The farther I get in D4, the more the Mythic Uniques system feels like it’s making the endgame experience suboptimal. I would love to see a rethink of this system.
- There is too little variety in MUs. I am increasingly having to build everything about my character around the small pool of MUs and the tiny subset of those that will actually improve him.
- Some of them, such as Ahavarion, seem extremely busted. I made the mistake of getting this staff, and found I’d often get the Greed shrine effect during a Pit run (mobs in the Pit aren’t supposed to drop gold and there’s a reason this shrine never appears in Pits otherwise). The fact that it only pops its shrine effect after killing an Elite means it’s useless against bosses, except for Varshan, which becomes trivial thanks to the summoned Elite during that fight. At the very least, find some other rule to trigger the shrine effect. (I gave up the staff this morning in exchange for a wand and a focus with 1 damage GA each and found that my Attack Power nearly doubled ansd I immediately advanced several Pit tiers.)
- On the other hand, some MUs are indispensable — my papier-mache Sorcerer could not survive without the Melted Heart of Selig. So I really have no interesting decisions to make for my amulet slot except to find a better MHoS. (Also a bummer, since Esadora’s helps me enormously and I love love love using it, but I can’t afford to lose the survivability of MHoS and nothing else gives me exploding crackling energy orbs).
- From a design perspective, MUs make affixes much less useful. Affixes are an awesome system, giving you a ton of interesting decisions. You invest a ton of time into upgrading your affixes, only to find out in the Torment 3/4 endgame, “Oh, I can’t actually use those any more, because to max out, I need MUs in a lot of my slots and have to work around the special affixes that come built into those.” And you often have to go with non-mythics in other slots just to be able to use affixes for things your character needs to function (mana regen and survivability for my Sorcerer).
So yes, some MUs are really fun.
And obviously you can’t remove them and I’m not saying anything silly like that.
But I am not in love with how the endgame feels so heavily built around a tiny pool of items that no longer support the customization I enjoyed and which are all over the map in terms of power and survivability.
And decisions become less interesting because there are some slots where I MUST have this ONE specific MU.
Lots of ways to address this.
One is just to a lot more MUs and balance the ones in the game already.
OR build a new system with new uber-uniques with more variety, that also let me add affixes (and, ideally, temper them too).
OR make a new skill tree specifically for mythic powers, so when I get a mythic, it gives me some special points in that tree (probably divided into separate offensive/defensive/utility points), so I have some choice in which mythic power I want to use, and then I can focus on getting the MU that gives me the most useful stats otherwise.
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There is too little variety in MUs. I am increasingly having to build everything about my character around the small pool of MUs and the tiny subset of those that will actually improve him.
This is the opposite of the point of the system’s design. You are to put them on a showcase. You are not supposed to build things around them. Why are you doing that? Stop doing that. The whole point is that you don’t do that. Once MUs became meta they destroyed the build diversity.
Quit it.
They just exemplify Blizzard’s incompetence at designing compelling itemization.
These items were intended to be “chase” gear that are aspirational and far from guaranteed. But they were so absurdly rare that they effectively didn’t exist. Then they added the boss ladder (which is a horrible system due to mandatory rotations), and now they’re so common they’re just part of standard build setups.
In order to maintain a semblance of the item chase, you’re now just looting dozens of the same unique that’s supposed to be uber-rare in the hopes it rolls multiple Greater Affixes. These numerical increases mean very little, since they only enable you to do the exact same content you were doing before, except that content has a few extra zeroes added to all its values that are already so high, they exceed human comprehension.
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I could not have said this better myself. Mythics are easier to get than a DECENT usable ancestral and don’t risk being bricked at tempering. The only they understand is quick profit and propping up their egos.
