why the fuck does everything that drops on the ground suck absolute porcupine dick 99.999% of the time? If crafting is meant to be this time consuming, specific gambling process then why can’t I be expected to go find some actual good gear on the ground in an ARPG? Lol. Currency drops plenty for the most part IMO, that’s cool, but that leads to either trading or...more gambling. I cannot fucking remember the last time I found an item on the ground outside of leveling the Acts or my first couple of maps that I actually used and was *good*. If there’s like 1,500 Uniques in this game, then what, like 1,200 are pretty much trash? That’s crazy. The fact that my game CRASHES WHEN I TRY TO PICK UP LOOT WHEN I BYPASS MY FILTER and there is NOTHING to pick up out of thousands and thousands of items...this shared experience among every PoE player who maps is ridiculous horseshit and also causes unnecessary performance issues. We like loot explosions, I get it, everyone does. But god damn.