Welcome to the Harbinger league mechanic guide!

Harbingers are not considered Extra Content, therefore they do not have a chance of randomly spawning in maps; they must be pureposefully added by the player.

Difficulty: Low-Average
Complexity: Very low, for Path of Exile standards.

The icon that denotes Harbinger content or rewards of the Harbinger type.

Depth 1 - The Harbinger

Unlike other past league mechanics, you don't have a baseline chance of randomly encountering Harbingers in your maps. As such, you'll need to use one of the following methods to interact with this mechanic:

• The Harbinger map crafting option, which costs 6 Chaos Orbs and guarantees three Harbingers in your map.
• The Harbinger Scarab, which does the same thing. You can use up to 4 of these per map!
• Allocating certain passive nodes on the Atlas Passive Tree, such as Ominous Arrival. We'll talk more about these in depth 4.

Alright, so you've gotten a Harbinger to spawn in your map, and now it's time to face it. Harbingers are floating blue men who:

• Cannot be directly damaged.
• Spawn waves upon waves of monsters. Killing these monsters will drain the Harbinger's health.
• Also spawn the occasional obelisk, which may have its own abilities such as a Proximity Bubble of a blue fire laser.
• Harbingers come in five flavors, depending on which skill they cast as an aura: Hatred, Wrath, Anger, Enfeeble or Assassin's Mark.

Basically, they're 'juice machines'. More monsters = more loot. They can also be currency machines. Let's take a look.

Sometimes, you may come across a bigger Harbinger...

Depth 2 - General Harbinger Loot

Aside from whatever its hordes of monsters may drop, Harbingers have their own special loot type that they drop when they die: Currency shards. Think Alchemy Shard, Chaos Chard, Exalted Shard. Yes, even the much-coveted Mirror Shard can drop from these folks, albeit still extremely rarely. Of all these shards, there's a few that only drop (more reliably) from Harbingers and from Harbinger-related rewards (rarely), which we'll discuss in Depth 4. Let's take a look at the table below, where you can see the special shards they drop, and right below, the currency they form when you collect 20 of them:

Note that Harbinger's Orbs also drop from 'map currency' reward chests (that have the Cartographer's Chisel icon). The rarest of these four is the Fracturing Shard, owing to its extreme power in crafting.

When a Harbinger dies, it has a chance to drop any of these currency shards, but more often than not it'll drop 'regular currency' shards, such as the ones we listed earlier. Harbinger shard drops are not affected by modifiers to Item Quantity from area modifiers or the player, except for a special case we'll talk about in Depth 4. Item rarity has no effect either, so it won't be easy to get the rarest of shards!

Here's a video of a regular encounter with a Harbinger in maps:

video

Depth 3 - The Beachhead & The Harbinger Boss

The Beachhead is a map where lots of Harbingers like to hang out. There's three ways to get this map:

• Using a Harbinger's Orb on a map will occasionally "corrupt" it into the Beachhead. Your original map's tier determines the Beachhead's tier:
  • Tiers 1-5 map -> Tier 5 Beachhead
  • Tiers 6-10 map -> Tier 10 Beachhead
  • Tiers 11-15 map -> Tier 15 Beachhead
• It may rarely drop from other sources, which we'll discuss in Depth 4.
• Just buy it from another player.

The Beachhead is a large map that's, well, an island, and islands have beaches. Scattered throughout the area are a whopping six Harbingers, and a whole lotta' monster packs that aren't particularly rewarding, but are pretty nice for farming experience. Note that the Beachhead is not on the Atlas, so your Atlas Passive Tree will have no effect here.

In the center of the map lies the cave / door that takes you to the island's summit, where you'll face the King Harbinger. Here's how the entire encounter goes:

• Once you approach the large, beautiful portal in the center of the summit, a regular Harbinger will come out.
• At this point, it's business as usual. Harbingers come out one by one for a bit as you keep killing monsters, but then, eventually you'll get to fight pairs of Harbingers.
• After a short while doing that, the King Harbinger comes out. He can be distinguished through his increased size, as well as the cape and crown he wears.
• This one has a higher health pool, and a few extra abilities. Shouldn't be anything too dangerous at this point, as long as you dodge!
• Once killed, the portal as well as the obelisks surrounding the arena will crumble into lots and lots of currency shards.

What's more, the central portal will also drop an "item piece". These are basically item 'shards', which, when placed together in a certain order in your inventory, will form a Unique item! For example, doing several Beachheads and collecting the First Piece of Brutality, Second Piece of Brutality and Third Piece of Brutality, you can then assemble them into The Enmity Divine! Check out all the possible Uniques below:

Here's a video of The Beachhead's boss fight:

Another item that can drop from this encounter is the Infused Beachhead Map, Harbinger league's "hardmode" encounter. The area is much harder to complete:

• Monsters have 100% more life and deal 100% more damage.
• Area contains 20 Harbingers instead of 6.
• It's a lot more profitable, of course!

The boss loot here is different to the regular map version. Aside from the very valuable Divination Card The Endless Darkness, the King Harbinger will drop a scroll, such as the Haemocombustion Scroll, which will transform our earlier Unique item example, The Enmity Divine, into its upgraded version, The Yielding Mortality! For all these Uniques, the differences between the regular and upgraded version is the skill they grant. For example:

• The Enmity Divine grants Summon Harbinger of Brutality, which summons a minion that buffs you every 20 seconds with 50% increased damage, 15% reduced damage taken, 30% increased movement and attack speed for 8 seconds.
• The Yielding Mortality grants Summon Great Harbinger of Brutality, which does the same thing, with the added bonus:
  • Bleeding Enemies that you Kill Explode, dealing 10% of their maximum Life as Physical Damage.

Pretty cool, eh? Here's a table showing each scroll, with its corresponding upgraded Unique below it. To get the upgraded Unique, you must use it with the regular Unique version:

Depth 4 - Harbinger Scarabs, Atlas Passive Tree & Other Harbinger Loot Locations

We've already covered how you can guarantee Harbingers in your maps. Now, let's see what else we can use to get more out of Harbinger content, starting with the other Scarabs:

• Harbinger Scarab of Discernment - one of the few ways to artificially increase the rarity of dropped currency shards, but you don't get to choose which one you'll get!
• Harbinger Scarab of Regency - 50% chance to replace regular Harbingers with King Harbingers! Note these map Kings will not drop Unique item pieces.
• Harbinger Scarab of Warhoards - double the currency shards!

In addition, there's a few nodes on the Atlas Passive Tree that are really useful to [we're doing this later]

Now, what if you want to get some Harbinger loot but don't want to interact with the mechanic itself? There's a few options available, which you can check out by opening the box below.

Other Considerations

Perhaps talk about how Harbingers are sometimes one of the main mechanics people use to farm currency to the max?