Mythics do add power to builds but are not required for builds you can play just fine with out mythics
Rotations are only mandatory if you can’t control your fomo. I’ve never done rotations and i had more mythics than i knew what to do with last season. I haven’t played as fast this season, so i’m not drowning in mythics, but i have all the right mythics on 3 characters with a couple extra in my stash… and i’ll probably get more ideal GA mythics while i’m farming uniques.
if you are using this mythic in any build on any class you are doing something wrong so its not itemization design issue.
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Mythics aren’t needed for torment 1 or 2. But if you want to push into 3 or 4, they rapidly become necessary for many builds. There’s a reason they feature in the endgame builds of many sites.
Avharion is worse than useless, honestly. The one build it makes sense for is an Esadora’s build because of how it scales Intelligence, but I found that it’s very much a double edged sword even so. Whenever I was doing Hordes last season the damn thing would get me killed every other time it randomly slapped me with Conduit. All my DR and barriers would fall off while it was active, leading to me getting one shotted the second it dropped unless I managed to get away from everything long enough for it to expire and me to get all my defenses back on before I got hit. It actually made things harder between that and Conduit not doing enough damage to be worth getting in the first place.
It’s a stupid item. They should reconsider the unique affix to at the very least pull Conduit and probably Greed out of the possibilities.
They need to quit putting fancy affixes on them and put standard use affixes on them like mainstat, vitality, core skill +, resource, crit damage, etc or whatever. Would be really slick if the mainstat mirrored the wielder so you could use on alts. Like druid it has wisdom and sorc it has intel, on same weapon. WoW does that, Diablo could.
Let the Mythic aspects do the work and contain any other affix that makes the item work.
Itemization is bad. You are now starting to see all the problems with it and Blizzard has painted themselves into a corner. The amount of Item Slots stays constant. Your Skill Tree has not grown. Paragon is shallow and Boards still only have 1 Legendary Power each.
Despite all of this, they keep adding Aspects and Unique Items. Some Mythic Unique items are needed to be able to progress in the game. These all share the same Item Budget Economy and when you have items and Aspects that are either needed to function or even make a build work, you do not have any real decisions.
It becomes readily apparent that Aspects should be moved off of items entirely. Tempering has added a whole new level of issues to the mix as Unique and Mythic Items are missing this ability and sometimes come preloaded with one you may or may not really need.
Most builds now rely on multiple Uniques/Mythics to play correctly. You have entire mechanics that really the only way to access are through Aspects.
Come on Blizzard. What are you guys doing?
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With all the items and limited slots I expect the D4 version of the cube to coming shortly. Although I suppose they will hold that for an expansion.
Yeah we didn’t get enough “p2w” complaints from people who have never heard of a video game expansion before. We need some more expansion-only content to really drive it home.
Blizzard coincidentally had a perfect system introduced with Season 2 with Blood Powers they could have adapted for Aspects.
- Progressing your Blood Powers was linear. You got to choose what you upgraded.
- You could easily slot things in and change stuff around.
- This system not being tied to Itemization allows for fairness in design since everyone would get the same allotment. No more complaining about Barbarians. No having to worry about taking Unique items.
- Unique and Mythic Unique items can be Unique.
- Aspect system would provide you with a set amount of Offensive, Defensive, Utility, Resource, and Movement Aspects. By default, you would be given at least 1 of each type with some Aspect slots that give you flexibility. For example, let’s say you get 12 Aspect Slots. 4 of those 12 Aspect Slots would require a certain category. Of the remaining 8, you might have certain slots that could be either Defensive or Utility, or Resource or Movement etc.
- As the game progresses, adding Aspect Slots is easy for scalability.
- The Primary Slots could have a Bonus Effect or effectiveness.
- You can add layers to this system allowing for modifications of Aspects.
- In addition to this, you could have separate slots for Class Aspects that are specific to your Class, Build, and Playstyle. No more having to rely on finding a certain item to activate a build!
- This frees up Itemization to be more fun. Set Items, Runewords, Unique/Mythic, Crafted Gear all makes sense now. You are getting Aspects on top and not having to Imprint each time or rip stuff from gear.