Ah, a fellow Harvest Lich enjoyer/sufferer! We need to make our voices heard before 1.3, or else we may miss the opportunity to ever see the spec buffed.
I started this league as a Harvest Lich because the aesthetic is just super cool and Harvest flows seamlessly with Lich’s other skills as a hit-and-run melee. For the PoE players out there, the playstyle is like a low life Vaal Pact Slayer without the instant leech: you need to be hitting things constantly to stay alive, but you are near-immortal when you are hitting things and dodging properly. I switched to a Stygian Coal Lich for a bit after a decent Coal dropped for me. But I found the autoturret playstyle boring, so I swapped back to Harvest and vowed to take one of the worst skills in the game as far as I could go. For the record, I’ve played melee in almost every league for over ten years of PoE1. I’ve killed all PoE1 ubers with outdated skills like Infernal Blow and Sunder. I’m very familiar with the concept of suffering. I’m currently hovering around 600 corruption with all content but Fading Brink and Uber Abby under my belt, but the glaring flaws in Lich’s design begin to show far before that point (300-400c).
Setting aside Harvest for a moment, the main problem is that Lich is far too dependent on Death Seal to even function. There is no Lich build where you do not take Death Seal. Death Seal’s talent tree simply offers too many necessary buffs. Deadlock enables the low life, endurance threshold playstyle that activates Death Seal’s massive damage reduction and damage, while Desperate Shroud gives you armor and stun avoidance that is crucial to staying alive in high-corruption maps and boss fights. Even worse, Death Seal’s uptime is inconsistent. Death Seal lasts for 8 seconds when fully talented, but has a cooldown of 5 seconds. Those 5 seconds feel like an eternity - an eternity in which Harbingers are free to slap you around, chain stun you, and knock you out of Reaper form. And getting turned back into a puny human is almost certain death, during which you play like a baby and wait 20 seconds for your Reaper to come off cooldown. My solution here would be to make Death Seal a toggle, but I would also like other Lich skills to get buffed first to open up different build paths for the class.
The second problem is Reaper form’s constant, escalating life drain. As mentioned above, the Death Seal + leech playstyle works great when it’s actually up and when you have things to hit. But there’s plenty of downtime in Last Epoch, whether it’s backtracking through maps or waiting for a Harbinger to stop rambling while it sucks the soul out of a boss. Because you’ve likely been in Reaper form for a while up to that point, the health drain ticks very quickly. You will likely fall out of Reaper form unless you’ve been hoarding your potions just for this specific cutscene. This feels terrible. I can’t recall how many times I’ve died to a 500-600c Harbinger just because my Reaper form fell off in between me killing the boss and waiting for the Harbinger to stop talking, or because my Reaper form was just about to fall off as the Harb fight started (leech doesn’t work when they’re in their “hittable, but dialoguing” form). This is compounded by the fact that you’re likely using a Titan Heart, which has ideal synergies with Reaper form. Lich was designed before the introduction of Harbingers, so this oversight makes some sense. But it’s all the more reason for the class to get updated. I’ll admit, I have no idea how to change this other than to remove the escalating life drain on Reaper form.
The third problem is that the Death Seal playstyle goes completely against what the devs seem to have intended for Lich. Many of Lich’s passives - as well as talents in Reaper, Drain Life, and Death Seal - revolve around building Ward and then spending it for powerful buffs. But no Reaper build ever uses Ward because Death Seal removes all of it. Many of Lich’s talents and passives are simply dead nodes as a result. This issue is much larger in scope than the others, and it’s one I hope the devs can address in the upcoming rework.
