Your uinques suck.

I realize that's a hostile title, but it's 100% true. They aren't fun to find, they aren't even fun to use outside a literal handful. There's what, a couple uniques only from bosses that are broken? The rest aren't even as good as a well rolled rare of the same level range.

Diablo 3's uniques were poorly designed because they felt mandatory. For some curious reason PoE's uniques are either actually worthless, or still mandatory such as the many ones in PoE1 like Headhunter, Mageblood, Progenesis, Ralakesh's ect. So you've designed your uniques not in a better fashion then Diablo 3's, just a tweaked version. They're either so bad every loot filter on the planet hides them, or they're just as 'mandatory' as a D3 'legendary'.

And here we are in PoE2, the exact same problem. You're so afraid I guess of a unique filling a slot at ~80% potential power that you'd rather they all turn into chance shards.

Let's pretend a rare 2 handed sword can achieve 1000 dps with perfect rolls, practically impossible. Let's say that with really lucky rolls, you're looking at 700 or so dps. It seems to me that an end game unique sword that's possible to drop in the general pool of loot, but is very rare, should land at about 700-800 dps, plus a unique stat. Would mean that finding that unique feels fun, and I can't just random craft a better one 9/10 times.

But of course the topic no developer wants to talk about in an ARPG; too many players means finding even 'rare' uinques trivial which in turn means they have to dial the rareness up so far that every normal player will never find one, all the while not actually balancing the insane juice of the endgame where less then 1% of players are farming in groups to find hundreds of uniques per hour.

TLDR; Just like poe1, the unique items that you've put so much work into art wise are wasted. But hey, I guess we'll be able to buy some mtx to grab that art at some point right?

Unique > Disenchant or Destroy

99.9% Trash !!

a shame to be honest... like the rest of the loot system

Uniques are in a pretty sorry state. Almost all of them are build-breaking (and not in a good way). There's quite a few i've found that really do sound pretty interesting, and i'd love to use them, but because there are so many gear affixes that are borderline mandatory, it makes the uniques a downgrade.

I'm running 3 on a build right now, and aside from their intrinsic benefit, they do fvck-all in terms of resistance, rare-find, damage buff, etc. It's a huge pain to try and supplement all of the required stat boosts to the remaining few pieces of gear that aren't unique. I could just as easily not use them in favor of rare gear with infinitely better stats, but then what even is the point of the uniques? Unique builds are hardly viable at the cost of survival when the stakes of dying are so high.

There's only a few that truly feel like they're all around good choices to run, but they're also a pipe-dream for the 99% of players that hasn't gamed the system and can afford to chance orb 3,000 pieces of gear or have >500 divines to outright buy them from the busted marketplace.

IMO unless the passive tree is going to have decent nodes for resistance, rarity, etc there's little reason to care about uniques unless we are able to craft on them above runes/quality/corrupting. I'd love to be able to add flat damage, better resists, atk speed, etc..