Why Unique Weapons are too Strong in PoE

(TLDR: Too strong Unique weapons and flat elemental gems discourage crafting of rare items. This leads to a lack of chase items in PoE. Rare items are worse than easily accessible unique weapons. This leads to lack of longevity in leagues. Unique weapons are often little more than "stat-sticks" which feels odd.)

In this post I am going to explain why I think unique weapons and flat elemental damage gems have become too strong and why I think this needs to change.

So let me start of by saying that I don’t claim to know all playstyles well. In fact I almost exclusively play bow builds. Still it my impression that if you look at reddit, twitch-streams and forums, builds generally speaking rely heavily on unique weapons instead of well-rolled rares. I think this is a shame for a few reasons.


Unique items
So with a lot of builds the damage part of your weapon is no longer an important part of your build. The abilities that a unique weapon offers is the important part.

A few examples.
Death’s Opus has become a quite popular weapon. Not because it offers a high damage, but because offers 2,5% base crit, 2 additional arrows and 100% crit multiplier. It’s a good choice as a weapon for builds that has scales completely of flat elemental damage from gems and jewelry.

Lioneye’s Glare. Far Shot, very high attack speed and hits cannot be evaded. The damage can be quite decent but honestly aside from the attack speed you don’t really need a high roll.

Some other types of uniques just have really great stats that they beat most of the very well rolled rare alternatives.
For instance for 2-hander melee builds Starforge and Atziri’s Disfavour are more or less the only two endgame options if you scale of physical damage. By endgame options I don’t mean that you can’t clear all content without these weapons but rather that they are – generally speaking – the best options out there.

Try to search in the current Harbinger League. There are currently 8 rare 2-handers for sale with a pDPS above 600 and almost 1200 unique weapons with a pDPS above 600.
With the introduction of these weapons that are very accessible the game strongly discourages players from crafting rares. And this is a bad thing for the game but I will get into that later.

Gems:
The added Lightning / Cold / Chaos / Ice Bite / Innervate / Immolate gems are very strong. Especially if you combine them (for instance Added Cold + Ice Bite). In itself that’s not a problem. One of the best things about PoE is that you can scale damage and defenses in many different ways. The problem here is that combined with unique items you can scale your damage purely of these gems so weapons become little more than “stat-sticks”.

Riddle me this: When was the last time you saw a bow build scaling flat elemental damage that utilized a well rolled rare bow with 300+ eDPS? The answer is most likely a very long time ago. Between Windripper, Voltaxic and even “physical bows” such as Death’s Opus or Lioneye’s Glare chances are they are better option the wast majority of the time.

A more few examples with video:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-9lydRPVigdLzqPp9nEsxw
Here is a Ace of Spades youtube channel. Now sadly he hasn’t played PoE since 2.6 so his builds are a bit outdated but most of them still works fine. His builds are very cheap and they still work great. Often he utilized cheap uniques that gave a player very high damage with very little effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAj47JcCTJM
here is Mathil with a very old wander. It mainly abuses Frostwall before it was changed but still… isn’t it odd that you can run around in tier 14 maps with a weapon without any stats and clear everything in seconds ?? Yes it’s outdated but the underlying point is the same: you can easily scale all the damage you need of gems and do just fine.

Why is this a problem for the game?
Because we need chase items. Here is a video posted the other day by Octavian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ_I9jPH14I. His main point is that PoE needs top-tier unique chase items to remain interesting.

I think he has a solid point and I would agree that we need chase items but I disagree that they should be unique items. In my humble opinion, rare items are much more fun to chase. Especially with the introduction of the annulment orb.

First of all once you got the hands on your unique chase item that is the end of the line. You can throw some divines on it but after a short while that’s it. It can’t really be upgraded any further and you have reached you goal.
With rare items you can (almost) always improve a bit further. It’s a constant process and it’s fun as an endgame option to keep crafting a better weapon.

An example:

The league before Prophecy I ended up with this rare bow. I had a lot of fun. Kept me going all the way to lvl 100. It wasn’t the best bow on the server but I crafted it myself and it felt good.



The next league I got this bow after 3-4 days. Basically I was handed a mirror-worthy bow on a silver platter and it felt bad. There was no chase. End of the line. I quit the league a few days after. I completely lost interest in the league and the game.



This is an example of why - in my opinion - rare items are much healthier for the game. It gives leagues some much needed longevity.

Unique weapons and the flat elemental gems are currently way too strong compared to a very well rolled rare weapon. I am not saying you shouldn’t’ be able to clear the game without the super top-tier rare weapons. I am saying they shouldn’t be the best options.

Starforge and Atziri’s Disfavour should be an excellent choice but they shouldn’t be so strong that almost all 2H melee builds out there ignore rare weapons as an option. Doomfletch Prism, Windripper or Death’s Opus should be solid choices but not so strong that they strongly discourage the use of a rare alternative.

Flat elemental gems should be a good choice for a build but honestly it feels weird that we can completely ignore flat damage on a weapon and use them mainly as “stat-sticks”.

What should be done?
This is where it gets tricky and controversial and I know a lot of players will disagree with me on many or all of the following proposals. Maybe don't even agree with the claim I made in my post so far.

