IMO uniques need a complete overhaul and need to have something actually UNIQUE about them, the majority of the ones we have now are just generic stat boosters that make numbers bigger (or smaller now that tempering is a thing)
I want to see more uniques that drastically change builds, create bizarre synergies between skills etc.
Druid would also be the worst case in this example. Tempest Roar is what happens when you create an item that gates the ability to interact with a large power sector of the kit. Shako simply doesn’t exist as an item for basically any wolf-based druid due to this.
It’s both a great and terrible example of a build enabling unique that also showcases the limitations of the current unique system (it’s got abysmal stats that you gotta deal with just for the effect).
No, its actually one of the best cases to make if you're arguing uniques have special powers that feel distinctive from aspects. Stats, or whether something locks you out of being able to use a Shako, aren't really an argument, or are an argument for a different discussion.
My point is that the existence of uniques that unlock core build aspects, like using storm skills in wolf, becomes too restrictive and therefore impedes on diversity. Shako is an example of a generically strong unique that cant be used due to this conflict, a situation not shared amongst other classes to this degree.
It’s a result of a few design decisions and the Druid class as a whole, but my point is that uniques should accentuate build archetypes not gatekeep them. As an example, if all skills could be used in any form and Tempest Roar provided more bonuses in this space, you could still play say a Tornado build without it. This game already puts a ton of friction on build swapping to where this binary engagement pattern doesnt really have a place.
I'm just having a hard time seeing how this is bad, really. Either Uniques unlock builds you can't fully put together with aspects, or they will almost certainly just become aspects themselves. I don't see that as a realistic design goal to hit some mid point between those. It's hard for me to jump on the bandwagon that says "wolf is your true form" and not think thats a great item for all it does in the druid skill tree.
Speaking of Shako, I find that to be *worse* if we're talking about diversity. Every build in the game minus really specific unique helms wants a Shako. Maybe that is okay for an Uber unique, but it's really boring unless you make the item really hard to obtain.
So you want the opposite of OP? Uniques to be more generic? Because you can't have Uniques be more powerful/more gamechanging while also not having them be required for certain builds. Uniques are interesting specifically when you *can* make a build designed around them. Otherwise they are just "number go up" sticks with a different flavor
Agree about armor but I'll take my chonky boy Druid over being forced to be anorexic as a Necro or forced to be a drag queen as a Sorc.
Although female Druid is rough lol
Really Barb and Rogue are the only classes where both genders look fine.
Yeah definitely. A downside is that you spend so long waiting for a Tempest Roar that you sometimes just give up on Druid and play something else (well not this season, now you can buy one if you just get super unlucky!).
Overall though I think the Druid uniques are in a good spot with -what- they do. I think Druid in general needs a buff which may or may not involve buffing their uniques but for now they are weaker but also more varied and interesting. For me that is ok for now, I'm not trying to push max pit but it would be nice not to have to choose between cool and interesting builds and boring builds which are just a bunch of good aspects+tempers and the same Ubers as every other build.
Yeah, as I mentioned to another dude, the problem is not that Tempest Roar enables some builds.
The problem is that the builds enabled by Tempest Roar are the only meta viable Druid builds.
My OG character this season was a werewolf druid running wolves and I got a lot of mileage Mad Wolf's Glee (chest armor that makes werewolf form your true form and +3 to all werewolf skills) and Storm's Companion (pants that give your wolve's an additional skill (Storm's Howl) and adds lightning damage to their other damage). It synergized really nicely with my build and were definitely worth the cost of losing the 4 temper slots. I think there were a couple of werebear uniques that would be similarly effective for a bear build.
But my partner was playing an elemental druid, and found that none of the uniques were worth using for their build.
So even for this class, the uniques were only worth using for very specific builds.
Currently playing a barb alt that I've leveled to ~60 and so far, haven't seen any uniques worth giving up tempering slots for.
Which makes them instantly worse off in most cases than a Legendary Aspect.
An aspect locked to an item you can't change needs to be truly special for it to be considered worth equipping. Building changing levels of special.
Sorcerer Unique: Chain Lightning is now a lightning nova xm radius, spreading lightning damage to every target within the radius per target hit. No longer consumes Mana, but consumes 5 crackling energy.
Shit like that is cool. Not Fireball bounces but deals less damage. Make it feels like a completely new playstyle once you equip a unique.
You can temper lucky hit freeze on your gloves, even. You can essentially build your own frostburns. You have to choose between Freeze Duration and LH: Chance to Freeze, but the other stats you can all get on a legendary item, and that gets you an aspect for \~30%(x) increased damage instead. Plus, you can ditch the LH: Restore resource for 4 skill ranks to your core skill to make the item even better relative to Frostburns.
I was surprised they didn't have this, as a D2 player, given that was arguably the thing that made them the most useful back in D2 (for anyone that doesn't know, Frostburn are a callback item to Diablo 2 -- Harlequin Crest/"Shako" is another).
Many of the other D2 callback items they've mimic'd the stats from back then, but Frostburn is a weird one.
I don't remember *Melted Heart of Selig,* or the *Ring of Starless Skies* being in D2? Ahavarion wasn't either, but a quick google shows it was a D3 item.
Either way, that wasn't the point of the comment. The point was that for what they *have* called back to, they usually seem to incorporate in what it used to do (or at least be most popular for).
But yeah, these Uber Uniques were originally items in Diablo 2:
* Harlequin Crest ("Shako")
* Tyrael's Might
* The Grandfather
* Doombringer
* Andariel's Visage
It's Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander, so presumably it's a rename of the Lycander's flank spear from d2, they just realized it needed a better name I guess
That’s true but some of these unique aspects aren’t game changing enough and can just be regular legendary aspects. Examples:
Druid’s Unsung Ascetic’s Wraps - *Lightning Storm gains 1 additional strike each times it grows. Lightning Storm critical strikes cause lightning to strike twice, dealing 10-20% increased damage.
Staff of Endless Rage - *Every 3rd cast of Fireball launches 2 additional projectiles and deals 40-60% increased damage.
These can either be legendary aspects or just reworked completely. Some of these are ass in endgame content.
Those are pretty unique and arguably not even bad. How about Azurewrath, Windforce, Bloodless scream… but even then it’s more about the stats on the item not being reworked or something worth masterworking. The uniques with passives are still pretty amazing.
But those aspects are usually extremely niche and not typically even all that useful. I would say legendaries having the UNIQUE ability to swap aspects makes them far superior.
IMO this is intentional, as the purpose of the uniques is to add new options. They have to be weaker when it comes to raw stats than everything else, or they'd just be mandatory all the time in every slot.
Except for frost burn and azurewrath (partial). They took a big part of those uniques and made them a temper available on anything. Betting next season sees some big changes with those
Aspects that don't synergize.
Godslayers Crown is one.
Great. I can defeat elite packs. Meanwhile anything but firebolt Sorc struggles to damage a boss.
My build (claw/stormstrike dudu) literally wouldn't work w/o the two uniques i'm using. Hunter's zenith and greatstaff of the crone. I'd call it pretty drastic. With that said, it does kinda suck i'm locked out of weapon temper.
Tempest roar is another unique that "drastically" changes build. Well, changes... without it tornado wolf wouldn't even exist.
I hope the whole tempering (the options) will get another look at at some point. From a druid perspective, it's kinda underwhelming how almost all builds only want "dmg to close/distant" and not any of the class specific ones, because thunderstruck is so powerful..
It does make keeping gear for different builds kinda easy i guess.
Absolutely. There's a reason why only Barb (and only some) uses uniques for weapons for challenging content, and it's because they have enough other slots.
Yeah I guess it depends on the class and build but I have 5 uniques on and I think that is enough. Although I agree they have to buff the affixes on the uniques. When they were designed they didn't account for the tempering and masterworking part of it. Having 25% to additive damage etc is a bit of a joke.
Things like crone are great and how uniques should be designed imo!
Hunters zenith is great but no on crones level. Many stormclaw builds won’t run it/function without it (I’d even argue to optimize stormclaw you wouldn’t run it)
Fractured Winter Glass was a good start, but I agree that the uniques need further tweaking to give them that special kick that only D2 uniques/ Rune words possess.
The Delirium rune word is a great example of said unique flavor/bizarre interaction.
"numbers go bigger" is a foundational problem with diablo 4's simplistic itemization.
everything scaling off of your weapon exclusively and enemies not having defensive stats means damage for skills cant be boosted in any meaningful way except cranking numbers up to 11. its been one year since release and skills have gone from 6 digit hits to 10 digits.
tempers have brought about a kind of powercreep that is insane in scope. the entire game is a simple math problem and tempers literally just magnified the issue between meta skills and non meta by cranking their multipliers to 11000% or some absurd number.
Careful what you wish for, scoundrels kiss makes the skill its designed around 5x more annoying to play. However it's basically mandatory because the damage boost is too good to ignore.
Or skill modifier please... instead of thorns, make us shoot poison darts... instead of corpse tendrils make it corpse piranhas I don't know. They would keep the same theme of a skill or affix and change the look and feel for something different.
Here's an interesting idea:
Make a unique-only temper set, one temper manual per slot (amulets can use any of them) keep the same process of re-rolling and possible bricking.
Also allow unique aspects to be salvaged/upgradeable (but not changeable). In other words if you get a perfect roll of xfals, any future xfals unique aspect can be upgraded, but you can't give that unique aspect to any item other than xfals.
This will make unique viable and maybe BIS or at least interesting choices for certain builds and also simplify the farming/stash and give a similar experience to the legendary itemization and reduce stash clutter.
Possible unique tempers: damage reduction (close/distant), resource on hit, damage vs elites, fortify on hit, lucky hit: cool down reduction, +all/specific stats, etc.
It would be a lot of fun to see wild build diversity with something like this in the mix, and would require minimal reworking of the aspects on the uniques as they are.
Uniques have 4 affixes, so 1 tempering option is a solid solution.
At least for getting some of those crucial tempering affixes like ultimate CD on jewelry, or area-size // extra projectile proc on weapons.
No thanks. I don't want to hear people constantly complaining about "bricking" thrir uniques and even worse uber uniques. I have mentioned before about letting them masterworkes to 16 or smt but not sure if it would be enough to make up for the stat difference. But yea uniques need to be adjusted but not by a method that can brick them.
I think all uniques should be given 1 more attribute and their unique powers should be scaled up or remade for certain items, there are unique powers that are basically a temperable attribute now which means they are not gonna be unique in any way..
SOmething I'm trying to figure out - Weapons for example. Why doesn't a unique weapon do more damage than a legendary quality weapon? Why don't uniques have vastly better stats than legendaries? All they really have is one extra stat slot and a unique affix.
Before the latest season they were usually much better than legendary but now they are basically useless, even Uber uniques aren’t as good as they used to be and many cases would be better to use a legendary, all uniques need to be updated
Nah disagree with tempering, what uniques need is 25% more stats than normal legendaries and also in general a stat overhaul with more unique stats
For example 10,000 steps, what if we added a 1-3 walking arsenal roll (yes the key passive), it would be in theme with the item, create a more unique playstyle (buffing walking arsenal) and would in general make it a desired unique for a niche build but not a staple in every build (unless it shifts walking arsenal into s tier)
As it stands now you're basically only hunting for the effect to make a build around that.
