Rebalance Loot based on uniques - plateaus and unique stat sinks

Uniques should be baseline stat sticks that bring your character up to a specific level.

Things like d2's shako / war travs / skullders.

Things that everyone likes (POE2 can make them class specific).

This gives you chase items that you can obtain throughout the tedious farming when youre inbetween juiced maps.

You can create different rarities of these items by assigning them to specific plateaus of player power, offering a set of specific unique items that all players recognize as solid investments. Then upping the power level and rarity for later game plateaus that allow you to more easily slip into end game content.

This does a lot of things.

It allows players to easily spot and find upgrades without requiring them to just seek stat stick rare items, which are naturally boring.

It allows players to get dopamine hits when those items drop, because they can trade them easily.

It gives players a baseline to strive for, knowing what they need to obtain to start moving into end game content.

Its specifically crafted by the devs and balanced to provide exactly all those things.

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In order to keep the count in check - the baseline stats need to provide a solid entryway into their designed endgame checkpoints.

But they need to require heavy investments of currencies to perfect for specific builds, and be ruined easily while crafting to ensure that the items remain at least somewhat scarce.

hahahahhaha. this guy is funny. when it's about death penalty D2 is irrelevant, but when it's about itemization, D2 is THE baseline.

This game gets hurt a lot by doing some things like D2. Uniques are a flawed approach. Either uniques become mandatory or they are irrelevant. The balance is incredibly hard to accomplish.

I think the idea of uniques is good, items that push a build towards a completely specific area. But maybe they should only be available for specific slots and in those slots you can ONLY use uniques? At that point though, we get closer to Keystone passives or Lineage gems in behavior.

The other approach is to go OP's way and make uniques all mandatory but that's a bad idea IMO, because it would trivialize the whole crafting system. Why spend any time crafting a perfect rare when there's a mandatory unique for that slot?

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

This game gets hurt a lot by doing some things like D2. Uniques are a flawed approach. Either uniques become mandatory or they are irrelevant. The balance is incredibly hard to accomplish.

I think the idea of uniques is good, items that push a build towards a completely specific area. But maybe they should only be available for specific slots and in those slots you can ONLY use uniques? At that point though, we get closer to Keystone passives or Lineage gems in behavior.

The other approach is to go OP's way and make uniques all mandatory but that's a bad idea IMO, because it would trivialize the whole crafting system. Why spend any time crafting a perfect rare when there's a mandatory unique for that slot?

the idea isn't to make uniques mandatory - its to make uniques a baseline for bare minimum gear stats to proceed into the next area of the end game.

For instance - at lvl 65 when entering the atlas, most players would be looking for a baseline set of uniques that allow them to beat tier 1-5 maps with no problem after they obtain them. Allowing them to enter t15 at reduced efficiency.

Then once at t15 - they start looking for the next baseline set of uniques that are more rare that allow them to complete unique builds and clear faster.

Rare items would function identically as they do now. They would generally provide better statlines and increase power if you find or trade for them.

The only difference would be that there is a baseline set of uniquely tailored items you can search for and KNOW you are making progress.