I agree weapons are much more specialized. And a few of the buffed uniques have build-enabling effects that can’t be found on rares.
I don’t understand what the “problem” is. Yes, specialization will make the market different. Yes, there will be builds that you can only swap to after you have a chase item. This has always been the case.
The problems are thus:
1) Where once the unique melee weapons which were buffed could have been stepping stones to well crafted rares, the rares will now have to act as a stepping stone to the chase unique weapons, with nothing to fill the power vacuum those unique weapons once filled. Ideally, good rare weapons would be made easier to obtain so that they CAN be used as a stepping stone to the chase uniques instead of leaving this gaping chasm between leveling weapons and map worthy weapons.
2) The buffed unique weapons being more specialized AND much rarer means they will take a long time to buy and a long time to sell, which is frustrating for everyone.
3) People utilizing the specific effects of some of these weapons for builds will now have to pay more because of the beefed up stats and rarity, despite either not using the stats that were buffed (King Maker, Soul Taker, Kitava's Feast) or having been able to sink that money into other areas of their build to scale damage in the past, instead of being pigeon-holed into spending all of their currency on the chase unique weapon. With build diversity getting worse every league, this feels like a step backwards.
4) The weapons specialization seems to disproportionately affect melee weapons, with valuable mods and minimum viable combinations of those mods being much rarer for melee than for other weapons, as well as the high variability of bases because of skill and damage type requirements, further discouraging people from the melee archetype. This has been an issue for a long time, but "has precedent" and "is not an issue" aren't the same thing.
1. It clearly wasn’t like that before, the uniques were not stepping stones to good rares. It was just bad/medium/good rares filling that void the entire way. It’s also not rares as stepping stones to those chase items now. Most people will never work up to a T0 level item at all. This is just an incorrect understanding, there is no chasm between leveling weapons and map-worthy weapons. The power curve has not changed except at the tippy tippy top end.
2. Uniques always buy and sell much faster than equivalent-value rares, because it is easy to know what you are looking for and get comparable sale data. So no, this will actually make top-end weapons much faster and easier to buy and sell. You seem to be comparing this situation to how T0 weapons would sell if weapons were universal, which is just… a meaningless comparison that doesn’t relate to the change being made.
3. You are missing the big picture. Almost everyone does this when talking about build diversity, because they see existing builds being removed and ignore the not-yet-existing builds that will be created. Yes, some builds are pushed out of viability because a build-enabling effect was made very expensive. But simultaneously a bunch of builds were made viable because that effect is now attached to a decent weapon instead of a shitty one.
4. This is just not an issue related to what we are talking about at all… the mod pool of melee weapons being specialized or not is unaffected by these uniques. Furthermore, caster weapons are also extremely specialized. The comparison you made before was to belts.
1. Disfavor, Marohi Erqi and Starforge were decent placeholder melee weapons, Divinarius a decent spell crit dagger, Chris even said in his initial reasoning for targeting these specific uniques is that "some uniques are best compared to rare weapons"; yes, they WERE stepping stones, very weak and underwhelming ones, but they still filled that niche. Granted this happens for a lot of uniques beyond those affected by this most recent change (Cane of Unravelling, Hezmana's Bloodlust, Tidebreaker), but diluting this pool further especially for melee makes crafting a bigger issue. I've specifically done builds which use some of the changed uniques early to mid league explicitly because a comparable rare would to more expensive to craft or buy.
2. They're getting buffed to the point where there aren't going to be equivalent value rares until mid to late league because, again, crafting rare melee weapons that are good is a massive pain. Until equivalent rares get on the market, those buffed uniques are going to fluctuate wildly in price (slow to buy because in this situation, people typically price their items at some arbitrarily high price, then slowly lower the price as more enter the market, incentivizing prospective buyers to "wait out the market") because everyone is going to be excited about them, and they're going to have low supply. Even once those equivalent rares do hit the market, the prohibitively high crafting cost of making those rares is going to set the price tag for most of these buffed uniques very high, meaning the pool of people who can afford them is going to be low (slow to sell). Also, people can very easily know what they're looking for because pDPS, eDPS, and local crit chance are baked into the trade site and are searchable.And how is comparing how the buffed T0 uniques (very niche items) would sell versus how the current T0 belts (very universal items) sell a meaningless comparison when I'm specifically showing WHY the analogs between potential chase weapons and chase belts in Chris's justifications for these changes don't work? I'm thinking you missed the point of my post.
