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[Jannick]

In Harvest, Path of Exile players can earn seeds by playing the game so they can use them to grow monsters. That's what makes it great (and not).

Path of Exile is no stranger to introducing game-changing mechanics in quarterly tournaments that introduce leagues. Challenge leagues are a great way for players to test experimental releases in a new economy while interacting with new mechanics.

The latest Path of Exile Edition is Harvest. In Harvest, players can earn seeds as they play the game so they can use them to grow monsters. Killing these monsters confers powerful crafting modifiers that dramatically change Path of Exile, for better or worse. From leveling up new characters to impacting the core game, here are the 5 best and worst parts of Path of Exile's Harvest League.

1. Excellent: Upgrading
Most of the league mechanics in Path of Exile present significant dangers in the early days of any league. Many experienced players will choose to skip the league mechanics altogether because they will not provide significant loot in the early rounds due to the slow leveling.

By allowing players to intentionally craft or upgrade the gear they need, Harvest does an excellent job of solving this problem. The extra damage, movement speed, and even recolored items on the opening day of the league are invaluable to any player. Path of Exile's upgrades has never been better.

2. Flip Circle: discourage board games

Because of the way leagues are designed, board games are generally in the bottom half of most leagues, but no league is as aggressively damaging to groups as Harvest.

Seeds dropped in each instance can only be used by the host of that instance and cannot be awarded to the entire team. The magic discovery bonus is sufficient loot for the monsters in Harvest Gardens, but unlike leagues of the past, not every player in the group can fully adopt the mechanics of the league.

3. Awesome: Breaks the mold of most league mechanics

Grinding Gear Games has created so many leagues for Path of Exile that they have become somewhat formal in their design. Virtually every league up to Harvest involves interacting with something, killing enemies, then earning loot and advancing some sort of meta-leveling system.

It's a formula that works well, but has been widely used recently. Harvesting is designed to break that mold by rewarding rather than dropping items. Best of all, the league allows players to interact with the mechanics at their own pace, rather than being forced to use explicit gear builds to get the most out of the league.

4. Flip Circle: no interaction with other mechanics in the league

Delirium does a great job of interacting with other league mechanics by changing almost every enemy on the map.

Because of its crafting choices, Harvest only interacts well with Bestiary and Delve, but it doesn't affect most mechanics at all. Since Harvest doesn't affect the monsters on the map at all, it is an isolated system that doesn't feel like it when dealing with most PoE content.

5. Excellent: gear upgrade is viable

Upgrading items is a tedious process in Path of Exile. Once players find an item that is better than what they have, they have to add mass, add slots, link those slots, color those slots, and then finally start using it.

In this league, it has become much easier to use gears or recolor sleeves. Players can choose to trade items for much less friction than ever before at www.ssegold.com/path-of-exile or choose to create new modifiers on existing gear to get more content.

6. Flip Circle: Disrupting the flow of the game

Since the harvest takes place in a garden that is not connected to the map, players will have to pause the map to enter the garden, plant seeds, kill the monsters that have matured, and then craft artifacts. This loop of play juxtaposes the quick release that the game has grown to in recent leagues.

It's horrible to go from deleting entire pieces of enemies to waiting for enemies to appear and managing multiple sub-menus. Harvest's gameplay loop is probably a big part of why it hasn't become central.

[tomharris]

Thanks for yor post!