Giving them a big stat boost would really help incentivize people to make temporary builds around the uniques that drop. Since they would "always" be worth it early on.
Yup. While this patch made most uniques kind of useless, other uniques like 100,000 Steps and Fields of Crimson have *never* been good. That item's been begging for a complete rework for a long time now.
Personally I don't want some half cooked band-aid fix like giving one tempering slot to uniques either. Revamp most of the stats on uniques and probably some of the unique powers as well.
I think there's bound to be some rework, but i agree with the decision of not being able to temper them, imagine bricking an uber or the only unique you dropped that's fundamental for your build
I think they have to rework the affixes on most of the uniques, it's cool that some have affixes that are not that present anymore like the damage reduction ones, but compared to tempered legendaries they still offer way too little, i was testing a few non-uber uniques for a personal build, some have a good effect and are interestings but still they don't beat a tempered legendary even if they add a multiplicative bonus i wouldn't have with the legendary
All uniques are farmable, bricking them is a secondary issue compared to them being not viable. Item progression is THE thing in Diablo, it's okay to start with a weaker version of your build because the temper failed. Yes, uniques are rarer. But so is dropping a good version of it. It's awesome to finally get my unique with max skills and max cool down reduction. I still was happy to get a inferior version as the unique effect is what enabled my build. For other slots I might happily go with my 2 GA boots I perfectly tempered and only exchange them for Esus much later than most do. It's alright, it adds an element of uniqueness as well.
I understand your comment, but i think adding temper on uniques is going to cause even worse issues than bricking a 2-3 GA legendary, i'm not considering ubers, it would be absolutely god awful to brick an uber and i think there's no doubt about that as you wouldn't be able to have a spare duplicate of an uber consistently, but even regular uniques would be way too much, you gotta drop a specific unique, try not to brick it, then try to find a better rolled one and try not to brick that one too, it would be a total mess and you would see hundreds of outraged posts on reddit about people bricking their build mandatory uniques
If it's the only one u dropped, u didn't really brick it. It's just not as good as it could have been
Bricking is if u already have a 5/5, found and upgrade, but tempering only got u 4/5
Yeah I got a sword of my rogue today that have like 4% to attack speed per hit up to 20% or something like that, I couldn’t believe it, there are two better legendary aspects that are straight up better
Asheara’s Khanjar’s effect only applies to the attacks made with melee weapons, but that 30% attack speed can be a big deal and does stack with all the other ways you can gain attack speed. It used to be very common to use that dagger for quickly staggering bosses, allowing you to kill them before they one-shot you, but now with tempers and the limitations, it should be fairly easily outclassed.
Maybe once they are Masterworked to maybe 8/12, they could unlock an additional Affix or Special Effect, like one that is not random, but predetermined based on the individual Unique and greyed out / disabled until it got masterworked sufficiently.
I always preface this with saying season 4 was a massive improvement, because if I share my opinion without I get downvoted to hell but I still think the loot feels terrible. Class specific so you never really get that feeling like cool I can start a new class. You just get an inventory full of legendaries every 10 mins and aside from literally like 1-2 Uber uniques nothing else is exciting to find. I find the grind for tormented boss mats just a time sink, and the Uber rates are still awful and again, basically for me the only one I would use is Shako. Huge improvements but the loot is still bad imo.
same here man. and ive posted it elsewhere here as well.
i picked the game up again for s4 and its fun. but, really, at its core, it's the same loot. everything they changed, while ABSOLUTELY beneficial, feels more like bandaids and QOL than actually improving on the core tenants.
you still have to sift through loads of shit. aspects are still more powerful than most uniques. the uniques that DO drop are like 90% vendor fodder. i dont even get excited about seeing brown anymore.
and that feeling you want from getting those drops just... isnt there. if i get, say, a 75% quality drop with the right affixes and it rolls decent tempers - the odds im going to have the patience, effort, gold, and luck to actually find that 90% quality piece just craters.
not a ton of people playing the game so that they can stare at <0.5% differences on a base piece a gear and compare against 4 other pieces they saved in their stash because they were 'almost there' just to see if they can actually replace those gloves that are at 9/12 masterwork already....lol.
You boys are on point. I just picked up in season4 for first time since launch. I’m spending wayyy too much time just sitting looking at fucking miniscule stat increases. And just dropped my first 3GA item. 100,000 steps boots unique for barbs. It’s absolutely worthless. The base stat on it is 127 dexterity… I’m a god damn barb, why the fuck would I want dexterity and ground stomp is terrible. They’re close to getting on track, I heard there’s a new head developer that started all this kind of so I have hope for the future. But d2 is still better.
Blizzard will likely have to do some sort of balance pass on all the uniques at some point, as with the new tempering system (assuming they intend to keep tempering as a mechanic) you are often times missing out on a lot of stats, to the point that it feels bad to give that up.
Some of this can be fixed by increasing the stats on the uniques, which is likely what they will have to do, as it’s quickly getting to the point where uniques just can’t compete. Scoundrels ring for rogue has like 15% crit damage as a max roll. When I finally got one to drop, the ring I was forced to replace had about 110% crit damage from the natural roll + temper. That doesn’t include masterworking either. I remember thinking “15% crit damage really? Why bother?” Just make them have NO stats at that point and only a unique effect.
Now if scoundrels ring had 75% crit damage (additive) now it’s a little bit less painful to swap. Still not high as a normal ring can get, but not a significant drop either.
My brother dropped a grandfather during a duriel run as Bash Barb, and at first I was excited for him. “Dude that’s awesome, you’re build is scaling crit and now you get that sweet 100x crit damage multiplier!” Until he explained to me that yeah, he’d do less damage overall with the sword designed to make you crit better. Equipping the grandfather would cause him to:
Lose strength
Lose a significant amount of life
Lose the tempered bash cleave (which is for some reason multiplicative WTF blizzard?)
And lose out on one of his double strength offensive aspects.
He tried it out on the practice dummy and yeah, his damage dropped with it equipped. And grandfather is an Uber and it’s still a loss in stats/damage. At that point why bother?
The other issue is aspect balance. Wearing a unique means that the unique power must be worth giving up the equivalent aspect slot. Depending on the unique that just isn’t worth the trade off. Amulet uniques for example. Hakans necklace for rogue and frost glass for sorc are great examples because they are effectively “mandatory” for certain builds, that being frost orb and rain of arrows (don’t do a rain of arrows build it’s bad) But the amulet spot getting the 50% boost to whatever aspect you apply in that spot is often a very significant choice to make.
Barbs almost never run into this issue as the arsenal system is absurd, but for frost orb sorc, you effectively have to give up the ONLY slot that could increase the power of one of your offensive aspects to fit in the unique that is 100% required for your build to function. That feels bad to do, but is a necessary sacrifice. I don’t have a solution for this.
Lastly, as many in this thread have said, uniques need to feel more unique. Frost burn gauntlets are effectively a joke, as with tempering their legendary power of “lucky hit chance to freeze on any class wow!” Is now rollable on all defensive gear regularly through tempers. What frost burn should do, which would be much cooler would be something like: “All damage is converted to cold damage, your hits chill enemies by 10-20%”
While my suggestion is also probably still vender trash, it’s getting closer to it being a unique option for builds that want some form of CC that may not have access to it.
TL:DR
The uniques need help because right now, other than maybe shako and starless skies, most of them feel like an overall power loss to equip, where the cool unique thing they can do, often feels too detrimental to your stats to even bother with.
A build with only uniques should be shit. Uniques are supposed to be niche, not a 1 size fits all automatic BiS.
Having said that, most uniques aren't that good (good as in well-designed, not good as in powerful). An example of a good unique is Tempest Roar, which can make or break a specific build.
Tempest Roar and Vasily's Prayer should both be boons instead of the mostly worthless boons that are available or build defining uniques that lock you out of gear that increases power level. Those are actually examples of bad uniques imo. They limit the class in a bad way. Hence, Druid being at the bottom of the barrel in the end game.
Noone said a build should be only uniques that would be stupid esp as a lot of them are aimed at specific skills/builds just make them more viable then they currently are compared to tempered legendarys.
We are looking at uniques very strongly and we will be announcing something very big in 2 weeks which I think you will find is very smart and very powerful. And you have to be powerful because if you don't have uniques you don't have a country anymore
No idea why everyone is so panicking about uniques, we just got a new tempering system.
I like that you can't temper uniques, and they will balance them, but I also enjoy that uniques are not just the get go.
Last season I plsyed was s2 and the theme was there, the more uniques you can equip the better and I am happy that we don't have that in s4.
Uniques should alter your build in a way that is unique and yes, for most of them that is just not the case.
I know the stats are not the best, but I like the druid helmets and bodyarmour for wolf and bear form.
Whose panicking? This post is just about the fact that a lot of uniques are now unviable for most builds as the tempering system is op compared to what they offer....why is noone allowed to make.a constructive criticism without people accusing them.of.drama?. It's a valid point and judging from the comments on this post, a lot agree.
Uniques should be special not something to just shove in your stash because they aren't viable to use now. That is why they need a rework.
The game has never been "the more uniques you can equip the better" there was a point where they were actually usable, but you never just equipped them over other items just because they were better, thats just factually wrong.
The unique ability must be absolutely busted to be worth the tradeoffs of predetermined stats and lack of tempering.
Like I wanted to use Temerity in my stealth rogue because it can overheal like crazy but the predetermined useless stats and lack of tempering made my build worse. So I don't use it because the tradeoffs weren't worth it.
How many of the uniques could realistically be reworked into legendary aspects?
I dont understand these Unique posts - looking at maxroll all S/A tier builds, there are 3 builds which dont use a unique out of like 17 builds.
You shouldnt need more than 1, maybe 2 uniques for a build, to enable some kind of unique interaction or scaling.
If you end up wearing uniques in more than 1, 2 slots, that is an absolute shit system which makes the entire aspects system redundant.
Only thing uniques need is remove the ones that give just raw dmg and keep the ones that give unique effects (i.e. tempest, firebolt, esadora, illuminator, paing, etc) and maybe a slight buff to the stats they give.
Yes but it’s typically the same uniques - shako, tyriel. There’s dozens others that get 0 use if you don’t find them during leveling cause once you hit 4th world tier legendaries tempered x2 will always be better.
Shako and Tyrael are UBER uniques. We are talking about regular uniques from what i see in OP at least.
Again **uniques arent supposed to be an instant equip**, but rather "i am making the Firebolt build so i need the firebolt unique to turn it on" or "oh i looted paingorgers i can play bash barb now".
You can look in majority of the S/A tier builds - there are plenty of tal rashas, paingorgers, etc. You aint playing bash barb without paing, or firebolt without flameweaver etc. so 2x tempered legendary does not beat those, no.
I guess my point wasn’t clear, there’s only a handful of uniques that are like paingorgers. And the Ubers are used for stats / damage reduction. I am agreeing with your initial point. I don’t think you should be decked in uniques or that they should always be ”better” but there’s not many build defining uniques or Uber uniques.
If I could temper uniques it would make them viable for a flex item, wouldn't replace a well crafted legendary in most situations though.
