Powerful uniques should have a tradeoff so that there is a choice to make - worst offender IMO is Herald of the Scurry

They are! Why do you think some uniques drop with LP far more frequently than others?

There are a few uniques that even with 4LP end up still being worse than normal non-lp gear, see Keeper’s Gloves.

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Correct - but that’s not always going to be the case; in the case of the Keeper’s Gloves, a whole host of new bee-themed items are coming (see Andrew Tilley’s teasers posts) that will help keep them interacting with their unique mechanic more regularly.

As for loot in general - there has to be some bad loot in order to feel good about picking out the good stuff. PoE took this too far in the other extreme direction, where you get millions of pieces of loot for a few good pieces - LE is focusing on a more balanced approach, but still needs some of that bad loot.

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I used to think blizzard’s drop rates were awful, but in this - OMG. Worse, unlikely my character will ever have truly good gear and stop feeling like a barely fit for purpose peasant :slight_smile:

Re uniques - I already find them punishing enough - even the ones with no overt -ve attributes. Just the loss of the essential; headlines stats (armor + whatever) on chosen rares can be a near devastating loss to your defences once that happen over more than a one to two slots.

While combining later can mitigate that a bit, I was kind of disappointed that the headline stats do not combine. I actually think they should even for LP0. Armor 80+ → Armor 5 or so over a few slots is painful enough already.

As it is, I see many unique that could be slotted into many builds for a small utility even if their full potential cannot be realized due to not being the ideal build to exploit them, but as it is, the loss of headline stats and combine with those having -ve effect affixes just makes them ignorable unless near mandatory instead of interesting to experiment with via an LP0 combination if such were possible.

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I assume you mean implicits?

Maybe :slight_smile:

To each his own opinion,

To me a successful unique is something that is impossible to obtain otherwise, new mechanics, or are build enabling. There’s a very important aspect of equipping an unique: you lose all the possible affixes, and the possible item base with its implicits in that slot. That on itself is a detriment for any unique.

Let me talk about one item that has been brought to the conversation: Suloron’s Step.

Suloron’s Step, looks promising, that’s a huge crit multiplier, can have decent movement speed due to that big movement affix that could match even be a tiny bit better than boots+ movement suffix, but the -75% physical just kills the item, because:

This is a tank game, and we cannot afford not only losing the inhered flexibility you lose using a unique, losing the possibility of a good base with a good implicit (fire/cold res), plus losing three affixes that usually are hybrid health, vitality and some resistance or percent dodge. You have to already to cover for that, then add two T5 phys res affixes in other places to cover for the phys res loss.

Also, any crit build has his ways to get crit multi from other sources, not only items, and any final crit build usually have about 400% crit multi already, and ways to be sure you crit always, at least when it matters.

So, you win: Up to 105% crit multi (worth 4x T5 crit multi in relic), some minor movement speed with a good roll (3-5%?).

You lose: Boots Implicit (could be a T5 res), Up to 8 vitality, up to 65 health and 5% health, one T5 suffix for anything, two T5 phys res suffixes in other places.

So, is a bad designed item, because is not aware of the tank meta, how you already have tons of crit multi, and you lose more value that you win (arguably you trade off 4x T5 offense with 5x T5 flexible value/defense + boots Implicit)

If you remove the -75% phys res, would be, all things considered, just trading defensive value and flexibility for offense value, and would be a great item to have around if you are going crit and you can afford the loss of flexibility.

Then we can consider exalted affixes and LP, but for me those shouldn’t fix an item usability. I consider those more of an endgame min-max and win-more mechanics. The item becomes useable from a pure value perspective if you have a good 2LP one.

By this metric of potential value loss and lack of flexibility, half of the designed uniques are just not worth the slot unless you get LP (and sometimes only 3-4LP make the item worth the effort to slot it in).

Uniques should be something worth considering when building your character without LP, when all their properties are useful for your build, is just not the case.

All opinions are fine, but sometimes some perspective can help:

Suloron’s Step is exactly the “win more” option for a melee boots slot - Only Lessons of the Metropolis and Foot of the Mountain have a lower effective level for LP, so getting a 2-3 LP version is the chase.

Without Suloron’s Step, you cannot get Critical Multiplier on a boots slot, so your Exalted Boots with good Implicits, Move Speed, Hybrid Health, and Resist are the base that you’re upgrading. Finding a 2-3 LP Suloron’s means adding a significant Critical Multiplier stat to those boots. It’s not a unique item in the way that it’s required for a build, or enables a change in playstyle - it’s there to be an upgrade path for someone with good boots already.

That’s where I disagree, and that’s okay! Items don’t always have to need a “+1 this affix” type of upgrade path in order to continue making improvements. Having some uniques “require” LP in order to be an upgrade is still an upgrade - you don’t need Suloron’s Step in order to play your melee crit build - you need other defensive layers already in place, and then are on the hunt for a high-multi mid-high LP Suloron’s in order to upgrade that slot.

If you try to think of Suloron’s Step (and other Uniques that are basically generic - possibly with slot-dependent affix swaps like Suloron’s) as a crafting material, used to upgrade a generic exalted item for that slot, you’ll be a lot happier with them. It’s also worth noting that this reduces the cost-basis for upgrading via legendary potential to only “I lost the implicits, and have to deal with any negative modifier’s I’m adding” - a much simpler problem in terms of gearing.