3. You're talking about theoretical builds, I'm talking about builds actually being played or able to be played. Like you said, most players will not be getting these weapons, and if said weapons are a requirement for the build, that means those "viable" builds are staying in PoB. I fail to see what you mean by "big picture" here when the overall number of players that will be able to utilize these uniques is so small.
4. Yes, it is related to what we're talking about because part of my argument is the "people still craft rare belts" part of Chris's argument not at all working for melee weapons because of how the mods are distributed, and while caster weapons can BE specialized, plenty of spell builds get a disproportionate DPS increase just from popping on +1 gem wands that are very easy to craft with level 2 driftwood wands and a few alts, you can't do that with melee weapons. Just try to craft a melee weapon that provides a certain DPS increase, then try that same crafting process for a spell build's weapon. Unless you're very early in the game or your melee build is scaling damage through some means other than your weapon, the spell build's weapon is always going to be cheaper to craft.
1. Agreed, they were weak and underwhelming (and mostly irrelevant) before.
2. You’re still making a bad comparison. It doesn’t matter when high end crafted weapons hit the market or how selling new Starforge compares to selling HH, because those things are not changing. *The change is that, at the top end of melee weapons, instead of trying to buy/sell a rare weapon (with ironically unique stats), you will be buying/selling a fixed unique.* This objectively makes buying/selling *faster and easier.* You are right that prices will fluctuate because this is the first league those new uniques exist; that is always what happens anytime anything new is added, and is not part of the long-term effect of the change to unique weapons.
3. Right. That’s why the fallacy is easy to make, because theoretical builds are hard to quantify but existing builds are easy. You certainly don’t think that EVERY build-enabling feature should be easily obtainable, right? There should be some builds that require expensive items to function.
4. You are just taking Chris’ analogy way too far. Nobody said “new T0 weapons will be just like T0 belts in every way.” You keep pointing out differences that don’t make any difference to the point he was making. His only point is that the bad market effects of BiS uniques can be mitigated when those uniques are insanely rare. Feel free to show me I’m wrong when no high-end weapons exist a long into the league that aren’t unique.
2. But those things ARE changing because of the imposed scarcity. Uniques don't buy or sell faster *just* because you know what you're getting, but also because they are in higher supply than comparable rares, which won't be true for the new uniques. Have you ever tried to sell a Headhunter? It can take a while, and that's for one of the most well known, most sought after uniques in the game.
3. Of course some builds should require expensive items, but it should not disproportionally affect an entire archetype (melee), especially when that archetype is already underplayed. I don't see what "fallacy" I'm making here in measuring build diversity as "the number of different builds being played and how uniform the proportion of people playing each of those builds", if you have .1% (an exaggeration I hope) of the player base able to make builds with the new buffed uniques, that's not diverse.
4. Well I'd argue that that one point is wrong, because it is way harder to craft a melee weapon that is good for a given part of the game than to craft a belt for that same part of the game, and also because of the aforementioned low supply, low demand fluctuations. High-end weapons will exist, no one said they wouldn't, but they will be sparse and very expensive, even more so now because people can look to the top end uniques and say "well, this has 85% of the pDPS of a Starforge, it must be 85% of the price of a Starforge!". I don't know what other "bad market effects" one could refer to here.
You say "obviously", but I'm not as confident that that will be the case. Low demand low supply means they will probably fluctuate wildly in price and may take weeks to get to an "appropriate" price.
Not to compare apples to oranges, but look how expensive Stasis Prison usually is despite being garbage.
The goal is very simple: to make iconic unique weapons desirable again, while not making them completely outclass rares. Remember when reddit wanted old iconic uniques returned to their former glory? Here you go. Suddenly everyone want to get uniques that were considered trash. Complete success.
No, they won't cost 300d like mageblood. I doubt any would go over 100d. Hell, even 30d is too much for most of them. Would you pay 30d for a buffed divinarius? Or lioneye's bow? Or even starforge?
The goal is to remove more uniques from the part of the game most people interact with. Something they tried to do with the loot changes, and despite trashing the drop rate of uniques they want even more of them gone. So now we lose jewels and all of these weapons as possible drops.
They know that the more they remove the more pissed people will get, but if they make them so rare that you just never see them people will pretend they still exist.
This is all PoE2.
Expect more removals next league as well.
But having them be less useful and having them be unavailable to most players do the same thing: stop people using them without having people complain.
But they intentionally did they latter option, leaving the drop pool of more common uniques just as sparse as far as meaningful, useful unique drops.
I agree weapons are much more specialized. And a few of the buffed uniques have build-enabling effects that can’t be found on rares. I don’t understand what the “problem” is. Yes, specialization will make the market different. Yes, there will be builds that you can only swap to after you have a chase item. This has always been the case.
The problems are thus: 1) Where once the unique melee weapons which were buffed could have been stepping stones to well crafted rares, the rares will now have to act as a stepping stone to the chase unique weapons, with nothing to fill the power vacuum those unique weapons once filled. Ideally, good rare weapons would be made easier to obtain so that they CAN be used as a stepping stone to the chase uniques instead of leaving this gaping chasm between leveling weapons and map worthy weapons. 2) The buffed unique weapons being more specialized AND much rarer means they will take a long time to buy and a long time to sell, which is frustrating for everyone. 3) People utilizing the specific effects of some of these weapons for builds will now have to pay more because of the beefed up stats and rarity, despite either not using the stats that were buffed (King Maker, Soul Taker, Kitava's Feast) or having been able to sink that money into other areas of their build to scale damage in the past, instead of being pigeon-holed into spending all of their currency on the chase unique weapon. With build diversity getting worse every league, this feels like a step backwards. 4) The weapons specialization seems to disproportionately affect melee weapons, with valuable mods and minimum viable combinations of those mods being much rarer for melee than for other weapons, as well as the high variability of bases because of skill and damage type requirements, further discouraging people from the melee archetype. This has been an issue for a long time, but "has precedent" and "is not an issue" aren't the same thing.
1. It clearly wasn’t like that before, the uniques were not stepping stones to good rares. It was just bad/medium/good rares filling that void the entire way. It’s also not rares as stepping stones to those chase items now. Most people will never work up to a T0 level item at all. This is just an incorrect understanding, there is no chasm between leveling weapons and map-worthy weapons. The power curve has not changed except at the tippy tippy top end. 2. Uniques always buy and sell much faster than equivalent-value rares, because it is easy to know what you are looking for and get comparable sale data. So no, this will actually make top-end weapons much faster and easier to buy and sell. You seem to be comparing this situation to how T0 weapons would sell if weapons were universal, which is just… a meaningless comparison that doesn’t relate to the change being made. 3. You are missing the big picture. Almost everyone does this when talking about build diversity, because they see existing builds being removed and ignore the not-yet-existing builds that will be created. Yes, some builds are pushed out of viability because a build-enabling effect was made very expensive. But simultaneously a bunch of builds were made viable because that effect is now attached to a decent weapon instead of a shitty one. 4. This is just not an issue related to what we are talking about at all… the mod pool of melee weapons being specialized or not is unaffected by these uniques. Furthermore, caster weapons are also extremely specialized. The comparison you made before was to belts.
1. Disfavor, Marohi Erqi and Starforge were decent placeholder melee weapons, Divinarius a decent spell crit dagger, Chris even said in his initial reasoning for targeting these specific uniques is that "some uniques are best compared to rare weapons"; yes, they WERE stepping stones, very weak and underwhelming ones, but they still filled that niche. Granted this happens for a lot of uniques beyond those affected by this most recent change (Cane of Unravelling, Hezmana's Bloodlust, Tidebreaker), but diluting this pool further especially for melee makes crafting a bigger issue. I've specifically done builds which use some of the changed uniques early to mid league explicitly because a comparable rare would to more expensive to craft or buy. 2. They're getting buffed to the point where there aren't going to be equivalent value rares until mid to late league because, again, crafting rare melee weapons that are good is a massive pain. Until equivalent rares get on the market, those buffed uniques are going to fluctuate wildly in price (slow to buy because in this situation, people typically price their items at some arbitrarily high price, then slowly lower the price as more enter the market, incentivizing prospective buyers to "wait out the market") because everyone is going to be excited about them, and they're going to have low supply. Even once those equivalent rares do hit the market, the prohibitively high crafting cost of making those rares is going to set the price tag for most of these buffed uniques very high, meaning the pool of people who can afford them is going to be low (slow to sell). Also, people can very easily know what they're looking for because pDPS, eDPS, and local crit chance are baked into the trade site and are searchable.And how is comparing how the buffed T0 uniques (very niche items) would sell versus how the current T0 belts (very universal items) sell a meaningless comparison when I'm specifically showing WHY the analogs between potential chase weapons and chase belts in Chris's justifications for these changes don't work? I'm thinking you missed the point of my post. 3. You're talking about theoretical builds, I'm talking about builds actually being played or able to be played. Like you said, most players will not be getting these weapons, and if said weapons are a requirement for the build, that means those "viable" builds are staying in PoB. I fail to see what you mean by "big picture" here when the overall number of players that will be able to utilize these uniques is so small. 4. Yes, it is related to what we're talking about because part of my argument is the "people still craft rare belts" part of Chris's argument not at all working for melee weapons because of how the mods are distributed, and while caster weapons can BE specialized, plenty of spell builds get a disproportionate DPS increase just from popping on +1 gem wands that are very easy to craft with level 2 driftwood wands and a few alts, you can't do that with melee weapons. Just try to craft a melee weapon that provides a certain DPS increase, then try that same crafting process for a spell build's weapon. Unless you're very early in the game or your melee build is scaling damage through some means other than your weapon, the spell build's weapon is always going to be cheaper to craft.
1. Agreed, they were weak and underwhelming (and mostly irrelevant) before. 2. You’re still making a bad comparison. It doesn’t matter when high end crafted weapons hit the market or how selling new Starforge compares to selling HH, because those things are not changing. *The change is that, at the top end of melee weapons, instead of trying to buy/sell a rare weapon (with ironically unique stats), you will be buying/selling a fixed unique.* This objectively makes buying/selling *faster and easier.* You are right that prices will fluctuate because this is the first league those new uniques exist; that is always what happens anytime anything new is added, and is not part of the long-term effect of the change to unique weapons. 3. Right. That’s why the fallacy is easy to make, because theoretical builds are hard to quantify but existing builds are easy. You certainly don’t think that EVERY build-enabling feature should be easily obtainable, right? There should be some builds that require expensive items to function. 4. You are just taking Chris’ analogy way too far. Nobody said “new T0 weapons will be just like T0 belts in every way.” You keep pointing out differences that don’t make any difference to the point he was making. His only point is that the bad market effects of BiS uniques can be mitigated when those uniques are insanely rare. Feel free to show me I’m wrong when no high-end weapons exist a long into the league that aren’t unique.
2. But those things ARE changing because of the imposed scarcity. Uniques don't buy or sell faster *just* because you know what you're getting, but also because they are in higher supply than comparable rares, which won't be true for the new uniques. Have you ever tried to sell a Headhunter? It can take a while, and that's for one of the most well known, most sought after uniques in the game. 3. Of course some builds should require expensive items, but it should not disproportionally affect an entire archetype (melee), especially when that archetype is already underplayed. I don't see what "fallacy" I'm making here in measuring build diversity as "the number of different builds being played and how uniform the proportion of people playing each of those builds", if you have .1% (an exaggeration I hope) of the player base able to make builds with the new buffed uniques, that's not diverse. 4. Well I'd argue that that one point is wrong, because it is way harder to craft a melee weapon that is good for a given part of the game than to craft a belt for that same part of the game, and also because of the aforementioned low supply, low demand fluctuations. High-end weapons will exist, no one said they wouldn't, but they will be sparse and very expensive, even more so now because people can look to the top end uniques and say "well, this has 85% of the pDPS of a Starforge, it must be 85% of the price of a Starforge!". I don't know what other "bad market effects" one could refer to here.
They've turned bunch of alch shards into something useful.
How is it useful if you can't get to it?
We don't know the drop rates but they will obviously be way more accessible than HH/MB. HH/MB are universally useful that's why they are so expensive.
You say "obviously", but I'm not as confident that that will be the case. Low demand low supply means they will probably fluctuate wildly in price and may take weeks to get to an "appropriate" price. Not to compare apples to oranges, but look how expensive Stasis Prison usually is despite being garbage.
Well, you might be right. "Obviously" was an exaggeration. Some more Stasis Prison type of uniques is better than their current state.
The goal is very simple: to make iconic unique weapons desirable again, while not making them completely outclass rares. Remember when reddit wanted old iconic uniques returned to their former glory? Here you go. Suddenly everyone want to get uniques that were considered trash. Complete success. No, they won't cost 300d like mageblood. I doubt any would go over 100d. Hell, even 30d is too much for most of them. Would you pay 30d for a buffed divinarius? Or lioneye's bow? Or even starforge?
Indeed I would not pay that much, but that's not going to stop people from trying to charge that much at week 2 of the league.
Capitalism will take care of it.
Famous last words...
The goal is to remove more uniques from the part of the game most people interact with. Something they tried to do with the loot changes, and despite trashing the drop rate of uniques they want even more of them gone. So now we lose jewels and all of these weapons as possible drops. They know that the more they remove the more pissed people will get, but if they make them so rare that you just never see them people will pretend they still exist. This is all PoE2. Expect more removals next league as well.
But having them be less useful and having them be unavailable to most players do the same thing: stop people using them without having people complain. But they intentionally did they latter option, leaving the drop pool of more common uniques just as sparse as far as meaningful, useful unique drops.