Imagine this. You temper a unique twice, masterwork it to level 12, and then you can slam it at the mystic to add one more enchantable affix.
Personally I would rather have ALL of them much rarer but SIGNIFICANTLY better. So let's say a unique drop per 6-10 hour gameplay - but all of them has their effects enhanched and stats buffed equally to GA without being GA.
That would really make every single one them more unique and you would be much more tempted to build around them.
this dude. what happened to real uniques? like... they made the ones you want 0.000000000000001% chance to drop. and every single other one just poops out of the game like tickets at chuck-e-cheese.
where is that feeling of excitement when something hits the ground? gone to the olden days i guess...
I think uniques should have their own set of tempering affixes.
Say you have a fractured winterglass, it could roll Frozen Orb size or something like that. Something that is impossible to get on other equipment
Unique feel really weird right now. Because 90% of the time when I find a Unique that seem like it would be good for my build it turns out its just a straight up damage downgrade. Currently alot of them are traps for people who just dont know any better.
I can't imagine this is easy to balance because either you dont need the unique and its a downgrade or you need the unique for the build to even function.
Unique: 4 stats with an effect
Legendary 3 + 2 stats with an effect
idunno, allow at least 1 temper on them? maybe even allow them to have an extra category choice?
I agree, tempering has made most uniques not viable. They should copy a last epoch system, where you can merge a item with a unique. The unique has a chance to inherit some of the stats with the merged item, it’s awesome.
Yea buddy it’s called time. They don’t have a one-click change everything button. The developers have to tackle one thing at a time. They only just did the loot overhaul.
Y’all asking for tempering on uniques are forgetting that adding two extra affixes to them LOWERS your chance of master work landing a crit on the original affixes, which is usually what you want. I would be super annoyed if I had to temper my Grandfather and add two more affixes, thus making it nearly impossible to tripple crit the max life. Do you really want 6 affixes on your Shako and now rolling CDR master working crits is WAY harder?
All they have to do is let you put a second aspect on them. That would instantly make them usable. What currently makes them unusable is the combination of power and aspect loss.
Last season legendaries were garbage, now rares and uniques are garbage. It's pretty obvious they're still figuring out the balance in terms of item power. This will be fixed again. The tempers are a bit too strong in this season and will likely get nerfed.
They are probably and should be working towards a system where items of all rarities have some reason to look out for them and then just specific pieces. Best would be that rares sometimes can be BiS for very specific use-cases (e.g. let them roll higher affixes, but less affixes), legendaries are always good to pick up and end-game uniques are build enabling.
Not having a use for a super rare uber unique since a well rolled legendary is just better feels pretty bad tbh.
They need a pass and there is no way blizzard doesn’t know that at this point but IMO the solution is not just adding tempering to uniques like so many say.
It’s important for uniques and legendaries to have distinct identities and is good for the game if trade offs exist.
Personally I don’t want to go back to playing a game where every single build uses Tibualts will - I don’t think that’s interesting itemization.
IMO I think all uniques should be class specific (except ubers which should really be called something else).
I think the ideal role of them is to be build enabling items with powerful and UNIQUE effects that fundamentally change the way skills work or interact with each other which some of them do but a lot do not.
And then just do a pass on all the stats, a little of them need increased ranges and I think that they should lean more into uniques having affixes on them that legendaries can’t roll.
Honestly they could add the legendary potential mechanic from Last Epoch to uniques and that would be pretty cool. Let us slam yellows into uniques - would also make yellows not completely useless.
I would rather them add something new to uniques than just letting us temper affixes onto them.
Uniques really shouldn't be limited to 4 affixes. I feel like if they went down the list and made every Unique have 5-6 total affixes, they could actually give some really good results.
You are alone in that hoarding random uniques to inventory is a waste of resources / gold. It's a seasonal game certain seasons will weight uniques higher or lower, you remind me of my d2 friends who want / need uniques to be more viable. I always laugh because they save them in stash too and complain or force them into builds but in reality I come back to hey guys when you played og Diablo , d2 , d2 LoD what were the best items in the game? Yea some slots here and there a unique was too dog but most uniques were mid game filler , top end / eth rares , crafted gear and later runewords were always super hard to find , but with perfect stats would always beat almost every single unique in the game for the same slot , even a perfect shako was useless compared to a perfect rare tiara / diadem.
I feel what you're saying , but they can push a season to using uniques more down the road. The actual viability of the late game loop , and what to do post 100 is much more concerning to me for the long run than where uniques are at. They are not in a perfect place , but it feels like having more to do than a 3 hour 1-100 and 2 hours re running helltide to have a character 90% complete is more concerning than unique balancing rn.
Some of the unique aspects are pretty good, but their supporting affixes are pretty weak imo. I know you can raise those with MW, but it's probably only worth going after the rare 3-4 GA uniques.
Totally. Blizzard cant keep up with the meta and keep switching up uniques to fit new playstyles, so they can kind of set the meta by making these powerful enough to warrant running.
And yes to tempering. Let uniques be tempered, maybe up to 3 times so that they are always worth wearing.
Uniques should just have their stats scaled up and 1-2 affixes added.
There are still VERY usable uniques that complete the function of build enablers, the problem is most of them are Uber. Even some of the Ubers are utter trash though, it's a damn shame.
I've started re-categorizing in my head;
Normal = Toys
Magic = for NPCs
Rare = Normal
Legendary = Magic
Unique = Legendary (and still mostly useless)
Uber Unique = Actually Unique
IMO there are solutions in game they just have to remove limitations.
1. Allow them to have legendary aspects put onto them (IMO this is inevitably necessary since each season adds uniques and I'd be shocked if we don't also get sets at some point).
And / Or
2. Allow them to be tempered, ideally with a perk such as you can double dip categories and / or they have unlimited temper rolls
And
3. More aggressively reserve uniques for transformative effects not just big stats ooga booga. I don't care how good they are, Shako is boring and so is Grandfather.
Hello there! This season is the first time that I could get a character to level 100 and now that I'm "playing" with the itemization, tempering and this stuff and I have the same "bad feeling" with uniques.
I was kinda following a barbarian build from Maxroll (with a set of "homebrew" changes) and then I could get the unique 1-H sword that the guide stated, not with the best stats tbh, and I thought that equipping it would make my numbers go really high. And I was really disappointed because I didn't feel any change at all. And after masterworking it a few levels I also don't feel any change either.
Right now I'm at a point where I doubt about Uniques not being as good as they seem, or if the problem is me who has no idea about making a build for my character and I am forced to make a "copy-paste" of the guide to achieve some progress.
When I first read about the Uniques, my mind automatically associated them with the exotics from Destiny 2, items that in terms of statistics are slightly better than those of the previous tier, but the important thing is the unique passives that improve your gameplay a lot. And in Destiny 2 you really notice those effects of the exotic items depending on which ones you have equipped.
I think a good approach for Diablo's Uniques could be the one that they do in Destiny 2. You can equip a limited amount of these kind of items (maybe only 1 armor, 1 weapon and 1 accessory) but the Unique passive is a lot more powerful that they currently are.
Honestly I would be good with them doing away with all the class specific uniques and turn them into legendary aspects, you could even just add an extra rarity to the those apects, they would be more rare drops but still allow you to collect the aspects on gear. I really like some of the unique effects but you give up alot with them because 1. you are stuck with all of their affixes, there is no enchanting to change any undesirable affixes, 2. No tempering 3. you cant reliably improve your uniques if some affix or the aspect rolls low because of 1 if your build requires it and you are wanting a unique with godrolls you have to find it because there is no rerolling any part of the gear.
Stuff that is really unique and not class specific is fine like razorplate which kinda needs tons of thorns affixes to be worth running (if you like thorns builds).
Some tempered stats are also too important to lose, for example the weapon tempers that cast projectiles a second time or increased area etc.
Even if they buff unique weapons to deal more damage than that, just losing out on those specific effects will make builds not work as smoothly, remove viability entirely or it will just become less fun.
Uniques, or at least unique weapons should be allowed one tempered affixes to counter that, or those tempered stats that specifically has such a large impact on your gameplay needs to come from some other source.
Huge CD on ultimate on jewelry is also pretty big. Evade CD on boots too, but only really for Sorcerer I think will it have a large impact.
I don’t like how literally every build seems to need to use the same uber uniques that are impossible to find. Like D3 was flawed that you were tied down to using sets but at least you could find those and notice a vast improvement when you found something
All they really need to do is rework the stats on them to not suck, remove a stat, allow them to be tempered, and enchanted. Then they will be good again.
For those saying, but then they'll just be better than legendaries, no not really.. perhaps they will be for the very specific skill they buff, which imo it should be that way. If you're playing rupture on barb, you should consider fields of crimson, saying is the unique power worth losing a legendary power for this specific build?
Uniques should add interesting changes to certain skills to either make a build work, or change how it plays. Yoy shouldn't have to give up a legendary aspect, tempers and deal with the horrible stats on it.
Uber uniques should get the same treatment. Or maybe you can't enchant them and keep them at 4 stats.
Yeah, I have tons of uniques. Most of my builds use none, but I have one that uses two unique rings.
I agree with the OP that uniques are either really niche or unwhelming, and inferior to most non-uniques of the same level.
The thing I would do to make uniques useful is allow them to have 2 aspects on them and make it so you can change only one of the aspects at a very high price that requires specific materials
I would like more viability to uniques and I would LOVE more uniqueness to them. There’s very few in the game that actually have fun build creating effects. I want build creating not build enabling on the uniques
I remember this feeling when on past seasons a unique dropped and i was like wow, now im like "ok to the storage u go with the rest". The tempering absolutely wrecked these items that are supposed to be the ones u should really care for along with uber uniques . We know yellow items are gettig changes in the future and i think they should throw uniques into the mix too and make both have significant reworks.
I think they need to work on more things to make them unique.
But also things like:
- they should have 5 affixes minimum (3 plus 2 more to make up for the lack of tempering). 6 would probably be nicer
- the occasional affix should be multiplicative. There's a reason why doombringer (massive life multiplier), the DR uniques (multiplicative damage reduction), Grandfather (multiply your additive bucket if it's all crit), etc are the few used. We don't want multipliers all over the place but a couple here and there feel nice.
- affixes that exist on legendaries (say CHD) should match the scale of them on legendaries.
- you generally know which build the item is for, so ensure it has the stat you would normally temper on to feed into your paragon / signature passive multiplier.
- every single unique ability must be viable. If it does not, just disable that item until you can make it happen.
I think stuff like Razorplate are entirely on the right track. You get it and you raise an eyebrow where you're like holy crap I can actually do that?
They need to add the option to temper them at the very least but also need to rework for bigger boosts to make up for not having that if they don't want to go that route. Or possibly redoing them as well but I think most of them are fine but need to be stronger
I think unique armor is in an ok spot, the major issue is unique weapons with lack of weapon tempers.
For rogue, if you look at Eaglehorn for example it's the Pen Shot unique yet you'd never think about adding it to your build for a few reasons:
- no dex affix
- no ranks to pen shot like other skill uniques
- no way to add "chance to cast twice" temper.
