Designing the Elder Uniques

So, no word about the Clarity jewel? Is that going to be fixed or not?

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While ailment builds are not as popular as direct damage builds

Golly gee I wonder why that is? Maybe it has something to do with how ailment builds only work really well when you scale them with the truckload of BiS uniques made specifically for them, or maybe it has something to do with how unintuitive it is to try to scale a fraction of your hit damage per second when you could just scale that hit damage on its own with similar multipliers instead? I dunno. Just spitballing.

Neat design notes all around, though. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with a lot of them - Hopeshredder and Shimmeron in particular don't seem like they have "many ways" to build around the downside, just one obvious way (leech for Hopeshredder, ES regen for shimmeron), one less obvious way (life regen), and then the "way" of just avoiding the downside entirely by not triggering it, which just seems kinda cheap to me. And Cyclopean Coil.... it's nice, but doesn't quite justify trying to build for all 3 attributes on its own in my opinion. Maybe with another unique supporting that "put points into all 3 attributes" gimmick it could work, but I don't see the (if you're really pushing) 100%ish increased damage being worth the hassle of trying to pick up so many attribute mods on gear.

But hey, at least Watcher's Eye and Impresence are kickass. Good job on those.

what's that eye thing?

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TherosPherae wrote:

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While ailment builds are not as popular as direct damage builds

Golly gee I wonder why that is? Maybe it has something to do with how ailment builds only work really well when you scale them with the truckload of BiS uniques made specifically for them, or maybe it has something to do with how unintuitive it is to try to scale a fraction of your hit damage per second when you could just scale that hit damage on its own with similar multipliers instead? I dunno. Just spitballing.

Neat design notes all around, though. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with a lot of them - Hopeshredder and Shimmeron in particular don't seem like they have "many ways" to build around the downside, just one obvious way (leech for Hopeshredder, ES regen for shimmeron), one less obvious way (life regen), and then the "way" of just avoiding the downside entirely by not triggering it, which just seems kinda cheap to me. And Cyclopean Coil.... it's nice, but doesn't quite justify trying to build for all 3 attributes on its own in my opinion. Maybe with another unique supporting that "put points into all 3 attributes" gimmick it could work, but I don't see the (if you're really pushing) 100%ish increased damage being worth the hassle of trying to pick up so many attribute mods on gear.

But hey, at least Watcher's Eye and Impresence are kickass. Good job on those.

Always good to see your take on these things. Thanks for that. Especially the shredding of where Ailments stand now. Or lie down, whimpering in lonely agony, as the case may be. Something had to be done, but I don't think they handled it very well.

What surprises me is that they'd bother making Elder uniques at all, given how ridiculously potent the rares are.

I'm going to be straight but all of the elder items with the exception of the neck and jewel is fucking garbage dude like the drawback to it is so fucking bad it's unreal.

You make a bad ass boss an he drops garbage dude that's not cool.

''Powerful'' pfft cmon man

How long till this gets nerfed

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The_Scourge wrote:

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TherosPherae wrote:

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While ailment builds are not as popular as direct damage builds

Golly gee I wonder why that is? Maybe it has something to do with how ailment builds only work really well when you scale them with the truckload of BiS uniques made specifically for them, or maybe it has something to do with how unintuitive it is to try to scale a fraction of your hit damage per second when you could just scale that hit damage on its own with similar multipliers instead? I dunno. Just spitballing.

Neat design notes all around, though. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with a lot of them - Hopeshredder and Shimmeron in particular don't seem like they have "many ways" to build around the downside, just one obvious way (leech for Hopeshredder, ES regen for shimmeron), one less obvious way (life regen), and then the "way" of just avoiding the downside entirely by not triggering it, which just seems kinda cheap to me. And Cyclopean Coil.... it's nice, but doesn't quite justify trying to build for all 3 attributes on its own in my opinion. Maybe with another unique supporting that "put points into all 3 attributes" gimmick it could work, but I don't see the (if you're really pushing) 100%ish increased damage being worth the hassle of trying to pick up so many attribute mods on gear.

But hey, at least Watcher's Eye and Impresence are kickass. Good job on those.

Always good to see your take on these things. Thanks for that. Especially the shredding of where Ailments stand now. Or lie down, whimpering in lonely agony, as the case may be. Something had to be done, but I don't think they handled it very well.

What surprises me is that they'd bother making Elder uniques at all, given how ridiculously potent the rares are.

Lonely agony? I think you mean Perfect Agony, har har har. More seriously, the Ailments rework was - and still is - pretty much the most disappointing thing GGG's ever done in my opinion. They had a whole expansion's worth of uniques and gems dedicated to this concept - hell, they even made 2 new keystones for it - but at its release (and to this day) it's still very difficult to numerically justify using most of the ailments (and thus those gems and uniques) when you could be just as effective by putting that investment into normal ol' damage and smacking the enemy directly in the face. And by "numerically justify," I mean that it's hard to get them to perform at even my standards of DPS. They've become like the first release of Marylene's Fallacy - something I want so badly to work, but that just... doesn't. And it makes me mad that I can't make it work, because it looks like so much effort went into making the content for it that just seems wasted for now. Hopefully they get some sort of tweak in the future to make them more palatable for normal use.

And personally, I like that they made Elder uniques despite the rares. Because true, the rares have ridiculously potent potential, but after finding a few stash tabs of them, I think I can safely say that the vast majority of them aren't going to have any real potency to them without heavy crafting investment. They've got more power than a typical rare, sure, but a typical rare has never been particularly powerful; it's the lucky stuff you have to watch out for. And Elder/Shaper rares are very much in the same boat, with perhaps some more niche appeal with mods that appeal to specific builds. Uniques, on the other hand, will always be good at the thing they're made for - be it leveling, endgame destruction, or weird build-enabling shenanigans, and I always like having more to add to my collection.

Oh, and one more bit that I left out of my original assessment - the theming of the items is pretty swell. The degen on the charge items, the weird eldritch look on everything, it's all very appropriate for the Elder. It just seems like it's hard for the flavorful downsides to be worth dealing with when the power isn't quite there to justify it.

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I_NO wrote:

I'm going to be straight but all of the elder items with the exception of the jewel is fucking garbage dude like the drawback to it is so fucking bad it's unreal.

You make a bad ass boss an he drops garbage dude that's not cool.

The Flammability/Despair neck are pretty outta control mate, what's your problem?

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Timbroslice wrote:

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I_NO wrote:

I'm going to be straight but all of the elder items with the exception of the jewel is fucking garbage dude like the drawback to it is so fucking bad it's unreal.

You make a bad ass boss an he drops garbage dude that's not cool.

The Flammability/Despair neck are pretty outta control mate, what's your problem?

Apparently I forgot to also say other then neck and the jewels

OPPS

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I_NO wrote:

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Timbroslice wrote:

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I_NO wrote:

I'm going to be straight but all of the elder items with the exception of the jewel is fucking garbage dude like the drawback to it is so fucking bad it's unreal.

You make a bad ass boss an he drops garbage dude that's not cool.

The Flammability/Despair neck are pretty outta control mate, what's your problem?

Apparently I forgot to also say other then neck and the jewels

OPPS

damn right