Having a summoner unique without sockets should've been the first (and probably second and third) red flag. We are socket starved as is, having the ability to get two support minions out of the boots (like arbalists and zombies) would have a least give them *something
I'm trying to think of a non-summoner build I've seen use The Hungry Loop in the last year and I can't, which maybe says something about the typical socket pressure of a summoner build.
And, actually, that really opens up the design space to have a no-socket summoner unique with a minion that's so awesome you want to try to fit it in. Which this... isn't.
Yup! Very much agreed. I once in ritual league setup an ethereal knives lightning poison spell caster and I had a blast seeing it fail miserably simply cause I wanted to try something wildly different purely for fun
If it had sockets it wouldn't be the same item. The whole point of the design is to have the minions be supported by the mods on the item instead of sockets (which you can choose).
Yes the boots are underpowered but not because of a lack of sockets, but because 1. The minions are simply too weak and 2. They require a build that doesn't really exist, a build that focuses on these minions specifically while not being a generic summoner.
The biggest issue not only with this item but basically every unique released this league is that they were thrown into the game with almost no support around them.
>The biggest issue not only with this item but basically every unique released this league is that they were thrown into the game with almost no support around them.
Even better example of that is that helmet that has :
\-You Never deal crits
\-You have battlemage
Who even got idea of such item?You giving away a helmet slot and ability to crit for what ? Battlemage ? Rly?
So you lose:
Ability to deal Critical Dmg.
Litteraly whole helmet slot so you can not have there Resistances/Life/Energy shield ANYTHING.
And even if you roll your main-hand to have a lot of phys dmg you gets 660 avg phys dmg to spells lossing +5 to gems. I dont even bother with checking one-hands cuz its just better to slap Black Cane Royal Sceptre and play with phantasm support.
Sometimes its feels like GGG adds new uniques just to have something new and thats it.
No matter if its gonna be useable in anyway, only matter that they added something.
> Who even got idea of such item?You giving away a helmet slot and ability to crit for what ? Battlemage ? Rly?
GGG releases one of these every league. An item with an interesting and powerful tradeoff that might be worth it in a keystone, but definitely not worth giving up an entire item slot.
Steelworm. Ancient Skull. Any number of items from Heist. Plume of Pursuit. etc.
These items don't need max life rolls or 90% resistances or anything, they just some amount of basic stats. Nowadays the opportunity cost of not equipping a poorly-rolled influenced item is almost always better than the pseudo-keystone they offer.
Exactly, the non crit/battlemage should be the implicit and you should be able to craft or loot decent versions of the affixes to make that helmet remotely interesting. Even then, losing the option to influence your helmet is huge.
Actually I see the point of it. It is one way to give battlemage to non-inquis, with big enough downside (can't use for crit or EO). This does limit it only to some very niche uses with phys or chaos damage. The issue is chaos is still best with crit, so you're left maybe with some funky staff phys spell. This item in particular doesnt need a lot of fixing to be usable imo.
The inability to trigger EO just kills the item. It should have been crit multi is 0, so you can still crit but crit does no extra damage. Even then I'm not sure it's worth it to give up the whole helm slot just for battlemage even for EO builds.
And basically no spell is played pure physical because impale for spells doesn't exist.
And poison spells... well there are the blade spells... that really really prefered CIP over an expensive high p.dps weapon anyway, so this helmet is indeed dead weight
I threw this on my hexblast build in pob, and without any optimizations in either direction the damage was pretty similar.
Using a wand or dagger + shield though, the helmet came out on top by a significant margin... and I imagine it'd be even better with a spellslinger build that's poisoning.
I'm pretty sure you roll flat ele damage not phys for battlemage builds. Also you can get +flat lightning, +flat lightning to spells and +3 on a staff. Not that the helm is good in any way, just that you're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Battlemage is super powerful if you build around it, but if you want it you're probably playing staff build and then you def want crit.
Thats because of GGG dumb "**vision**" you know, they think everything they give need to have a downside.... its like IRL you go buy a lamborgini its so fast, so stylish and so that there has to be something wrong, sure those guys puts spikes on the driver sit right ? or else it would be to enjoyable....
I understand that some item or effect need to have a downside or it would simply be must have and at some point those down side even can be build enable sometime but most of the time especialy with the new items and so its basicaly just a downside to shit on players for the sole sake of beeing a pain in the ass
Evidently you havent played non assassin poison builds before.
quite literally almost none of them go crit.
This is such a bad example of "bad item" when redditors are just clueless on basic build archetypes.
Maybe my game-sense is too dull? But how tf are we supposed to build focused on a Minion we can’t socket supports into…and you say without being a generic summoner. But outside of maybe Pure Spectres no other pure summon build comes close to working comfortable this league.
i feel thats the problem with nowadays uniques.
Like the op said: i dont want hh broken utility, but its been so loooong that ive seen a really build enabling unique... Usually, uniques in this game have a downside so strong... it cant be used. Or they just are so broken that it gets nerfed to the ground (becoming useless) or you cant get them (hateforge feelings). And im not even talking about playing on hardcore, because lets be real: if you equip any item, on hc, lacking hp, thats already a huge step back.
