Delving into dungeons every day can be exhausting work, but Path of Exile's next expansion, Harvest, will give adventurers a garden to nurture and relax inside. Maybe it's time to hang up the axe and grab the gardening shears instead.
Actually, better keep the axe nearby, because you'll be growing monsters, not lovely flowers, which you'll then have to defeat, consuming their lifeforce. And first you'll need to go out and explore, hunting down caches containing seeds that will eventually grow into a monster.
When you defeat a monster in the Sacred Grove, you'll get a new crafting option, but to take advantage of any of them you'll need to spend some of the lifeforce you've been gobbling up. That means you'll need to keep feeding, taking on more and more monsters so you can keep improving your gear.
Some seeds can just be plonked in the ground and grow without much attention, but there are some exotic seeds that require a bit more work. You'll have to build condensers, dispersers and collectors that will use the lifeforce you've gathered to make your garden more fertile. That means you'll probably need to harvest monsters from seeds that grow easily and use their lifeforce to grow needier crops.
There are some similarities to the Bestiary league update, which introduced monster hunting, but Harvest sounds a bit more elaborate as you construct this industrial monster-growing factory inside a mystical grove.
Harvest comes with a bunch of changes that aren't related to gardening or monster sacrifice, too. The sprawling passive skill tree has been updated, with various skills getting buffed to support things like two-handed weapons, along with new clusters of skills. As well as the passive skill changes, two-handed weapons will also benefit from a bunch of melee skills being turned into slam skills, while existing slam skills have been gussied up with new visual effects and more practical improvements.
Warcries have been reworked, too, and now scale based on the power of the enemies that surround you. Four new ones have also been added to the roster. Brands have been beefed up, as well, with a trio of new ones and revamped existing ones.
On the unique item front, 50 uniques are getting reworked, and you'll be able to get your hands on 12 new items. There's a bit of a lightning theme in the items Grinding Gear has shown off so far, like Doryani's Prototype, a piece of chest armour that stops you from dealing any non-lightning damage and makes nearby enemies have the same lightning resistance as you. Then there's the Wake of Destruction boots that add lightning damage and drop Shocked Ground while moving, which will stick around for a couple of seconds.
Though the Delirium league is ending, it will still live on, as Delirium and Cluster jewels are being added to the core game. Grinding Gear reckons it stacks well with other mechanics, so expect to see Delirium crop up more when there are lots of league mechanics in the area.
Harvest is coming on June 19, so expect full patch notes soon.
