I’ve tried so many times, so many ways and so many different types.
All the ways, seems very frustrating and boring.
When I saw for the first time, reaper form and harvest I thank “dam, I have to try this.”
I’m just wondering if anyone else has gone through this.
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot to mention Death’s Embrace, the 2H axe that you will need for almost any LL Harvest build. Also, you can take the Ethereal Revenant passive node to spawn minions besides Golem(s). Then, every 15 seconds, you will get a decent minion.
It is very gear-dependent. When leveling, your best friends are curses (like necrotic bone curse aura, but it is your choice), Reaper Form/Reap, Death Seal, and Hungering Souls (or maybe another spell…but the HS/DS combo is pretty wicked). For that build, you need a LOT of leech and flat health increases since ward and health regen doesn’t matter (DS cancels ward, and RF is a second health bar, but you lose all health regen). Thankfully, a unique like “Woven Flesh” will help you a lot, and it is a common-ish drop. I play something similar to this build.
The second way of playing with Harvest is “Exsanguinous,” a somewhat rare unique chest. This is known as a “ward-tank” piece, as it gives you low life (sweet, sweet dmg boosts), and you can combo it with the Soul Barrier passive tree nodes to get even more ward every 6 seconds. With this build, you can skip DS/HS (you will need tons of ward, and DS cancels it) in favor of other spells, preferably another curse or big-ass golem(s). You could keep DS and cast it on your golem(s). It will still eat your ward for a few seconds, BUT you can convert the ward into necrotic shred (which is hard to come by) and armor. The goal is to use Exsanguinous to proc your low-life damage boosts and Revenant/Soul Barrier. Last Steps of the Living is a common drop that can fill in for Exsanguinous while you wait. However, it isn’t as good.
In short, Harvest can be useful in a low-life (LL) build. Vatinas gave a good answer on implementing LL using either Death Seal or a “ward-tank” route. Here is the thread. It is scary to do LL at first, and it can be unforgiving if you mess up, but you facemelt pretty much everything in your path.
Ask @Heavy for advise.
I play some Harvest Lich every now and then it’s pretty solid if you compare it to other melee classes. Is it boring af? Hell yeah! I would’ve loved Lich to be a more melee focused class and less of a caster but that’s a me problem.
Thanks so much for the explanation and update.
Yes it’s a almost item mandatory skill.
I wish I the future we see more melee lich builds, maybe another skill in future.
I feel like Warlock will be the melee “death knight/drain tank” style of play. We won’t see it until the final release, though.
I had tried a Bleed + Ward harvest variant with Exsanguinous+Last steps, Dragonbone axe and a shield(bastion) in 0.8.5. The issue with a ward melee reaper is you can’t do death seal+reaper form meaning you miss out on most of the speed, melee buffs and DR of the class. I then tried adding Reaper form which felt pretty bad with low life and was constantly off. So then I went life based and added Death seal and by that point I was like ditch this lets just make a death seal+reaper form caster…
I’d like to try it again since the new nodes in 0.9 for Harvest look really good and nice synergy for low life. But being locked out of Reaper form (the only real melee support) looks pretty bad. I wish Reaper form was easier to maintain like the Druid transforms and had some decent synergy for ward low life.
Not sure what exactly is frusttrating for you. Could you elaborate?
Is it boring? Maybe? Depending on the variant of the possible builds its pretty straight forward and no “advanced” build. But it fulfills its job and is very scaleable for most cases.
The Low Life/Endurance/Non Ward Variant that I designed Death’s Embrace for is definitely pretty easy and straight forward to play and gear.
But there are more intricate things you can do with Life’s Journey for example. I am not a big Ailment Fan, but Bleed SpiritPlague/Harvest is nuts now. It was already pretty good before 0.9, but with the new Phy Conversion Node that gives Harvest Bleed Chance per Int its insanely scaleable.
