Old uniques are becoming obsolete

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More recently GGG has been attempting to make uniques "too interesting" by creating an extremely tiny niche which allows it to perform slightly better than other items if you align 50 other things just right.

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Astasia wrote:

I don't feel like their original design philosophy for uniques was ever going to work. It doesn't matter how much power creep exists, it's always been a fact that rares were simply better than most uniques, so no matter how interesting they might be to use there isn't really any reason to do so.

The exception has been uniques that fall outside of this balance, things like Headhunter which in most situations is significantly better than any rare belt.

The concept of "leveling uniques" sounds great, except how much time is actually spent "leveling" in this game? People can hit 70 in 4 hours, and about the only unique most people consider to speed that up is tabula. How much power does something add vs. how much power is actually needed to quickly clear? You don't need a leveling item that doubles your power output for 20 minutes worth of leveling when you are already killing everything in one hit with no real investment. This isn't power creep, this is just raw gem damage and early content being a joke.

More recently GGG has been attempting to make uniques "too interesting" by creating an extremely tiny niche which allows it to perform slightly better than other items if you align 50 other things just right. The problem is, why do that? Why jump through hoops when a decent rare is easy to alch/essence/fossil and gets you through most of the content without issues?

I don't see a solution, they either have to make uniques competitive, or most of them will just remain useless. There's a reason most other games in the genre make uniques strong and add endgame scaled versions so they are always fun and useful. Rares are not fun or interesting (99% of them), they are stat sticks, why make that the focus of your game?

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caboom wrote:

uniques should fall into 2 categories

first is build enablers. Uniques like whispering ice, facebreaker, pillar of the caged god,etc...

second ones are min-max uniques, They have one or two monster mods and plenty of drawbacks to avoid making it a no brainer. kaoms heart comes to mind, It gives more health than any rare chest will ever give but in exchange you loose sockets and other mods making it a hard choice for most builds.

uniques that dont belong to those 2 categories will either be worst than rares and as a result vendor trash like many of the so called "leveling uniques" or better than rares in wich case they become overpowered and a no brainer for most builds.

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Exile009 wrote:

I mean, they've updated a bunch of them just this patch. And some of them are actually good now. For instance, Bitterdream - yes, that sceptre that's the subject of so many memes and complaints - is now awesome for leveling. It combines great with Arcanist Brand and Freezing Pulse or Ice Nova. So much so that you can even completely skip on needing to buy a Tabula!

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Phrazz wrote:

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

The reality is that most uniques aren't worth bothering with at all.

I strongly disagree. You sound like a player that makes only one character each league (which is totally OK). But I ALWAYS save up a lot of "selected" uniques for my rerolls. And I think that's where unique item shine: On your way to the top. I very much see their point of view when it comes to uniques notbeing (close to) BiS.

That said, some chase uniques (like your HH) are valuable to the game. We don't have many, but HH, Farrul's, Ryslatha's, Inpulsa's (for some builds) and Shavronne's (and a few jewels'n stuff). Maybe we need more? But for some uniques to "fall behind" is just natural in a progressive game like this. They can't update several hundred uniques each league, but they do update some here and there, focusing on making them unique rather than BiS.