You know what game has really strong unique item design?

Plants vs Zombies. The first one. The mobile game.

Is it difficult to acquire the unique items? Not at all! They're automatically given to you at the end of each quest completed. No RNG to it at all.

Despite this, is acquiring new unique items exciting? Yeah.

Do they all do rather different things? Yes, very much so.

Do they enable various builds with different weaknesses and advantages? Yeah. They do have this semi-p2w "more gear slots" feature so getting that undermines that pretty severely (why play one build when you can play two or three simultaneously?) but if you don't buy more slots there's a heck of a lot of meaningful choice.

Are some builds better against different content than others? Sure.

Do you get free respecs? Absolutely, one after each quest. That way you can easily incorporate the new item into a new build, or keep plugging away with your old one.

Does item progression stop once you get all the unique items? Yes, because there's no way to string that on forever. But thankfully, right around that point, the game itself ends, so you don't need to worry about it - you're done.

Is the game casual as fuck? Yep.

Plants vs Zombies: a game that actually understand unique items and implements them properly.

On the other hand, if you're making a game for "infinite" randomized replay value, then it only stands to reason the gear players make build with needs to be full random as well. Every item in a game with, say, the Torchlight 2 map mechanic should be affix-based.

Explain torchlights mechanics more, I think you did it once or brought it up before but I don't recall what the answer was.

Unique items wouldn't be that bad if there were fewer best-in-slot unique items. The problem is that some of the strongest builds in this game rely on certain uniques, and most of the slots can often be filled with uniques as well.

The fact that very few unique armour pieces and rings/amulets/belts have life on them is a great start. They should just have been more strict there. Also unique items should usually not provide the stuff you would be usually looking for on the item (except for movement speed on boots) - making you "pay" for using uniques and limiting the total number of uniques without running into life, ES, resist, stat, or all of those problems.

Unique weapons are a different thing. Windripper (MF on stat ailments), Voltaxic (lightning to chaos), Atziri's Disfavor (bleed), Hegemony's Era (power charge on knockback), Void Battery (bonus on power charges) are all great design ideas, but the fact that they are so strong combined with the fact that the average rare item is completely unusable kind of ruins it. I mean, why would I aim for anything but a Marohi or a Disfavor on an Earthquake character? Maybe Hegemony's works, too (never played EQ). But a rare? In a temp league? Why would I?

Unique weapons are kind of naturally harder to design well than unique everything-else, because there are only two essential stats on them you are looking for (DPS, crit) and if they don't provide these, they are kind of useless. And you only have one of them most of the time, so you cannot "balance it out" with other items.

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Char1983 wrote:

Unique items wouldn't be that bad if there were fewer best-in-slot unique items.

Except for the part where unique items are bad when very few of them are best-in-slot items. I think the closest one could get is tweaking the numbers so a poorly rolled unique merely enables a unique, while a perfectly rolled one feels distinctly better than a poorly rolled one... but don't you see, that's just "affixing" a unique item, making it a little less deterministic and a little more random.

A game like PoE should have unique affixes - maybe a prefix "Legendary" which has a different, often crazy mod on each different gear base. It shouldn't have the preformatted, deterministic items we ironically call "uniques." The lack of randomization does nothing but hold the itemization back.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

if you're making a game for "infinite" randomized replay value, then it only stands to reason the gear players make build with needs to be full random as well.

I disagree with this entirely. Item progression/endless item hunt is a very narrow and gimmicky way to obtain "infinite" replay value, and it doesn't work for players who aren't addicted to chasing a carrot.

Completing a build is fun. Finishing a character in fully optimized gear is satisfying. And achieving that doesn't negate replay value. Games with the best replay value are enjoyed even when you have all of the items [and one could argue that being able to fully complete a build in a reasonable timeframe is important in a game where vast meta changes and starting over from scratch every few months in a new league is a thing].

BIS uniques aren't holding it back. It's the opposite: Having a diverse set of gameplay changing items that target or unlock distinct builds, that players can fully explore and experience provides more replay value than having completely random everything. With completely random everything (i.e. adding all unique affixes to the rare affix pool), there'd be so much affix dilution that the time horizon to piece together a workable build defining gear set would be so long that players would spend the majority of their time playing a more homogenized pre-build build.

While your suggestions might help players who find enjoyment from an endless loot hunt, I believe this is a gross mischaracterization of the ARPG genre. IMO the vast majority of players gain the most enjoyment from playing the game with items, using the items, not simply searching for them. The more distinct items (toys) you have to play with, the longer and more satisfying your play session will be. Completely random items with extreme RNG in affix pool selection and quality doesn't help with this, they're more like broken toys.