I always recommend that players use as few uniques as possible - they’re not supposed to be the best-in-slot items in this game, unlike D3 - until they hit this stage of their gearing/crafting journey. And it’s one of those things you tend to learn organically.

An argumentative aside here: I don’t think you need to worry about the -75% physical resist affix as much as you think you do. Other defensive layers (armor/endurance/glancing blow) can make up for that pretty solidly, and if you happen to cover that resist, even better.

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I’m not arguing Suloron’s Step are not unique enough, I agree getting that huge crit multi on boots is unique by itself. Also the fact that is melee only crit multi.

I strongly disagree, getting 2LP is hard by itself, getting 2LP in Suloron’s is quite hard as it has 70 level for LP and are rare boots, can happen you once or none in two hundred hours of farming monos. And they can roll with low values.

You seem to see LP uniques as a bandage aid to the many horrible uniques we have in this game. Shouldn’t be the case, the uniques should be valuable without LP, again I see LP and Exalted affixes as a min-max and win-more, if the unique fails to give enough value without LP, is a bad unique. LP should only enhance already decent uniques, not enabling their use.

Gearing in this game is like a tetris game, you fit your pieces to meet certain goals (crit avoidance capped, distributed resistances, certain prefixes, health/vit as much as you can, while covering the rest…), that’s why i don’t see this uniques in isolation, but as a value aggregate to the rest of your gear/idols/passives. This is not longer the case if the effect is truly special, but for Suloron’s it fully applies.

I agree partially that resistances are not that important, you can live with less than the 75% cap, but as you min-max, again, you want your resists as close to 75% as possible. Physical resistance is the most important resistance in the game, due to the abundance of sources of physical damage.

As you play more and more, and you push corruption, you discover how this game scales and is a tank game. My min-maxing always involves in the end getting more defensive value, not more offense. I don’t understand how you came to that conclusion, maybe you play ranged most of the time (BTW Suloron’s are for melee).

My 1200 hours in the game says I may have played enough to know… I’ve played almost every mastery to 90+, except for Beastmaster, Forge Guard, and Paladin - not as into them as the others. I agree, as an ARPG fan myself, that a “tanky-dps” build is important for every character - and figuring out how to get the gear in an optimal spot to do so is part of the fun of these games.

That being said, there are two categories of Uniques in this game - the ones that provide gameplay-changing effects (i.e. the Reign of Winter bow) and the ones that provide an effect normally seen elsewhere, which can either free up a slot or layer on-top of effects that have already been slotted elsewhere (Like Suloron’s Step, or Darkstride Boots). I don’t even pick up Uniques in the second category unless they have >2 LP - and still end up with stash tabs full of them. In this regards, that level of crafting is reserved for players with enough time to chase the high-LP versions. Again, part of the learning process about how gearing is tiered in Last Epoch.

I’ve argued above that games like this need some “bad loot” in order to psychologically reward good loot - Uniques in the second category, without LP, fit into that “bad loot”. They’re filtered in, so we need to make a decision about whether they’re worth slotting on with what they have, which makes finding a 3-4 LP version feel good, because you know you can use it to get those little extra bits.

Legendary Potential isn’t a bandaid - it’s a system designed around searching for the unique effects you want to stack up, without having to give up your explicit affixes on otherwise great gear - and finding better and better explicit affixes helps solve for losing good implicit affixes, too. The system creates a dual-fed hunt for gear - you need to find Exalted items with good explicit affixes - whether they drop that way or you craft them up - and find Unique affixes you want to layer on, and enough LP on that base to make it worth sacrificing an Exalt. It’s a wonderfully complex system of crafting, that’s fed mostly by picking up loot - rather than picking up materials and just hoping you don’t run out of Forging Potential.

And it’s a separate crafting system from the original - a lot of posts about “crafting” seem to miss that point - the Forge isn’t designed to be a feeder for Legendary items - it’s designed to get you gear that will let you hunt them down. T20-T22 gear is the goal for any slot that isn’t a Gameplay Changing Unique - and from there you’re back to hunting for items.

And that’s not a problem? Well, if they designed their unique to be half of them trash, I could agree with you.

However, I doubt that’s the case. Most of the uniques were designed before all the legendary stuff. So, they were designed with a specific goal that could be:

A leveling unique, a low level unique useful for part of the game until you reach higher level content and the level of such unique start to hurt.

A unique with very specific properties designed to be at useful in niche builds or builds with very specific qualities (Soluron’s Step enters here, useful only if you are a crit melee build)

Or as build enabling if you build around them.

Or very hard to obtain chase items (Bastion of Honor, Ravenous Void, Herald of the Scurry) that could help you climb corruption a bit more, if you can slot them in.

I mostly agree on your supposed role of legendaries. But I still stand that, if is not good enough in any situation, is just a bad designed unique.

I don’t pretend to be harsh, maybe most of them they are just outdated with the current game state, and need a revision.

Balancing items around needing maybe 500-1000 or 10k hours of game to get what you want is just not a thing, in any game.

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