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

Had another thought. So I really dislike the term "unique" as an item designation in any game where you can get more than one. I get it: the "unique" part of it is the design, not the quantity. It is an item design unique among all the others in the game. But I have to point out that outside D1 or D2, pinnacle/chase items weren't really called unique because it was glaringly obvious they weren't.

I think Everquest did it right and did it first. The chase items of that game were called Epic, both as an adjective and a noun, and the means to acquire one were... Epic. You didn't chase your glowing Epic in EQ. You fucking quested for it. For weeks. Sometimes months. It was a true Grail in the late Arthurian sense and when or if you got yours the entire zone was told. They were the only glowing weapons in the game. Best in slot by default. Instant respect to anyone carrying one, because you knew what they had been through. The sheer bullshittery of it.

In a word, epic.

Legendary isn't much worse but I think it lacks the same punch.

Both are more accurate than unique.

Signature would have worked too.

Anyway. Uniques aren't unique in effect, merely in intention. They are more like mass copied replicas of some original creation long lost to time. A simulacrum posing as authentic. Delightfully consistent and reliable in ways no rare could ever be, but impossibly duplicated many, many times over. There was, let's face it, nothing unique about a Stone of Jordan. For fucks sake, it became a currency unit.

Therion asked why I did it the way I did, and my answers were characteristically circumlocutious and incomplete. As most writing is. But I realise on reflection I also did it to negotiate my dislike of the idea of a "unique" item you can buy at the local trading post, hypothetically speaking. Once I treated each instance of The Twilight Strand as a separate instance of all Wraeclast and beyond, it became a lot easier to conceptualise multiple versions of the exact same item.

Not only is the sword unique to any given incarnation of the world, it doesn't exist in a vast majority of them. And they're none of them the original. They're just echoes. Fakes, if you really want to get down to it.

The cherry on top is I think the sword any of you might be using knows She isn't the real thing. The lines I gave the item aren't quite the sort of thing the original personality would say. It definitely knows it's a game of sorts in which it is stuck. It is compelled to speak only about that context, give or take a few glimmers of deeper recollection (running theme of stymied motherhood, for example). It is a convenient intrinsic madness, one I worked fairly hard to rein in and not let become her totality. Insanity is fun to write and explore. Manic randomness is not fun as a character trait.

I think we went wrong when we conflated unique item design with almost objectively powerful item design. Go back to D1. Most uniques were gimmicky and situational. We were more apt to dupe magic items like kings sword of haste or plate of the whale. And those uniques people did want were usually hacked: an indestructible version of a unique designed to be frail to offset its power. Probably the most inherently broken unique in D1 was Windforce, because it did the one thing you always wanted: kept monsters at a safe distance while you fucked their shit up.

I don't know where or when this changed as an epochal moment, but it was a mistake.

A mistake I genuinely thought GGG would avoid. Kaoms Heart was the antithesis to true power in PoE: so much life, but no 6L potential. Brilliant. Wurms Molt was imo best in slot for a while at low level but you did outgrow it.

Then they fucked up with Shavronne's Wrapping. The downside simply didn't match the benefits of an item that broke the game's one true threat to every build. Sure, we had a true chase unique, but it was just plain bad item design in terms of diversity and creativity.

Any unique that becomes desirable to absolutely any player, regardless of whether or not they trade or alt or whatever, is a misfire. That's when you know you have jumped the game design version of a shark. A gameshark, if you will.

And it just kept going from there. More and more unique designs that simply had too much utility. Not enough thoughtful downsides or niche application.

A game that has truly random rares and the means to craft them should not have chase power uniques. It should not have uniques that undermine the game's core challenges without presenting challenges of their own. In such games uniques are a good early to mid carry and a vector for anomalous play styles that reward creative character design. They should delight with their usefulness and uselessness both. That is precisely how I approached PoE's Oni Goroshi as a mere representation of Charan's Sword. Early utility, eventual redundancy, with a palpable tension between its growth as a weapon and its inability to be anything more. She's a metaphor and fucking hates this fact. Like any of us, She just wants to be wanted and needed and expresses that very poorly most of the time.

Little wonder it had to start with a chase of sorts.

But note: the chase STARTS the journey. It doesn't signify the end of it. I have so little time or respect for a chase as the bulk of a story. In any context. And even less when its conclusion is also the end of the story.

Which is why as much as I love the movie Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail will always be considered a superior movie despite fuck all budget and zero prestige. Ecalibur is bombast and grandeur. HG is honest and raw. No one gets the grail because real life gets in the way. Sure was a fun little quest though, eh?

Chasing power is compelling. Acquiring it is rewarding. Having it is almost never enough.

Stay hungry, Exiles. Or die gorged and happy. No one is gorged and happy for long. The heartburn is terrible.

Why everytime I read a thread/reply from Kopogero feels like sort of AI/bot bro feels like thius is just trolling or something

"

Kopogero wrote:

a bunch of words

Yes.

Powerful and exceedingly rare items should exist in games that has other viable/powerful gear to find to begin with. A good example of how it is not supposed to be done is how uber uniques were close to impossible to find in D4 at start. It would have been fine in PoE since PoE has lots of lots of end game options anyway but not so much in D4.

PoE has come to a point where there are a lot of decent/good end game items so adding items that players _can_ find but can't expect to find would be awesome. Sadly they decided to make a lot of these items waaaay too accessible so now even semi serious people expect to have headhunter or mageblood/mirror/whatever every league. This is a huuuuge mistake by GGG. Allowing divination card duping and or allowing divination cards to drop from too many areas should never have happened. Sure, add the div cards to a decently tough boss's loot pool to make it a semi-pity-loot system but "T0" uniques and end game boss uniques should not have their value watered out by stacked deck div cards or general area div cards.