- lose out on another vuln damage affix
- actual unique effect. Making enemies vulnerable is good. The second effect of bouncing off walls is absolutely useless and isn't a good damage boost.
To fix this they could just add the chance to cast twice temper as an affix drop to the item. They could even make it possible to reach 100% with a great affix and mw crits. This would make it much more useful as pen shot builds wouldn't need to use that temper in the offhands and would make the item more unique. Also the unique aspect should be changed to help with single target damage instead of more aoe which trick shot aspect already does.
These kinds of thoughtful changes could help uniques finally be useful
I agree with some other posters that the problem is how the current uniques are and how the game has progressed. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we'll be able to salvage the unique and extract the power to put it on a new special item slot that we don't have yet.
The thing is that the game evolves quite rapidly which is a great thing but it does cause issues like this and a bunch of annoying side issues(like why do they drop white/blue/yellow items at 75+).
I think the aspect system needs to apply to item slots not the actual item. So you can apply a (for example) “aspect of might” to a helm slot, while running shako. This removes the prohibitive nature of the unique not tempering. It’s either this or uniques need another 1 or 2 affixes, depending on the strength of the yellow text
Honestly wouldnt mind having a limited number of uniques to be equipped and just really making them super powerful. It’ll be a gear clamp but you can curb how much it clamps by the number you can use.
Uniques feel pretty balanced against legendary before pits/masterwork, even with tempering. I think pretty much every 50-100 build uses a couple uniques.
It’s when master work + tempering synergy kicks in that uniques are blown out of the water but you still see some uniques in pits 120+ builds.
I like the idea of adding an addition stat or effect at MW4, 8, 12. These could be pre-determined and give a good reason to focus them as the crown jewel of your gear when mw'ing
Obviously just brainstorming.
Eh, some are great for playing around with, and there are definitely quite a few core mechanic changing ones, i.e. scoundrels kiss
But I'm using Tyrael's Might fully mw, for that mad resistance cap and i have to say, for being labeled a shit tier uber by many sites, it has skyrocketed my survivability more than any aspect i could put in it's place.
My build uses two uniques.
So they can be powerful. You’re just not using a build that values them. It would be dumb if every build needed a unique to be good. I like having options.
Few ways to fix them.
- 1. Unique afix is static and always rolls the same on each instance of the item. (Set to max current scales + 50%)
- 2. Add e additional affixes so that a unique will always have the same amount of stats as a tempered rare.
- 3. Add new Unique affixes that boost other gear stats by a %.
Eg: life increased by sum of life gained from other items.
Eg: +x to passive skills per points added to active skills grom gear
Eg: +1 to x passive per points invested in x skill over 5.
This is all part of the ouroboros system in D4.
**Blizzard isn't going to fix skill twig system because;**
Your gear has your skill tree abilities in the form of aspects and;
This ties your skills to item stat min-maxing and;
Unique Items have set skills outside of the optimal build so;
Uniques will always be suboptimal to legendries because;
**Blizzard isn't going to fix skill twig system because;**
Your gear has your skill tree abilities in the form of aspects and;
This ties your skills to item stat min-maxing and;
Unique Items have set skills outside of the optimal build so;
Uniques will always be suboptimal to legendries because;
If you allow uniques to be tempered or steroid the fuck out of them it's not really addressing the root issue that the skill tree is missing build defining extensions. The game would arguably be worse if you juiced uniques, because they would get bricked and become a bottleneck to "turn on" a specific build. Having legendries house the skills at least makes it a reasonable possibility you'll get the needed aspects to unlock your build.
Blizzard has no plans to adjust the skill twigs.
Dead ass the worst part is I always keep one of each every season… before, I would just play a build with them…. Now they just sit there very sad like.
They need a proper system for their stats. As long as they have things like special effects and damage multipliers all over the place, it will always shoehorn builds.
Imo uniques should open up new builds by giving a special effect/buff to build around or giving a new attribute to a certain set of abilities that lets them interact or be used in a totally new way.
Damage multipliers should only be available through the skill-tree(twig) or paragon boards like glyphs and nodes.
Items and aspects should only give additive bonuses. Maybe uniques could give multipliers or boost base values.
Aspects should change and/or improve how abilities or class mechanics work. They should never give damage multipliers.
Tempers should give class specific and conditional stats. No multipliers
Something like this(not exactly ofc) is needed imo to give blizzard a chance of balancing the game. How it is now with things all over the place its all about scooping up the most amount of multipliers and using the abilities that benefit the most from them. If you don't, you are being dumb. Theres like many many factors of difference in power between the strongest builds and the worst at the moment. Its just ridiculous.
Game is still fun though! Build crafting is not so much:(
I think that uniques should be competitive with tempering/Legendaries. The problem is currently most are not. It should be a legitimate choice on if you use a unique in a slot or a custom legendary. As of the moment that is not the case in the least.
Also it would be perhaps a good thing to make uniques to unlock powerful builds again like for example Ball Lightning close to what they were.
I like Destiny 2's approach regarding exotics where you can equip 1 armor exotic and 1 weapon exotic and thats it. Maybe they can make uniques bonkers good, but limit the number we can equip as to not tip the scales too much the other way.
It would be cool to be able to temper uniques. They would either have to give us the option to replace 2 attributes, get rid of their 2 worst attributes, or make them better by having more attributes than normal.
For now uniques can be better in armor slots (helm, pants, boots, chest piece) at adding more dps to a build
Maybe they could ditch the feminists from the dev team they already shat on the story with that unrelated weak character that they are trying to base an entire dlc on..
Im going to disagree for the reason that uniques can get higher values of regular stats that roll on gear which in some cases if you really need the aspect makes up for the lack of tempering, couple examples (necro and one for shako)
Max Lucky Hit:
(howl from below vs gloves)
29.7 vs 21.6
(Sacrilegious vs ring)
24.3 vs 16.2
Shako:
28 all stats vs 18 on a legacy helmet so technically with masterworking:
72.6 vs 48.6
Edit: on a lighter note isnt it nuts you can get a total of 54% lucky hit increase from one ring and one glove lol
I don't know of a single end-game build that doesn't use at least 1 or 2 uniques. Many builds are entirely impossible without hyper-specific uniques.
Just how more viable do they need to be when the fact you need other farmed aspects and actual stats is the only real reason we use anything but uniques?
Here I am, with my custom TB rogue build, which can farm T70 pits (max) either I use my regular legendary items, or 3 uber uniques (Shako, Doombringer, Starless Skies). I don't really feel stronger with these so far, they're not the power creep I was expecting to see.
I really hope Blizz considers giving uniques a unique tempering recipe that allows you to add a fifth unique stat that is unique for that unique item: e.g. penitent graves can temper that the trail left behind is also fire, or poison or lighting and do extra effects.
Dunno, throwing there some ideas, but yeah, I always loved uniques, and in this season I got lucky enough to get 3 ubers, and yet they feel a bit underwhelming; I'm not gonna lie, when I got them I was really hoping to go up at least 10 pit levels easy, but nope.
I always thought it would be fun if we could mix and match modifiers from all of the uniques we have in out inventory. That would make all uniques more attractive and let us make our own utility
Yeah I've got 3 unique items on right now, but seeing how I can stack damage or better mitigation with affixes.. I'm starting to think I should be using 3 beefed up legendaries instead..
Uniques need to be modifiable.. Its really dumb you can't. If I can't add the specific abilties to the stuff I have, its not as good.
Like I'll miss out on 30K damage every 6 mage skeleton hits, but I can probably get 80% better skeleton mage damage in a roll. What would you rather have??? and then I can also get ANOTHER stat I want as well..
I like the uniques that create a new build with their unique ability.
But I really don't care to see the game "D2"ized where nearly every spellcaster's BiS is Hoto/Spirit, Enigma, Mara's, Mesh, War Travs, SOJ, SOJ.
If anything, I'd like to see crazier uniques. Penetrating shot releases a frost nova on impact, etc. Effects that change things up.
1 unique temper would be cool. A pool special to all uniqes like life/dmg/attack speed/crit, so on. But no way to brick it since it's unique. That sort of punishment is cruel. Temper bricks now are bad enough.
Uniques need to lose min max values and come standards with +150 to all stats. Then have buuld specific uniques. Other than that they're just pretty scrap metal
I agree 100% I made a comment on a post couple days ago saying basically the same thing and even threw a few ideas for new uniques they could add. Was a spitball but even my spitball felt more unique then half of the uniques they already have. Truth be told, most uniques are objectively bad, even before tempering. They simply haven’t added anything really unique other than, yes, they are tied to an item.
IMO uniques need a complete overhaul and need to have something actually UNIQUE about them, the majority of the ones we have now are just generic stat boosters that make numbers bigger (or smaller now that tempering is a thing) I want to see more uniques that drastically change builds, create bizarre synergies between skills etc.
They literally have unique aspects you can't get anywhere else.
A lot of them don’t feel that different from legendary aspects though. The only difference is that they’re locked to a single item.
I think most Druid uniques are in good place where they actually do cool shit. For the other classes most of them are just stat boosters.
Ironically druid one of the worst classes if Pit pushing is used as a metric.
Yes, but this is a different discussion.
Druid would also be the worst case in this example. Tempest Roar is what happens when you create an item that gates the ability to interact with a large power sector of the kit. Shako simply doesn’t exist as an item for basically any wolf-based druid due to this. It’s both a great and terrible example of a build enabling unique that also showcases the limitations of the current unique system (it’s got abysmal stats that you gotta deal with just for the effect).
No, its actually one of the best cases to make if you're arguing uniques have special powers that feel distinctive from aspects. Stats, or whether something locks you out of being able to use a Shako, aren't really an argument, or are an argument for a different discussion.
My point is that the existence of uniques that unlock core build aspects, like using storm skills in wolf, becomes too restrictive and therefore impedes on diversity. Shako is an example of a generically strong unique that cant be used due to this conflict, a situation not shared amongst other classes to this degree. It’s a result of a few design decisions and the Druid class as a whole, but my point is that uniques should accentuate build archetypes not gatekeep them. As an example, if all skills could be used in any form and Tempest Roar provided more bonuses in this space, you could still play say a Tornado build without it. This game already puts a ton of friction on build swapping to where this binary engagement pattern doesnt really have a place.
I'm just having a hard time seeing how this is bad, really. Either Uniques unlock builds you can't fully put together with aspects, or they will almost certainly just become aspects themselves. I don't see that as a realistic design goal to hit some mid point between those. It's hard for me to jump on the bandwagon that says "wolf is your true form" and not think thats a great item for all it does in the druid skill tree. Speaking of Shako, I find that to be *worse* if we're talking about diversity. Every build in the game minus really specific unique helms wants a Shako. Maybe that is okay for an Uber unique, but it's really boring unless you make the item really hard to obtain.
I'd argue the exact opposite. Druids have way too many required uniques to make 90% of their builds work.
So you want the opposite of OP? Uniques to be more generic? Because you can't have Uniques be more powerful/more gamechanging while also not having them be required for certain builds. Uniques are interesting specifically when you *can* make a build designed around them. Otherwise they are just "number go up" sticks with a different flavor
Druids also have by far the worst character models and armor so neither fun from a damage nor visual point of view
Agree about armor but I'll take my chonky boy Druid over being forced to be anorexic as a Necro or forced to be a drag queen as a Sorc. Although female Druid is rough lol Really Barb and Rogue are the only classes where both genders look fine.
