Why i think it is important to boost Unique drop rates across the board

Introduction:

While discussing in this thread i came up with a way to communicate some thoughts i have been having about unique items and the current role they serve in the game.

I hope that you will consider the feedback GGG, and that you do not forget that players must be motivated to create a good game, it is not always enough that something is possible in some way.


Why it is relevant to discuss drop rates:

The build i am working on right now needs an auxium and a voltaxic rift. The farming stretch to get them will be 10h every single day for about 2 months, of doing the same areas over and over, a time in which i in comparison would have been able to acquire full gears on not just one but several characters in D2 by trading on bnet. I would have felt satisfied so many times, maybe over 30 times by the time i would be satisfied one time in PoE.

What i am trying to say is that there are too long barren periods, before you are even able to be satisfied to play with a fully functioning build, and that they result in player exodus. I do not think these barren periods are well balanced for rewarding gameplay.

The effect that i aim to accomplish by boosting drop rates of uniques is to straightforwardly reduce the value of uniques so that they are more easily attainable for people in general.

The reason i am not too worried about messing with unique drop rates is because they are only a part of endgame gear, rares are much rarer and i do not intend to make them any easier to acquire. In fact i would like to see eternals being much rarer so that they cannot be acquired for just 3 ex, which makes it harder to achieve perfect gears.

Unlike many others i also have no interest in self-found. It is a noble idea, but i prefer an open community where you can share items, trade and fight over loot.

There is a difference between judging when something is too much or when it is too little and simply seeing things as black or white. Seeing things as black or white leads to thinking in an absolute way such as: "drops must be rare else everyone will be BiS", and in doing so you neglect the entire spectrum of balance. I hope we can avoid these comments in this post and instead deal with why something is too much/too little.


How i envision the role of uniques:

A notion i had almost forgotten was that the D2 system of attainable unique items created playerbase and culture. When uniques where rather attainable and it was entirely possible to base builds upon just uniques, that created a flow of things, an easy-to-get-into-and-flow-with rhytm.

What D2 did not get right was that the rares in D2 were too weak. In PoE rares are not too weak, in fact for the vast majority of builds you only want 1-4 uniques at most if you consider BiS, or even half-bis gear which i think is just great as it is.

I would envision a game similar to D2 where the uniques were farmable and you sometimes find one of the good ones or at least semi good ones(think shako, but not Tyrael's). The ironic thing was that in D2, the very top uniques(and similar) were meant to be exceedingly rare, but in reality, due to bots, they were attainable by trade which turned out to be a great player experience.

Like in D2, everyone would be able to build characters that would function with these uniques, but when they needed to really gear their characters, when they decided to invest a serious amount of time in a character to maximize its power progression, they would eventually replace almost everything with rares since rares are simply better in terms of raw power.

Flashforward to PoE nowadays, we are not too far from that vision. New uniques are always being added and some have that function of being good mid-endgame, for example carnage heart, heup of all, rainbowstride, rathpith globe etc. However, they will never really serve that culture supporting function if they remain that rare.

Unique drop rates have to be increased across the board i believe, low, mid and high-end ones, but at the same time it is important that you still have more power to gain by acquiring rare items so that it is not only about getting fairly attainable uniques like in D2 and then being done.


Conclusion:

In the end, i am hoping for something along a 25-100% boost to unique drop rates all across the board, depending on the item.

I am also hoping there will be more uniques that can serve as an intermediate state until you get a good rare.

Then you'd get even more complaints about trash uniques.

What we need is a way to craft uniques, similarly to runewords in D2. Build-enablers should not be gated behind RNG.

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Novalisk wrote:

Then you'd get even more complaints about trash uniques.

What we need is a way to craft uniques, similarly to runewords in D2. Build-enablers should not be gated behind RNG.

Almost agree, but... RNG is RNG, either couple of items to make a single one out of them, or a single item as a whole.
But there's a but to that too, as you may want to buy missing part(s), so in the end you get it cheaper and faster.

That would actually benefit the GGG idea of this game, more player interaction.

Common build-enabling uniques tend to have very high drop rates. They're pretty abundant even in emerging economies. How many Crown of Thorns do you think the average map-farming player has found? My guild has a whole stash tab devoted to them.

It's rare uniques, like Astramentis or Kaom's you want boosted, right? Because that's what you're talking about/mean.

If Kaom's were common every single solitary life-user would wear one. That's more a fault of the current itemization of high end rares... but even so, it would not be better for the game if an item like Kaom's became more accessible. Rather, the itemization of non-uniques should be improved and more uniques should be added to the game. Once all base types have unique versions of them, you'll be more likely to find a unique.

Astramentis and Kaom's Heart aren't build enablers.

As Auxium and Voltaxic Rift aren't (the item OP mentioned he needs).

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Crackmonster wrote:

The build i am working on right now needs an auxium and a voltaxic rift. The farming stretch to get them will be 10h every single day for about 2 months, of doing the same areas over and over, a time in which i in comparison would have been able to acquire full gears on not just one but several characters in D2 by trading on bnet. I would have felt satisfied so many times, maybe over 30 times by the time i would be satisfied one time in Po

Those are no build-enabling uniques.
They are just so powerful that they allow very wealthy players to afford -not dealing with- reflect and - almost not dealing with- status ailment.

Play your build with an elemental bow and use Chayula - DF/Alpha's like everyone else, those items are definitely not mandatory to play a "build".

