PoE 3.11 Harvest Revealed Details

Coming this month on June 19, Path of Exile's latest expansion Harvest is all about growth. Players can build up gardens that grow monsters, and then harvest them for all kinds of powerful loot. Also, the new update will contain new gameplay mechanics, and will bring changes and revamps to many areas of existing Path of Exile content.

New NPC, Oshabi

In Harvest, players meet a new NPC called Oshabi who was cast out by the Azmeri - a simple people who condemn superstitious activity. Oshabi's interest in the powerful potential of the land makes her lose touch with the practices of the Azmeri and begin a quest to find her own identity.

She discovers the Sacred Grove, an ancient garden created by an ancient people. She begins to learn of new possibilities for power and enlists Exiles to help her explore them. There are some plot bits and pieces that Chris did not particularly want to spoil, but she is the main character that you would talk to in this league about your progress.

Farming And Harvesting

The most exciting new mechanic in this expansion is the farm planning gameplay element which may appeal to players who like city building games, or strategy games. But don't worry, the whole thing is designed to be pretty easy and low management for players who don't have a lot of time or don't want to engage with it much. And for those who are concerned about micromanagement, and don't really want to build anything complex, Grinding Gear Games made sure that there is a relatively simple process that can be done each time you visit the farm. This new mechanic is a change of pace for Path of Exile, and involves creativity that encourages a different type of gameplay rather than just focusing on pure clear speed.

Seed Caches

Players will encounter Seed Caches when playing, and these are found when they encounter magical roots that point in the direction of the cache. As you open the Seed Caches, each will drop a couple of special Seeds that can be planted inside the Sacred Grove, and Oshabi will appear and provide easy access to the Sacred Grove.

Once inside the Grove, you can plant the seeds that you just acquired, but you will also have to build a collector near them, and these collectors have 3 purposes. First, these can trigger any and all fully grown plants near them to hatch the monsters contained within them. Second, the collector harvests the life force of the planted monsters you defeated and third, you can then use the life force to perform crafting upgrades on your items (we will get into this more later). However these collectors can only store so much life force, so you will need to build extra storage tanks known as Condensers and connect them to your network of pipes.

Harvesting Time

Each Seed Cache you open in the world marks a growth cycle, meaning every time you open a Seed Cache your seeds or plants in the Sacred Grove will grow slightly. And Seeds that you acquire from these caches are known as tier 1 seeds and there are three types Wild, Primal and Vivid. Every seed in Harvest has some kind of requirement for you to grow, and Tier 1 seeds require you to plant them near a collector of the same type. So primal seeds near a Primal Collector so on and so forth.

Tier 2 seeds on the other hand have more strict requirements for growth, and these seeds are occasionally dropped from Tier 1 hatched monsters. Some examples of requirements are: complex garden designs such as, having specific colors of seeds nearby and having irrigation, where you must build a Disperser and connect it to your Condenser via pipes.
Monsters hatched from these Tier 2 plants will occasionally drop rare Tier 3 seeds, which are even harder to grow, and higher-level players will find that it's possible for Tier 3 harvest monsters to drop Seeds that enable special Boss encounters. There are three such encounters, one for each type of Harvest Seeds: Wild, Primal and Vivid. When grown and harvested, these seeds will yield formidable fights with even rarer rewards. There are also rumors of a fourth tier, that has a much harder and a rarer boss that you may be able to grow.

The basic cycle as you play through Harvest is, find a seed cache, go to your garden, plant some seeds, see if there are any fights ready, which there probably will be. Do a fight, do some crafting, maintain your garden, repeat.

Crafting

In this expansion, Grinding Gear Games is trying something different. In most Path of Exile challenge leagues the player always ends up with way too many items as they play through the game. And, while monsters killed in the Sacred Grove do drop appropriate rewards for their difficulty, the core reward system comes in the form of a very powerful crafting options that you can spend unprocessed Lifeforce on. Each type of Seed will grant different crafting options that are added to the list available after combat. This allows the player to improve and perfect items they've acquired into exactly what they want, instead of having to simply use the best of what they find. It's a sort of “Build your own” approach, allowing the player more control over their equipment.

To get the best rewards you'll need a garden full of variety so that you can meet the lofty lifeforce requirements of the top tier of crafting options. While fans of city-builders can enjoy this expansion's emphasis on experimentation, Grinding Gear isn't looking to alienate any of its players. So it's entirely possible for minimalists to get strong items, too.

Skill Changes And Rebalancing

When it comes to Skill changes, the devs have focused on rebalancing two-handed melee weapons, improving the base item types themselves, as well as buffing various related skills and adding better passive skill tree support. For example, “Slam” Skills received makeovers to improve their usefulness and make them more viable in general.

Two-handed Weapon Enhancement

Two-handed melee weapons are going to see some significant improvements. Related slam skills will be improved and reworked to make two-handed melee weapons more competitive. Players can find new items like the Fist of War support gem, which supports any slam skill and occasionally sees an Ancestor appear to enhance the player's slam attack. Other skills, like Tectonic Slam, are being reworked to be more viable in the field. Tectonic Slam will now only remove an endurance charge every three uses, which will work well with the ability's new area-of-effect range.

Warcry Skills

Warcry skills are likewise getting some attention in an effort to revitalize them. Four new Warcry skills are being added, while three are being reworked. Players will find new passive tree support, improved functionality, and greater power. All Warcries will also taunt nearby enemies while affecting their stats. But the biggest change is that Warcry attack power will no longer be proportional to enemy quantity, but rather enemy power level. This comes in handy for the new Seismic Cry, which creates a shockwave that pushes back enemies.

A Warcry skill that received reworking is Rallying Cry. The skill will 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 will also cause your next few attacks to become exerted, granting increased damage based on the number of nearby allies.

New Skills

The Harvest Expansion will also introduce three new brand skills, but we will only cover the Arcanist Brand and the Penance Brand in this article.

Upon placing the Arcanist Brand on the ground, it will attach to an enemy and trigger any spells linked to these skills in a sequence. It works similarly to Poet's Pen and other trigger skills. This will open up more options for player builds, because this will let you use almost any spell as if its were a brand.

Upon placing Penance Brand on the ground, it will attach to a nearby enemy and become active. It will build up energy and spread to additional nearby enemies before exploding, causing a quick succession of explosions while dividing and spreading between enemies.

Passive Skill Tree Changes

Path of Exile's massive passive skill tree is one of the features that sets it apart from other ARPGs, and is the core of all character builds in the game. While the expansion Delirium introduced the cluster jewel system that allowed you to expand your passive tree, the core tree didn't receive any significant changes. For the Harvest expansion, they're adding many new keystone passives and notable passives. They're also adding passive tree support for mechanics that have been introduced recently but don't currently have any passive tree options to allow you to enhance those play styles.

They will also add some of the popular keystone passives from Legion's Timeless Jewels, making them available on the main tree. A good example of a keystone passive that was originally only accessible by socketing Timeless Jewels in your tree is The Agnostic keystone. This keystone prevents players from utilizing Energy Shields as a defense but allows players to use Mana as an essential life-saving tactic.

Delirium Game Integration

Like many previous leagues, Delirium is going to part of the main game. However, it will not be implemented quite like other leagues have been; instead of granting a 10% chance to encounter a Delirium, the plan is for the chance of encounter to start off lower but be proportional to the amount of other additional content in the area. So stack on those mods if you want a higher chance of falling back into the madness of Delirium!

Release Data

Grinding Gear Games plans to release Path of Exile: Harvest on June 19 for the PC. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One owners will be able to see what's in store within the week after that. However, due to the impact of COVID-19, the release date may be postponed