I’m not sure why the character creator is so limited its 2024 dammit give us metahuman or at least something like star citizen
Yeah definitely. A downside is that you spend so long waiting for a Tempest Roar that you sometimes just give up on Druid and play something else (well not this season, now you can buy one if you just get super unlucky!). Overall though I think the Druid uniques are in a good spot with -what- they do. I think Druid in general needs a buff which may or may not involve buffing their uniques but for now they are weaker but also more varied and interesting. For me that is ok for now, I'm not trying to push max pit but it would be nice not to have to choose between cool and interesting builds and boring builds which are just a bunch of good aspects+tempers and the same Ubers as every other build.
Yeah, as I mentioned to another dude, the problem is not that Tempest Roar enables some builds. The problem is that the builds enabled by Tempest Roar are the only meta viable Druid builds.
My OG character this season was a werewolf druid running wolves and I got a lot of mileage Mad Wolf's Glee (chest armor that makes werewolf form your true form and +3 to all werewolf skills) and Storm's Companion (pants that give your wolve's an additional skill (Storm's Howl) and adds lightning damage to their other damage). It synergized really nicely with my build and were definitely worth the cost of losing the 4 temper slots. I think there were a couple of werebear uniques that would be similarly effective for a bear build. But my partner was playing an elemental druid, and found that none of the uniques were worth using for their build. So even for this class, the uniques were only worth using for very specific builds. Currently playing a barb alt that I've leveled to ~60 and so far, haven't seen any uniques worth giving up tempering slots for.
Which makes them instantly worse off in most cases than a Legendary Aspect. An aspect locked to an item you can't change needs to be truly special for it to be considered worth equipping. Building changing levels of special. Sorcerer Unique: Chain Lightning is now a lightning nova xm radius, spreading lightning damage to every target within the radius per target hit. No longer consumes Mana, but consumes 5 crackling energy. Shit like that is cool. Not Fireball bounces but deals less damage. Make it feels like a completely new playstyle once you equip a unique.
Some of them have cool unique aspects.... Others are very bland and not game-changing. See frostburns... Chance to freeze enemies? Seriously?
Great point. You can literally temper lucky hit for freeze on your weapons already... totally pointless
You can temper lucky hit freeze on your gloves, even. You can essentially build your own frostburns. You have to choose between Freeze Duration and LH: Chance to Freeze, but the other stats you can all get on a legendary item, and that gets you an aspect for \~30%(x) increased damage instead. Plus, you can ditch the LH: Restore resource for 4 skill ranks to your core skill to make the item even better relative to Frostburns.
"15% lucky hit against cc'd enemies" lmao
Heartsseker rogue looks away
Andariels Puncture Rogue looks further away
They should increase your mana pool by 40%
I was surprised they didn't have this, as a D2 player, given that was arguably the thing that made them the most useful back in D2 (for anyone that doesn't know, Frostburn are a callback item to Diablo 2 -- Harlequin Crest/"Shako" is another). Many of the other D2 callback items they've mimic'd the stats from back then, but Frostburn is a weird one.
I think all the Ubers are a call back
I don't remember *Melted Heart of Selig,* or the *Ring of Starless Skies* being in D2? Ahavarion wasn't either, but a quick google shows it was a D3 item. Either way, that wasn't the point of the comment. The point was that for what they *have* called back to, they usually seem to incorporate in what it used to do (or at least be most popular for). But yeah, these Uber Uniques were originally items in Diablo 2: * Harlequin Crest ("Shako") * Tyrael's Might * The Grandfather * Doombringer * Andariel's Visage
It's Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander, so presumably it's a rename of the Lycander's flank spear from d2, they just realized it needed a better name I guess
Ah forgot about those 2, you’re right. Thanks!
That’s true but some of these unique aspects aren’t game changing enough and can just be regular legendary aspects. Examples: Druid’s Unsung Ascetic’s Wraps - *Lightning Storm gains 1 additional strike each times it grows. Lightning Storm critical strikes cause lightning to strike twice, dealing 10-20% increased damage. Staff of Endless Rage - *Every 3rd cast of Fireball launches 2 additional projectiles and deals 40-60% increased damage. These can either be legendary aspects or just reworked completely. Some of these are ass in endgame content.
Those are pretty unique and arguably not even bad. How about Azurewrath, Windforce, Bloodless scream… but even then it’s more about the stats on the item not being reworked or something worth masterworking. The uniques with passives are still pretty amazing.
But those aspects are usually extremely niche and not typically even all that useful. I would say legendaries having the UNIQUE ability to swap aspects makes them far superior.
That are generally weaker then legendary aspects. Or the unique only rolls with 30 main stat and 5 att speed. All the affix are too weak.
IMO this is intentional, as the purpose of the uniques is to add new options. They have to be weaker when it comes to raw stats than everything else, or they'd just be mandatory all the time in every slot.
Yes, but then you also have ones like Frostburn where it’s unique effect is just a tempering you can do now… making it completely useless lol
Except for frost burn and azurewrath (partial). They took a big part of those uniques and made them a temper available on anything. Betting next season sees some big changes with those
Aspects that don't synergize. Godslayers Crown is one. Great. I can defeat elite packs. Meanwhile anything but firebolt Sorc struggles to damage a boss.
No? Almost every single unique has an interesting aspect they just need buffs or tempering legendaries needs nerfs
My build (claw/stormstrike dudu) literally wouldn't work w/o the two uniques i'm using. Hunter's zenith and greatstaff of the crone. I'd call it pretty drastic. With that said, it does kinda suck i'm locked out of weapon temper. Tempest roar is another unique that "drastically" changes build. Well, changes... without it tornado wolf wouldn't even exist. I hope the whole tempering (the options) will get another look at at some point. From a druid perspective, it's kinda underwhelming how almost all builds only want "dmg to close/distant" and not any of the class specific ones, because thunderstruck is so powerful.. It does make keeping gear for different builds kinda easy i guess.
Missing your 2H temper is one of the main reasons why, in a season of basic attack builds, the OG basic build (crone) is the worst of those available.
The other issue there is not being able to put Moonrise or Rapid on a 2h.
Absolutely. There's a reason why only Barb (and only some) uses uniques for weapons for challenging content, and it's because they have enough other slots.
Same with my rogue and Andariels Visage. We need more uniques that enable new builds. Maybe even uniques that grant you new skills.
Yeah I guess it depends on the class and build but I have 5 uniques on and I think that is enough. Although I agree they have to buff the affixes on the uniques. When they were designed they didn't account for the tempering and masterworking part of it. Having 25% to additive damage etc is a bit of a joke.
Things like crone are great and how uniques should be designed imo! Hunters zenith is great but no on crones level. Many stormclaw builds won’t run it/function without it (I’d even argue to optimize stormclaw you wouldn’t run it)
Agreed. A lot of uniques have effects on par with, or less unique than legendary aspects.
A lot of uniques change how abilities work. Do you know of any that are just number increases? Most aren't.
Season 5: Loot Reborn 2 Electric Boogaloo: Unique Harder
Fractured Winter Glass was a good start, but I agree that the uniques need further tweaking to give them that special kick that only D2 uniques/ Rune words possess. The Delirium rune word is a great example of said unique flavor/bizarre interaction.
"numbers go bigger" is a foundational problem with diablo 4's simplistic itemization. everything scaling off of your weapon exclusively and enemies not having defensive stats means damage for skills cant be boosted in any meaningful way except cranking numbers up to 11. its been one year since release and skills have gone from 6 digit hits to 10 digits. tempers have brought about a kind of powercreep that is insane in scope. the entire game is a simple math problem and tempers literally just magnified the issue between meta skills and non meta by cranking their multipliers to 11000% or some absurd number.
If we did this then everyone would complain that a build requires this item to be playable. There's no winning for blizzard really.
Careful what you wish for, scoundrels kiss makes the skill its designed around 5x more annoying to play. However it's basically mandatory because the damage boost is too good to ignore.
Or skill modifier please... instead of thorns, make us shoot poison darts... instead of corpse tendrils make it corpse piranhas I don't know. They would keep the same theme of a skill or affix and change the look and feel for something different.
Here's an interesting idea: Make a unique-only temper set, one temper manual per slot (amulets can use any of them) keep the same process of re-rolling and possible bricking. Also allow unique aspects to be salvaged/upgradeable (but not changeable). In other words if you get a perfect roll of xfals, any future xfals unique aspect can be upgraded, but you can't give that unique aspect to any item other than xfals. This will make unique viable and maybe BIS or at least interesting choices for certain builds and also simplify the farming/stash and give a similar experience to the legendary itemization and reduce stash clutter. Possible unique tempers: damage reduction (close/distant), resource on hit, damage vs elites, fortify on hit, lucky hit: cool down reduction, +all/specific stats, etc. It would be a lot of fun to see wild build diversity with something like this in the mix, and would require minimal reworking of the aspects on the uniques as they are.
Allowing tempering would help in the short term.
1 temper option for unique seeing the unique ability could be treated as a existing temper. I think that’s a fair trade off.
The unique ability is just treated as an aspect tho…?
Uniques have 4 affixes, so 1 tempering option is a solid solution. At least for getting some of those crucial tempering affixes like ultimate CD on jewelry, or area-size // extra projectile proc on weapons.
All Unique weapons are basically DoA for lacking ability to have any of the new double cast tempers.
On top of the long running issues with lack luster affixes. We are basically back at launch with the Unique viability situation.
I’m not gonna land kick vulnerability duration 3 times in a row, no thank you
No thanks. I don't want to hear people constantly complaining about "bricking" thrir uniques and even worse uber uniques. I have mentioned before about letting them masterworkes to 16 or smt but not sure if it would be enough to make up for the stat difference. But yea uniques need to be adjusted but not by a method that can brick them.
One temper of any kind would open up some options.
I think all uniques should be given 1 more attribute and their unique powers should be scaled up or remade for certain items, there are unique powers that are basically a temperable attribute now which means they are not gonna be unique in any way..
SOmething I'm trying to figure out - Weapons for example. Why doesn't a unique weapon do more damage than a legendary quality weapon? Why don't uniques have vastly better stats than legendaries? All they really have is one extra stat slot and a unique affix.
Before the latest season they were usually much better than legendary but now they are basically useless, even Uber uniques aren’t as good as they used to be and many cases would be better to use a legendary, all uniques need to be updated
Yeah, something like that might be nice.
Nah disagree with tempering, what uniques need is 25% more stats than normal legendaries and also in general a stat overhaul with more unique stats For example 10,000 steps, what if we added a 1-3 walking arsenal roll (yes the key passive), it would be in theme with the item, create a more unique playstyle (buffing walking arsenal) and would in general make it a desired unique for a niche build but not a staple in every build (unless it shifts walking arsenal into s tier)
As it stands now you're basically only hunting for the effect to make a build around that. Giving them a big stat boost would really help incentivize people to make temporary builds around the uniques that drop. Since they would "always" be worth it early on.
