It sounds like my PoE experience in a nutshell. 
Back in school I had a friend I played a lot of arpgs with. Mainly Sacred and Sacred 2. He was the luck magnet. Everything dropped for him, but nothing for me. As a kid this was immensely frustrating. We got back together a few years ago and played a little again. And it was the same all over again. It was hilarious.
Then “Build enabling” uniques are much more rare meaning you have to slog through the game longer without the feature you wanna build around.
LP has just set a problematic expectation for players. LP was supposed to be a chase end game mechanic for rare items, and a slight boost for weak early game uniques.
instead its become the key gearing mechanic. They probably need to greatly nerf LP on everything but low level campaign style items. But doing that would cause the player base to flip out and the game would boom and get review bombed etc.
True, I guess.
I wouldn’t mind but I suppose a lot of players wouldn’t like that.
I agree with the rest.
I suggested a while ago a 2 LP limit, I still think this would be the best solution to avoid legendaries being BiS in every slots, for every build. But yeah, it would probably lead to riots if they implement that.
I wouldn’t say it’s the key gearing mechanic, because it’s not required to make a build function as far as I’m aware? There could be builds that absolutely require a minimum LP that I just don’t know about. If I’m right in my assumption/experience, then LP is for pushing your build to the absolute limit, not the bare minimum to enable the build to function. As long as LP remains a “use this to push your build” and not a “this is required for your build.” it will be fine if it stays as is.
Again, I could be wrong and all endgame builds currently could require 4LP items, but I just don’t believe that’s the case.
That probably depends on what you concider endgame. If you think that only 2/3/4/5k corruption is endgame, then yes, builds capable of that would probably require 4LP gear. If you think it’s anything above ~300 corruption, not so much.
omg, a Sacred fan! I love you man <3
This was my whole point in the original post! You worded it perfectly.
And every time people counter me with “Just make a good loot filter”
Hell yeah, brother I’m still sad Ascaron Entertainment ended the way it did. The devs and their worlds were awesome.
I need to check if the Sacred 2 community patch still exists somewhere.
There is currently a bit of a disconnect with the community, the devs, and the perception of “build functions”
The devs claim to balance around 300c, which is very easy for most builds, and some of the weaker builds get there with some gear. Some builds currently do 300c with no gear. As in like less then 24h after a new cycle start, you can be killing abby and farming 300c+.
The community seems to focus on 600+, 600~ is where favor gains sorta cap out. So eveything sub 600c, is no good to some people.
And as for legendaries, They are for pushing your build, but you get finished with “normal” gearing much before 600c, some builds are fine farming 600c without legendaries. So then they are just pulling the slots on legendaries.
And what I mean by the key gearing mechanic, is late game people are using items that simply have no reason to be on their build, as I mentioned you will see in MG often is people using 3-4lp tongue of the abberant seer, a ring that has a few lines of text, +1 to poison spell skills, some %poison damage, and some %damage reflect and +3 all attribute.
Now why is a non poison falconer build using it? or a non poison wraithlord build? well because +3 attribute is pretty good, and if it has 3 or 4 lp, you basically get most if not all of your exalted ring anyways. So they are using a legendary item that is themed around poison on non poison builds simply because why not? LP is just that good.
Blood of the exile is another popular one, has movespeed on it, and tons of attributes, so a 2lp one is extra attributes and movespeed, or extra attributes and hybrid health etc. its supposed to be a unique set of boots built around making bleed more thematically like PoE’s bleed, but tons of non bleed builds are hankering for it just for its silly stat stick qualities.
LP was intended as a system where you felt less bad about putting a build enabling low level item on cause you could give it hp or offense so it didnt fall behind a rare while letting you keep its unique effect. However now LP is just sought after in high values to double dip on affixes while losing little or no stats.
I see, this could definitely be an issue. I’m not sure what the best way to resolve that issue is, but if you’re just slotting in a Unique with LP simply because it happened to drop with 3/4 LP, it’s kind of an issue. I was thinking solely about uniques that are useful to your build being required to have 3/4 LP.
Having 3 or 4 extra affixes is indeed very strong. Ideally, you’d make it rarer than it is currently to keep it out of reach, but then the chance of you finding that unique WITH the LP you need is next to impossible. So they’d need to add a way to farm specifically for items with higher LP, either with currently implemented systems or with a new system. That’s just creating even more work and issues though. I suppose removing LP as a concept and replacing it with actual Legendary Gear that can drop with 1-4 extra affixes and higher Forging Potential to compensate so you can try to customize it before it bricks?
Edit: To explain the second idea more clearly. Currently you find a unique drop that has LP, find an Exalted with stats you want, go through the whole process of “Creating” a Legendary item. This idea would remove that whole process and replace it with drops that already have the extra affixes on them. For example, a Tongue of the Aberrant Seer with 4 affixes and + 2 “legendary” affixes (they’re still normal affixes like any legendary, but they’re already included), then you can use the forge to adjust those affixes as you’d like. Not sure if this alleviates the LP issue though, probably not.
