Acestral Uniques vs Ancestral Legendary Items questions

[dirtyferret-1872]

So I’m getting lv 925 Ancestral Uniques and Legendary items as drops in Tier IV. It seems to me the Legendary items are the better of the two most times since you can temper, enchant, and change their codes as opposed to the Uniques or am I missing something about the Uniques?

[Iggi-11818]

Yes, you are missing context as to what the developers have said about this.
 

@Iggi-11818

Do unique items get a stat/funcationaly boost since tempered legendaries are just straight up better? Is it generally not worth it to equip a unique item after the patch?

:

Colin
We’ve done a pass on all the unique items, we’ve done things like Razorplate I think has 4 thorns affixes and we changed what the legendary power is.

Adam F
By the way that was a big question from people on the PTR. Changes should be in the patch notes.

Adam P
Heavily Summarized
In updating tempering mechanics and legendary items in Diablo 4, we aimed to give legendaries a unique journey and story, distinct from the more static nature of uniques. We acknowledge that uniques are currently powerful but lack the same ongoing engagement as legendaries. While some adjustments were made to certain uniques, we didn’t go over all of them, as the focus was on preserving their distinct identities.

We anticipate that uniques may be less prevalent than before, but still essential for various builds. Rather than make changes immediately, we prefer to observe how players engage with the current system. We could potentially add crafting mechanics to uniques, but we want to see how the current system works before we make any changes.

Colin
And the fix nature sort of has you consider its part of your optimization as well. Well I’m going to give up some tempering affixes to get this unique for example in my chest slot. We want to see where that goes, we think that’s fun. We think the excitement of a unique are those fixed stats when you see the item on the ground you know ‘ok thats the unique I want, I can just equip it, I don’t even have to work on it.’

Tl;Dr - Some Uniques were changed, but not all. It’s going to be a work in progress essentially.

[Plagueth-11751]

I have no idea how to play. I just use the Uniques I find

[TatsumakiJim-1766]

Well, it’s colored differently therefore it must be better.

[Plagueth-11751]

That is pretty much how I look at it.

[dirtyferret-1872]

thank you, i knew i was probably missing something

[Iggi-11818]

It was during the live stream two weeks before S4 launched. Helps to give an idea what their thought process is at least. Maybe come S5 they’ll come up with a solution of some sort.

[righthere-11972]

Uniques are very corner case this season. Was working to rebuild a Werewolf druid build I had used in pre season one, but realized I would be giving up way too many slots (it used three uniques).

Subsequently stumbled on a uber unique and unique combo that seems to be working pretty well. Not sure I’d want to lose two slots if one wasn’t an uber.

[pmulgrew612-1259]

Before this season uniques were definitely saught after. Last season for example I had 6 uniques in my build, 2 of which were Ubers. This season uniques are lagging behind. Right now I’m only using one, if I get a shako I might use it and that would be 2.

The devs have stated they’re working on something to make uniques more desirable again. But for now unless it’s absolutely build defining uniques are probably not all that useful.