unique belt concept (buffs bad body armor)

So i thought for a while, there are a lot of items with interesting mods, but they are just weak or early game only. I took a notice of new unique amulet "whispers of infinity" which adds a ton of flat damage and allows to use any trash weapon for their unique mods, so why not do the same for body armor?

belt
body armor armor, evasion, and energy shield is replaced with +1000 evasion, +1000 armor, +500 energy shield.
other non unique mods.


note: maybe should inspect other gear pieces for similar treatment, or make belt variations for this purpose..
it also should exclude non attribute body armors like tabula rasa and skin of the loyal.

depending on the other modifiers and level requirement, who would ever use such a belt? It is ridiculously easy in current PoE to get body armour with numbers way above those. Even on an exceedingly "cheap" piece of body armor, that is damn good for most of mapping.

Even starting in the 50s, which is Act 6/7....hybrid armor with 1000 each of armor and evasion, life, one or even two resistances, literally costs nothing. Even with an open suffix for MORE resistance crafting.


And you completely misunderstand whispers of infinity usage at the same time lol. You also ignore some pretty classic items that are basically the "same" as Whispers which have existed in PoE for years now. It's just another stat stacker item. It doesn't "allow you to use any trash weapon"....good luck with a trash weapon surviving on ONLY that stack. Or I should say why the hell WOULD you do that? It's a level 74 item for freaking sake! By then, you should have some sort of decent chaos damage weapon if that's your build.

Some numbers could be balanced, ofcourse. Do note that it would not replace life resistances and etc, just the first body armor line which gives armor, evasion or energy shield. Main intent is to replace defense line of low defense unique item so you could get some better defenses and without gimping yourself massively for that one desired unique mod, or just would be able use not so good unique body armor for extended time. For rare items ofcourse it has no use, its not designed for them.

And whats about this amulet shaming? Im not hyper optimiser who optimises fun out of the game. I do know what you can do with it and i also do look for EVERY other use. Yes, you can buff trash unique items with this amulet even if its not primary intent of it, thats how hipster builds are born, thats mentality of creating unique stuff.

I only amulet-shamed because you used it as the premise for your idea: a faulty comparison that sparked the whole unique item. You are talking about unique items and put your lack of understanding of unique items on full display. That one is on you...

It's even WORSE if the belt modifier ONLY adjusts the defense line of the body armour. And doubly so if you specifically want it for UNIQUE body armours lol. That would make it quite ridiculously powerful, almost to the point of being broken as all hell for all low level armors. And furthermore.....belts can ALREADY get armour or evasion or ES rolls quite high on their own to supplement "bad" body armours (as you describe). Not only that, but Vanguard belts and Crystal belts exist for this very purpose later in the game.

There are two things wrong here, as ideas go:
1) Misunderstanding of what "flat values" and "scaling" actually means
2) Under-baked (less than even 50% understanding) main idea
3) Lack of pros and cons
4) Lack of belt knowledge and numerical thought.
5) The whole idea that base defenses are what make an armour "good" or "bad" is flawed to begin with. Tabula has zero defenses for a reason. So do Lord/Loyal. Many have low defenses for the sole purpose that their OTHER mods are that powerful, such as Dialla's or Cloak of Flame. If you could suddenly add massive defenses onto these items, just how broken do you think things would get?

Basically...you were asking for some harsh treatment here. At least from a person like me, who appreciates actionable and well thought out ideas.



So lets actually flesh out this idea:
1) What are the numbers that would make this belt usable? When do you want it to be used?
2) Let's just set aside the whole "this should be used to buff unique body armours".....that is absurd.
3) How will the belt work and what are the sub mods that make it actually useful? Or is it ONLY going to have the line: Body Armour has 1000 armour, 1000 evasion, 500 ES.
4) OR do you want it scalable? "Adds x armour, x evasion, x ES to base body armour values". Very very VERY different and much more useful long-term.

*Or an even CRAZIER idea: "Adds x armour value to body armour based on x evasion of body armour" or something to that effect (a la Trickster). There is precedent for an item like this: GGG does like to create unique items that take their inspiration from popular ascendancy nodes (and vice versa).

it looks half baked because i dont see much reason to fill non critical mods which dont define unique interactions, because either way if it would enter the game it would go through rebalance, its 100% given. We can try thou.

*i did mention that it does exclude non attribute armors like tabula and skin of the loyal... But as other armors go, i dont think that it would be too powerful, i mean dialas armor give about 100 es, thats replaced by 500 which is +400, it also takes up belt slot which as you said competes with crystal belt and other so its about another 100 es less. Its usefull, esp before you have gg other belts, but not broken imo. Extra ev and armor might be deal breaker here for keeping it past yellow maps.

