I was just thinking, one of the things that slightly bothered me last season was I got a pair of Red Rings fairly quickly. (In fact, I ended up getting like 5 of them before they fixed the imprinting mechanic.) This was my first time getting any, so I was happy to have that powerful option for my builds. However, what I found was that when I was going to make new builds, inevitably I’d end up just throwing on double Red Rings kind of just because I could and they were the strongest thing for the slot unless I really wanted to do something very specific. It actually made me kind of less willing to try certain builds because the only red rings I managed to get attributes on were str ones, so if I wanted to do an int/dex/attune build, I was either going to have to not wear them or just be annoyed that they’re a bit inefficient.
And honestly the same thing could be said for some other chase uniques. Once I got a Nihilis I started putting it on anything that didn’t need a more specific item. And while I never got Uber Abby down, I noticed that a lot of build guides basically all had their end game aspirational options as the gloves and relic from him as just generically good stuff.
While it can be fun to get these powerful items, it strikes me that they have the downside of flattening choices. And as we get more powerful tools to get these items, CoF, MG, weaver stuff, or just being able to farm certain bosses easier as power creep makes them more accessible, this is going to come up more frequently.
So one possible solution has presented itself with the new league mechanic: Uniques that are super powerful, but which are mutually exclusive with each other. That way we can have these build defining or chase power items without eventually just making those dead slots for choices.
So what if we expanded what uniques that included? Like maybe we include Red Ring, Omnis, and the Abby/Uber uniques for example? idk if anything else currently fits into that category, but I could imagine taking some uniques that we’d like to be able to balance to be stronger than they currently are and giving them this treatment.
We could also maybe pair this with ways to make it easier to get these uniques sort of like how you can just farm for a specific primordial since you’re limited in how you use them anyway. Or not. It’s fine if they stayed rare, but this could be an option that would be opened up by such a change.
Anyway, what do you think? I’m not full on “this is so important that we need it or the game will be bad.” But I think it’s at least interesting enough to merit considering how such a change could impact design space.