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

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Aim_Deep wrote:

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OwlRaider wrote:

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.

The disatvatge of LL is you're missing 500ES which is huge. I'm having a hard time hitting 10K ES which I consider bare minimum. Add skyforth it's even harder since it has like 65 es. Most people play CI not LL look around you'll see. Shavs is the glass cannon option too glassy for most. Might as well go beserker for 40% more and like 7K real life especially dual wielding or two handed