Set items in Path of Exile

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tks2103 wrote:

The logic goes something like this: set items must have good bonuses to be useful -> if set items have good bonuses everyone will use them -> if everyone is using the same set items, the game is boring.

I believe you're actually missing a significant part of the logic, although perhaps a part that isn't best expressed in the particular post you liniked.

This game, at it's heart, is about items, and finding better ones. People play to find better gear to upgrade their character. Set Items work against that goal.
Take your example of three items that together grant CI - that's three item slots which together give you CI. You now can never find an item that will be an upgrade for any of those slots, because replacing any of those items would mean you loose CI, and you've established that CI is worth more than any one item can provide - thus, no potential replacement item will give you as much as you've lost. That's three item slots you will never upgrade, and given the limited number of slots on the character, that's a decent part of the game gone, because finding upgrades is the game to a large extent.

This is why it's important that uniques aren't better than the very best possible rares - so they can be upgraded from, and it's why when we do have uniques that are best in slot for certain builds, such as Facebreakers for an unarmed build - which are necessary for other reasons, those are individual unique items, not sets - to mimimise the number of potential upgrades you loose.

If we wanted a unique with CI*, and judged, as you have, that CI was far more powerful than a single item could provide, I'd argue the solution is not to make 3 items that together give CI, thus locking you into not upgrading those items, but to put it on a unique and add a drawback that balances it, so that the item as a whole still isn't better than the best possible rares - that way you can get the effect on an item, but it can still be upgraded unless the property it gives is so important to the build that you can't go without it, in which case you've only lost one slot to potential future upgrades, which is better than three.

I'm sure Chris could explain this better and more convincingly than myself - he's passionate about the item system and getting it right. But that's my understanding o one of the major reasons we don't want set items.

*For the record, this won't ever happen, CI is fundamentally broken on an item because the ability to turn on/off the "1 maximum life" thing at will by removing and replacing the item breaks the game. But it works fine for the sake of example.

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tks2103 wrote:

Another thing that was really interesting to me was the tidbit where Chris mentioned Wings of Entropy was the most complicated new item they have created. Was it worth the effort? (I would say yes, based on the benefits of novelty

As the person who put in most of said effort, I also totally believe it was worth it.

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tks2103 wrote:

P.S. To be clear, I think it is more likely that Wings of Entropy was created because someone wanted to have a six-link, dual-wield setup with Bringer of Rain rather than as a way of allowing multiple OP affixes on one item.

Nope. Wings of Entropy's design predates Bringer of Rains by a long time. It got put in later because it took us (me) a while to work out the various bits of black magic needed to make it work.