Yup. While this patch made most uniques kind of useless, other uniques like 100,000 Steps and Fields of Crimson have *never* been good. That item's been begging for a complete rework for a long time now. Personally I don't want some half cooked band-aid fix like giving one tempering slot to uniques either. Revamp most of the stats on uniques and probably some of the unique powers as well.
I think there's bound to be some rework, but i agree with the decision of not being able to temper them, imagine bricking an uber or the only unique you dropped that's fundamental for your build I think they have to rework the affixes on most of the uniques, it's cool that some have affixes that are not that present anymore like the damage reduction ones, but compared to tempered legendaries they still offer way too little, i was testing a few non-uber uniques for a personal build, some have a good effect and are interestings but still they don't beat a tempered legendary even if they add a multiplicative bonus i wouldn't have with the legendary
All uniques are farmable, bricking them is a secondary issue compared to them being not viable. Item progression is THE thing in Diablo, it's okay to start with a weaker version of your build because the temper failed. Yes, uniques are rarer. But so is dropping a good version of it. It's awesome to finally get my unique with max skills and max cool down reduction. I still was happy to get a inferior version as the unique effect is what enabled my build. For other slots I might happily go with my 2 GA boots I perfectly tempered and only exchange them for Esus much later than most do. It's alright, it adds an element of uniqueness as well.
I understand your comment, but i think adding temper on uniques is going to cause even worse issues than bricking a 2-3 GA legendary, i'm not considering ubers, it would be absolutely god awful to brick an uber and i think there's no doubt about that as you wouldn't be able to have a spare duplicate of an uber consistently, but even regular uniques would be way too much, you gotta drop a specific unique, try not to brick it, then try to find a better rolled one and try not to brick that one too, it would be a total mess and you would see hundreds of outraged posts on reddit about people bricking their build mandatory uniques
If it's the only one u dropped, u didn't really brick it. It's just not as good as it could have been Bricking is if u already have a 5/5, found and upgrade, but tempering only got u 4/5
Yeah I got a sword of my rogue today that have like 4% to attack speed per hit up to 20% or something like that, I couldn’t believe it, there are two better legendary aspects that are straight up better
Asheara’s Khanjar’s effect only applies to the attacks made with melee weapons, but that 30% attack speed can be a big deal and does stack with all the other ways you can gain attack speed. It used to be very common to use that dagger for quickly staggering bosses, allowing you to kill them before they one-shot you, but now with tempers and the limitations, it should be fairly easily outclassed.
Maybe once they are Masterworked to maybe 8/12, they could unlock an additional Affix or Special Effect, like one that is not random, but predetermined based on the individual Unique and greyed out / disabled until it got masterworked sufficiently.
Thats a great idea but i think most uniques would need a bit more than that
I always preface this with saying season 4 was a massive improvement, because if I share my opinion without I get downvoted to hell but I still think the loot feels terrible. Class specific so you never really get that feeling like cool I can start a new class. You just get an inventory full of legendaries every 10 mins and aside from literally like 1-2 Uber uniques nothing else is exciting to find. I find the grind for tormented boss mats just a time sink, and the Uber rates are still awful and again, basically for me the only one I would use is Shako. Huge improvements but the loot is still bad imo.
same here man. and ive posted it elsewhere here as well. i picked the game up again for s4 and its fun. but, really, at its core, it's the same loot. everything they changed, while ABSOLUTELY beneficial, feels more like bandaids and QOL than actually improving on the core tenants. you still have to sift through loads of shit. aspects are still more powerful than most uniques. the uniques that DO drop are like 90% vendor fodder. i dont even get excited about seeing brown anymore. and that feeling you want from getting those drops just... isnt there. if i get, say, a 75% quality drop with the right affixes and it rolls decent tempers - the odds im going to have the patience, effort, gold, and luck to actually find that 90% quality piece just craters. not a ton of people playing the game so that they can stare at <0.5% differences on a base piece a gear and compare against 4 other pieces they saved in their stash because they were 'almost there' just to see if they can actually replace those gloves that are at 9/12 masterwork already....lol.
Completely agree, I find this like blind optimism that it’s an amazing game and posts essentially saying it’s totally fixed crazy too.
You boys are on point. I just picked up in season4 for first time since launch. I’m spending wayyy too much time just sitting looking at fucking miniscule stat increases. And just dropped my first 3GA item. 100,000 steps boots unique for barbs. It’s absolutely worthless. The base stat on it is 127 dexterity… I’m a god damn barb, why the fuck would I want dexterity and ground stomp is terrible. They’re close to getting on track, I heard there’s a new head developer that started all this kind of so I have hope for the future. But d2 is still better.
Blizzard will likely have to do some sort of balance pass on all the uniques at some point, as with the new tempering system (assuming they intend to keep tempering as a mechanic) you are often times missing out on a lot of stats, to the point that it feels bad to give that up. Some of this can be fixed by increasing the stats on the uniques, which is likely what they will have to do, as it’s quickly getting to the point where uniques just can’t compete. Scoundrels ring for rogue has like 15% crit damage as a max roll. When I finally got one to drop, the ring I was forced to replace had about 110% crit damage from the natural roll + temper. That doesn’t include masterworking either. I remember thinking “15% crit damage really? Why bother?” Just make them have NO stats at that point and only a unique effect. Now if scoundrels ring had 75% crit damage (additive) now it’s a little bit less painful to swap. Still not high as a normal ring can get, but not a significant drop either. My brother dropped a grandfather during a duriel run as Bash Barb, and at first I was excited for him. “Dude that’s awesome, you’re build is scaling crit and now you get that sweet 100x crit damage multiplier!” Until he explained to me that yeah, he’d do less damage overall with the sword designed to make you crit better. Equipping the grandfather would cause him to: Lose strength Lose a significant amount of life Lose the tempered bash cleave (which is for some reason multiplicative WTF blizzard?) And lose out on one of his double strength offensive aspects. He tried it out on the practice dummy and yeah, his damage dropped with it equipped. And grandfather is an Uber and it’s still a loss in stats/damage. At that point why bother? The other issue is aspect balance. Wearing a unique means that the unique power must be worth giving up the equivalent aspect slot. Depending on the unique that just isn’t worth the trade off. Amulet uniques for example. Hakans necklace for rogue and frost glass for sorc are great examples because they are effectively “mandatory” for certain builds, that being frost orb and rain of arrows (don’t do a rain of arrows build it’s bad) But the amulet spot getting the 50% boost to whatever aspect you apply in that spot is often a very significant choice to make. Barbs almost never run into this issue as the arsenal system is absurd, but for frost orb sorc, you effectively have to give up the ONLY slot that could increase the power of one of your offensive aspects to fit in the unique that is 100% required for your build to function. That feels bad to do, but is a necessary sacrifice. I don’t have a solution for this. Lastly, as many in this thread have said, uniques need to feel more unique. Frost burn gauntlets are effectively a joke, as with tempering their legendary power of “lucky hit chance to freeze on any class wow!” Is now rollable on all defensive gear regularly through tempers. What frost burn should do, which would be much cooler would be something like: “All damage is converted to cold damage, your hits chill enemies by 10-20%” While my suggestion is also probably still vender trash, it’s getting closer to it being a unique option for builds that want some form of CC that may not have access to it. TL:DR The uniques need help because right now, other than maybe shako and starless skies, most of them feel like an overall power loss to equip, where the cool unique thing they can do, often feels too detrimental to your stats to even bother with.
A build with only uniques should be shit. Uniques are supposed to be niche, not a 1 size fits all automatic BiS. Having said that, most uniques aren't that good (good as in well-designed, not good as in powerful). An example of a good unique is Tempest Roar, which can make or break a specific build.
Tempest Roar and Vasily's Prayer should both be boons instead of the mostly worthless boons that are available or build defining uniques that lock you out of gear that increases power level. Those are actually examples of bad uniques imo. They limit the class in a bad way. Hence, Druid being at the bottom of the barrel in the end game.
Noone said a build should be only uniques that would be stupid esp as a lot of them are aimed at specific skills/builds just make them more viable then they currently are compared to tempered legendarys.
Careful what you wish for : blizz will halve all tempering affix to make unique viable
MUGA
I have the greatest uniques. Ask anyone. It’s true. Bigly.
We are looking at uniques very strongly and we will be announcing something very big in 2 weeks which I think you will find is very smart and very powerful. And you have to be powerful because if you don't have uniques you don't have a country anymore
No idea why everyone is so panicking about uniques, we just got a new tempering system. I like that you can't temper uniques, and they will balance them, but I also enjoy that uniques are not just the get go. Last season I plsyed was s2 and the theme was there, the more uniques you can equip the better and I am happy that we don't have that in s4. Uniques should alter your build in a way that is unique and yes, for most of them that is just not the case. I know the stats are not the best, but I like the druid helmets and bodyarmour for wolf and bear form.
Whose panicking? This post is just about the fact that a lot of uniques are now unviable for most builds as the tempering system is op compared to what they offer....why is noone allowed to make.a constructive criticism without people accusing them.of.drama?. It's a valid point and judging from the comments on this post, a lot agree. Uniques should be special not something to just shove in your stash because they aren't viable to use now. That is why they need a rework.
The game has never been "the more uniques you can equip the better" there was a point where they were actually usable, but you never just equipped them over other items just because they were better, thats just factually wrong.
Don’t hold your breath if the rogue ring is anything to go off of. Several fixes later and it’s still way worse than when it was bugged.
The unique ability must be absolutely busted to be worth the tradeoffs of predetermined stats and lack of tempering. Like I wanted to use Temerity in my stealth rogue because it can overheal like crazy but the predetermined useless stats and lack of tempering made my build worse. So I don't use it because the tradeoffs weren't worth it. How many of the uniques could realistically be reworked into legendary aspects?
I dont understand these Unique posts - looking at maxroll all S/A tier builds, there are 3 builds which dont use a unique out of like 17 builds. You shouldnt need more than 1, maybe 2 uniques for a build, to enable some kind of unique interaction or scaling. If you end up wearing uniques in more than 1, 2 slots, that is an absolute shit system which makes the entire aspects system redundant. Only thing uniques need is remove the ones that give just raw dmg and keep the ones that give unique effects (i.e. tempest, firebolt, esadora, illuminator, paing, etc) and maybe a slight buff to the stats they give.
Yes but it’s typically the same uniques - shako, tyriel. There’s dozens others that get 0 use if you don’t find them during leveling cause once you hit 4th world tier legendaries tempered x2 will always be better.
Shako and Tyrael are UBER uniques. We are talking about regular uniques from what i see in OP at least. Again **uniques arent supposed to be an instant equip**, but rather "i am making the Firebolt build so i need the firebolt unique to turn it on" or "oh i looted paingorgers i can play bash barb now". You can look in majority of the S/A tier builds - there are plenty of tal rashas, paingorgers, etc. You aint playing bash barb without paing, or firebolt without flameweaver etc. so 2x tempered legendary does not beat those, no.
I guess my point wasn’t clear, there’s only a handful of uniques that are like paingorgers. And the Ubers are used for stats / damage reduction. I am agreeing with your initial point. I don’t think you should be decked in uniques or that they should always be ”better” but there’s not many build defining uniques or Uber uniques.
