Part of the justification we have been told (I think in the campfire chats) is that that the Devs didn’t want uniques that were too powerful and everyone to be walking around with the exact same equipment.
And the irony now is that mostly everyone is hunting for the exact same type of ‘yellows’, and basically wearing the same items in end game. e.g. Rings comprised of Perfect Rolls of Vulnerable Damage, Critical Strike Damage, Critical Strike Change, etc.
Imagine if the problem were solved with abundance instead of scarcity of uber uniques. Imagine if there were 25-50 unique for each class that were as good as Tempest Roar that enabled each skill on the skill tree to be a viable build.
While I appreciate uber uniques being farmable some season 2, I fear the further downward slide of the game since that just starts the power creep inflation. What I would rather have, or have in addition to the target farming, are more class viable unqiues to open up the skill tree and make more builds viable and classes more diverse.
Honestly, blizzard already created 20 or something unique gear for the game. They don’t want to dump it all in one Season. Have to spread them out until the next expansion. Still got to give players something to chase after.
Itemization is something else entirely. As a barbarian, thorn damage doesn’t crit. Nor is vulnerbile benificial. A bleed build has some interactions with affixes.
This is blizzard by the way. So anything that becomes too popular will be nerf. If everyone runs around with a ring with crit chance, crit damage, vul, damage, then blizzard is going to change it. They’ll change it so only one of those affix can ever show up on ring slots.
Agreed, sadly. I don’t care if they dump more over seasons (5 uniques per season at 4 seaons per year is 20 new uniques every year). But like the original 20…it’d be nice if they were all Tempest Roar nice.
And of course I think they already nerfed the changes of the most popular affixes showing up together, but I think the essence of the point remains, they wanted to avoid everyone wearing same items…and ironically that’s what they largely ended up with.
I imagine that we’ll get more uniques over time. But you’d be kidding yourself if the community couldn’t optimize any number down to 2 or 3. Then bring the same complaint.
I’d personally rather that optimization than the current one we have though.
And I think there are enough casual players that would even use the Druid companion unique pants if it was actually fun to use, like if it said have up to 10 wolves and they all cast storm strike as the unique power.
Edit:
@Furblog Yes, I believe they said that too. And that’s a secondary problem though right? Most unique dont’ compliment any playstyle or build. Most barb uniques don’t suddenly make that skill vaible to play even low NM dungeons as the main go to skill that they build around. If new uniques rose to that bar of actually complimenting play styles and making more builds viable because of the unique, then I think we’d all be happier.
Really, you’d rather people complain about “not having enough uniques” when there’s 50 uniques available only because they come up with a meta list of 2-3?
Right. I think the first they should do is try to actually buff the uniques they have. There are a lot of them that actually do really interesting things. If their affixes weren’t blown away by some of the OP affixes on rares, more of them would be used, but I’d rather have their affixes be thematic (and sometimes more than 4) and then make them strong by just buffing the aspect hard. No one uses Bloodless Scream? Double the chill amount, double the essence gain.
There are a few uniques that should really just be legendaries because they don’t alter a skill or group of skills enough. I hope they focus new uniques on being more like Tempest Roar, Mad Wolf’s Glee, Staff of the Crone, or The Oculus. Either create new synergies within the skill tree or create some trade off like a key passive in PoE (e.g., you don’t have mana but all your skills cost life). The Oculus is kind of like this.
I think they need to entirely rethink Unique’s. IMO they about as useful as blue items. I’ve found a lot of Unique items for a Rogue, and the only one I use is a dagger. Even that one I debate a lot whether I should put the legendary dagger back on. It does slightly less damage, but it’s better in just about every other way.
I tried the Mothers amulet, went back to the legendary one. The rest was not even worth giving a shot, even though they were close too, or over 800 power… The fact that they can’t be altered other than upgraded, makes them pretty much useless for anything other than maybe a very specific build. I have nearly a complete set sitting in my stash, but it’s soon for salvage/selling.
sorry to let you down but uniques are indeed very powerful. The build i have as bard is based around the helm that is uber rare and most poeple dont have it, but with that i crush everyone so they are game changing! gg for devs!
Lmao, this isn’t based at all, imagine needing an uber unique to kill stuff in this game where everything is already easy as hell and yet you still need one to “crush everyone”, this is called bad itemization and build variety/balancing, it’s not about the uber uniques which i might add they are utter garbage like 95% of this game’s items, but the lack of creativity that this dev team has…
They are simply copying and pasting from the other Diablo games, hell if you are going to do that at least copy the good stuff e.g : Runes /LFG system / SP option /Uber bosses etc…
Creatively bankrupt company it’s sad to see what this company was and what has become.
I mean they did say uniques are supose to be build defining. But the reality is they are not only a few “define” a build aka tempest roar cause it alters the skill tree in a way. Supposedly there are a total of 60 uniques in the game, some class specific others are not.
Diablo 1 - 112 unique items
Diablo 2 - 385 unique items
Diablo 3 - got lazy didn’t count but more than 60
Diablo 4 - 60
I don’t think the devs of this game are very talented tbh, or maybe such a huge creative muzzle was put on them by the execs that their creative sensibilities have been sterilized.
people need to understand they are adding higher difficulty in future (this was datamined early on) so enemies will be harder to kill regardless.
and even if not powercreep is not inherently bad…just as long as they do it properly and not the D3 way.
example would be give powercreep but with downsides to another part of your character or unique style effects where they do not grant you effect if X stat is Y or higher/lower.
powercreep will always happen in a game like Diablo. It is a power fantasy.
could also add content that can’t be powercrept (similar to D3’s set dungeons) by limiting what you can bring in or even capping your stats at a certain limit.
the game is pve 1st and foremost so no downside to power creep as if u dont want to…just use worse gear (its always an option)
I fully agree with OP. I play an off-meta trap rogue and Eyes in the Dark, the rogue unique that is supposed to buff Death Trap, is pretty much useless for me. A streamer described the only use case of this unique as taking hours to slowly clear a 100 NMD.
It’s poor item design by developers who seem to not understand or play the game at a high level.
there are to many underlying problems and the players have already spoken they are not going to stick around and wait for them all to be fixed.
by the time d4 is even remotely “fun” there will be a whole new batch of games out.
its about time game devs realize games live or die by how well they perform on twitch.
if you want your game to have staying power. its needs to cater to what streamers want to stream and what viewers want to view… which generally speaking is GOOD pvp or insane replayability
what do all the top twitch games have… insane pvp and/or insane replayability
You are absolutely right. Plenty of gamers don’t want to be seen as noobs or morons — or just want to maximize their limited playtime without wasted experimentation.
Meanwhile, there will always be star players that figure out the 2 or 3 best builds per class and tell people on Twitch or YouTube “this is how you do it!” and that’s how it happens.
Plenty of builds are fun at lower NM levels but the videos that get views are the “2m 30s LVL100 [Name the NM Dungeon] clear” ones that link the build in the comments. Clear speed is way too much of a gamer fetish for Diablo.
so they are game changing! gg for devs!