Uniques: Useful or useless?

Are Doomfletch or Storm Cloud viable as end game weapons? Are there any builds that successfully take advantage of them?

This guy has gotten Doomfletch to work endgame, but you need to build around it: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/955414

Storm Cloud is not going to be useful endgame.

A number of uniques are good for levelling but not much else.

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viperesque wrote:

This guy has gotten Doomfletch to work endgame, but you need to build around it: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/955414

Storm Cloud is not going to be useful endgame.

Yeah, unfortunate that it requires a lot of investment.

Thanks viperesque.

As a general rule, uniques that have powerful beneficial mods that don't occur on rares in that slot (e.g. extra curses, max resists, hits cannot be evaded and so on), an extreme version of a basic stat bonus (e.g. Kaom's) or simply have very strong stats overall have the potential to be best in slot for some build. Keystones on uniques are occasionally enough to justify wearing the item (only one I can think of is Cloak of Defiance, because MoM is so far away from the natural home of big mana builds).

Everything else will eventually be outclassed by some rare, although the rare may take a while to acquire.

Best belt for physical damage builds.

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CommodoX wrote:

Best belt for physical damage builds.

If you need flat physical, arguably yes.

However, for anyone that needs %physical, which would be anything but Facebreaker and Pillar of the Caged God, you would want either a good rare belt or:



31% increased physical damage? Hot damn. Imagine a crit dagger that already does about 100-250 physical damage. That 10-20 from your suggested belt won't do close to half of what this belt would do.

Edit:

Oh, don't forget the strength adds physical damage too.

Although that 10% increased life is more valuable now that it was prior to 1.2.

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

Although that 10% increased life is more valuable now that it was prior to 1.2.

Quite true.

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Natharias wrote:

31% increased physical damage? Hot damn.

Not so hot if you calculate all the % increased physical damage nodes from the skill tree. This belt is worth 2 skill points, each 15% increased physical damage.

I prefer the flat damage, I have enough IPD on my Tornado Ranger.