I have been playing LE on & off since 2 years, and for the first time I am “pushing” farther than I did before, really using crafting & gearing as much as possible.
I have quite a lot of set uniques in my stash, and I am concerned that none of them are pretty interesting to use. Seeing the (great) power of the crafting system, and thus the immediately available power of good rares, the set bonuses are not enough to sacrifice 2-3 gear slots.
Is there a counter-example to that ? Maybe I still have to encounter relevant set uniques.
I think set bonuses should be much more potent, or much more build defining, to justify not using good rares.
The intent of Sets in this game is that each item should be good on its own and the set bonuses should not “force” the use of the whole set, but just be a bonus.
The problem in application is that the majority of set items are not very good and the weak set bonuses just make them not viable. There are a couple of set items that are good on their own, but I don’t think a single whole set in the game is viable at this point. (Maybe the Shattered Lance set is an exception). It could change in the future.
Your terminology needs some clarification. Are you referring to Unique items (Brown) or Set items (Green)? I’m going to assume you’re referring to the green Set items. One of my favorite builds is boardman21’s Regifter Paladin, which is based on using the Shard of the Shattered Lance sword and its relic companion Fragment of the Shattered Lance. Both can be obtained by killing God Hunter Argentus in The Stolen Lance Monolith.
Boardman also created a build termed the Decimator based around Gasper’s Will (Sceptur from The Last Ruin Monolith).
There have been other builds that incorporate Set items, but these are just two examples.
Gear feels underwhelming across the board for me. The crafting system is great and all but a well-crafted rare is almost always BiS. There are exceptions but by and large that’s true, at least from what I’ve seen. Combine that with the fact that it’s just a stat increase and most of the time doesn’t even have a unique appearance or anything, and gear is just… meh. It doesn’t need to be D3 levels of insanity but better uniques and set items would be nice to see along with variations in how the character looks through the various levels of gear progression.
From a loot hunting perspective, isn’t that preferred to the early D2 system when Uniques were BiS and everyone wanted the same 6-7 items to finish their characters? Uniques have a role in the early game for alts, particularly Unique weapons. As it stands now, summoners probably get the most mileage out of the Uniques from beginning to end. I imagine as the devs finish up the core end game systems and multiplayer, they will start working on Uniques/Sets/Legendaries, including the accompanying art.
I wish sets were more “wild card” slots type. As in, there is a “set” that has set bonuses up to 2 or 3 items, but there are 6 pieces to the “complete” set. That would allow people to mix and match the set how they want. There could be a set with 4 different weapons, gloves, and relic. A person could then choose one of the weapons with the gloves and the relic and still get the 3 piece bonus. Or a person could dual wield 2 of the weapons and use the gloves for the 3 piece bonus. As long as they don’t allow set bonuses to go beyond 3 piece, it gives players that feel of customizing their set for their build.
There could be a set with 6 different 1H weapons called Kali’s Armaments. It just has a 2 piece set bonus but basically requires you to dual wield any 2 different weapons of the set.
I see your point. It just seems odd to me. I think a big part of what put me off is how difficult it is to know whether something is an upgrade or not. Maybe that’s different from the POE crowd but it took me a long time to figure the system out and there are still huge gaps there. It basically feels like the key part is the base then craft-gambling to give it better tier attributes than what you’re wearing. I’ve never had quite as much trouble in a game knowing whether to switch out a piece of gear or not. Appearance, although minor, is another issue. Most of my time has been spent on Primalist and Rogue and they both look essentially the same from beginning to end. There seems to be a hugely limited variety in equipment appearance and it’s part of what makes gear feel unrewarding.
What in particular is giving you difficulty? When in doubt, skills now show DPS on their tool tip, so you could always refer to that in a pinch.
I understand. Sentinel has one set that looks really good (Solarum) and the rest look like a kid dressed as a Knight on Halloween that his Mom made out of cardboard. Acolyte got a new set and I’m sure other classes are in the queue if they haven’t already received theirs (I don’t play much of the others). Though, having independent art for each piece of gear doesn’t always work out in your favor. Without cohesive MTX sets, you tend to look like a clown show in POE. If you’ve ever played Cyberpunk 2077, that was another game where individual art per piece didn’t tend to serve the player well. Sometimes, having the loot meld into the base model is a good thing until they can implement MTX.
What it comes down to is there’s no at-a-glance number or stat on any piece of gear that seems to set it apart from another piece. The best I can figure is if it’s a higher tier base it might be an upgrade but only with the right affixes or a white / blue piece that I can forge into an upgrade. Quivers seem all over the place and I haven’t gotten that right yet.
Try spending some time experimenting with the loot filters - there’s no “Only show better than my current gear” filter as you can probably imagine, but there are enough options to set up a filter that makes it really easy to see whether an item is something you want based on A) Whether it even appears for you, B) The color it is, and C) You can bold the names of items on the floor based on the criteria in the filter as well.
A very basic example is on my sorcerer, Any base that’s the highest current usable level appears green to me so I can pick it up for crafting (assuming it has good implicit rolls), Items with Tier X (depending on what you’re willing to spend your shattering runes on) or above Shock are Yellow, Chill are Blue, Ignite is Red, Damage of the respective elements are the same color but bolded, and it doesn’t show me common or magic items UNLESS it’s the highest tier I can use base.
A nice bit about the filter is it also shows the next level base ABOVE what I can use so if you come across something you could use in 1 or two levels it doesn’t screw you over.
Anyway, just my 2 cents but I felt like you too before I set up a filter and yeah, it did take me quite a bite of time to get it just right (although mine is very specific, what I showed above was like maybe 8 lines out of 40) - maybe somewhere between an hour or two. Or maybe three over the course of time - but again, mine is probably far more specific than most peoples’ would end up being. I think simplifying the filter would just remove functionality, unless they implemented a way to allow us to choose “Highest level usable” for specific item subtypes without making a line for each item TYPE… IE have a generic one where it’s Highest Usable Level for all Class X subtypes and one that’s the same but for classless subtypes.
