Rebalancing Internal Unique Item Rarities (Locked June 16)

I've been playing since CLOSED BETA, and I've yet to have a truly high-end unique drop. I just recently had a Carcass Jack drop,(2 weeks ago) and that has been the best unique I've had in the couple of years I've played. A bit frustrating.

But let me be clear; I'm not totally for greatly increasing all drop rates across the board.
Hard to find uniques SHOULD be hard to find. Finding a unique item should be exciting, or at least somewhat appealing to get. However, like many have posted, finding all low level uniques, drop from high level bosses..all the time..IS frustrating. No, I don't want another tiki amulet, or one of the dozens of low level helms I've found, when I'm grinding lvl 65+ areas.

I can't tell you how many Piety runs I've done, how many maps I've ran, how many docks, library, etc runs I've done and gotten nothing for drops. And on the other hand, I've ran 1 map before and found 3 Uniques. RNG is well, random.

My opinion, for what its worth, is that unique items should be more weighted depending on monster level/difficulty and tier of enemy..I'd be OK with LESS items dropping from bosses, but at a higher IIR. Or even increasing higher tier currency drop rates from just bosses could help make it feel more worthwhile doing run after run.
Or why not increase the chances of any 5L item dropping from bosses.


And trade chat is just blah...Sorting through spammer after spammer, channel after channel, is just as frustrating.

I don't want to spend hour after hour posting/reposting in the hopes that I'll sell 1-2 items for a few chaos. Or even trying to find an item to buy. I don't mind playing the economy a bit here and there, but I'm here to grind and play and kill stuff.

I'm not a game designer or a programmer, and I don't totally understand every mechanic that makes the game tick.. so maybe what I've said has no relevance, but its just my 2cents.

"

Chris wrote:

The four tiers of uniques are internally known as:

• Common: Straightforward uniques that are useful for twinking and are very impactful when levelling. Shiversting is a good example.
• Uncommon: Somewhat more complicated or build-defining uniques like Facebreaker or The Three Dragons.
• Rare: Specialised and end-game uniques that aren't meant to drop often, like Bino's Kitchen Knife.
• Super-rare: Chase uniques like Shavronne's Wrappings, Kaom's Heart or Song of the Sirens.

While it's excellent that GGG is implementing a system like this to distribute rarities, your criteria are not very good criteria.

When Mark Rosewater was asked what makes a rare card a rare card in Magic the Gathering, his answer included the following list of criteria:

• Complexity: simpler means less likely to be rare
• Breaking the rules: defying the standard rules for items means more likely to be rare
• Wordiness: the more lines of text, the more likely to be rare
• Big effect: if it's all about huge numbers, more likely to be rare
• Narrow: the more obscure the use, the more likely to be rare
• Disruptive to Limited: the more gamebreaking it is if it drops in a race, the more likely to be rare
• Good stuff should be spread amongst all rarities: having all of the goodness at rare and ultra-rare presents too great a barrier to entry for new players

Note that being end-game or even "chase" is not a criterion! (Chase is more of an effect, anyway.)

For example, Veil of Night is far too specialized and weird to drop as often as it does. Same thing with Shackles of the Wretched. Both of those are very niche, wordy, complicated items... and the power level of them is irrelevant. Both should drop less often than they do.

Over at the other extreme, I can't find anything about Belly of the Beast which screams "rare" to me. Look guys, it's another chest which gives life, defenses, and resists. How groundbreaking... seriously, this should be uncommon at worst. Yes, I know it's a very good chest... but there should be good, endgame viable uniques at the lower rarities.

"Build-enabling" isn't on the rare criteria list for a reason. I'm not saying all the build-enabling uniques should be easy to acquire, because they shouldn't... unlocking all the possible builds in the game should take time and be something to strive for. This effect doesn't work if they're easy to acquire.

But I do hope the devs, and anyone else here interested in unique rarity, reads the entire Mark Rosewater article. It's damn good advice.

By the way, just for reference, if you open 80 booster packs of MtG (1120 cards total), you'll likely get...

• 800 common cards, out of 60 possible commons, ~13 of each common
• 240 uncommon cards, out of 60 possible uncommons, ~4 of each uncommon
• 70 rare cards, out of 35 possible rares, ~2 of each rare
• 10 mythic cards, out of 10 possible mythics, ~1 of each mythic

If Path of Exile was following a similar distribution pattern, out of the 231 non-Atziri, non-Vendor uniques in existence, 84 would be common, 84 would be uncommon, 49 would be rare, and 14 would be super-rare.

I'm surprised that this was even announced to the public...
I thought GGG were constantly tweaking the drop rates behind the scenes.
This must be a much bigger change than they commonly make.

"

Hemmingfish wrote:

Oh boy, an increase of 20% for the 0% drop rates!

Yeah nah they still won't drop at all. Hell, the chests with +1900% increased rarity still don't drop rares.

Ah hah hah hah. I had to laugh because this is so damn true :D

Still, I am looking forward to finding some of the rarer items (crosses fingers)

So in other words you want us to wear uniques as a BiS item?

Are you serious GGG? like everyone has a Rise of the Phoenix RF build?!...

My opinion is to nerf those powerfull uniques so its a hard choise between a good rare and the unique one.

After all the top-end rare gear is the "goal" isn't it?

Nice change. :)

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

If Path of Exile was following a similar distribution pattern, out of the 231 non-Atziri, non-Vendor uniques in existence, 84 would be common, 84 would be uncommon, 49 would be rare, and 14 would be super-rare.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but their philosophy of "every unique should have unique art" has put them in a corner of sorts. If you have to spend time and money making something, you don't want it to be boring and unremarkable.

Diablo 2 had a unique version of every base item type, sometimes a couple. (And some set items.) (And some runewords.) Just counting weapons and armor, PoExile has like 800 items. At the pace of 8 uniques a month, that's another 6 or so years until every single one has their box checked.

I'd be hella fine with texture and palette swaps if it meant filling out a few more medium type items along the lines of the Peregrine. The average unique in PoExile is of higher average design quality than Diablo 2's checkbox uniques, but sometimes you just want a simple stupid shortsword that doubles your Viper Strike damage or something.

Excellent, thank you! This gives more purpose to boss runs, and it'll be fun to find a wider selection of unique items instead of the 25th copy of Crown of Thorns. Good initiative.

Next up: Tighter mod pools for crafting so that the "bottom" of available mods raises with the item level? Getting ilvl 5 mods on an ilvl 80 rare item isn't fun. :)

Often describe this game as comfortably the best I've ever played, but badly let down by the loot system/loot drops.

Eagerly await the rebalance described in the OP and applaud everyone at GGG for attempting to sort it out. Honestly, I WANT to give you more money but the present loot system/drops stop me playing nearly as often and as long as I'd like.

"

CliveHowlitzer wrote:

Spiffy. I've had incredible luck in the last 4 month league when it came to unique drops and it was refreshing and quite nice. As normally all I find is garbage over and over.

This. It's unbelievable how fun a 4 month league can be when you actually drop rarer uniques. I realize they have to be rare in order to keep people chasing them, but this change is really nice. I hope that 20% is noticable. :)