The fourth major problem with Lich is that half its skills suck. It’s also missing a fourth skill, like Shaman and Blade Dancer. Drain Life and Aura of Decay are real stinkers, though. Drain Life is a channel for some reason, and you’re never going to stay still and channel in Reaper form. Dark Shackles fixes this somewhat, but the skill instead becomes a super expensive, small puddle. It’s also currently very buggy, often following the player’s cursor and failing to latch onto targets. Stygian Coal “fixes” Drain Life as a whole by outright turning the skill into an autoturret. That’s… not good design. It’s interesting that you can play Drain Life that way, but it’s bad that it’s the only way to make the skill tolerable (or even functional). Aura of Decay, meanwhile, does pitiful damage and offers very little utility for its cost. There are better, more consistent ways to proc poison and armor shred without proccing those statuses on yourself. Reduced poison damage taken and a self-heal are nice utility, of course, with the latter helping to offset Reaper Form’s own life drain somewhat. But they’re not helpful enough to spec into the skill itself anymore. The result is that nearly every Reaper build looks the same: Reaper Form, Death Seal, Transplant (for mobility and utility like Bone Armor and Bone Curse procs), your main damage dealer, and a filler skill (usually Rip Blood). Lich probably needs a new skill entirely that shakes up their cookie cutter builds, along with heavy reworks to the aforementioned skills. My personal wish is to see Drain Life and Aura of Decay combined: turn it into a Necrotic aura that drains life from nearby enemies. Buff its damage, give it more utility talents, change its visual into a teal necrotic ghost haze, and allow players to change it back into a poison skill via talents. Maybe even let it accumulate overheal, which would turn into surplus life regen.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about Harvest,
Oh yes, Harvest. Where do we even begin…
I was initially attracted to Harvest because the aesthetic is just cool. Very few games in general let you turn into a literal wraith/grim reaper, oddly enough. It’s also a natural fit for Reaper Form, mechanically, and playing a melee skill on an otherwise-caster class is always fun and interesting. Its problems quickly surface once you take it to 200c+ - which is a pretty early soft ceiling before you start optimizing your skills with gear. Some of the problems include:
- Low base damage, with very few ways to scale it. Acolyte has almost no way to scale raw necrotic melee damage outside of a few uniques like Death’s Embrace. Harvest’s saving grace is that it has high crit stats and crit talents, and that it scales with Int. Even when stacking crit and Int, though, Harvest’s damage is subpar at best.
- Terrible talent tree. It would require an entire video to explain how dismal Harvest’s tree is in detail. Put simply, it’s filled with trash talents and tax nodes that don’t have any synergy with how Harvest is currently played (minion buffs?). Harvest’s entire tree needs a rework to mesh with multiple melee styles (DoT, Crit, AoE clear, single-target), not a few mandatory damage nodes locked behind mediocre-to-useless travel talents.
- Low base range. The visuals don’t even match increases to Harvest’s base range. Why does the Harvest shrine look and feel better than our own Harvest?
- Namelock skill. You need to root yourself in place to use this skill, which means dodging dangerous boss telegraphs is clunky at best if you want to do decent damage.
I could go on, but I should just post my feedback in its own thread instead. Lich, its skills, and Harvest are all very close to being decent-to-good in the current meta. But they’re hampered by outdated design and weird restrictions that other classes don’t have. Let’s see some buffs in 1.3!
One final note: I’m with the others who would like to see Reaper Form’s model changed. The twin scythes with long handles are goofy, and some of the cast animations are comically bad. A single large scythe would look fine!
I just found stygian and seal on max roll. Basically once I got into monos after lvl 60 I respecced from warlock to coal since they say it’s an early build as stygian coal can wear from ~30. I just put what I had that fits for the build, like mad alchemist, some belt rings, boots with a bit of int, armor +skill, not much at the time crit multiplier or chance and I had a hard time to go beyond my current level area. Yesterday I lvled up 80+, stacked 180+ int, used 1 red ring, put some crit in my 2LP BiS, unfortunately bad rolls with 1 stat T7 guaranteed, but second one useless, so I treat them like LP1, and I made it pass 300c however feels like it’s the cap at the moment. Definitely need lp2+ and much much more armor to go any higher.