Please do not derail the thread, this is not about late-game builds and metas, this is about too much useless loot and useless uniques, that take away of the good feeling of seeing a unique, or even a rare, drops.
That’s the thing though, hardly anyone seems to agree with you on that feeling.
If you make loot rarer, the already extremely rare stuff becomes next to impossible to find. If you remove the common loot, then people who use the common drops for their builds are screwed over.
This is entirely subjective and you can’t make major changes to a game on subjective things.
Alright, so I guess then people want the loot drops to be increased even further?
I didn’t say that, nor did anyone else. Most of us are fine with the current drop situation with our loot filters set up properly. I don’t feel flooded with useless stuff that I NEED to pick up because of salvage like in D3/D4, nor do I feel like nothing useful ever drops. Just like TQ and GD, I’m getting a healthy stream of useful gear and useless gear with how my filters are setup. Unlike those games though, selling items means absolutely nothing, so I don’t bother picking things up if they’re not going to replace what I have.
I think there will always be people who find that good or bad. Everyone probably has a personal preference.
But I personally think that if more loot drops, then you should have a better filtering option.
I think it’s necessary to be able to narrow down the value range of the affixes. For example, to be able to specify the min/max value of an attribute as a percentage → Show only Idols with Health > 80% of max possible value.
Currently I already have a very restrictive filter.
But if I still have to stop every time to hover the
mouse over 10 idols, it just kills the game flow.
Or rather, it’s nothing fun, it feels like “work” 
I favour an approach of adaptive loot generation with the player having some more influence about loot generation bias.
Example:
Overall, if the math is right, the same amount of good items should drop - but more targeted and with less stuff to sift through if the player so desires.
In PoE, good high-item-lvl bases are worthwhile to filter and pick up.
In LE, there is basically no reason for any white item at a certain point. Magic and rares are okay - you might want to filter for those with rare affixes to extract the shards.
Yeah, they were awesome. Sacred 1 & 2 were 2 of my favourite arpgs, I still remember people coming into a server & dumping a load of gear on the mp starter island. No trading, no asking for stuff, just generosity. And how the devs memorialised the community was awesome as well, gravestones & named deamons to kill (I have my own).
I don’t think that is the actual issue… it’s the symptom rather.
The root cause is that we derive pleasure from finding meaningful things that could help us… which happens still after all! But - and that’s the important part - it’s basically ‘covered’ by the vast amount of ‘garbage’ we have no use for.
Hence I think the issue lies more in the part that the loot filter doesn’t auto-adjust to content and is then further handled by specializing it as the player but rather… has a need to be intricately set up by us personally. And often in faulty ways which doesn’t fully do what we want.
Because if we see 10 item each minute then ‘items’ loose value for us as drops. But if we see only a single drop every 2-3 monoliths and know ‘this is a nice one’ then it’s exciting after all! For that all the other stuff needs to ‘vanish’ from our view.
A perception issue mostly. And perception is important.
Or you could use a completely different method which doesn’t enforce the drop-rate of uniques to be high in the first place, hence causing each dropped unique to have intrinsic value, even if it’s one you commonly wouldn’t use… it’s rare, the affixes are ‘special’ and not seen otherwise, nice. And since we wouldn’t see it often it would have a inherent value of being exiting and letting us think if we can do ‘something’ with it.
If it’s ‘needed’ or not is of no matter. It’s the core way to progress for most builds currently. The power behind LP is ridiculous in comparison to anything else presented, and it has such a massive design space attached to it that it intrinsically becomes ‘the thing to go for’.
Which is what I’m often saying that designing things with the future in mind is important, but presenting it to players with that being already visibly unlocked is detrimental for the perception in many cases.
LP could’ve been a outstanding mechanic (and it is a good one, very enjoyable overall) but the upper limit which enforces people to use uniques in many slots despite not being fully fitting rather then a top-tier exalted item on the right base is a detriment to the game. It limits the direction in which you can progress your character.
Sacred is and was one of the best diablo-clones of all time It’s on par with Grim Dawn in quality for the time.
Yes, and that is a major problem.
Uniques should be used for the task they’re made for, not be so strong to outpace any other option simply because they are exalted+ items.
This is the part where the design fails to function as intended, a bad side effect, quite a bad one even as it reduces build variety substantially. It’s always ‘unique x is better then a exalted despite not being for my build, hence I need unique x with LP!’ and then it ends for the example about ‘but we don’t need LP items!’ yeah, I don’t need to play video games either, but it’s what brings me fun, hence I do it nonetheless 
Apologies for going off-topic, but Sacred is NOTHING like Diablo…
That’s why I always say that the best uniques are the ones with huge negative drawbacks, because they are the most fun to build around. PoE is full of those. Otherwise they would just become yet another mathematically better upgrade, so you can have bigger numbers across the board
It’s an arpg, aka a Diablo-clone.
To elaborate further. Since ARPG is very vague, you can further narrow that down into “Diablo-Clone” as technically the Musou games, the Kingdom Hearts franchise (numbered titles anyway), and even Soulsborne games are all “Action RPGs” but not Diablo clones