I think flat values are fine to fulfill main idea, unless it could play other roles as well, what do you think?

a flat, static value makes it very difficult to balance. Coming from your initial mistaken comparison to the amulet, this is why the idea has so many issues.

Take a look at an item like Meginord's Girdle (10-20 physical damage) or Sidhebreath (minion cold damage). Those unique modifiers, as flat non-scalable values offer a very tiny window of usability in which the item is extremely OP, but outside of that window....almost entirely useless. At least when it comes to that particular flat value mod.

Now lets look at the belt idea.
1) First, clear up my own misconception: is your idea that it would add ONE of those stats, or ALL three stats? If its only 1, its vastly underpowered even more than I thought. If its all three, its wildly overpowered in the few instances it would be used.

2) Consider Dialla as per your example: going from 100 to 500 ES is enormous. That is more than an entire level 21 discipline aura. If the belt also added evasion and armour, that is some insane level of tank added to that armour, that it simply wasn't designed to have. The same is true of MANY other armours (if we exclude Tabula/Lord/Loyal). In fact, you seemed to even be catching onto the issues by excluding those 3 armours in the first place. Anything that makes those wildly more powerful, is going to likely be doing the same to many other armours. You simply picked the low hanging fruit. Any mod that has to exclude specific uniques in the first place, is likely not a good mod. Given that the main purpose is to buff uniques, this is even more true.

3) If it's only one stat, that further reduces its effectiveness to an even smaller window than I initially thought, adding only half the effectiveness on an evasion-conversion build that could make the most use of it.


As for secondary modifiers, you discount their importance here ESPECIALLY in a belt, which is pretty much the most sought after slot in terms of uniques. Meginord's Girdle survives well beyond its 10-20 flat phys unique mod BECAUSE it also gives 10% maximum life, decent cold resistance, and strength. Sidhebreath extends its use because it offers conversion, max life (in case you want to popcorn), and resistance.

The unique modifier needs to be very powerful for it to be the only thing that matters, and also needs to be balanced and thought out accordingly. Something like Darkness Enthroned works so well because the mod is exceedingly powerful but entirely dependent on the mods and level of the items being inserted into it. It is fully scalable, without being too utterly insane or with crazy interactions with other item slots.

But an item that adds flat value without scaling is really really really tough. Even more so when it adds or changes flat values to another piece of gear, rather than to your character. We don't want uniques that REDUCE the build variety like that. That's anti-PoE. It would really only end up in two ways: being BiS combined with another body armour unique, with other belts being simply incomparably worse. Or it would be entirely useless, with other belts outscaling it too quickly. It's not worth existing if it only maintains use for a short window. That's the problem with like 90% of the uniques in this game.

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It's not worth existing if it only maintains use for a short window. That's the problem with like 90% of the uniques in this game.

Thats the goal of this item, to extend the life time of other unique items. As for this item's lifetime itself.. mhh..

At first I thought that this belt would give defenses according to body armor attribute requirements, but then I thought that it may be a bit too complicated for no reason, so I ended up with all three defense bonuses at the same time. But maybe we can change initial design to extend its lifetime.

It could be something wild, like halved initial values (250, 500, 500), but then those values are increased by 50% for each empty jewel socket.

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Andrius319#4787 wrote:

It could be something wild, like halved initial values (250, 500, 500), but then those values are increased by 50% for each empty jewel socket.

I assume you mean gem sockets? That could be cool, and I wish we had more uniques with fun socket mechanics like that. Or something that multiplies high based on empty (but allocated) passive tree jewel sockets. But I still have a major hangup we haven't addressed: I just can't really get around the "why" of this belt just yet...

If you were stacking defenses, you'd have items better than this long before even completing the story. Plus, you wouldn't be effectively stacking until much later anyway. If you weren't stacking defenses...what does this item actually enable or do? As I mentioned in an earlier post: a unique body armour is generally going to be used for something OTHER than its base defenses, except when those base defenses are the reason to use it (such as Brass Dome).

Why use this belt in the short window its useful, if it wouldn't make a meaningful defensive difference at the time its being used? I've never once felt like I needed more evasion or more armor (sure, more ES, always) before hitting maps or even late maps.

As a short example: a granite flask on an armor character, presumably also running determination would end up granting an easy 10k+ armour with maybe a few armour nodes on the tree. You don't need more armour than that to reach maximum physical reduction in most of the story. Same with evasion and evade rate. Even without the supplemental aura, numbers can generally get high enough even on a tabula through to maps.