Why Unique Weapons are too Strong in PoE

"

sucrecandie wrote:

For me the problem doesn't come from too strong uniques, but for the near impossibility to craft/drop a competitive rare.

It depends on the weapon type.
Weapons that have endgame uber uniques.. there's no point in attempting a craft.
It's damn near impossible to craft a 2h Axe better than Disfavour.

...but you can craft some pretty nice foils or 1h swords with 300+ dps quite cheap (I crafted a couple dozen this league, and crafting cost was always below "market price").

crafting in it's current state is a horrible RNGfest time and currency sink

only the people who trade and/or scam all day and the lottery winners are the ones who can craft really nice weapons

oh and over 99% of the rares you pick up are pure garbage, out of the remaining one percent, over 99% of those are worth maybe 2-5c at best and dont work for your build. if you bought one lottery ticket per league and picked up every good base of your chosen weapon type you would probably win the lottery first before you find a good weapon

dont take away my cheap uniques that let me get by until i can buy something better (because god knows you will never find it yourself) thanks

"

Frankenberry wrote:

And that's cool. I am not saying GGG should take that away from you or anyone else. I am saying it's bit silly that in many if not most cases uniques have become superior choices to even very well rolled rares.

Well, than please no nerf to the uniques (that let me get by despite the horrible rares).

Plus, for most uniques, there are better rares possible. The problem is just that they are just theoretical possibilities, and most of those possibilities will never actually exist, because the chance of them dropping is a LOT smaller than the chance for dropping a mirror.

"

Frankenberry wrote:

You can clear all content with so many different items out there. The problem is when Lioneye's Glare, Doomfletch Prism, Atziri's Disfavour or Starforge becomes so strong that it discourages even wealthy players from attempting to craft a good weapon because chances are so slim.

Yeah. But the problem is not the too good unique items, but the too bad rares.


EDIT: Just saw one of the streamers report in one of his videos that he hit the Merciless roll for the 10th time in 45000 Alterations, so 4500 Alterations on average for a Merciless roll.

As others are saying, the problem as stated is backwards. Rares are in a horrible place right now.

Yes, I agree that GGG fucked up a little by making some uniques ridiculously powerful, but that horse is already out.

Nor would I say that the solution is to buff rares indiscriminately, which would be the knee-jerk response. (And we all know GGG never does knee-jerk responses, right? :P )

Rather, the overwhelming number of trash rares needs to go, especially when it comes to weapons. Here's a (probably oversimplistic) brute force solution that I came up with after about 5 seconds of thought:

For all rare weapons with certain stats < (X / ilvl), that rare doesn't even drop. That's right, instead of making your players filter out garbage that they can't filter out anyhow because it is hidden behind an unidentified state, you do it for us so that we can start to feel incentivized to actually pick up and identify rares again.

Well, that was my 5-second solution. As simplistic as it is, it would be a huge improvement for most players. And it shouldn't be hard to come up with a better one. But the solution should match the problem, and the problem is that 99.9% (or more?) of rare weapons suck right now.

it works like this:

content requires XY ammount of 'power' to complete and ZZ to 'steamroll'

if uniques (that are more or less guaranteed to be available) can both 'complete' and 'steamroll' - noone will ever bother with rares. because why? if you steamroll something with starforge - will you EVER need a mirrored rare 2h sword?

if uniques are enough to complete but not steamroll (like Doomsower - you can kill shaper with it, but it wont be 15sec/phase encounter) the content you can have two scenarios:

- the content is 'worthwile' (profitable, fun, engaging, bragging-rights - whatever really) then people have motivation to get something better than the guaranteed unique -> thus people pickup and craft rares
- the content is 'one-time affair'. well.. then you do it once and it no longer matters that your unique weapon is barely 'ok' for it. you did it, took you 10 minutes instead of 5 but it is all done. you do not need rare upgrade. why bother picking rares up (not even mentioning gamblin)



other side of the coin: rare phys weapons without high IPD are worthless no matter what. games like Grim Dawn moved most of the damage out of the IPD roll into the weapon itself. this solved lots and lots of stupid itemization issues.

yet another: elemental weapons.. pointless. added elemental sources are FAR stronger than weapon rolls. 2.02APS foil with T3/T4 ele rolls is better than master crafted vaal rapier with T1 ele rolls. just because ASPD multipliers the external sources and results in far higher effective dps

in general it is just matter of numbers: uniques are now stronger than what can be realisticaly crafted/found by 'normal' players in normal circumstances AND are enough to complete the game

so why bother?

"

Peterlerock wrote:

...but you can craft some pretty nice foils or 1h swords with 300+ dps quite cheap (I crafted a couple dozen this league, and crafting cost was always below "market price").

1h swords with ~340 pDPS or rapiers with ~300 pDPS are just "nice", and nothing more. They are crafted with mere catching "merciless" prefix with alts and adding all other mods with masters. A really well rolled rapier can have 600 pDPS, and 1-h sword - even more!

Getting anything significantly better that "merciless+multimod" with current chances to get high-tier physical rolls, is near-impossible.
For 2-handeded axe, this crafting method gives you 500 pDPS axe, for example.

If we take rings, for example, then getting 4x(T1-T2) desired mods isnt so hard. You can get a ring with T1 life, WED, flat physical and resist for several exalteds (maybe, 10). To get a 600 pDPS rapier (4xT1 mods as well)? It doesnt exist even, 500-pDPS rapier is shown for mirror service only!