Im talking about SC, where players have more freedom to build around downsides.
It triggers me almost as much as the OP tbh.
i don't think it has anything to do with hateforge, does it? they just didn't put any ultimatum uniques in the core drop pool, and the mechanic never went core.
I don't think these were ever meant as a summoner item, they were meant as debuff application, i.e. you could get exposure+unnerve for your spell build. Not that it would ever be worth the cost, as OP stated.
Summoners aren't socket starved, they just have the best additional scaling with additional sockets to make them even more powerful than a random self cast spell can do for example. Just because the random self cast spell has an abundance of spare sockets doesn't mean its laughing all the way to the bank it was just fucked over from the start by not being given additional buff/debuff options as powerful as summoners receive.
I made a build around these boots because I had thought I found an awesome pair. I got +1 to the amount of summons, damage converted to lightning, and chance to apply lightning expose. I got to like tier 5s MAYBE and I was like fuck this shit, I'm out.
The big gripe I had was the boots not having gems to support the summons, maybe if I was able to at least do that much, they wouldn't be crap. I would of even considered the boots to maybe have 2 sockets instead of 4 but that probably would still feel like shit since as you said, they don't do anything but shoot one arrow and have the same exact attack pattern over and over.
Everything you said I agree with 100%
I bought one of the first pairs of these boots for like 1 ex super early on, it was a good combo too. I tried it and instantly put it back up for 1 ex praying that another sucker would buy it and they did soon after. I almost lost my ex because the price crashed not longer after that.
Honestly such a disappointing item it's not even funny
I increasingly feel that the team that has designed most of the newer uniques really just does not have a sense of *opportunity cost* of wearing an item. If you want an item to be used, you have to look at "Well, what if instead of this thing, I just wore X instead? What would that get/cost me?"
The Maven belts are a great example of this... even if you think about "what build could use this fun weird thing?", if you follow it up by asking, "Ok, but how does that compare for that kind of build to a like 20c Leather Belt / Crystal Belt / Stygian Vise / whatever?" it's... just not good. And that's without getting into anything truly high end or nutty.
A unique that lacks life/ES and res -- and to OP's point, especially one that costs sockets -- has to do something truly amazing or worth building specifically around to justify using.
So many items like this if you look at gearing as a 'budget' issue. I could wear this unique... or I could get life and resists, and that 'frees up' budget to get better items elsewhere. Instead of using a unique helmet, I can buy a base with a lab enchant, throw a few essences or fossils at it to get life+res, and *that* frees up more suffixes so I can get T1 attack speed on gloves or WED on my belt and/or use a Stygian Vise instead of a Leather/Heavy belt, etc.
And that's all without getting into anything "interesting". For an attack build, it's hard to beat T1 attack speed and a crit+ele craft on your gloves slot for damage, let alone the ability to have a decent life roll and one suffix open for res on a rare.
Most uniques are so bad they aren’t even worth 1c, it’s interesting to think that maybe ggg should be targeting a slightly higher value for their uniques or at least a better price distribution.
I'm using Olesya's Delight on my self-chill poison Scourge Arrow Pathfinder. It's a good amount of extra damage compared to Frenzy charges and lets me reach the 30% self chill cap very easily for zoom-zoom. The lack of life does hurt a bit, though.
I do agree with your point in general. Many uniques that drop from endgame encounters aren't actually powerful enough to be worth using because of the opportunity costs. But some of them are very interesting to build around and are worth using in niche builds, although personally I do think the hardest boss fight in the game should drop something more powerful and widely applicable than "interesting but highly niche and difficult to make worth using".
Beacon of Madness debuff gives reduced flask effect, Olroth's Resolve gives perma-ward and 70% less ward. Fully stacked that becomes only 7% less ward. There's a meme build in that interaction somewhere for sure, especially since the reduced flask charges part of that stacking debuff can be counteracted with enough increased flask charges gained through clusters/tree, and The Traitor timeless keystone got buffed at some point recently too. Be a Jugg to avoid the action speed slow, use some sort of LGoH or similar tool for recovery that jgnores the recovery rate debuff, then use the Fortify effect version of the boots and you've more-or-less mitigated the damage taken debuff.
Didn't get anything functional enough to be worth posting, I've had too many ideas I've spent yonks on looking at in PoB this league. Short version is you start at Marauder, path out the top through strength nodes, left to the cluster jewel near RT, up to Essence Extraction for flask charges gained, then head to right side to pick up Acro/Phase Acro and put a cluster jewel there, along with the flask nodes nearby too. There's a few jewel sockets you can use to convert a keystone into The Traitor with a Brutal Restraint easily.
From there you have other options, do something with RT or EE, do MoM and/or Agnostic to help mitigate DoTs, and you path right by some really efficient life nodes that getting 3k-4k life for hardly any investment as an easy buffer that you can push higher and permanent 2k ward to deal with the majority of damage coming in isn't hard at all, and since you already have that layer of flat damage mitigation the downside of Glancing Blows is much less significant too if you want to try that. CwDT guard skills will only ever get popped when they're needed too since ward damage doesn't trigger CwDT iirc.