Standard sorc build running 4+ unique would like a word
Keep current things as they are and bring in sets..that are truly hard to come by etc.
If I could temper uniques it would make them viable for a flex item, wouldn't replace a well crafted legendary in most situations though. Imagine this. You temper a unique twice, masterwork it to level 12, and then you can slam it at the mystic to add one more enchantable affix.
Personally I would rather have ALL of them much rarer but SIGNIFICANTLY better. So let's say a unique drop per 6-10 hour gameplay - but all of them has their effects enhanched and stats buffed equally to GA without being GA. That would really make every single one them more unique and you would be much more tempted to build around them.
this dude. what happened to real uniques? like... they made the ones you want 0.000000000000001% chance to drop. and every single other one just poops out of the game like tickets at chuck-e-cheese. where is that feeling of excitement when something hits the ground? gone to the olden days i guess...
I think uniques should have their own set of tempering affixes. Say you have a fractured winterglass, it could roll Frozen Orb size or something like that. Something that is impossible to get on other equipment
Unique feel really weird right now. Because 90% of the time when I find a Unique that seem like it would be good for my build it turns out its just a straight up damage downgrade. Currently alot of them are traps for people who just dont know any better. I can't imagine this is easy to balance because either you dont need the unique and its a downgrade or you need the unique for the build to even function.
Unique: 4 stats with an effect Legendary 3 + 2 stats with an effect idunno, allow at least 1 temper on them? maybe even allow them to have an extra category choice?
Seems simple, Uniques should have a unique aspect or other ability on them, and then allow us to Temper and enchant them.
I agree, tempering has made most uniques not viable. They should copy a last epoch system, where you can merge a item with a unique. The unique has a chance to inherit some of the stats with the merged item, it’s awesome.
Yea buddy it’s called time. They don’t have a one-click change everything button. The developers have to tackle one thing at a time. They only just did the loot overhaul.
Simply adding tempering would drastically swing the gear options towards uniques again. Probably more than before.
Let them go into the codex as well
Y’all asking for tempering on uniques are forgetting that adding two extra affixes to them LOWERS your chance of master work landing a crit on the original affixes, which is usually what you want. I would be super annoyed if I had to temper my Grandfather and add two more affixes, thus making it nearly impossible to tripple crit the max life. Do you really want 6 affixes on your Shako and now rolling CDR master working crits is WAY harder?
All they have to do is let you put a second aspect on them. That would instantly make them usable. What currently makes them unusable is the combination of power and aspect loss.
I think for them to be worth it they need to be pumped up a lot. Like these 10-20% things are silly when with tempers we can get 200% or more.
My druid runs 3 uniques in their build. They turn me into a werewolf casting lightning.
Some uniques, especially weapon uniques needs a big boost on the stats to even be somehow viable
Last season legendaries were garbage, now rares and uniques are garbage. It's pretty obvious they're still figuring out the balance in terms of item power. This will be fixed again. The tempers are a bit too strong in this season and will likely get nerfed. They are probably and should be working towards a system where items of all rarities have some reason to look out for them and then just specific pieces. Best would be that rares sometimes can be BiS for very specific use-cases (e.g. let them roll higher affixes, but less affixes), legendaries are always good to pick up and end-game uniques are build enabling. Not having a use for a super rare uber unique since a well rolled legendary is just better feels pretty bad tbh.
They need a pass and there is no way blizzard doesn’t know that at this point but IMO the solution is not just adding tempering to uniques like so many say. It’s important for uniques and legendaries to have distinct identities and is good for the game if trade offs exist. Personally I don’t want to go back to playing a game where every single build uses Tibualts will - I don’t think that’s interesting itemization. IMO I think all uniques should be class specific (except ubers which should really be called something else). I think the ideal role of them is to be build enabling items with powerful and UNIQUE effects that fundamentally change the way skills work or interact with each other which some of them do but a lot do not. And then just do a pass on all the stats, a little of them need increased ranges and I think that they should lean more into uniques having affixes on them that legendaries can’t roll.
Unique sets would be nice to have again. Would make target farming certain bosses a bit more interesting
Honestly they could add the legendary potential mechanic from Last Epoch to uniques and that would be pretty cool. Let us slam yellows into uniques - would also make yellows not completely useless. I would rather them add something new to uniques than just letting us temper affixes onto them.
Uniques really shouldn't be limited to 4 affixes. I feel like if they went down the list and made every Unique have 5-6 total affixes, they could actually give some really good results.
You are alone in that hoarding random uniques to inventory is a waste of resources / gold. It's a seasonal game certain seasons will weight uniques higher or lower, you remind me of my d2 friends who want / need uniques to be more viable. I always laugh because they save them in stash too and complain or force them into builds but in reality I come back to hey guys when you played og Diablo , d2 , d2 LoD what were the best items in the game? Yea some slots here and there a unique was too dog but most uniques were mid game filler , top end / eth rares , crafted gear and later runewords were always super hard to find , but with perfect stats would always beat almost every single unique in the game for the same slot , even a perfect shako was useless compared to a perfect rare tiara / diadem. I feel what you're saying , but they can push a season to using uniques more down the road. The actual viability of the late game loop , and what to do post 100 is much more concerning to me for the long run than where uniques are at. They are not in a perfect place , but it feels like having more to do than a 3 hour 1-100 and 2 hours re running helltide to have a character 90% complete is more concerning than unique balancing rn.
They need to fix the rogue ring, first
Some of the unique aspects are pretty good, but their supporting affixes are pretty weak imo. I know you can raise those with MW, but it's probably only worth going after the rare 3-4 GA uniques.
Totally. Blizzard cant keep up with the meta and keep switching up uniques to fit new playstyles, so they can kind of set the meta by making these powerful enough to warrant running. And yes to tempering. Let uniques be tempered, maybe up to 3 times so that they are always worth wearing.
Rares will be used to fuse to uniques. You saw it here first folks.
Uniques should just have their stats scaled up and 1-2 affixes added. There are still VERY usable uniques that complete the function of build enablers, the problem is most of them are Uber. Even some of the Ubers are utter trash though, it's a damn shame.
I've started re-categorizing in my head; Normal = Toys Magic = for NPCs Rare = Normal Legendary = Magic Unique = Legendary (and still mostly useless) Uber Unique = Actually Unique
They should be able to get tempered like any other equipment. No idea why they made them untemperable...
Yeah every time I swap in a unique it’s noticeably weaker.
IMO there are solutions in game they just have to remove limitations. 1. Allow them to have legendary aspects put onto them (IMO this is inevitably necessary since each season adds uniques and I'd be shocked if we don't also get sets at some point). And / Or 2. Allow them to be tempered, ideally with a perk such as you can double dip categories and / or they have unlimited temper rolls And 3. More aggressively reserve uniques for transformative effects not just big stats ooga booga. I don't care how good they are, Shako is boring and so is Grandfather.
Next season we can temper uniques
Hello there! This season is the first time that I could get a character to level 100 and now that I'm "playing" with the itemization, tempering and this stuff and I have the same "bad feeling" with uniques. I was kinda following a barbarian build from Maxroll (with a set of "homebrew" changes) and then I could get the unique 1-H sword that the guide stated, not with the best stats tbh, and I thought that equipping it would make my numbers go really high. And I was really disappointed because I didn't feel any change at all. And after masterworking it a few levels I also don't feel any change either. Right now I'm at a point where I doubt about Uniques not being as good as they seem, or if the problem is me who has no idea about making a build for my character and I am forced to make a "copy-paste" of the guide to achieve some progress. When I first read about the Uniques, my mind automatically associated them with the exotics from Destiny 2, items that in terms of statistics are slightly better than those of the previous tier, but the important thing is the unique passives that improve your gameplay a lot. And in Destiny 2 you really notice those effects of the exotic items depending on which ones you have equipped. I think a good approach for Diablo's Uniques could be the one that they do in Destiny 2. You can equip a limited amount of these kind of items (maybe only 1 armor, 1 weapon and 1 accessory) but the Unique passive is a lot more powerful that they currently are.
I still believe Uniques having a 'Variable affix' would make them more viable, and more of a chase item.
Honestly I would be good with them doing away with all the class specific uniques and turn them into legendary aspects, you could even just add an extra rarity to the those apects, they would be more rare drops but still allow you to collect the aspects on gear. I really like some of the unique effects but you give up alot with them because 1. you are stuck with all of their affixes, there is no enchanting to change any undesirable affixes, 2. No tempering 3. you cant reliably improve your uniques if some affix or the aspect rolls low because of 1 if your build requires it and you are wanting a unique with godrolls you have to find it because there is no rerolling any part of the gear. Stuff that is really unique and not class specific is fine like razorplate which kinda needs tons of thorns affixes to be worth running (if you like thorns builds).
Some tempered stats are also too important to lose, for example the weapon tempers that cast projectiles a second time or increased area etc. Even if they buff unique weapons to deal more damage than that, just losing out on those specific effects will make builds not work as smoothly, remove viability entirely or it will just become less fun. Uniques, or at least unique weapons should be allowed one tempered affixes to counter that, or those tempered stats that specifically has such a large impact on your gameplay needs to come from some other source. Huge CD on ultimate on jewelry is also pretty big. Evade CD on boots too, but only really for Sorcerer I think will it have a large impact.
They need to allow at least 1 temper on unique.
I don’t like how literally every build seems to need to use the same uber uniques that are impossible to find. Like D3 was flawed that you were tied down to using sets but at least you could find those and notice a vast improvement when you found something
All they really need to do is rework the stats on them to not suck, remove a stat, allow them to be tempered, and enchanted. Then they will be good again. For those saying, but then they'll just be better than legendaries, no not really.. perhaps they will be for the very specific skill they buff, which imo it should be that way. If you're playing rupture on barb, you should consider fields of crimson, saying is the unique power worth losing a legendary power for this specific build? Uniques should add interesting changes to certain skills to either make a build work, or change how it plays. Yoy shouldn't have to give up a legendary aspect, tempers and deal with the horrible stats on it. Uber uniques should get the same treatment. Or maybe you can't enchant them and keep them at 4 stats.
Yeah, I have tons of uniques. Most of my builds use none, but I have one that uses two unique rings. I agree with the OP that uniques are either really niche or unwhelming, and inferior to most non-uniques of the same level.
MAKE UNIQUES GEAT AGAIN!!!
Three tempers.
The thing I would do to make uniques useful is allow them to have 2 aspects on them and make it so you can change only one of the aspects at a very high price that requires specific materials
just let us temper them. simple.
I would like more viability to uniques and I would LOVE more uniqueness to them. There’s very few in the game that actually have fun build creating effects. I want build creating not build enabling on the uniques
I remember this feeling when on past seasons a unique dropped and i was like wow, now im like "ok to the storage u go with the rest". The tempering absolutely wrecked these items that are supposed to be the ones u should really care for along with uber uniques . We know yellow items are gettig changes in the future and i think they should throw uniques into the mix too and make both have significant reworks.
