Why GGG CAN'T CREATE A REALLY GOOD UNIQUE ITEM since beta?

The super powerful OP ones are the mistakes their goal is to not make those items.

"

_Daybit_ wrote:

"

Thror2k5 wrote:

yea, no new uniques have ever been good.

paradoxia. saviour. farruls fur. loreweave. bottled faith. cinderswallow urn. timeless jewels. maloneys mechanism. Circle of XYZ rings.

Funny that half of the examples were nerfed since introduction.
Paradoxica and Bottled Faith are still living...

I should add The Eternity Shroud to the list, very powerful and interesting unique with special interaction.

Saviour is still BiS for most dual wield cyclone builds, which is what 90% of people used it for anyways. The trade league price drop was literally just a huge overreaction over the dual wield nerf. Circle of XYZ rings were nerfed but still remain a BiS item for most of the builds that wore them anyways. Crit cinderswallow is still good. Timeless jewels are still good and can provide an advantage to most builds. Loreweave is still a good "all around" chest. Nerfing the item doesn't necessarily mean it's not good anymore. I killed AL8 deathless multiple times this league on a loreweave rolled with good resist and ele% damage - it's still a good chest that's actually... unique. Almost all of the examples he listed are still great uniques that are still 100% viable and in some cases still BiS.

We need more build enabling uniques and uniques that are really strong but has big downsides, like say Abyssus.

actually, the bit about 'these ones were nerfed' reinforces my counter-point:

to say 'no good uniques have been made in 10 years' is about as far from the truth as you can get.

they have made good uniques recently that were TOO good, and had to be nerfed. Even post nerf, they're viable.

What this thread is really asking for is to remove trade. The whole idea of good items is that they should be rare. Trading makes them too available.

Min-maxers divide everything into two groups: BIS and useless. One might be open-minded enough to expand this to conditionally BIS: necessary/best for a specific build but otherwise useless.

Many uniques are designed to be "lore" items or player-designed vanity items, and/or feature effects that are only found on that item (you might say they are meant to be unique). Others are generally good items, especially for leveling alts, but are eventually replaced by BIS-rolled rares, again by design.

For the most part, uniques just are not intended for min-max players. If you think (almost) all uniques are shit then the problem isn't the items, you just have unrealistic expectations.

Uniques aren't a level of power upgrade, that's actually a very smart move on GGG's part. They are not intended to be on purpose.

So you end up having two basic functions.

"Leveling" uniques: stuff that is good / fits a generic role pretty well early on before you flesh out with an actually good item. Boots with low lvl req but high movespeed, Tabula, that sort of thing.

"Build mechanic" uniques: these provide a different way to build an archtype or skill around in an interesting way. The niche build wouldn't be possible or function without them at all.

There are of course varying degrees of success on both of these fronts. For instance weapons tend to be tricky since attacks are reliant on the weapon for the base of their damage. A unique weapon can have a "cool" mechanic and have such a terrible base that it becomes irrelevant. Or those unique "skill specific" jewels that basically ended up as crutches to play that given skill at all (not good, and they are going away from that design because of that).

"

tolunart wrote:

player-designed vanity items

I can never understand a vanity item which will be hidden in 99% loot filters. Especially a divination cards, because all of them were designed by supporters.

Even Skyforth hath fallen to... 10 chaos.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

What this thread is really asking for is to remove trade. The whole idea of good items is that they should be rare. Trading makes them too available.

Rare is the only thing they know how to do in this r tarded mess.
Lion's Roar = once every 700-1000 hours on average, have fun with that.

"

tolunart wrote:

For the most part, uniques just are not intended for min-max players.

Yet again you've nailed the point. Uniques are all about consistency and reliability. Unlike rares, which were always meant to be potentially BiS if you 'win' the RNG game, a unique has set attributes. Ironically, rares are more unique than uniques, which could be why Blizzard changed the nomenclature to 'legendary', but that then carries the connotation that they're not only 'special' but also 'awesome'. Which, honestly, they rarely are.

The whole point behind the Mirror of Kalandra, other than to fuck with the very notion of duping as the pinnacle of ARPG cheating, was to disseminate these unique-rares, and even now we call them 'mirror worthy'.

Any unique item that is absolutely BiS for anything but a gimmick/fun build is a failure of balance. As Shags noted, this comes back to trade -- if you have allowed a unique that BiS and meta-potent into your game, and it's easy to trade for said unique, AND every unique is much like another, then you have fucked up. Shavronne's Wrappings was, contrary to the OP's stance, the first truly bad unique in PoE. We had lacklustre ones; we had a few standouts (Kaom's Heart was never broken; just ask Daresso); most were just filling designed by the GGGang early on with a few from long-time D2 modder Brother Laz (shout-out to Facebreaker there). But Shavronne's Wrappings enabled a meta-build, the low-life caster, by breaking a fundamental rule of the game: chaos damage bypasses energy shield, with one very specific and well-balanced exception. Uniques can and should break certain rules, but there should always be a cost to that.

And once we had a BiS chest piece for so basic a play style as 'caster', the precedent was set. Uniques, not rolled rares, would be the chase items. I mean, it didn't *start* there -- people would get very pissed off if they found a low-level unique in what was Closed Beta's endgame, but I think that was more about area item scaling than unique design. Find a unique at its appropriate level and, sans trade, it's probably not going to be entirely useless. I maintain that Crest of Perandus was the best unique in beta, period. It is the Pelta Lunata of PoE, and finding one at low level was absolutely awesome for anyone who uses a shield. No drawbacks, but no rule-breaking either. Just very high, very useful stats for its level.

But let's not pretend that it's all doom-and-gloom for GGG once uniques were chase items and dictating the meta and the market. After all, uniques are consistent -- so GGG can and did effectively take control of the issue by teasing upcoming uniques that just might work with their intended incoming metagame intentions. For a while there, they were at the mercy of these BiS uniques, but I'd say now they've reined them in with the same discipline as Wizards of the Coast do with supposed game-breaking cards. They LOOK ridiculously strong, but there's always a measured and deliberate gap between the players' idea of OP and the experienced developers' idea of broken.

So the OP is almost unequivocally wrong about GGG 'not creating really good unique items' since Beta, if by good we mean 'highly desirable and highly marketable but still within the parameters of the internal idea of manageable'. Even player-designed monsters like Poet's Pen and Mjolner only make it to release after a lot of consideration.

__

That all said, I also find this 'replica unique' business highly suspect and phoned-in, but when you work from home because your country actually took a pandemic seriously despite very few cases, phoned-in is pretty good. I mean, the whole shebang was inspired by browsing movies on Netflix, so y'know, temper your expectations already people.