Make Unity Great Again

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.

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One small little problem though how does that affect followers who cannot die and also wear unity…Already this is enough of a buff if you combine with the right gems to make it very hard to die on any GR below 90. Not everything is designed for 4 man teams or optimised for 4 man teams.

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Unity is useful…in Solo.

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Unity is a flat 50% damage reduction when playing with followers.

This wouldn’t change that.

Followers that use the Cannot Die relic do not take any damage. The player therefore does not take any damage directed at the follower. Which means only damage taken by the player is split. 50% of it is redirected to the follower, who takes no damage.

Unless I’m misunderstand something, OP’s idea would only affect multiplayer Unity use.

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stop trying to make everything about the 4-man meta. Some people like the solo experience.

We’ve been alienated enough, true solo play is extremely inefficient in D3. It’s already at the point that solo leaderboards are actually filled with the same exact people who top the group leaderboards.

But you want MORE buffs to group play?

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you stop adopting a lame political tag line to make your thread title.

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I think I love you right now. :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

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Cheers to that! :beers::beers::beers::beers::beers::beers:

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I never said every ring should be designed for 4-man teams. But this is a Unity ring that bonds wearers. It would be nice if it could function as a team item the way it was intended, rather than only being useful as a Solo item. Unity of who? The separate components of one’s self?

My suggested change wouldn’t make it overpowered for followers. It’s only reducing the damage that gets passed. If your follower cannot die, then the 50% reduction to passed damage isn’t affecting that.

This isn’t even a buff to group play. Just a buff to the ring, giving players another potential strategy. There are better rings, and ones that reduce damage by a larger amount. This is reducing the SPLIT damage by 50%. Not all damage taken. It’s still only a 37% total damage reduction in a 4-man party from all 4 players wearing the ring at the same time, when a ring like Elusive Ring can reduce damage taken by 60% sustainably without hurting allies. This wouldn’t be the new meta. It would just become another choice players can make, and not the best one, but one that won’t terribly punish them for choosing it.

People always assume when I make a suggestion, that I’m trying to buff my own particular playstyle and force everyone to play only that way. I’m not. I’m trying to increase the variety of options available to the player, because making unique choices is what makes games like this fun. I play more solo than anything else. I probably wouldn’t use this ring much after the buff, and I don’t think many other people would, either. But at least it would become an option that doesn’t punish players for using it.

Also, maybe the reason the same players who top the single player leaderboards are the ones who top team play, is because the players at the top of the leaderboards are the strongest players, and that strength is going to be useful whether they’re playing alone, or not.

Okay, but why does the ring need a buff in the first place? Solo, it’s still the most powerful mitigation option for many builds.

Or it could be that people think it’s just a bad suggestion.

Which is fine, but Unity already has it’s place and its niche. Not everything needs change for the sake of change. SoJ, for example, was just terrible. It needed a change. Unity does not.

They probably could place if they were solo, but the fact is they get a very large advantage from grouping. Groups clear much faster and at higher levels than solo players, so their gems are better, their Paragons are much higher, and they have more and better Caldesaan enchants. That equates, in general, to a main stat advantage of thousands, and higher damage modifiers because of the gems.

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The advantages of getting your gems and Caldesaan’s a few levels higher in team play don’t make a huge difference. So let’s say you solo 140, but with your team you do 150. 3 gems at 10 levels higher each is +2.5-4% damage per gem. +50 Primary from +10 levels per Cald on 13 items. +650 Primary Attribute on your gear when you’re already a high paragon level with good Caldesaan on all gear and Ancient or Primal, is basically the same as adding another +2% damage. Then let’s say you’re 500 paragon levels higher because of leveling up faster with a team. Each level takes more EXP, and I don’t think it makes THAT drastic of a difference, but we’ll say 500. That’s another 2,500 primary stat, or about +8% damage. Now you’ve got a total of about +20% damage output as a result of your teamplay experience. That will carry you through 1 level higher in GR. And a solo player can still just go and do a bit of team games to those last few gem and caldesaan levels.

I really don’t see a problem with 4-man teams being slightly better than solo. It’s a team. It’s supposed to do better. If it didn’t, then why would anyone play in teams? Everyone would just play solo and never meet anyone, because why risk wasting precious seconds waiting for other players after rifts if they aren’t going to help?

You folks act like Single-Player is completely pointless. It’s not that big of a disadvantage. Throw them a Unity, Oculus Ring, Ess of Johan, Follower Cannot Die, pick your follower’s best Support abilities, throw them a nice crowd-control weapon effect like Azurewrath or Buriza (there are a dozen other viable follower weapons I can name) and you’re good. Heck, I do better solo than I do with a team of players around my same humbly low paragon level.

The only thing we might agree on is that the buff to Gold/EXP/MFind for multiplayer is unecessary and should be removed.

Was unity ever great? I even stopped using it in solo. There are better rings out there.

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Even if this were to happen most classes/builds has better ring/amulet options. And actually seeing a group of 4 players all wearing Unity seems unlikely. I very much do dislike the current Unity though, it’s dumb how someone else has to be wearing one to make it work, I beleive its used more as Solo with the other Unity on the Follower. In my opinion Unity should just be deleted and should be replaced to a class specific item to replace builds that used Unity, something that doesnt require someone else to wear in order to work.

There are already plenty of items that work good without needing someone else to wear them. I think the concept of Unity should remain the same, it should just be buffed to the point where it’s actually decent, hence my suggestion to also add healing split, which would be a decent benefit.

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Of course it does.

What you’re missing here is that it’s pretty much the tip top for solo players to do 140s on certain classes - but it’s nothing special to do 150s in groups anymore.

So you have a case of the solo players doing their utmost to maintain, but you have a large amount of people who are playing multiplayer in addition. The flood versus a seaside town - sure, a few of the people in the town might be able to survive, but the rest are going to be swept aside.

It’s not “slightly.” I favor multiplayer and even I can acknowledge the gap is too wide and they went in the wrong direction with it. Zdps the way it is now is stupid. Sure, maybe it should be an option… but it should never been the best thing evarz by far to have 3 zdps and 1 dps, or even 2 and 2.

There’s a difference between saying there’s a big imbalance between single player and multiplayer and saying single player is pointless.

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I didn’t say anything about making the Unity like America. And I didn’t say America was perfect. A parody of a slogan is not an endorsement for everything the person who said that slogan has ever done or a support for the entire history of that person’s country.

I can’t even remember the last time I used it. Mine go straight to the salvage pile.

A long time ago, before RoS, it was an okay ring for the bonus damage against elites. The SoJ had elite damage, too, but the Unity could roll with crits.

It wasn’t a parody, it was a salute, (I won’t go into which one, lol)

If you don’t want a political discussion or what the slogan “stand for” in your thread, then don’t put the slogan in your title.

I’ve seen so many of these titles that my stomach rolls each time. It’s not like people post “Hope and Change” in a title and then go on about what they would like to see in the game. Why? I wonder.

Point is, it isn’t cute at all to use a political slogan in the title of a thread in a Blizzard forum.

'Nuff Said.

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is fine as is… or should we also try to reinvent the wheel while we are at it?

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