Buff Bringer of Rain

For those who have been on the game long enough to remember, it used to be that the helmet Bringer of Rain was very sought after and worth sometimes up to a couple exalts. Times have changed however, and a few nerfs have made it complete trash.

So I have a pretty simple solution to buff it: Remove the "cannot wear body armour" line. That would make it an interesting option for some melee builds, yet not overpowered.

It's unusable now because there are so many great mods on rare helmets and rare armors, not because of any edits to the item itself. This is true of 99% of the uniques in the game, not just BoR. GGG doesn't really seem to get that...pouring tons and tons and tons of new influence mods and crazy rare mods and then just leaving terrible uniques.

It either needs to be thrown out completely, or reworked from the ground up. Simply removing the "cannot wear body armour" tag would not only ruin the uniqueness of the item itself, but also would make it an ABSURDLY op helm, which basically every melee gladiator or block build would be forced to use, even over abyssus

Yeah I like uniques with downsides so I don't like this proposition.

I like the softer systems they have in place to upgrade uniques - prophecies, Heist replicas, and the old reliquary keys that gave legacy versions. Very disappointed this season's reliquary keys didn't modify the uniques in any interesting ways (even ways that weren't straight buffs).

Just turn faster attacks into something that is actually useful in terms of support gems. BOR will never be able to compete with top notch rare gear but if it made for at least a decent 6 link it might be an alternative to Tabula for early game.

They could whack it with the "fated" treatment. Make the supports "Awakened". Add a cool mod.

Well, some items have to be trash some op, how to decide which would be which? I guess this bringer of rain is rather iconic item and could be buffed as some others as well.

I had a thought brewing for a while, what if unique items (maybe rares as well) would be numerically evaluated reflecting items power, then whole build's summed up value would be used in some challenge scenarios, not quite sure what it could be yet, but this could put all uniques into use (like beat this while your character sucks gear wise and earn this). But this concept has some issues.

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Andrius319 wrote:

Well, some items have to be trash some op, how to decide which would be which? I guess this bringer of rain is rather iconic item and could be buffed as some others as well.

I had a thought brewing for a while, what if unique items (maybe rares as well) would be numerically evaluated reflecting items power, then whole build's summed up value would be used in some challenge scenarios, not quite sure what it could be yet, but this could put all uniques into use (like beat this while your character sucks gear wise and earn this). But this concept has some issues.

Nah, everything besides a handful of uniques are virtually trash now because crafting is too strong. I suspect thats another reason why harvest was nerfed in the way it was.

In order for them to make new unique items now theyre going to have to be equal or more powerful that what we have now.

BOR Pre-nerf back in the day was amazing because it was an 8 link item. The kicker was also that it provided the same health as virtually a top roll chest and helmet while also providing a huge portion of block and a way to passively generate Endurance charges. You can do this similarly with influenced helmets, unveils and such. Which brings up the question "Why did GGG add this if they knew itd be the end all be all" ? They knew 8L helmets were not balanced and yet here we are again, except now you can also wear a 6L with crafted mods to also make it more like a 9L.

In my mind, they knew straight up these crafts were game breaking yet decided to go through with it anyways which in turn, destroyed itemization.

There's indeed a lot of obsolete uniques, despite the latest effort to update some of them.

I also think that rares could now have up to 4 prefixes and 4 suffixes (hell, why not even 5) because so many new affixes have appeared since the release of the game.

There's this interesting mechanics now where you have more attributes requirement with boosted values on the affixes.
It could be the same principle here : 4 affixes of each kind but with a penalty of, let's say, 20% on the top values. Same for 5 affixes with an increased % penalty.
But at least it could be possible to have a much greater variety of affixes combinations.

Problem is, they would really have to buff it, and I'm talking some insane buffs for people to even consider using it again. Keep in mind that back when it was a T0 unique, rare chests were only life & armor/es/eva + resistances, so sacrificing a chest to use BoR wasn't as big of a deal and was worth it on pretty much every attack build as long as you were able to cap your resists without a bodyarmor.

Now you have the awakener orb and the new influences which power creeped the game beyond repair. Who's gonna give up +1 curse and 2% attack crit or explode + frenzy on hit for BoR? No one really.

I say go very crazy with the buffs, make it a pseudo 8 link with 3 awakened level 6 supports (i.e multistrike, melee phys, brutality), but make it as rare as Shavs were back in the days to make it a real T0 chase unique again.

yep. just like pretty much all pre-3.0 uniques, this one is dead

sadly, BoR is a combination of THREE separate issues in one item:

- it has a drawback. modern uniques dont have drawbacks. the worst thing they have nowadays is no life roll and a pseudo drawback that is trivial to work around and ignore

this alone is enough to make people skip it

- the numbers are from 2010. life roll might be 'nice' but how does it compare to 55c chest like this:


and you have one entire item slot worth of gems to go with it. the chance to block is paltry, endurance charge is too unreliable to be worth mentioning and the supports are just bad (also - no quality)

the only affix on it that still stands strong is the flat phys. kinda meh for TWO item slots isnt it?

- it is melee unique. aka unpopular playstyle. it is a helmet - aka 'enchant or you are noob'. it can be difficult to get right enchant on POPULAR base. try getting unpopular enchant on even less popular base. so you end up playing a build without a helm enchant. sorry, thats dumb idea in a game where enchants can give up to 40% more damage.


i know that this item is not end-endgame itemization goal (but what is for melee builds anyway? abyssus and what?) but i couldnt see a point equipping it at lvl 70

why? resists. nowadays getting resists got easier (catalysts, higher rolls, better resist passives, jewels) yet.. somehow harder than before. this helmet put ENORMOUS pressure on your resists elsewhere. it is just not worth it


my solution (keeping it as a stepping stone):

+20 all resist (not only elemental)
baked in gems have 20% of RANDOM quality and are lvl 20. no reason for this lvl 18 stuff.

that would make it at least interesting for someone. right now it is pure garbage.