I think that high-tier physical damage mods on weapons should NOT be so incredible rare as they are. They should have approximately the same chances as all other mods. And game should be rebalanced a bit accordingly, so well-rolled weapons wont be so incredibly rare, and so godly powerful when you get the one.

I already said it, but i'll repeat - the odds to get T1 physical roll are ~1/5000 (if not less), T2 - 1/2000. While for most mods, odds to get T1 range from 1/100 to 1/200. Such low odds to get desired mods are DETRIMENTAL to the game.

"

I_NO wrote:

Fuck that.

Yeah, i'm having a blast with my glare and i have it since lvl 50-60, bought it when i couldn't even use it, for real. It's actually very tranquilizing for me not having to worry about the gear chase too much (for key items at least) specially on weapons since crafting it is a pain, very unbalanced and currency consuming and may give you nothing in the end, i remember a friend saying he was like 20ex deep into a 6l lvl 83 white harbinger base and nothing good yet, buying it as well (specially if there wasnt any good unique bows); i had a ton of luck in essence league, like 20c worth of essences, got a 360 dps 9 crit 1.38 aps harbinger with a shrieking loathing essence (never 6led it tho, even now in standard).

The gear chase i focus is on jewerly and other rares, but i nevermind the weapon because its just too agonizing (for ppl with anxiety i guess, which is mostly everyone nowdays xD); also i'm not casual as you can check my profile, not hardcore either, but that seems like a very elitist point of view. The gear grind and crafting is just too RNG-related for rare weapons atm, if it had better failsafes i would like it, something like mmo's resource-expensive, but guarnateed success, legendary weapon recipes.
And if there such a thing is implemented, i hope it's not like vorici 1500 fus which is most of the time more expensive than 6linking stuff by hand -.-

I keep upgrading my build through very cunning changes mixed in the tree + rare top notch jewels and other items, and using path of building to confirm i'm not just loosing money/power.

"

MortalKombat3 wrote:

"

Peterlerock wrote:

...but you can craft some pretty nice foils or 1h swords with 300+ dps quite cheap (I crafted a couple dozen this league, and crafting cost was always below "market price").

1h swords with ~340 pDPS or rapiers with ~300 pDPS are just "nice", and nothing more. They are crafted with mere catching "merciless" prefix with alts and adding all other mods with masters. A really well rolled rapier can have 600 pDPS, and 1-h sword - even more!

Getting anything significantly better that "merciless+multimod" with current chances to get high-tier physical rolls, is near-impossible.
For 2-handeded axe, this crafting method gives you 500 pDPS axe, for example.

If we take rings, for example, then getting 4x(T1-T2) desired mods isnt so hard. You can get a ring with T1 life, WED, flat physical and resist for several exalteds (maybe, 10). To get a 600 pDPS rapier (4xT1 mods as well)? It doesnt exist even, 500-pDPS rapier is shown for mirror service only!

I think that high-tier physical damage mods on weapons should NOT be so incredible rare as they are. They should have approximately the same chances as all other mods. And game should be rebalanced a bit accordingly, so well-rolled weapons wont be so incredibly rare, and so godly powerful when you get the one.

I already said it, but i'll repeat - the odds to get T1 physical roll are ~1/5000 (if not less), T2 - 1/2000. While for most mods, odds to get T1 range from 1/100 to 1/200. Such low odds to get desired mods are DETRIMENTAL to the game.

I'll add a bit to that, that again, rares have to be nearly top of the line to be worthwhile. This axe has about 320 dps, but the unique effect of ignoring mana costs is insane depending on the ability (Dominating blow which costs 81 mana in a 6L for some reason) or wanting to reserve all your mana. There's little reason to trade it out for a different 1h with marginally better paper dps. The upgrade must be substantially better to warrant the cost of giving up these effects.

In the end, it's not a matter of uniques being better, but good rares far too rare.

The way I see it, GGG only has 2 options when it comes to this.

The first is to just increase some regularity of t1 damage rolls, whether dropped or crafted. I think people would be more inclined to attempt to craft at least with alts/regals/chaos if they had a better chance for something worthwhile, or even pick up decent bases of weapons.

The second option is to just rework boss drops. If Boss drops instead were identified and could not roll below a certain tier (i.e. nothing under t3 affixes on a t16) that'd be the best. There's still rng that limits drops, but it's not so steep as to be prohibitively rare.

In any case, I remember one of their interviews way back in the past, they said something along the lines of "rares should be the ultimate power of endgame" or something like that. Right now, it's true, but it rares that good are just far too rare to be a feasible goal.

When you have 600-800 dps rare 2-handers going for triple digit exalt costs or hoping for an actual dang mirror drop to obtain one, it's almost always better to just pick up a Headhunter as it's cheaper and often times provides more power.

As mentioned, good rares are very rare, & after playing the league since the first week, only today did I find a weapon with over 150%phy damage on a rare, & its still lousy, as the other stats are bad.

Adding to the fact meta crafting is so expensive for many if not most player base, & the value for getting a GG rare is poor. You will be paying exponential price for margin to moderate gains in power. You could payl upwards of well over 50x the price of a rare that is marginally better than a unique, currencies that could be better spend for decking out other gears.

ratio of usage of rare/unique armors & jewellery are more balance as the odds of getting good rares are better, as its fare easier to get good & high tier stats on them, also base don't matter as much.