After trying it out properly finally I have to give some feedback on that.
A big gripe with the community has been that ‘re-farming corruption in timelines is tedious’, so the current implementation - in my eyes - for how the Harbingers have been implemented goes quite against that notion.
Enforcing to basically grind up every single timeline rather then allowing us - as before - to focus on 1-2 of them as we like is a downgrade for the overall enjoyment.
So my suggestion is to adjust that, having 11 timelines and keeping the overall feel in there but making it more stomachable.
My recommendation is to not ramp it up a baseline 25 corruption per timeline but instead do in in a ‘staggered’ way.
The first 4 stay at 100.
The following 3 are 150.
Then 3 more for 200.
And the last with 300.
This allows at least a partial choice of which timelines to focus on without the need to push each one of them. The overall amount of needed corruption is lowered a bit to reduce the time investment which is quite substantial after all.
Also it gives enough time to get glyphs of Envy as well as needles to expedite the progress, currently they help… but definitely not remotely enough.
The boss is supposed to be a pinnacle boss, sure, but I thought the boss is supposed to test us and not the time-investment solely to try him out for the first time. I don’t want my sanity to be tested
I hard disagree with this. With 5 out of 10 timelines being character power blessings and the other 5 being blessings that you ideally want to optimize as well for endgame target farming, we need more systems like the Harbinger Systems that support and incentivice to put time and effort in all timelines.
The game should encourage not focusing on a few timelines, especially early on. And then later, when truly min maxing your character, then you will hyper focus on a few specific timelines.
With the addition of harbingers the process of going through normal, unlocking empowered and grinding up the corruption inall of these timelines was super engaging and fun for me. Finally a reason to do some of the timelimes I never touched before.
Together with the new Nemesis syste, where actually finding a Nemesis is super exciting I am very happy and the game overall keeps improving.
We need more things being put into all the timelines so we as a playerbase a more incentivized to play all of them.
In my opinion the game should give the player the agency to choose how to spend their time, if they want to get only the absolute baseline of blessings to achieve their goal and hence forego for example the target-farming ones… or optimize those and divert their time.
The current status of the Harbingers simply enforces you to do those things up-front. It limits the options simply. You can’t just go and do every timeline 2-3 times to get your optimal (but not well rolled) blessing and proceed on, letting it rest before playing up a single timeline to get a place which provides gear and experience.
Now you have to actively cull your ability to progress in such a way and branch out, enforced by this. Which I personally find to be a massive negative.
And with that I fully agree! incentive, choice… but having them branched out through all the timelines is something I would say isn’t all too good with how it’s set up. The baseline system is great though.
One major gripe I have is that you can screw yourself majorly depending on which Harbingers you choose to beat first. After all you can’t tackle another one unless you play a new timeline up higher then any other ever before.
So one prime example is when you don’t think about it and choose Lagon at the end just to realize that Harbinger is a mess. Little place to do anything and overlapping attacks that they can’t be avoided. The waves + a targeted attack on you when there’s 4 waves at once on the field while having this tiny little strip of area to fight in? That was utterly horrendous. All others fell in moments while that one… I actually struggled with, heavily.
And that’s solely 200 corruption, there’s a slew of builds which can’t handle 300 corruption easily, needing a surprisingly vast amount of time investment to farm up gear. Which yes… they shouldn’t be able to tackle and beat the pinnacle boss, that’s obvious. But… it also means if you choose the ‘wrong’ timeline as the last one then you’ll get stuck there despite easily being able to kill the timeline boss itself, and the Harbingers are not really a lot stronger, copying some core mechanics simply while adding their own baseline mechanics into the mix, just some combinations are… wild.
You are not forced to do the Harbingers, they are only required for some Forgotten Knight Faction Ranks and accessing the pinnacle oss.
You can still farm specific blessings or boss items in 1 or 2 timeliens if you want to do that.
In Fact this is even the faster way of doing all of this. I farmed one timeline to 350-400 corruption before defeating the last few harbingers, this way I could increase these timelines from 100 to the required corruption a single low Shade of Orobyss.
Even when not doing that, the new Harbinger’s Needles are really good and farming a couple of them in 1 or 2 timelines before branching out is something I would recommend anyway.
What if corruption was character-bound across all the monoliths?
As it is now, I have to farm specific monoliths for the items but at the same time, I should be doing another monolith for the Hanbingers and blessings …
Which is what I’m saying should be the way to handle it since 1.0 now given that the time-investment for re-playing corruption levels is bothersome with the same character. It always feels like the equivalent of going back down to white maps after reaching red maps in PoE for those who’ve played it.
