There are so many bad uniques, I'm never excited to find one.

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Squishydew wrote:

Basically, i quit a long time ago because of the desync issues, lockstep fixed that and i came back when breach league started.

In that short time, I've completely lost any and all excitement for finding uniques, because 9 out of 10 times they're worth 1 alch and are for the most part useless to me.

I feel like finding a unique should always be a fun rewarding experience, which it currently simply isn't.

I'm not saying make good uniques drop like candy, thats what turns diablo 3 boring so quickly, but the current system feels pretty unrewarding.

I kindly dis-agree.
I hoard every unique I can. I know eventually, possibly, one day a build could come up that hits big with youtubers or twitch casters that will possibly sky rocket the price. Also, Some of the cheap uniques help a lot for fast leveling.

Then again, I haven't memorized every unique. I know when I played D3, and how often uniques drop I literally didnt care anytime one dropped.

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EwokVillage wrote:

I kindly dis-agree.
I hoard every unique I can. I know eventually, possibly, one day a build could come up that hits big with youtubers or twitch casters that will possibly sky rocket the price. Also, Some of the cheap uniques help a lot for fast leveling.

Then again, I haven't memorized every unique. I know when I played D3, and how often uniques drop I literally didnt care anytime one dropped.

Outside of Standard, this isn't a sound strategy ;)

Interesting topic. I agree that a lot of the gutted uniques are a shame now. Used to be that The chimeric mace was the "Trolljner" then they actually shit on mjolner and that unique itself is the bigger joke.

There are a LOT of dead uniques. That being said, there are interesting league uniques that constantly come out which makes it decent. I'm not a big fan of "all the good uniques behind chayula" and everything else is meh model...but it is what it is.

I agree with a lot of what people are saying here. The main problem is the gap between upper tier uniques.

THere are no mid-high tier uniques. There is nothing between shavs/kaoms heart and Skyforth. You either get a decent unique (which also can be obtained by lesser rewarding card system) or you drop/chance a GG fucking unique that is so rare it might as well not exist in the game.

They need to close that mid-high tier gap as i think a lot of people stop playing once their build is complete simply because there is no reason to use their build to farm any longer.

I know I have been creating more and more characters every league simply because end game is boring as fuck to me. I have no interest in grinding shaper over and over again for currency...because what would i really do with that currency? Buy more maps? For what? Buy a skyforth/headhunter? Then what?

There is nothing really left to farm for and that is a huge issue imo.

ALSO I am sick of pure power uniques. I love interesting uniques that change game mechanics not "1 million DPS" uniques or "Here you are unkillable" uniques. Those suck ass imo because it gear locks you for builds when you know no other item would fill that slot.

Prisus, sounds like you need to play SSF in the next league.

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mrpetrov wrote:

Prisus, sounds like you need to play SSF in the next league.

Not a bad recommendation mate. I was considering it to be completely honest. Only problem is that i love melee builds and melee self found is 10x worse for melee than it is spell casters (imo). I know there are ways to get ahead of the gear curve for melee but it's still annoying being so weapon locked.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Just for a point of reference, friends, I play a lot of vanilla Titan Quest. That means no muling at all, so I get plenty of "bad" epics for my characters. But they're always level appropriate and always make me eager to find them on another character. Most of them are really bland compared to PoE uniques but they usually sit at the higher end of level power.

They also sell well to the vendor.

Of course, characters in TQ are much simpler than in PoE so I can empathise with GGG's struggle to make uniques meaningful for very, very different characters...but they made this bed.

I think the big problem is the idea of meta build enabling uniques. Meta defining uniques. It's lazy design and creates very unfair standards. Uniques should ideally be either quite strong across a wide board (astramentis, rainbowstride, and the revamped crown of thorns come to mind), very strong for a much more limited style (eg wings of entropy, Marohi erqi, daressos defiance, cherubs maleficence) or stupid strong for their level with possible drawbacks (eg my swords, bringer of rain, facebreaker). At least one of these did become meta, but nowhere near as pervasively as, say, Shavs, binos or of course Skyforth.

Meta should ideally be defined by rares, which should in turn be ultimately undeniably stronger than any unique. Uniques are about reliability. You know one version of a unique is likely very similar to another. Reliable meta-level power belongs only in games where rares don't exist and it takes ages to get, eg most Mmos. In an ARPG, it's a mistake to let uniques outshine rares, and doubly so in PoE where you can spend a lot fine-tuning your rares.

