unique items are bad

hello,

i've reached act 2 with at least one of each character class, and i've focussed on equipment that has "increased rarity of items found", so i can collect the most interesting items. i'm in the "solo self found" league, because i think trading items goes against the spirit of the game, as finding loot is the best part. and in my time playing the game, i've found about a dozen unique items.

so far, only 2 or 3 of those unique items have actually been useful additions to the game. the rest have had more detrimental attributes than useful ones, or else they've been worse than the rare items i've been throwing away at that point in the game.

the whole point of unique items is that they're supposed to be better than the rare items i can craft myself using currency items. and if they have detrimental effects, the positive effects are suppsed to be good enough that i'll adjust my playstyle to try to make best use of them.

but at this stage i'm just not excited about finding new unique items, because so many of them are useless. this is the first arpg where i prefer finding rare items than unique ones, and i think that's a point against this game.

please make unique items more useful and less detrimental. for example, since boots are pretty much the only way to increase movement speed, i'll never equip unique boots that don't have a movement speed buff, regardless of how much armour/evasion/shield they provide.

thanks,
-az

p.s. the "Security token has expired. Please submit the form again." message appeared again when i tried to submit this post, which is a point against this whole website. why should i hit the "submit" button a second time when i have more than a single sentence to post?

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the whole point of unique items is that they're supposed to be better than the rare items

that is true for "other games"

but never in Path of Exile

unique is NOT "legendary"
unique is NOT "legendary"
unique is NOT "legendary"

important things have to be said 3 times

they serve purpose as a variant of that base item type
in most cases they aren't really very powerful
more of serving purpose as levelling unique
some rarer variety however are strong enough to be build defining.

Still, let's be real. As far as I could see almost every non-boss unique (save for 4-5 outliers) are basically useless clutter.

In poe 1 you could often find a common unique in campain and keep it all the way to almost red maps.

i think rare items are too powerful even early on, this is good obviously,
but it does makes unique less desirable, and need another round of buff.

I am quite surprised to see +gem level is so common on rare item and roll up to +6 (or did it go higher?)
that causes gear without +gem a lot less desirable
POE1 +gem never went that high, totally surprised to see they go up to +6 straoght out of the gate for POE2

that is definitely one reason why unique feels weak to me
I really think they should just kept at +1 for the usual ones, and +2 max for 2H

the current end game power curve already too damn strong, nerfing +gem is one potential balancing act they can do to reduce the curve and make unique less bad in comparison.