In my opinion:
A) Drop rates of uniques should be lowered.
B) Shaper should be less accessible or only have a 25-40% chance to drop a unique item.
C) Elemental gems such as added lightning /cold / etc. should have their damage lowered.
D) Flat elemental damage enchants from Elreon should be lowered
E) Flat elemental damage from weapons should be increased so off-set the loss from jewelry and gems.
F) Elemental penetration from gems and unique jewels should be lowered a bit.
G) Unique items should be either be changed in a way so they are solid options but not better than 99% of the rare options that are out there. For instance the additional damage elemental damage from flat physical damage from Doomfletch Prism could be lowered to 3 x 85% instead of 3 x 110%. Starforge could have it’s damage lowered or have another disadvantage added.

Final thoughts:
I know some players would argue that this would only benefit the players that spend a lot of time on PoE and make top tier content inaccessible for “casuals”. I would disagree for a few reasons:

A) There would still be cheap builds out there that could clear all content. The absolute strongest gear just wouldn’t be as easily available.
B) If you encourage crafting of rares the supply of rare bows, axes, swords etc. would increase and thus the “casuals” would also gain access to that kind of gear. Maybe not the a 400+ pDPS bow but certainly one with 360 pDPS

Thank you for reading.

Fuck that.

wall of text, can you make it shorter

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Babymakerkiller69 wrote:

wall of text, can you make it shorter

there is a tldr :)

Basically rare items aren't used very much anymore because Unique Weapons are much cheaper and often even better than their rare counterparts. Rare items are great chase items that brings some much needed longevity to leagues.

Unique items should be strong but not stronger than top-tier rare items.

"

Frankenberry wrote:

Unique items should be strong but not stronger than top-tier rare items.

Ummm I don't think so? Best bow in the game were rare and best claw is rare + the cullin bender hmmm just example of that. Basically they should just remove unique all together. Because 99% it sucked or you might wanna be specific about a build that uses "unique" weapons?

"

Babymakerkiller69 wrote:

"

Frankenberry wrote:

Unique items should be strong but not stronger than top-tier rare items.

Ummm I don't think so? Best bow in the game were rare and best claw is rare + the cullin bender hmmm just example of that. Basically they should just remove unique all together. Because 99% it sucked or you might wanna be specific about a build that uses "unique" weapons?

Rare bow were superior before. Now unique bows are strong and easily accessible that GGG strongly discourages crafting of rare bows. Yes - in theory it is possible to create a bow that is better than the current best unique choices (except maybe doomfletch) but it's much more difficult. So balance between unique bows and rare alternatives is in my opinion is definitely completely off.

Off course mirror-tier weapons are still better than uniques but honestly it's a bit silly to compare mirror-items with uniques. Compare strong and well rolled rares with uniques.

Claws: Yup. Luckily GGG hasn't added a claw that made rare claws and claw crafting obsolete. I think claws are honestly in a fairly decent spot.

If you read my whole post try to take a look at 2H rare weapons and compare them to Atziri's Disfavour and Starforge. In my opinion it's fairly evident that these uniques are too strong and discourage any use of rares.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I don't think GGG are anywhere near experienced enough to find this balance. It's going to be one or the other: either uniques are doing something broken rares cannot, or rares are simply obviously stronger numerically regardless of said quirks.

Apologies for not writing more or engaging deeper

No apology needed =)

Well I think GGG actually found a decent balance with some weapon types. For instance rare elemental damage wands and rare claws are popular choices.

I definitely think it would make a big difference if GGG nerfed flat elemental damage from gems / jewelry and increased it on rare weapons. This way it would be harder to scale damage purely of gems / jewelry and use your weapon slot as a "stat-stick" (for instance Death's Opus).

But yes. It's a hard balance :)

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鬼殺し wrote:

I mean, if they're proudly admitting that Berserker is ridiculously popular, far more popular than any other ascendancy by a long, long, long shot, then I read that as them being okay with an obvious metagame. Same with uniques vs rares, or even uniques vs other uniques. This is just part of the long term plan.

As long as people keep playing and keep supporting (ostensibly, keep enjoying). Bottom line.

I suppose there is some truth to that. Still that won't keep me from giving feedback and hoping GGG will change a few things here and there =)

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Babymakerkiller69 wrote:

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Frankenberry wrote:

Unique items should be strong but not stronger than top-tier rare items.

Because 99% it sucked or you might wanna be specific about a build that uses "unique" weapons?

Well maybe you should read the post xD? Specific builds are besides the point.

Before you make game changing suggestions, you should really learn the difference between a 'gem' and a 'jewel'.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Before you make game changing suggestions, you should really learn the difference between a 'gem' and a 'jewel'.

Care to be more specific ?

In my post:

Jewelry = rings, amulet and belt.

Gems = skill gems and support gems.

Jewels = passive tree jewel slots... jewels.

Unique jewels = Unique jewels (often threshold jewels) such as Fight for Survival.

I am fairly certain I didn't make mistakes through the post. If you can point out a mistake by all means tell me so I can edit :)

The reason I spend some time discussing gems is the interaction between "stat-stick" unique weapons and flat damage gems such as added lightning damage. It's not that one or the other is too strong. It's the interaction between the two.