Just a few thoughts.

Tq is a bad example gear wise,since uniques there in the end is pretty much like d3's,best legendary sets for its situation(alexander comes to mind,all this years and this set stuck on my head)

But I agree,the best thing is for rares to be above uniques longterm.Uniques should be filing niece categories.

But we are getting away from OP.

I find uses in most uniques, not considering them all bad

In PoE uniques aren't categorically stronger than rares. The categorical difference between uniques and rares is that uniques have consisten stats whereas rares are all over the place and can be crafted to perfection albeit costing a lot of currency. Now, the interesting uniques are those that have stats/mechanics that can't be replicated with crafting, whether it's +500/1000(legacy) life Kaom's Heart that is significantly higher than the highest possible life role in any armor(or any item in general) or a unique ability like Shav's chaos doesn't ignore ES mechanic. There are many unique mechanics in this game, but only a handful that are actually powerful, like the above mentioned Shav's, Skyforth's, Cospri's, etc. Shav's and Skyforth's are unique in the sense that they're not merely enabling a specific build but an entire build archetype: low life, which along with CI and life make the 3 build archetypes in PoE. Similarly(but to a much lesser extent) life builds are reliant on Kaom's Heart(or at least Belly of the Beast) to have a high enough life total to be competitive, but this isn't a unique mechanic just overloaded raw numbers and because of that isn't 100% necessary like Shav's is to low life builds but similar to how Skyforth's is amazingly good but not technically a must have.

It seems that most people here hate low life builds and the ridiculousness they allow, which makes them hate Shav's and Skyforth's for enabling these builds. However archetype enabling uniques aren't necessarily bad as more build archetypes makes the game more interesting as a whole. The issue is with low life itself, enjoying all the advantages of CI(a significantly larger health pool) while bypassing the disadvantages of being ES based and without CI with Shav's(negates the problem with chaos damage) and Skyforth's(negates the problem with stuns). Now, Skyforth's itself is also good in CI builds for the same reasons it's good in low life builds but at least there are alternatives to it like the keystone or Eye of Chayula for the stuns and other power charge generation methods for that aspect. For that reason I don't personally view Skyforth's as a problematic item. It's simply a very powerful one and also incredibly rare(unlike Atziri's Promise for example which is also incredibly powerful but also very common) which is why it's so insanely expensive, but every build that wants it can use alternatives. Shav's on the other hand is a true build enabler, without it low life simply can't exist as even the tiniest of chaos damage will always wreck these builds. Now, there technically is an alternative to it, it's called CI but than it becomes a different build. Now, Shav's has 1 disadvantage: it has no ES, however all the other benefits of going low life(Pain Attunement and extra auras) more than make up for that and some ascendancies make up for it further.

So basically out of all the uniques in the game, Shav's is hands down the best one because it enables the best possible builds in PoE. Low life is simply stronger than both CI and life because more multipliers are amazing and because there are many powerful auras in this game. It only makes sense that the most powerful build will also be the most expensive, so in that sense it's fine. But still low life breaks too many mechanical limitations. If it wasn't for Shav's none of it would be possible.

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Prisus wrote:

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mrpetrov wrote:

Prisus, sounds like you need to play SSF in the next league.

Not a bad recommendation mate. I was considering it to be completely honest. Only problem is that i love melee builds and melee self found is 10x worse for melee than it is spell casters (imo). I know there are ways to get ahead of the gear curve for melee but it's still annoying being so weapon locked.

I have played almost entirely SSF since Beta, below is the first good 2 hander I have ever found

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Squishydew wrote:

Basically, i quit a long time ago because of the desync issues, lockstep fixed that and i came back when breach league started.

In that short time, I've completely lost any and all excitement for finding uniques, because 9 out of 10 times they're worth 1 alch and are for the most part useless to me.

I feel like finding a unique should always be a fun rewarding experience, which it currently simply isn't.

I'm not saying make good uniques drop like candy, thats what turns diablo 3 boring so quickly, but the current system feels pretty unrewarding.

Yesterday I did my Zana rotation and just 2 or 3 T12 maps and found 3 Icetomb chest...

Most are good. I was face rolling red maps with a 1alc nycta which is a 6L couple leagues back. Are they GG no but still good. Who doesnt like wunderlusts or lifesprig starting out?