Should "powerful" uniques exist in PoE or any other "online" ARPG?

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roundishcap wrote:

My opinion is that too many unique modifiers should be on the passive tree somewhere instead of deal 20% more fire damage or whatever.

Honestly they should just delete the chase uniques and mirrors and re-balance the game. Stuff like t0 uniques and mirrors just don't exist for me because they never realistically drop. The more GGG balances around players that play too much where they say mageblood/headhunters are too common, the worse the game gets.

Reading comments like this I am forever grateful that it's absolutely inconsequential whatever is suggested here

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roundishcap wrote:

My opinion is that too many unique modifiers should be on the passive tree somewhere instead of deal 20% more fire damage or whatever.

Mmm, yeah.

“We came up with this cool idea” - yay!
“We put it on a unique like the last twenty cool ideas” - not yay

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BastiatXIV wrote:

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Finally, one can nit pick to find "reasons" or "excuses" to justify not "supporting" and spending money on a game, especially a game that's already free to play or the company behind it, because that's always easier to do. Those who understand or see the reality better will continue to support the game based on how much they're pleased with it, because I and many others appreciate and care about PoE, and GGG behind it. At least for me it's this game I've been consistently playing for many years, something that it hasn't happened with another game these last 7-8 years.

I wish COMMAS were unique in this paragraph. Jaysus.....

The good thing about the English language is that "most" can understand whoever is writing whatever, but then the "perfectionists" will drop these comments from time to time, individuals posting solely to criticize how one chooses to write on a forum, which isn't an English test exam, but hey I'll gladly spend just for you an extra minute or two to "improve" the statement you quoted above.

Better? =)

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ArtCrusade wrote:

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roundishcap wrote:

My opinion is that too many unique modifiers should be on the passive tree somewhere instead of deal 20% more fire damage or whatever.

Honestly they should just delete the chase uniques and mirrors and re-balance the game. Stuff like t0 uniques and mirrors just don't exist for me because they never realistically drop. The more GGG balances around players that play too much where they say mageblood/headhunters are too common, the worse the game gets.

Reading comments like this I am forever grateful that it's absolutely inconsequential whatever is suggested here

^^

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Kopogero wrote:

The good thing about the English language is that "most" can understand whoever is writing whatever, but then the "perfectionists" will drop these comments from time to time, individuals posting solely to criticize how one chooses to write on a forum, which isn't an English test exam, but hey I'll gladly spend just for you an extra minute or two to "improve" the statement you quoted above.

Better? =)

Again, who're you quoting here? You're quoting your own thoughts. It looks silly.

People are questioning your writing because you're writing conflicted messages: "...if you understood the words you're using properly by its defined meaning..."
To then contradict yourself a short while later with
"..."most" can understand whoever is writing whatever..."
You're writing 108 word-salad sentences, while at the same time ridiculing others for not being able to decrypt your nonsense.

I think yes there should be unique chase items, but also they should be exceptionally more rare than they are. I liked the game a lot better when they had mentality that a good rare item should always be better than a unique item that just is not very plausible these days with some of the unique item's available now.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

Luck should ALWAYS have a place in a loot-based game.

I agree.
But I do, to some point, also agree with OP.
In a competetive environment, luck shouldn't have much more impact than skill/ endurance.
Powerful uniques, on the other hand, should have their place in an ARPG, imo.
So... PoE just isn't designed to have competetive events in its current form.

If I remember correctly, Charan put the drop restriction on Oni Goroshi so that it would not interfere with races.
Making it rare would not be enough, because some lucky person would surely find one early in the game, gaining an incredible edge over every other player.
So he hid it behind a Hillock grind, which excluded it from having any impact on race events or even league starts - because at the time you've farmed an OG, most other players would already be in Part II of the game or even in maps.

Kinda sorta, old friend.

Mostly I put it in because I didn't want a complete newbie to find it on their first day. Chris and co agreed - - once we found a way to make it truly a chase item with 100% acquisition likelihood, they let me go full speed on the power. I argued that if a person can trivialise a game with 100 dps then 10000000 dps actually doesn't change anything of real value as far as meaningful gameplay goes.

I wanted OG to have a tiny tiny tiny chance to spawn in ANY Twilight Strand past the first, but I am fairly sure the spawnrate rises from 0 around level 6.

There is another factor to the acquisition process though, one that I felt remedied a long standing issue with my iterations of the same deliberately OP item: you cannot get it when you don't want it. EVER. It is impossible to call OG a "trash unique" because every single one took deliberate effort.

There is a place for so called trash items in any game driven by RNG loot, but that place should not be filled by someone who paid a significant amount of money to design an item. With the exception of deliberately trollish items, supporter uniques are a legacy, and even the troll ones have a legacy of their own.

Very few supporter uniques are chase items because very few supporter uniques were made when chase items were not strictly GGG designed (Kaom's Heart, 6L anything, mirrors, shavswraps etc).

Instead we mostly just wanted to leave a footprint in the sand. A cool idea inspired by a personal experience or a favourite franchise. Thus we have a My Little Pony wand, a Shadow of the Torturer sword, a Monkey King staff, a Spartacus helmet, amd so on.

Enough has been said about my own inspiration and it is to be honest irrelevant here. Suffice to say I didn't want it to be some meta beast because I didn't know the first thing about PoE's meta. Well, thats a lie. It was Ground Slam. Booooring. Thanks Krippbama.

So my first attempt at the sword, a level 7 rapier, was absolutely OP IF you were lucky enough to find it at that level. Unfortunately most people found it long, long after its utility and it became "trash". I never quite understood why GGG allowed low level OP items to drop well past their appropriate appearance but there you go. 1k down the fucking drain right there. Edit: maybe they were thinking about twinks but PoE even then was far less conducive to altaholism than D2 - - ironic given how cleverly GGG monetised storage. That and people were already treating the first 40 to 50 levels as "tutorial". Things designed for said tutorial dropping in the real game can't be anything but trash, I guess.

