Most unique items are not unique enough (In my opinion)!

Feedback and Suggestions
1

First off, this is my opinion not a fact.

There are a few unique items in LE that really feel unique for me.
One of them is that your life is reduced and energy shield becomes your “life”.
So instead of focusing on stacking life as a defensive layer you focus on energy instead.

I can name a few and will give you a few more example.
The Ashen Crown:
Elemental Nova is now cast at the target location.
This line changes up your playstyle.

The stormtide unique:
You are shocked for 4 seconds when you stop moving
This line could open up new ways to play the game with supporting other uniques.
For example, when you are shocked you are switch to a Thor Form. In the Thor form you will have a new skill called Hammerstorm. Thats jus my own idea btw.

My point is with lines like this it could open up more unique ways to play the game.

My main issue:

Iam afraid this game will become a D3 clone in terms of unique items.
In D3 there are not that many build enabling uniques. What i mean by that is that the uniques mostly has Stats increases like when you have X you get increased damage.
I noticed that Last Epoch has those unique items aswell.

The new unique item in LE is OMNIVIDENCE, a two handed Staff.
It has reflect damage and +1 to void spells as their “most” interesting lines (in my opinion).
This opens up a reflect build wich isn’t interesting enough to me. However this is better then a lot of uniques in the database.

To many unique items tend to have Stat upgrades in the description which is boring in my opinion.
The set items already have a lot of stats upgrades aswell so why not making more really unique items? Really unique items (to me atleast, it is still an opinion) are uniques that makes your gameplay unique. I know that if you could only could get a +1 fireball on a unique item in the whole game that it technecally past the unique line.

I hope however that EHG will release more interesting mechanics/build enabling options within the uniques.
Path of exile is a good example imo who does a great job in this area.
Those kind of items pushes me to look over other rare and unique items to find possible interactions that nobody thought of.

This experience could make my character unique aside from others who don’t have that certain item. Especially when i, or other players found a new interaction or combination that others didnt think of.
GGG of POE actually admitted more then once that they didnt thought of some interactions or combo’s that players came up with.

I think that is the main purpose of unique items. Being like the word says Unique.
Iam not saying that every Unique in the game should be a build enabling one btw.
I think for the balance of the game and other reasons +1 frostbolt and certain extra stats should have a place on uniques aswell.

I really hope however this game is not following the D3 path by making to many “uninteresting” (my opinion again) Stat uniques.
Beside that i think games should have some really different uniques to make players wanting play to play your game longer. Or else games will all have mostly builds like frostbolt and fireballs which would be boring in my opinion. Iam not saying those builds shouldnt exist btw!

When i look over all the uniques i fear that this happends since most uniques are actually: Increase damage, multply this, if you do X you apply increased damage etc.

Maybe there wasnt room/time enough yet to think about more interesting uniques.
The game is in Beta so i would understand if that is the point.
My post might sound harsh to some. Its not my intention to be rude towards the devs.
Because i hope this game succeeds and because i actually love a lot of things in the game already that i post those kind of things.

Anyways thanks for your time :slight_smile:

3 Likes
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I think that many existing uniques could do with more interesting modifiers (this is a very common request), but I think that some should retain the “stat buffs” to make them more widely usable. For example, that staff (Omnividence) is only really for the Sentinel/Void Knight, which is awesome, but it’ll have limited usage due to that.

And yes, I’d assume that the relative lack of unique effects on uniques is due to the small team & limited resources (ie, time for the programmers to write the code to make it work).

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I agree, uniques should have unique effects. More ones like plague bearer (100% Chance To Inflict Plague on Hit, where plague is a spreading DoT), or Volcanus(10% chance to cast Flame Shards on melee hit) or Bone harvester(20% chance to summon a Skeleton Harvester for 15 seconds on kill).

Fewer uniques like Dreamthorn(void damage, void pen, some defence stats)

Chronicon was made by one guy and it has lots of unique effects on gear.

1 Like
4

And D3 was made by hundreds of people, yet the uniques at launch didn’t have hundreds of unique affixes, they were added over time. Just because project A has very few people & lots of unique effects doesn’t mean that project B, that has more people on it, should therefore have more effects. There’s also the scope of each project, though I’m not familiar enough with Chronicon to go into that.

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I think a lot of the uniques in this game are very, very old and haven’t been touch on for a long time. I think mechanically and technology wise what the devs could do has really upgraded since then.

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Chronicon is a 5 act 2d diablo-style game with some randomised dungeons as postgame content, 4 classes and each class has 4 skill trees. There are several sets for each class, a bunch of legendaries for each class and a lot of sets and legendaries that work for all classes - almost every legendary/set has unique effects, only a handfull are just stat buffs(though the crafting system lets you craft affixes onto legendaries, so legendaries are the best items by far). Though it is currently patch 1.11.0 compared to LE being still in beta.

My point was in response to you commenting that the small dev team would effect unique quality, which is not true.

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You are kidding right? When you don’t have to do real weapon models and don’t do a 2.5 or 3D isometric view you save hundrets of hours in development. Don’t compare apples with a racecar please. Chronicon is a well made game but it’s something copmpletely else. it’s like saying all arpgs are crap if they don’t have 8 endgame types in EA like Sanctum Breach. I don’t want to sound offensive but I’m no native speaker and can’t remember the fitting words to make it a more pleasent read.

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The scope of a project also affects how much stuff can be done (as Macknum said).

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it is the exact same genre, the game uses overhead view, the fact that it uses 2d models instead of 3d models has nothing to do with the actual gameplay. It has as much in common with diablo as LE does.

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I agree with you on that one. The size of the LE team should be perfectly able to do it.
I got chronicon myself aswell. The fun starts for me even more with those interesting items to enable different ways to play the game.

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My issue so far with uniques are they are often too specific.

I think you can have uniques that buff certain playstyle skills, but I think there should be more general purpose uniques people canm use while leveling.

Something like Tabura Rasa in PoE, & other uniques that grant movement spend & flat damage allowing faster leveling. Or something like stone of Jordan, or Frostburn in D2, where they can be used for many classes/build, at least while leveling.

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I am like the complete opposite, i think most of them should be very specific and not just generic stat sticks.

In LE you are meant to use rares/exalted items and only use like 1-2 uniques, maybe 3 uniques or like a complete set in some rare cases.

Having some more generic low/mid lvl ones, especially ones that are meant for leveling would be ok.
(Like boots that only give crazy movement speed or mabye a melee weapon that gives “adaptive melee damage”)

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frankly I doubt you played much D3 - sorry! MOST of d3 uniques are build enabling BUT since SETS are 100x nore effective the only way to use others is the cube or RORG. SETS are the issue, not uniques

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I know that alot of D3 legendaries do have some cool build enabeling efffects, but still their item budget is just sooooo much higher, they are in a different league compared to rares in that game.

The role of Uniques vs. Rare is just so different in LE.

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I meant to say there be a balance between specific & general uniques.

Also, I think in general the stats on gears are very boring. If you ask me, I think there should be affix only available on drops, & they should be exciting, not just a higher tier of stats.

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So you basically mean a slightly different version of “exalted items”, maybe a new rarity, which has a specific affix that only drop, but also has a very unique effect.

I think this sounds great.

Maybe legendaries are something similar to this, but if not i coudl see something like this getting implemented into the game at some point

2 Likes
17

I was reading the transcribed dev stream from the 12th or something and it stated in there that what would be optimal would be for characters to mix and match from all types of gear. So optimally balanced would be players running around with a set (that is why sets are small, 2-3 pieces in LE), 1-2 Uniques, and the rest filled out with Rares/Exalteds.

There are 11 gear slots on a character in LE, ideally there would be about 3-5 slots filled by set/uniques.

If the current state puts set items at near useless and uniques typically at 1 per build, if that, then the balance isn’t right yet. There are a couple set items that do see play, but only as a single item, so they are just another unique at that point.

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18

I don’t think that this weighting of rarities is what Mike meant in the dev stream.

I am preetty sure it’s more meant for 1-3 uniques per build.
And if you are using a set (2-3 pieces) maybe 1 set + 1 unique.

But even with that, there will always be build that might use none unique or maybe some outliers that use like 4-6.

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I still think some (not all) Uniques could come with a new skill attached.
When you equip the Unique, you can use this new skill. It seems powerful, but it would replace one of your skills, so it’s a choice to make and the choice would balance the build. You will still end with five skills, but one would come from the item.
One advantage of this (and disasvantage at the same time) is the the skill should be generic enough to work with all classes. Or the Unique that brings the skill should be class restricted.

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20

In my humble opinion. Itemization is one of the weakest point, if not the weakest point in LE.
They are in general boring, compare to other games like PoE, grim dawn, D3 and D2.

I think PoE went a litle Over the top with the influence mods which are sometimes over power, but Last epoch is the extreme end, where most stats are boring stat adder, like +dex, more melee damage, 15 lfe., with little synergy or make gameplay interesting.

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