Path of Exile: Harbinger League - Beasts, Fragments, and Spheres from TomRiva's blog

In the Harbinger League, the game introduces new changes with fresh monsters and mechanics. Harbingers are a bit like Breakers but smaller and less chaotic. You can't target them directly, although they occasionally attack you. When you come across a Harbinger while wandering in Wraeclast's world, there's a blue pack nearby. Killing this blue pack summons smaller creatures. As you defeat these spawned minions, the Harbinger's health decreases until it's defeated. Defeating these creatures earns you fragments of different currencies.

Battles with Harbingers can be a bit slow at times, but the excitement ramps up when these smaller creatures suddenly gather around you, especially when you can make them explode. This mechanic increases the density of maps in Path of Exile, making the Harbinger League more engaging. While it might not be as thrilling as Breach, it's still a dependable concept.

The real issue with Harbinger Outlaws lies in the rewards. Engaging with them is high-risk, high-reward; you can swiftly eliminate hundreds of creatures within seconds but also sustain incredible damage. While Harbinger groups bring danger and dozens of foes, the rewards are almost absent.

Harbinger Outlaws won't drop regular items; instead, they provide PoE Divine Orbs item fragments. They also introduce some entirely new currency items, which we'll cover later. These fragments are somewhat plain. The fragment system in the Harbinger League feels underwhelming. When I took a 30-second break from mapping to kill a Harbinger pack, I hoped to see three or more Chaos Shards drop.

Generally speaking, Harbinger Outlaws seem to drop about half Chaos items. This means that if you're solely interested in currency, stopping to engage Harbinger Outlaws might not be worth it. The problem lies in the scarcity of expensive shards and the accumulation of cheap ones. There's no real reason for a stack of Chaos Shards to need to reach 20, but it does.

The rarity balance between valuable shards and actual valuable Orbs of Fusing doesn't have a good explanation. Of course, there are also Mirror Shards, the truly expensive drops from Harbinger monsters, each worth two Chaos. Harbinger lesser creatures frequently bring us low-value drops.

It's worth noting that the new types of fragments take up a significant amount of inventory space. Harbingers drop twelve distinct types of fragments. Twelve. Even if you ignore valuable and Mirror Shards, you still end up with two whole rows of inventory filled with small items. Now, they don't all neatly fit into the "Currency" tab either.

Harbingers also bring six new types of currency items. Binding Orbs, Engineer's Orbs, Horizon Orbs, Harbinger's Orbs, Ancient Orbs and Path of Exile Chaos Orbs, and Annulment Orbs. Some of these are decent, some very powerful, and some become less useful around level 40. All six are exclusive to the Harbinger League.

The first three spheres are very common. The most prevalent among them is the Binding Orb. It upgrades normal items into rare items with up to four linked sockets. Being able to craft four-linked items at levels 20-40 is quite potent. However, beyond that, Binding Orbs lose their utility.