That’s your personal impression. The truth is that almost every unique has at least one effect that is unique.
Look at this page and point out one unique that has not at least one unique effect.
Go on for every peace of gear. There are no uniques that aren’t unique besides very rare exceptions that only have “boring” damage modifiers. But those are often specific for certain damage types and so thematic for a certain build and/or you find those stats on items they cannot be occur on normal items because of crafting restrictions.
If you don’t know what to build with certain items, that’s fine. I haven’t found the purpose of all of them either.
But most of them have a defined theme you can use for doing niche builds, like a void sorcerer for example.
I agree with some of the iniques/sets not being powerful enough. But show me one single set that doesn’t have a clear theme?
BTW, you can use Harvard’s Set on a void knight very well.
Just go for it and do crazy stuff. Many things will work surprisingly well.
Why not remove all the stats from items while you’re at it? You want/need certain stats and bonuses for your build to work and if you want to get them, you need to farm them. If you don’t get certain items, change your build to match the items you have at your disposal. As Boardman said, there’s about one build in the game at the moment that NEEDS set items to work properly.
I don’t know if you are purposefully misunderstanding me or not. When I say they don’t have unique effects, I am purposefully excluding those that are “This stat doesn’t appear on a boot but does appear on 4 other slots of gear”. Those are not unique. When I say unique, I don’t mean to that specific slot of gear, I mean unique to everything in the game, All gear and skill nodes. A unique item should fundamentally change something about the game that you can get nowhere else in the game but on that unique item.
No. Crit builds build around crit, not that sword. Nobody makes a build around Eye of Reen. They make a build that Eye of Reen can fit into. There is a huge difference.
Not necessarily, you can use a build that has high crit chance to proc lots of stacks of Reen’s Ire & then do massive ignite damage (which is what I was doing here: Llama’s Firebrand/Flame Reave Spellblade Tankyboi)
That’s not true though, any melee ignite build will have Eye of Reen as it’s BIS weapon. Where you draw the line between “this weapon is BIS” & “I’m building around this weapon” I’m not sure, I think that is a matter of personal definition.
IMO, if you’re going to use a definition of “this build only works with XXX unique” to define a unique, then that could probably only be applied to a very small minority of uniques - Exsanguinous/Last Step of the Living/Shroud of Obscurity for low life builds & Dark Shroud of Cinders/Blade of the Forgotten Knight before they nerfed Fire Auras.
IMO, there are a number of uniques that, while they aren’t essential for a build to work, they really do make it significantly better - Eye of Reen for any melee ignite, Blade of the Forgotten Knight for any void hybrid/spell build, Taste of Blood/Undisputed for any fast melee bleed build, Plague Bearer’s Staff, Dragonflame Edict (probably), Draalsting, Vipertail, to name just a few.
I’m a bit tirered today so I only thought about this without doubble checking it but in every arpg with sets sets are THE endgame gear and not only something to dabble with but something that get’s worse.
This is sort of what I am getting at. It is just my opinion, but I think unique items should make unique builds. I agree that Eye of Reen is good for ignite builds just because of its very high ignite chance, but it isn’t unique in flavor.
This was absolutely NOT the case before the Set rework in D3. Sets in D2 were hot garbage for the vast majority of them too. Even the great sets like tals and IK weren’t BiS for the whole set.
Honestly, the ONLY game I can think of where full sets are BiS is current D3.
Grim Dawn sets are great, but that is because they massively overlap with Unique design space in how they change how skills and builds function. D3 sets do the same thing currently. Even still, I don’t think Grim Dawn has full sets as BiS on the vast majority of the sets. Partial sets are common.
But it is unique in flavor because no where else in the game would you possibly try to build into 100% crit chance to boost your ignite damage as thats what you do with eye or reen since you get a 5% boost to fire damage over time per stack of ire reens. This weapon is completely build defining and can and is built around in quite a few builds. It is unique because you dont get its benefits anywhere else in the game.
You are right I should’ve narrowed it down a bit. D3 and chaosbane comes to my mind and oh boy wait for D2 remastered :D. In Grim Dawn sets are the core of every endgame build and I’ve never seen a build without it. Then again… Grim Dawn did a very good job to incorperate everything but I still hope this can be done better but we’ll see. Afaik we still miss another rarity tier in LE and I’m eager to see what EHG has up their sleeves.
While we give a lot of examples you keep on saying that uniques in general are boring. If you expect unique effects like spawning litte ants that shoot rainbows that explode on impact - yes, you are right. That’s not the case with LE items.
We only have uniqes that spawn skeletons, tidal waves, animated weapons, firebolts and all that boring stuff.
I think you made clear that you have set your mind and thats it.
Great, so maybe Eye of Reen isn’t the best example of a bad unique, but it is still bland. Unique items should be items in the game that when dropped, people make a new character to specifically build around that item. I still don’t know that Eye of Reen reaches that point. It still seems more like an item that just gets slotted into an existing build idea rather than the item creating the idea itself. Eye of Reen is a good item, it just doesn’t feel particularly unique to me.
It’s really crazy how the perception of certain mechanics (in this case uniques) differs so greatly.
LE for me has by far the best approach to uniques out of any aRPG.
I do agree, that there are alot of old ones, that need to be updated to live up to the new standard, but i am definitely very happy with uniques in LE.
It’s really crazy, because i think one of the most complains i hear about uniques, is actually the complete opposite. People do not find them very exciting most of the time, because most of the time, you find a unique that does not fit into your build, because they are so specific.
They are very specific, but for the wrong reasons.
Just to clarify what I am talking about, of the 7 different unique helmets, only 3 feel in any way “unique”. That is Altors Legacy for the generic +1 to max companions, Decayed Skull for the damage taken conversion, and The Ashen Crown for “Elemental Nova is now cast at target location”. Of those, only The Ashen Crowns effect feels exceptionally unique and build defining. So 3 of 7 if I want to be very generous, but really 1 of 7 for what I actually am talking about.
Don’t get me wrong, i am totally behind the idea of overhauling and maybe reworking some uniques/sets that are no longer exciting enough.
But even the uniques that do not have have outrageously special mechanics, usually have at least stats on them, on a slot where you can’t get that stat for example. Which still is way cooler than a “unique” that is just a infalted stat stick.
Except one helmet(namely the Snowblind, which has a unique stat “cannot be blinded”), your example was perfectly valid, if you want to go one step further you could even rule out “The Ashen Crown”, since it’s basically only doing what a node within Elemental Nova’s Tree is doing. So it’s not “unique”, just unique for an item.
But i feel like you just picked out possibly one of the “worst” slots in terms of uniqueness.
Literally all other slots have insanely cool uniques.
I just clicked on the first lastepochtools.com link RawSuicide posted. Just happened to be helmets. I think weapons are in the worst shape, but that may just be due to the number of them.
I must say, this whole discussion is now totally focused on examples of bad unique or set items. While the core question was about removing SET MECHANICS. And I’ll repeat myself: I’m totally convinced (thanks @boardman21 ) that LE version of this mechanics is totally viable.
Concept is like …
Unique items give some unique modifiers.
Set items give some unique modifiers INDEPENDENTLY to exact item combination. Those mods depends on the NUMBER of items.
So, perhaps this discussion should transform to a new suggestion-topic?
) that LE version of this mechanics is totally viable.