In many cases players would be motivated to play more if it was easier to complete a build. The brutal grind and extremely poor loot quality in PoE is demotivating. I suspect it's a much greater contributor to poor new player retention than BIS uniques, since the majority of new players stop playing well before getting anywhere near BIS uniques.

I don't necessarily agree with the "put everything on random" either. However, especially for weapons: How many Marohi Erqi drop during the time in which one rare maul with the same DPS drops, on average? I've personally found 5 or 6 Marohis so far, and not a single rare maul that even comes remotely close. So why would I go for a rare maul then?

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Vhlad wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

if you're making a game for "infinite" randomized replay value, then it only stands to reason the gear players make build with needs to be full random as well.

I disagree with this entirely. Item progression/endless item hunt is a very narrow and gimmicky way to obtain "infinite" replay value, and it doesn't work for players who aren't addicted to chasing a carrot.

You misunderstood me then. I didn't say it's a way to obtain replay value at all; if that's what I meant, I wouldn't have mentioned maps, which are intended to obtain it. Instead, I'm merely pointing it that a system like maps, which is basically Endless Mode with a lot of random affixing to keep things interesting, deserves to be complemented with a similar "Endless Gearing Mode" which relies heavily on random affixing to keep things interesting.

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Vhlad wrote:

Completing a build is fun. Finishing a character in fully optimized gear is satisfying. And achieving that doesn't negate replay value. Games with the best replay value are enjoyed even when you have all of the items [and one could argue that being able to fully complete a build in a reasonable timeframe is important in a game where vast meta changes and starting over from scratch every few months in a new league is a thing].

"Negate" is a strong word; "contradicts" is better. Completing a build means part of the cycle of "kill things, get better, kill more things" is broken. I wouldn't say this is a deal-killer but it's definitely a negative (one which I imagine can be overcome). Personally, the only games where I have all the items and I still find engaging are those with strong PvP elements (ex: Hearthstone).

It's worth noting that beating a game can be fun, and watching those end credits roll knowing you've conquered all the game has to offer can be satisfying. I'm not trying to say deterministic itemization is an unusable design, I just feel it's best in games with deterministic - therefore finite - level design. And I guess in a "kill Malachai" sense, PoE actually could be looked at this way. So I guess unique items which are, say, Merciless viable aren't so bad. However, uniques designed for map viability are still antithetical to the kill-gear cycle.

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Vhlad wrote:

BIS uniques aren't holding it back. It's the opposite: Having a diverse set of gameplay changing items that target or unlock distinct builds, that players can fully explore and experience provides more replay value than having completely random everything. With completely random everything (i.e. adding all unique affixes to the rare affix pool), there'd be so much affix dilution that the time horizon to piece together a workable build defining gear set would be so long that players would spend the majority of their time playing a more homogenized pre-build build.

Here you're just flat-out wrong. Build-enabling uniques are binary, you have them or you don't, which means you have BiS or you don't even have your build. Putting the cool stuff as affixes would open up a huge range of items, ranging from the beginner/budget to the near-perfect. You make a critical error in thinking the vast majority of players want to complete builds; they merely want to enable them... which, with unique items, is unfortunately the same thing, as far as one gear slot is concerned.

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Char1983 wrote:

I don't necessarily agree with the "put everything on random" either. However, especially for weapons: How many Marohi Erqi drop during the time in which one rare maul with the same DPS drops, on average? I've personally found 5 or 6 Marohis so far, and not a single rare maul that even comes remotely close. So why would I go for a rare maul then?

I have at least one 90+ of each class (95, 95, 92, 92, 91, 90, 90), more below 90, and countless deleted characters from races, etc.

And I've found 0 Marohi Erqi. Zero. It has never dropped for me.

That you can't find a good rare 2H and find so many Marohi, it's just another example of extreme loot variance, rng, dilution, poor loot quality in PoE already being out of hand. GGG may like the drop rates/quality on average but for individuals the experience is poor. And no, trade doesn't solve everything.

If anything GGG should increase loot quality, reduce dilution, perhaps even bias synergistic affixes, bias higher ilvl affixes to high ilvl bases, or target drop tables to specific monsters/zones, etc. My understanding of ScrotieMcB's suggestion is that it goes in the opposite direction: increase dilution, pile on the random. Bleh

They should do all those things, but they won't.