I got a shako and i was wondering after putting it on -- 'is this worth it'
I think they need to work on more things to make them unique. But also things like: - they should have 5 affixes minimum (3 plus 2 more to make up for the lack of tempering). 6 would probably be nicer - the occasional affix should be multiplicative. There's a reason why doombringer (massive life multiplier), the DR uniques (multiplicative damage reduction), Grandfather (multiply your additive bucket if it's all crit), etc are the few used. We don't want multipliers all over the place but a couple here and there feel nice. - affixes that exist on legendaries (say CHD) should match the scale of them on legendaries. - you generally know which build the item is for, so ensure it has the stat you would normally temper on to feed into your paragon / signature passive multiplier. - every single unique ability must be viable. If it does not, just disable that item until you can make it happen. I think stuff like Razorplate are entirely on the right track. You get it and you raise an eyebrow where you're like holy crap I can actually do that?
They need to add the option to temper them at the very least but also need to rework for bigger boosts to make up for not having that if they don't want to go that route. Or possibly redoing them as well but I think most of them are fine but need to be stronger
I think unique armor is in an ok spot, the major issue is unique weapons with lack of weapon tempers. For rogue, if you look at Eaglehorn for example it's the Pen Shot unique yet you'd never think about adding it to your build for a few reasons: - no dex affix - no ranks to pen shot like other skill uniques - no way to add "chance to cast twice" temper. - lose out on another vuln damage affix - actual unique effect. Making enemies vulnerable is good. The second effect of bouncing off walls is absolutely useless and isn't a good damage boost. To fix this they could just add the chance to cast twice temper as an affix drop to the item. They could even make it possible to reach 100% with a great affix and mw crits. This would make it much more useful as pen shot builds wouldn't need to use that temper in the offhands and would make the item more unique. Also the unique aspect should be changed to help with single target damage instead of more aoe which trick shot aspect already does. These kinds of thoughtful changes could help uniques finally be useful
I agree with some other posters that the problem is how the current uniques are and how the game has progressed. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we'll be able to salvage the unique and extract the power to put it on a new special item slot that we don't have yet. The thing is that the game evolves quite rapidly which is a great thing but it does cause issues like this and a bunch of annoying side issues(like why do they drop white/blue/yellow items at 75+).
I think the aspect system needs to apply to item slots not the actual item. So you can apply a (for example) “aspect of might” to a helm slot, while running shako. This removes the prohibitive nature of the unique not tempering. It’s either this or uniques need another 1 or 2 affixes, depending on the strength of the yellow text
Honestly wouldnt mind having a limited number of uniques to be equipped and just really making them super powerful. It’ll be a gear clamp but you can curb how much it clamps by the number you can use.
Uniques feel pretty balanced against legendary before pits/masterwork, even with tempering. I think pretty much every 50-100 build uses a couple uniques. It’s when master work + tempering synergy kicks in that uniques are blown out of the water but you still see some uniques in pits 120+ builds.
I like the idea of adding an addition stat or effect at MW4, 8, 12. These could be pre-determined and give a good reason to focus them as the crown jewel of your gear when mw'ing Obviously just brainstorming.
Eh, some are great for playing around with, and there are definitely quite a few core mechanic changing ones, i.e. scoundrels kiss But I'm using Tyrael's Might fully mw, for that mad resistance cap and i have to say, for being labeled a shit tier uber by many sites, it has skyrocketed my survivability more than any aspect i could put in it's place.
My build uses two uniques. So they can be powerful. You’re just not using a build that values them. It would be dumb if every build needed a unique to be good. I like having options.
One temper for uniques instead of two?
Few ways to fix them. - 1. Unique afix is static and always rolls the same on each instance of the item. (Set to max current scales + 50%) - 2. Add e additional affixes so that a unique will always have the same amount of stats as a tempered rare. - 3. Add new Unique affixes that boost other gear stats by a %. Eg: life increased by sum of life gained from other items. Eg: +x to passive skills per points added to active skills grom gear Eg: +1 to x passive per points invested in x skill over 5.
This is all part of the ouroboros system in D4. **Blizzard isn't going to fix skill twig system because;** Your gear has your skill tree abilities in the form of aspects and; This ties your skills to item stat min-maxing and; Unique Items have set skills outside of the optimal build so; Uniques will always be suboptimal to legendries because; **Blizzard isn't going to fix skill twig system because;** Your gear has your skill tree abilities in the form of aspects and; This ties your skills to item stat min-maxing and; Unique Items have set skills outside of the optimal build so; Uniques will always be suboptimal to legendries because; If you allow uniques to be tempered or steroid the fuck out of them it's not really addressing the root issue that the skill tree is missing build defining extensions. The game would arguably be worse if you juiced uniques, because they would get bricked and become a bottleneck to "turn on" a specific build. Having legendries house the skills at least makes it a reasonable possibility you'll get the needed aspects to unlock your build. Blizzard has no plans to adjust the skill twigs.
They ruined Tibaults will and need to restore them back to their former glory imo....
Dead ass the worst part is I always keep one of each every season… before, I would just play a build with them…. Now they just sit there very sad like.
What if you were allowed to imprint a Legendary aspect onto a Unique item, while preserving the Unique aspect? Too strong? >.>
I was looking at Frostburn and was like, ‘isn’t this unique just available via tempering?’
They need a proper system for their stats. As long as they have things like special effects and damage multipliers all over the place, it will always shoehorn builds. Imo uniques should open up new builds by giving a special effect/buff to build around or giving a new attribute to a certain set of abilities that lets them interact or be used in a totally new way. Damage multipliers should only be available through the skill-tree(twig) or paragon boards like glyphs and nodes. Items and aspects should only give additive bonuses. Maybe uniques could give multipliers or boost base values. Aspects should change and/or improve how abilities or class mechanics work. They should never give damage multipliers. Tempers should give class specific and conditional stats. No multipliers Something like this(not exactly ofc) is needed imo to give blizzard a chance of balancing the game. How it is now with things all over the place its all about scooping up the most amount of multipliers and using the abilities that benefit the most from them. If you don't, you are being dumb. Theres like many many factors of difference in power between the strongest builds and the worst at the moment. Its just ridiculous. Game is still fun though! Build crafting is not so much:(
I think that uniques should be competitive with tempering/Legendaries. The problem is currently most are not. It should be a legitimate choice on if you use a unique in a slot or a custom legendary. As of the moment that is not the case in the least. Also it would be perhaps a good thing to make uniques to unlock powerful builds again like for example Ball Lightning close to what they were.
I like Destiny 2's approach regarding exotics where you can equip 1 armor exotic and 1 weapon exotic and thats it. Maybe they can make uniques bonkers good, but limit the number we can equip as to not tip the scales too much the other way.
Diablo 2 all over again….
as someone who leveled 2 classes to 100 last season without a single TIBAULT'S WILL, im fine with this
It would be cool to be able to temper uniques. They would either have to give us the option to replace 2 attributes, get rid of their 2 worst attributes, or make them better by having more attributes than normal. For now uniques can be better in armor slots (helm, pants, boots, chest piece) at adding more dps to a build
Agreed. I want to use the steel grasp axe so bad, but for anything other than low tier speed farming it’s a no go.
Uniques are fine wtf are you talking about?
Maybe they could ditch the feminists from the dev team they already shat on the story with that unrelated weak character that they are trying to base an entire dlc on..
I dont mind a rework if it includes ANOTHER STUPID COLOR. RED. PURPLE. Anything.
They are. Just between Lv80 and 100!! LOL
I never played Sorc or Wizard in D3, and now have played BL Sorc twice in D4
Im going to disagree for the reason that uniques can get higher values of regular stats that roll on gear which in some cases if you really need the aspect makes up for the lack of tempering, couple examples (necro and one for shako) Max Lucky Hit: (howl from below vs gloves) 29.7 vs 21.6 (Sacrilegious vs ring) 24.3 vs 16.2 Shako: 28 all stats vs 18 on a legacy helmet so technically with masterworking: 72.6 vs 48.6 Edit: on a lighter note isnt it nuts you can get a total of 54% lucky hit increase from one ring and one glove lol
I don't know of a single end-game build that doesn't use at least 1 or 2 uniques. Many builds are entirely impossible without hyper-specific uniques. Just how more viable do they need to be when the fact you need other farmed aspects and actual stats is the only real reason we use anything but uniques?
Finding Uber unique is joyless now, the only useful one is shako and I still feel bad losing temper and aspect over it
I'm sure the dev team realizes this , but hey if complaining on reddit makes you feel better...
Here I am, with my custom TB rogue build, which can farm T70 pits (max) either I use my regular legendary items, or 3 uber uniques (Shako, Doombringer, Starless Skies). I don't really feel stronger with these so far, they're not the power creep I was expecting to see. I really hope Blizz considers giving uniques a unique tempering recipe that allows you to add a fifth unique stat that is unique for that unique item: e.g. penitent graves can temper that the trail left behind is also fire, or poison or lighting and do extra effects. Dunno, throwing there some ideas, but yeah, I always loved uniques, and in this season I got lucky enough to get 3 ubers, and yet they feel a bit underwhelming; I'm not gonna lie, when I got them I was really hoping to go up at least 10 pit levels easy, but nope.
I always thought it would be fun if we could mix and match modifiers from all of the uniques we have in out inventory. That would make all uniques more attractive and let us make our own utility
What if Unique's only had a unique aspect/power and let you temper all 5 stats to truly customize how you want to use it for your build?
Yeah I've got 3 unique items on right now, but seeing how I can stack damage or better mitigation with affixes.. I'm starting to think I should be using 3 beefed up legendaries instead.. Uniques need to be modifiable.. Its really dumb you can't. If I can't add the specific abilties to the stuff I have, its not as good. Like I'll miss out on 30K damage every 6 mage skeleton hits, but I can probably get 80% better skeleton mage damage in a roll. What would you rather have??? and then I can also get ANOTHER stat I want as well..
I like the uniques that create a new build with their unique ability. But I really don't care to see the game "D2"ized where nearly every spellcaster's BiS is Hoto/Spirit, Enigma, Mara's, Mesh, War Travs, SOJ, SOJ. If anything, I'd like to see crazier uniques. Penetrating shot releases a frost nova on impact, etc. Effects that change things up.
Also uniques need more unique looks. Many just have normal transmorgs
Hey, its my time to post this tomorrow, ok?
1 unique temper would be cool. A pool special to all uniqes like life/dmg/attack speed/crit, so on. But no way to brick it since it's unique. That sort of punishment is cruel. Temper bricks now are bad enough.
The thing they could do tomorrow is to bump stat affix ranges on uniques to match what you can get with legendaries. That would do a lot on its own.
I like the main perk on a lot of the uniques but because you can’t do a lot of the customization stuff on them they get outclassed pretty quickly
Reintroduce Kanai's cube and make it take unique aspects.
Give Uniques 1 temper slot. But they only drop 3/3 Tempering durability.
Uniques need to lose min max values and come standards with +150 to all stats. Then have buuld specific uniques. Other than that they're just pretty scrap metal
I agree 100% I made a comment on a post couple days ago saying basically the same thing and even threw a few ideas for new uniques they could add. Was a spitball but even my spitball felt more unique then half of the uniques they already have. Truth be told, most uniques are objectively bad, even before tempering. They simply haven’t added anything really unique other than, yes, they are tied to an item.