Path of Exile Harvest League

Introducing Path of Exile Harvest league! The newest Path of Exile league is nearly upon us, and there is a ton of incredible stuff in the teasers already. While the patch notes have not yet been released, we have seen quite a few new keystones, skills, items, and general balance changes. Bex has also announced that the manifesto alone is 3500 words, so we’re expecting some major overhauls on top of what has been released. But let’s jump into what we know!

What is the New Path of Exile Harvest League Mechanic?

The new mechanic for Path of Exile Harvest is a mechanic based entirely around gardening. I’m not kidding. You collect seeds throughout maps and then take them to the newest zone, the Sacred Grove, where you will plant them. Once you have planted enough you choose to harvest them, and monsters will bloom from your planted seeds. Killing these monsters grants you a resource that can be used in the machines that you build around the area. These machines contain dozens of crafting recipes, allowing you to modify your items directly based on how many monsters you slaughtered.

This mechanic is a lot more fleshed out than what I just explained, but we don’t know entirely how the rest of the mechanic works. The machines that you build can have their resources transferred to other machines via something resembling a telephone pole, allowing you to accumulate more resources than one patch of monsters would give. What this leads to, we’re currently unsure.

This mechanic has been toted by Chris Wilson as the mechanic that will make the most broken gear ever. It’s not that we’ll reach new heights of broken items, like we did in Synthesis, but rather that normal players will suddenly have access to items similar to ‘mirror-tier’ items, due to the fact that they have so many crafting options available on-hand. For those who love crafting, this league should be a fun one!

Are There Any New Path of Exile Harvest Uniques to Look Forward To?

Of course! So far we’ve seen a handful of entirely new unique items, as well as quite a few items being reworked for the Path of Exile Harvest league launch. The new items are very interesting, so I’ll talk about a couple here. You can find the full list of teased uniques and reworks on this Reddit megathread.

Those of you who have been paying attention will know that two-handed weapons are receiving a very large buff in this patch. As much as 15% on the base weapons themselves, as well as buffs to a handful of the skills that employ two-handers, such as Ice Crash, Earthquake, Sunder, etcetera. Well if you’re excited by all of that news, well then do we have the unique for you. The newest unique gloves to join Path of Exile are the Great Old One’s Tentacles.

In addition to the decent life roll and flat phys damage roll, these gloves have chance to impale built into them, as well as their unique attribute, which is that ‘Enemies you kill have a 50% chance to apply their impale damage to all nearby enemies’. For builds that use impale, over half their damage comes from impale. If a monster deals that much to nearby enemies, you’re effectively using an Inpulsa for physical damage. These gloves might be able to take single-target impale builds, or low AoE Cyclone builds to very respectable levels of clear.

For those of you who like meme builds, Fleshcrafter is a new body armour that gives your minions 2% of their maximum life as energy shield for each point of Chaos resistance they have. While this may turn out to be strong by itself, it can certainly be interesting with some builds built around your minions dying. If you can get your minions up to 50% chaos resistance, they die as they are spawned, leading to some potentially very interesting interactions!

There are a host of other uniques and reworks teased, so please check out the link above and enjoy your theory-crafting as much as I have been!

Are There Changes to the Skill Tree in Path of Exile Harvest League?

Yes! There will be quite a few changes to the skill tree in the upcoming league. And by quite a few, I mean a lot. A handful of the keystones previously locked behind Timeless jewels are being added to the tree directly, and new keystones are taking their place within the Jewels. These keystones are all extremely interesting, similar in power level to the Timeless keystones previously.

There is also a new keystone on the tree specifically for Warcries. Call to Arms – “Using Warcries is Instant, Warcries share their Cooldown”. Allowing Warcries to be instant outside of the Berserker class can be very interesting, and will potentially lead to quite a few other classes making use of them, especially considering how many Warcries are being buffed this league.

Chainbreaker is an extremely exciting new keystone that reads “Regenerate 3 Rage per second. Increases and Reductions to Mana Regeneration Rate instead apply to Rage Regeneration Rate. Lose 5 Rage when you Hit an Enemy, no more than once every 0.3 seconds.” Doing the math on this is difficult, but if you can get to a place where you have max rage on a non-Berserker class? Slayers employing Berserk? There’s a ton of potential here, and I hope that we see some builds come out of this with crazy damage numbers as a result of Rage.

Again, there are quite a few other keystones, we’re just touching on some of the ones we’re excited about. Check out the full list of teased keystones here.

Final Note

There are so many new things coming out in Path of Exile Harvest that it was very difficult to choose a few to talk about. We didn’t even touch on the new skills, skill rebalancing, or look at dozens of rebalanced uniques or keystones. This league is looking to be an incredible one, with so much changing. Hopefully the league delivers and delivers on how incredible it is looking right now!