With previous post whining I come up with interesting (or not) idea. Yeah we all have shit ton of uniques (btw mostly idols, not uniques) in our stash that we too lazy to care about and too greedy to sell.
Let as shatter unique and set items with chance of 0.0000000001% (you get it) to obtain shard with unique affix. Dunno what it does to balance, but… It’s interesting.
I don’t think this feature should be target of farm. I want it to be already epic if you find one unique shard from item. Chance must be very low, 1/100 something balanced for each item. Random affix and they weighted too inside item by power. More powerfull, less chance.
For example: Prism Wraps have “30% less Elemental Damage Taken” that’s some crazy shit on very common item so shard rate for this specific affix 0.005%. Another story: Red Ring of Atlaria have “10% less Damage Taken if you have at least 180 Total Attributes”, but ring is very rare, so shard rate for this specific affix 0.5%. Like that.
Of course you can’t use shards from another item type, it’s obvious Rings on rings, gloves on gloves, etc
So what you really mean is shattering uniques, not fracturing them, correct? Fracturing was actually part of LE in the past but (gratefully) that was changed to what we currently have in the forging potential.
It sounds like you want the Diablo 4 Aspect system, where you can shatter a unique with a chance to get the unique affix for crafting onto another item. That is similar to the temporal sanctum already where you can combine an exalted item onto a unique to make a legendary.
Maybe there could be a similar dungeon that allows you to consume a unique with a chance of adding one of the “unique” affixes on the item onto a target rare or exalted item.
Chances could be
affix as a sealed affix
affix randomly replaces an affix on the item
affix doesn’t land on the item
affix doesn’t land on the item, but instead adds another random affix from the unique item following the first two rules above.
This would probably have to change the item into a new type like legendary, maybe a “replica”, so that you cannot use it again.
The problem with normal affixes is that they just are not worth that much.
When I am looking for a specific dark orange shard, the odds that shattering a random unique I will get some will always be very low (there are a lot dark orange shards).
And the other shards are so plentiful that I rarely go even close to running out.
So shattering uniques for random shards would just not be worth the time to do it.
I notice now that in my original response could have been misinterpreted.
To articulate: there are hundreds of dark orange shards in the game.
Just counting the prefixes that are classified as very rare in last epoch tools, there are over 250 of them.
Any given build will likely use just a couple of them.
So, even assuming that every single unique that you shatter gives the equivalent of tier 5 of an orange shard, the odds of shattering a useful orange shard for your build is very low. Primalist Storm Crow Added Spell Damage might be a fabulously rare shard, but if I am doing literally any build that is not storm crows it is completely useless.
Random rare shards are just not enticing as a reward, at least for me.
If you want a specific affix, you are going to be better off just putting it on your filter and shattering rares for it. That is of course unless the favourable weight is set to absurdly high levels, but then there are going to be other issues.
Rings on rings, gloves on gloves, etc