I hope the next ptr takes a look at some underperforming uniques, especially elite uniques.
I personally think that the best way to buff uniques is to give them “unique” modifiers that will give them use in niche builds. I don’t think the solution is to turn everything into a Grief PB.
Give interesting skill points to underused skills, for example. And buff those numbers up!
Why not give the earth shifter +10 to elemental skills instead of +7 to make it worth that str?
Give the Grandfather cleave? Or a level 1 might aura? Or +5 to sword mastery?
Give Steel Carapace 100% ctc iron maiden when struck and attacker takes damage of 100?
There’s SO much that can be done to make uniques feel more exciting. I can think of 100 things at least. Opening up more options is always going to be more fun. It’s not about making everything meta, it’s about letting stuff be decent in its own way.
People would be willing to try more fun builds if they weren’t so underpowered. Not everything needs to be a Hammerdin but it shouldn’t have to be junk.
For starters, uniques need staffmods
(auto mods) and indestructible uniques should be able to roll Ethereal (or always Eth):
Lower level uniques can also benefit from changes to how upgrades work. A flat base change without upping the affixes still leaves them rather useless:
Agree with your idea very much! Examples could be tuned though.
Grandfater
Giving it a cleave… as much as I hate cleave… i wouldn’t hate it if it was just on 1 item, but it would just set a precedent and major rage in the community IMO.
Level 1 might aura is worthless. Everyone already has so much skill-ed% from skills and stats and auras, etc, it wouldn’t do anything.
Sword mastery if given as an Oskill could make it an interesting choice on paladin, druid or BLADE SIN, but need to look at the numbers. It might be pathetic still.
Overall Grandfather stats look the most uninspired of them all, just “big damage and stats”, so it’s hard to tell what should it get. I wonder if they could make grandfather to “stun monsters”, that would be cool. CTC Stun on striking, if that would work… If not, CTC Shock Wave?
Steel Carapace
attacker takes damage of 100 is kinda very little (yes, literally all ATD is insignificant at level 66). I did a thorns+conversion paladin playthrough on 2.4, and 340 damage thorns is very slow at killing things in act 1 hell (which starts at level 66).
But the idea of buffing it’s iron maiden and adding damage return sounds good. Just the iron maiden needs higher level (not higher chance, so you could override it if you need…), and damage return to 300 or smth. It then would be a fascinating Iron Golem. And perhaps add some big replenish life to it, or some absorbs.
If you don’t want to go that route, adding one extra mod to every unique that is completely random would be nice and make finding uniques actually interesting.
What we have now is boring, as items are worthless after two weeks. Handing out occy and shakos feels bad in terms of loot hunting. Having an extra mod roll into them would be neat, although they’d have to buff monster HP pools a bit to compensate.
To compensate monster HP pools, you could just make players 3 happen when just one person is in the game.
First they need to raise the base weapon damage on exceptional and elite items then they can start messing with adding mods. When they buffed mob health, resistance, defense in act 5 nightmare and hell mode in 1.10 they never addressed base weapon damage so start there.
Then I would like to see caster spell damage linked to base weapon damage…
I was thinking about this and was wondering maybe Blizzard could add some new cube recipes that could add affixes/prefixes/modifiers to Unique items…
I think trying to buff unique items individually will be too much work for Blizzard. But some new cube recipies that allow players to customize or re-roll their uniques to make them more useful or roll rare affixes would be easier to implement, and very, very cool… Could get some amazing items to keep or trade this way…
That leads to power creep though. I think nerfing runewords is the way to buff uniques.
I don’t remember og base d2 but pre 1.10
i thought uniques were bis mostly so the issue is runewords obsoleting them