Also the new Transplant stuff with Frenzy, Haste and automating bone curse + cursed limbs is pretty nice as well. (This also benefits a hit based variant)
All in all Harvest is a pretty unspectacular skill with a very boring skill spec tree. (The new nodes only helped partially). Harvest is very much carried by other skills in most builds or setups.
Still its my favorite skill in the game, because thematically and fro ma archtype perspective I like it a lot. It was ltierally the reason I bought LE in the first place.
The entire “Reaper Archtype”, together with Reaper Form just needs a overhaul.
Reaper Form is a mechanically strong skill, that is still super boring and does not have a lot of different interesting options.
I just recently made this exact build but I’m using the life’s journey shield that applies spirit plague.
Been fun so far but definitely pales in comparison to leech harvest lich.
I was under the impression the ailment version of Harvest wasn’t viable because none of the damage multipliers in its tree apply to damage over time, only hits from Harvest.
I really don’t like the term “viable”, because its very subjective.
Is it as strong as a comparable Ailment Build from Rogue for example? No
Can you compelte all content in the game? Absolutely
It already worked decent pre 0.9 without hte new Phy Convert Node. I have offline character that doesn’t have any Legendaries, only uniques that can go 150-250 corruption.
With the new node and some realistic legendary crafts that surely can go 300-400 coruption at least.
I am recreating the build in online currently and it already blast through everything.
Harvest itself is not the only skill that carries this build, Spirit Plague also does, especially with the Exsanguination Node.
To make this work you also are kidna forced to go Low Health/Ward with Exsanguinous, because both Harvest’ strongest Node Double-Edged Scythe and Spirit Plague’s Exsanguination is causing self-bleed.
I hope they will implement new ways (probably uniques) to get bleed imunity in the future to help getting a bit build diversity for buidls like this.
You cna kinda play a very simialr build but not with harvest, but with self-cast Rip Blood or Marrow Shards, it might be slightly better because its ranged, but Life’s Journey has a lot of power in conjunction with Spirit Plague.
If you reapply Spirit Plague to a Target, that already has it, it still counts as applying Spirit Plague to a target (this is important for Pestilence and Hemorrhage)
I am personally a sucker for cool and interesting uniques such as Life’s Journey and ultimately I don’t care if its objectively strong, as long as its “playable”.
I had tons of fun with the build before and still having a blast recreating this build in online.
I bought this game to play this exact build, but Reaper Form is just a second life bar + stats and Harvest is a mediocre skill.
One day I’d like to do a big feedback post on why this mastery skill is boring. In short it needs the bear/bug/spriggan treatment - skill replacements, some of which using base skill trees. Reap should be an evolution of Harvest for example, and should use the Harvest tree.
Neat idea, I was using self cast but the automation sounds fun.
My main issue was the build felt sooo slow, not just compared to zoomy reaper form or bladedancer builds but even to Rive sentinel, Lightning flame reave, poison serpent strike beastmaster(in 0.8.5) of course. Tried Wing guards and still the skill felt sluggish, added quicksilver coil for movement and felt kinda better but with all the uniques resists and hp were shot. I then decided to think of the whole thing as a bad dream and respec to Reaper form + Death seal…
I still don’t even like Reaper form bcos of the utter lack of QOL but I mean its the way to play lich for now.
Reap should not be directly tied to Harvest. That would bottleneck some of the best builds in the game right now. Reaper Form is mostly a casting buff/debuff with a movement skill built in. The Lich tree is really a LL/Leech tree with some other options thrown in. I play a DS/HS/RF variant with 3 minions (Unholy Trinity node), and it shreds everything in its path. I use channeled Wandering Sprits for necro shred. My Lich is technically a caster, but the whole build revolves around RF. It seems like people want Lich to be something it isn’t. I assumed Lich could be melee, but looking at the passive trees, I saw that “melee” was a debatable term concerning the Lich tree. I think Warlock will be the melee Acolyte variant. Remember, Harvest isn’t tied to a specific mastery or sub-class.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.