I have been playing p8 D2 classic offline so every character is SSF as there still is no Shared Stash.
I was playing a Necromancer this time around and Summoner went down and the reward was a Magic Chain Mail and a Set Breast Plate:
Here were the stats:
Glorious Chain Mail of Warding:
+107 Defense
+Magic Damage Reduced by 1
Isenhart’s Cage:
+106 Defense
+Magic Damage Reduced by 2
Now, my Necromancer found a Gull dagger in early A2 and had it equipped the remainder of the playthrough for Normal (156+ MF). No other pieces of Isenhart were found.
If this were LOH, Stealth runeword would be BIS for days to come. But since I am playing Classic, vendor bought armor with lightning resistance and FHR was the obvious choice over Isenhart.
Low level set items are useless as individual pieces. Finding two or more pieces of the same set in a single playthrough is almost impossible (for some reason you always find plenty of duplicates of single piece).
These pieces, on their own, can’t even compete with vendor bought magic items.
Why aren’t the on item multi piece bonuses fixed stats instead? For example, the +2-198 Defense (Based On Character Level) 2 item bonus on Isenhart’s Case shouldn’t require 2 pieces of the set and should be a fixed value on the set. There are already partial set bonuses to entice players to wear multiple pieces but individual pieces are utterly garbage on their own.
The alternative was revamping the entire affixes of the low level sets but developers opted to just stick to fluff set bonus changes.
Since PTR is supposedly coming soon, here was the write up from last PTR: