I’d like to see the Unity ring restored to a useful level. I like the concept of it, and teams should be rewarded for cooperating well enough to take advantage of it. Many incredible rings have been implemented since the adding of the Unity’s ability, and an already originally overlooked ability simply became useless.
If you get all four players in your party to use the Unity, then each player is taking 25% of their own damage sustained. They’re also taking 25% of every other player’s damage. If two of them out of four are getting attacked, it’s already become less effective than other rings that can sustainably reduce damage taken by 50-60% without passing it on to other team members. If all four are taking a lot of damage, then it’s basically doing nothing but passing it all around. Or one person with high health and low damage reduction could sit in a dangerous spot and kill his team.
Here’s how I would suggest we make Unity great again. Change the ability from:
All damage taken is split between wearers of this item
to:
All damage taken is shared between wearers of this item. Damage passed to allies is reduced by 50%.
Mind you, this is only reducing the passed damage, not the total. This would amount to:
2 Wearers: 50% + 25% = 75% damage received. 25% Eliminated
3 Wearers: 33% + 16.7% + 16.7% = 66.4% damage received. 33.6% eliminated
4 Wearers: 25% + 12.5% + 12.5% + 12.5% = 62.5% damage received. 37.5% eliminated
This is competing with choices like the Elusive Ring, which reduce damage taken by 50-60% without hurting teammates. Sometimes it’s comparable to other options, sometimes it will help slightly better, most of the time it will help less, and sometimes it may even get them killed, with the reduction on damage passed only somewhat helping that issue. Players who use it would be trading the stronger and more reliable protection they could have gotten from other rings in order to make one of their affixes on the ring +15% damage against elites, which is competing against several other equally valuable affixes that could have gone in that spot already. At the bare minimum this buff should be added with no risk of it being overpowered. But if you have the guts to go closer to the line of balance, it could still use more buffing. I would like to add another bonus to the ring:
All damage taken and healing received is shared between wearers of this item. Damage passed to allies is reduced by 50%.
The added affix will result in multiple outcomes. In a 4-man team using this ring, a player may find that their own healing isn’t enough to keep themselves healed anymore. They may have to rely on other members of the team to also be healing. But on the upside, a player that has to stop hitting to move out of a dangerous situation can continue being healed, players will recieve smaller but more reliable healing at all times, and players who are at max health will at least keep healing their allies each for 25% of that healing. Players who aren’t generating much healing would basically be leeching 25% off of each of their allies.
There would still be more effective options, but a team utilizing this would be rewarded with stability, as long as nobody on the team gets everyone killed.