OP Legacy Uniques are the worst decision i've seen from the devs thus far

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jiggyji wrote:

why do people care about the items other people have? Especially in legacy league? If its not PVP what difference does it make?

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"People who have them deserve them." This is somehow assuming that people who played the formally unfinished game, or at all "were there earlier" than newcoming players, are somehow more privileged. They are not, and I fail to see any good reasoning why they would be.

Special case: "it would be a slap in the face to the players who already have them." Similarly it would be a slap in the face of people who'll never be able to have them. Also, any significant nerf or balance change, such as incompatible trees, mana costs and crit chances of skills, other kinds of requirements, can technically be "slap in the face" of people who spent time basing their builds around specific restrictions.

"They won't matter for me or most people." Yes they will, in two indirect but very noticeable aspects. (Unconstrained PvP is the third, but only a few people really make specific builds for it, so it's right to assume that "most" will not engage in it at least. But there will never be a stable metagame with pre-nerf Kaom's Heart around. It will always going to be a winning ticket for reasons I'm sure you understand.)

1. Endgame balance. Either it'll be more of a faceroll for players who have the aforementioned items, or even harder for people who don't have them, which again creates very odd disparity. And we know endgame difficulty is generally balanced around people with top-end gear and builds, the exceptions being when said builds are strong enough to warrant a nerf. The build diversity in top-100 on any league is laughable because other builds are too unsafe or inefficient to end up there. All of these typical builds (FP, EK, Discharge, Dual totem, Wander, RoA/Split Arrow, Facebringer, Blender)—no exceptions!—use, or at all rely heavily, on some of the about-to-be-legacy uniques. What you will see is these builds becoming relatively more powerful until...

2. Power creep vs. price inflation in permanent leagues. Nerfing uniques is admitting that a power problem exists and trying to scale it back. But those extra-powerful items don't leave the game—they just become the privilege of the few who were there with the funds to have invested into them. These people have already started gouging the prices so much it will make an insane hit to economy Chris loves so dearly. To answer how exactly this affects anybody else, well, you can think about how ongoing trends in oil prices affect your salary and the price of the food you eat. It's because a global economy is an interconnected system; there's nothing sufficiently self-contained in it. Exalts will fluctuate the hardest in permanent economies, as they'll be the main purchasing currency for the legacy items; if we consider that the rate of finding and using exalts stays more or less similar, allowing prices to stabilize, then their hastily induced concentration in only several people's stashes would very quickly create a deficit that would inflate the price of new exalts entering the market, and will create an even more significant rift between those who have invested in them and those who haven't; i.e. newer players. Which means GGG loves economy, but only cares about it in fresh leagues. The other two are left to rot and be subjected to heavy RMT business and various forms of exploitation.

Needless to say, if you were playing self-found and hoping you would find any of those extra-powerful items in some way, you better forget about that now and forever.

"Go play in the new leagues." What about people who like their existing gear/character(s) and prefer to continue playing with them? What about the characters four months from now, when they enter the permanent leagues' economy? What about people who don't care enough about new features/challenges/competition to start in a fresh economy, but would rather like the economy they already participate it not to be so fucked up?

Hope that was enough food for your thought.