What you want is just the cake and the cherry on top of it at the same time, no wonder PoE is no just giving it like that, more like the opposite.

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tinko92 wrote:

Astramentis and Kaom's Heart aren't build enablers.

As Auxium and Voltaxic Rift aren't (the item OP mentioned he needs).

exactly.

There's a grand total of 2 build enabling uniques in the game - Facebreaker and Shavronne's Wrappings. And Shavs drop rate is the polar opposite of very high.

The problem is the lack of fairly common but still strong mid-tier uniques.

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kolton wrote:

There's a grand total of 2 build enabling uniques in the game - Facebreaker and Shavronne's Wrappings. And Shavs drop rate is the polar opposite of very high.

The problem is the lack of fairly common but still strong mid-tier uniques.

Aurumvorax (sp?) is pretty "build enabling" for the dual wielder without access to strong resists in other gear slots due to mod tiers at lower levels. It "enables" dual wield survivability until you gear out of it's usefulness (almost as if it were designed that way....).

My guild leader has a low life build without Shav's and is doing quite well, so is his build "enabled" or not? To read the forums, you would think that you couldn't even attempt such a build without Shav's in your pocket already. Now, would his build be even stronger with a Wrappings? Of course it would be, but to argue that the build can't be "enabled" without the item is to argue from ignorance.


Let's provide the OP with the conceit that his request is granted, and these items begin to drop more frequently. What next?

I'll predict: due to the RNG of item rolls not providing enough max roll uniques that drop with pre-linked max sockets, with exactly the socket colors needed to immediately slot support linkages we will get more posts just like the OP but presenting the argument that because every drop is not "optimal" the devs are "afraid" of "becoming great" and any player that disagrees with that assessment is small minded and incapable of seeing a bigger picture.


My solution to the "problem" presented in the OP post? We need some people in Standard with the items the OP so badly wants to just give him the damn things so he'll stop polluting the forums with multiple threads all demanding the exact same thing. Of course, I doubt even that would ease the sense of entitlement.

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anubite wrote:

Common build-enabling uniques tend to have very high drop rates. They're pretty abundant even in emerging economies. How many Crown of Thorns do you think the average map-farming player has found? My guild has a whole stash tab devoted to them.

It's rare uniques, like Astramentis or Kaom's you want boosted, right? Because that's what you're talking about/mean.

If Kaom's were common every single solitary life-user would wear one. That's more a fault of the current itemization of high end rares... but even so, it would not be better for the game if an item like Kaom's became more accessible. Rather, the itemization of non-uniques should be improved and more uniques should be added to the game. Once all base types have unique versions of them, you'll be more likely to find a unique.

I am not only asking for the big uniques to be boosted. I want them to be boosted all across the board. Someone above mentioned more trash complaints, but that will never be avoided because that is not related to droprate, but rather to that it becomes harder and harder to find an upgrade the further advanced your character is.

The worst thing that can happen from also increasing low unique drop rate is that people get more uniques to vendor that often vendor for many alchemy shards or even more than an orb of alchemy each, they are fine vendor goods. You may even risk that people start being generous in helping out newer players if uniques are more abundant.

I also wish for higher unique drop rates boosted, because i feel it would benefit the game if it was easier for people to acquire these uniques. It is a bit too rough now and i feel the balance of the drop rate is not right. I am only asking for a value of somewhere between 25-45% increase in drop rates of the top end items. It will still take hundreds of hours focused farming to earn enough currency for one of them.

On the topic of whether or not they are build enabling, there are many aspects.

I can tell you there are a great many players, including myself and those i play with who think like me exactly. Let me explain.

We theorycraft our builds to the highest degree of perfection we can possible do, constantly questioning our choices. We plan everything ahead for our builds. We have no interest in playing something random as we have already done that. We always aim to improve and move on. We play one build at a time and do not stop playing it until another build can steal our attention. We are idealistic people who think ahead, and assume that things will work out for us. We do not play hardcore because for us the objective and why we have always played ARPG's as our first choice is because we want to build and complete characters, not because we want to restart the process like some random game of counter strike.

To us, our builds are enabled by certain items. For example the build i am using now is flawed until i can acquire voltaxic and auxium. Let me explain.

Without Auxium i am slowed for many seconds by almost any cold damage. Without Auxium i am forced to use either Dream Fragments or Wanderlust. Due to the nature of the build, there is no choice for me, i must use wanderlust. That means without Auxium my build has a great weakness and it moves at reduced movement speed due to wanderlust. The build is also theorycrafted to require the +mana on auxium in order to use auras.

Now Voltaxic is the reason i want to play this build at all. The only reason i have interest in this build is because i want chaos damage and purple shocks. Simple as that nothing else, i have no interest in the build outside of that item, therefore it enables the build to me.

We have decided that Voltaxic is the coolest item in the game just yesterday, and it is no wonder i will be playing it. Style matters, power matters. That is our way, the way we have always played ARPG's and it is the epidome of desire, pure want wanting to build the coolest powerful characters since as long as we can remember and nothing else.

Can we adapt? Sure.
Do we? yes.
But? we always want to escape it, we are not happy there.

EDIT: Just in case someone is still in doubt. To us, they are 100% build enabling and we would never be building that build without them. You may attempt to claim that is not correct but that is the true nature of our feelings. It is not up for discussion, it is our reality.