To rectify this seeming waste of money and effort, I decided that any unique I designed would not be in the loot pool. Period. If you wanted it you went for it. Otherwise it never once bothered you. Everyone wins.

The game has an incredible de facto forging system via its trade with npcs - - so why not give players a chance to "upgrade" a unique logically deemed as trash at any level past, say, 30? Hence the second sword, even more OP than the first for its level (but also more demanding in terms of what sort of character could really benefit from it). Acquired purely by trading the first sword with some bits and pieces to any npc. Your reward for this effort was a fiery upgrade and a heck of a lot of burning potential.

I fucking loved that sword and so did GGG. They even put it in a trailer at one point. I think Goddess Scorned is my greatest contribution to PoE.

Third version was a flop due to me not being ambitious enough and just trying the same thing over again. But hey, another nice skin and the first item in PoE to follow a script. Fwiw Goddess Unleashed had better lines and voice acting. I always loved that the first voice actress was half Chinese, like me.

(fun fact: I was on probation and vacation when GGG first sent me the voice lines. I was also on vacation when I created the first sword, but due ti being a forum mod was not yet intimately aquainted with the Red Badge of [dis] honour.)

I was pretty bitter about how Unleashed landed and GGG's handling of it. This was their first intelligent, speaking weapon unique (Jack the Axe is more cunning than intelligent I reckon) and they really fumbled it. So later, I asked if I could have a do-over. Same concept, retooled for 3.0. Instead of four acts worth of commentary, let me do all ten. And instead of making it limited to a level range, let's have it grow with the wielder. And instead of upgrading from an existing item, lets create an entirely new way of getting it. Something akin to an MMO item hunt where you know a certain unusually difficult monster with a shitty low spawn rate WILL drop what you want.

And as such let me make it fucking ludicrous for a low level item. 6L. Lots of base damage that only gets stronger. Speed to spare. Stun immunity. Whatever.

And let me create an entirely new base item for it because it is otherwise entirely divorced from the loot pool. A real weak one. And in a fit of vanity, let me put my name on it as so many others did theirs.

So that was my gift to fellow low level grinders - - a possible drop that both breaks low level aaaand demands that you finally get the fuck out of act 1. With some fun if uneven metatextual observations along the way.

What I didn't expect was that said sword would be even vaguely attractive outside that clique. The number of Hillocks murdered when OG went was... Astounding. Enough for GGG to tweet about it so that was neat.

Sooooooo to answer your sort of question, no at first, yes much later. I WANTED someone to find my first sword during a race. To win the lottery on a microscopic scale. I recall one time Chris did drop Goddess Bound in a Descent race - - and lacked the dexterity to wield it. Lol. Glorious.

But every other iteration of the sword was by design outside drop RNG for the core game and so not a concern for racing or league starts.

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As for the topic at hand, I only know one supporter designer who became an item dev for GGG and he did not design a chase unique. He made a unique and keystone that fit within the game so neatly very few players know they're supporter designed.

I don't think there is a serious place for endgame chase uniques in ARPGs in terms of the general loot pool. Let that be where the actually unique powerful items spawn (rares), and maybe some quirky build shifters (ribcracker in D2). Level appropriate power uniques are great (Pelta Lunata in d2, crest of perandus in PoE), and those can drop deep into the endgame.

But for a true chase, you can't just run around willy nilly and hope what you want just appears. A chase requires a target and a target requires aim. To call a randomly dropped unique a chase item just because someone was foolish enough to make it best in slot is to really minimise the potential of the concept. To relegate "chase" to nothing more empowered than buying lottery tickets every week for years. Totally related fact: most lotteries are won by carefully constructed syndicates who game the game as much as possible. What a shock, right?

Rarity alone is an inadequate factor for a chase. There must be some element of determined trajectory. I suppose in a game like PoE that determined trajectory is in raising the odds of beating RNG by maximising efficiency (which certainly includes mastering its metagame, Fleecing Followers), but that's really abstracting the point. That removes too much onus from the devs. Otoh Exiles have been doing that ever since the beginning. For me it started with two threads I used to moderate on here: one was to delete dead trade posts, and the other was a sanctioned but unactionable name and shame thread for drop trade scammers.

Read into that what you will.

Okay my thumbs are sore AF and these xenos won't exterminate themselves. (A subtle hint as to what I think is one ARPG that gets item rarity and power scale fairly right.)

PS true chase uniques in the general drop pool, if there they must be, should also be seasonal only. That way they can break one iteration of the game but not the next one.

Oh. I see I also unintentionally answered kOP's second question re powerful items used in non-challenging contexts. If anything I think that is where they generally belong - - after you have faced down the challenge of the game (up to your personal ceiling) and want to break it creatively using what you have learned. Isn't that the absolute crux of long term ARPG play? It's not like Blizzard made seasonal content for Diablo 2 - - we stretched the shit out of very thin content. How? Well different ways, but I reckon a big one was when you'd find a weird unique or strong rare that didnt fit your current build but might be great on a different one.

After all, tweak/twinking was fundamental to D2's longevity for a lot of people. No twinking, no real need to mule items, no need to make mule characters, which were an artificial form of item storage... You can probably trace GGG's biggest money earner mtx wise to the idea of people wanting to use unusually powerful items in non-challenging content. Given you feel as though you have earned it, curbstomping content that once challenged you is rarely joyless.

Well that was worth the read in an otherwise uninspired k-pop thread.

Oops. Think I broke it.

Edit: looking at GD, yep. I did. Gomen. orz