Makes rares interesting again! Master-rares rarity

The gearing for characters have been lackluster boring recently, not only uniques too common, but rares (the real juicy part of a ARPG with random properties) are all the same and while T1 rares are worth, they are boring.

Although essence made they a little more interesting, it is not enough and also the dropped rares still boring making grinding items boring, only when crafting with essence u can get something unique-like.

My suggestion would be to create properties on rares that could be dropped, chaos reforged, exalted or regaled that would be blue like the master craft affixes, but these properties wouldn't be the generic master craft affixes, would be unique-like affixes that would be build enablers and perhaps borrow some of the more interesting unique affixes.

Because they would behave like a master craft, when you found one of those master-rares (which would be very rare like a new rarity above rare, but still in mechanically be the same as a rare with a master slot occupied), you wouldn't be able to master craft on them, thus this would be one of the drawbacks , you couldn't craft on demand the life or resist u needed for example. You also wouldn't be able to scour suffixes or prefixes or use elreon metamod, thus crafting them would be hard, because only yolo exalts could do the trick.

But why they would be worth and interesting? because someone of these mods could be unique-like mods, like having physical damage taken conversion, no sockets but high flat ES above t0, increase number projectile and so on. Because this properties would be weighted to be very rare, these item would bring flavor to the rare items without being to trivial to acquire. Also when rares with the mods dropped, they would be classified on the filter lists as master-rares, a tier above the common rares.

This would give a real bolt of excitement to gearing, as there would build enabling rares and some very unique combination of mods could appear that rivaled amazing uniques.

aI kinda agree. Rares have very marginal place in this game except to work as a filler for most builds out there. I've never seen a rare and looked at it and thought "Wow, this looks good, I wonder what I could build around it?"

Here's a good example:

It's not interesting at all, because there is astramentis. Pretty much nobody would buy that as a budget astramentis.

The certain exceptions for rares are mostly ES stuff. If you can roll 800+ ES regalia, it's great. If you can roll 500+ ES shield, it's great. But otherwise, don't bother. Also high damage modifiers on certain items are great, but still nothing special. And often they will not outperform decent uniques unless they roll t1-2 damage modifiers + attack/cast speed.

Essences, although a nice concept, don't really add much value. In my opinion it's not really worth it at all to try and craft with them anything unless we're talking about a craft where you really only want / need the guaranteed property (especially essence of hysteria).

And sadly there's no much gap between gg rares and just decent rares. Good rares don't really exist, because most of them have better unique alternatives. A good 6l life chest is usually not much better than a belly or carcass jack.

Essence craft, I guess, was supposed to solve this problem. But it really doesn't, because crafting with essences is just far too expensive.

With all that being said, what you propose would be ultimately hard to balance. Lot of uniques with interesting stuff comes with drawbacks. If you can do the same with rares without drawbacks... you're running into real issues.

Maybe some Master rare properties could come with built in with drawbacks on a second occupied slot property.
Others properties could occupy two slots by being split in two and thus the rare would have less properties then the max 6.

Also, they would be very very rare, so power would come at cost and being susceptible to random rolls.

bump because I can't wait for 3.0.

Its better now than ever. Every CI wears a rare chest, gloves, rings etc - maybe skyforth unique otherwise rare boots too and since 90% of ppl are CI all we wear are Rares.

Its life ppl pigion holed into unqiues like Cospris, Koams, Belly

The best way to make rares more interesting is for there to be different optimal 6xT1 setups.

It's really insanely boring when the best rare es chest is always:
- Flat ES
- % ES
- % ES/stun
- resist
- resist
- intel

It was the same last year, and the year before, and all the way back to 1.0. Changing the affixes to have >3 desirable prefixes and >3 desirable suffixes would make a world of difference. Even if it was 4 desirable, that's already 3x as many optimal 6xT1 setups.

Weapons have some variety, at the very least between flat ele and flat phys/%phys, and then again between crit and other suffixes, and the bases matter a lot more.

Make item affixes great again!

Need something like Nemesis mods for rare items.
I kind of wonder if Vaal orbs were supposed to do that with their implicit change. But with only a small chance of getting that and generally small values, it doesn't really work like that.