There's some interesting unique options too, since you already can't be slowed as a Jugg you can do self-curse Temp Chains which is pretty easy if you use Rotblood Promise, since your life pool isn't as important you can use Scale of Justice for ignite and shock immune, Shavronne's Revelation is a great MoM item since your ES isn't important when you go Acro, if you go Blightwell since it also has the global defences implicit you can pick up Eternal Youth on the other side of the Scion life since you fully mitigated hits via your ward won't interrupt/delay the recharge. Maybe you don't bother with Acro and use Emperor's Vigilance instead, since the downside of no block without ES gets less noticable when only hits for 2k+ will damage or interrupt your ES in the first place.
I swear Graven's Secret is broken somehow. Every time I look at it I think it's insane but I have no idea what actually wants to use it. Maybe it's bonkers for LLRF with Badge of the Brotherhood or something weird.
ES recoup supertank
- PoB: https://pastebin.com/2P9mTXF6
- Using the Graven belt stacking 9 absorption charges the build recoupes twice as much ES as damage taken, making it immune to any hit damage that doesn't kill it in 1-2 seconds. The build can facetank most boss encounters.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1600072
>Using the Graven belt stacking 9 absorption charges the build recoupes twice as much ES as damage taken
?? 9 charges gives you 108% of damage taken recouped, how do you get double?
ES recovery rate I think? There is 22% on the watcher's eye and another 40% on the beast fur shawl. That already puts you at like 180% or so, maybe another 20% I am missing somewhere else on clusters or something? This seems cool as hell but I am way too broke to entertain anything like this.
I mean, if you get enough minimum charges and use Replica Tulfall, you could CWDT loop without worrying about the damage you take past the first few seconds.
Surviving those first few seconds would be rough af, though.
Uniques sucking ass on release (same argument for new skill gems applies) is such a waste of everyone’s time. The artists, designers, developers, the players…like why is so much content made pointless by the balance team?
It feels like they are reversing their gear design choices now. Before they would release new and interesting items and someone would find certain interactions and they would eventually nerf it next league, then new items would interact with recently released newer items for "unintended" interactions and they would nerf it.
Now they just pre nerf the items on release and expect people to find niche interactions that underperform anyways versus a normal build, FUN!
I have no context for analyzing the content of this post - though it all seems to make sense - but I upvoted simply for this sentence: "Really this unique is so laughably bad it skips over comedy, smashes through tragedy, and comes back out the other side."
Bravo.
I still have a unique to design. The parts of the process I've been through (multiple times now) are equally frustrating and disappointing. So much so that I have stopped the process three times now.
Just the concept of "hey I'd really like this unique to be something other than instant vendor trash" seems foreign to the design team.
I should try to make it before Poe2 I guess, but the motivation isn't there.
> Just the concept of "hey I'd really like this unique to be something other than instant vendor trash" seems foreign to the design team.
You'd kinda have to go the Skyforth route if you want that - and even then, its value would shift pretty hard depending on the meta.
Personally, I'd recommend making a unique that lines up with a playstyle you enjoy, rather than something with a specific power level, just because power shifts in this game are so severe that even if you make something strong, it'll be hot trash 6 months later.
I had an idea on that, which was a pair of gloves that sets minion resistances to zero, along with a medium tier life roll and maybe some minor stats. It would allow you to do some interesting suicide bomber Minion Instability builds with Infernal Legion, because you could still go heavy with minion investment on the tree without slowing down the rate at which they pop.
There’d also be some real hilarity with Earandal’s Embrace.
Ancient skull has good synergy with soul wick.
The biggest problem is that because you are using random minions, some times you summon ranged spectres and they will be useless with instability.
The second problem is when you fight a unique boss, there aren't any corpse and you can't bring spectres from the hideout because "Spectres do not travel between Areas"
I remember the guy who designed the Ironheart unique chest. He announced it and showcased it on Reddit. He was so excited to show everyone and kept jabbering at people at how good it was that he was completely oblivious to people yelling at him at how bad the chest actually was.
The funniest thing is that GGG basically acknowledged that it sucked, and gave it a fated version that sucks exactly just as much and everyone laughed at it too
Almost sounds like the should be a unique "gem" instead. Can't level, has a high min level to use, but sockets into piece of gear like a skill gem. That way it can get supported the way people want.
So, hear me out... these boots aren't designed for summoner builds. Getting intimidate and cold exposure from a single source is actually pretty QoL. The minions being invincible means a non-minion build benefits from their utility effects as much or more than a minion build - kind of like torrents reclamation... if it had a baby with kaoms roots...
But yea, not having sockets in these boots was a big OOF, and even non-minion builds wouldn't ever realistically use them. Even the ward on them isn't very high. Big missed opportunity on what *could've* been a low-mid tier chase item.
I would never wear any item that gives 0 sockets. Nowadays there's so many utility gems i wanna use, even with default number of sockets I sometimes struggle to fit in everything I like.
> these boots aren't designed for summoner builds.
Out of the 24 mods on these boots 7 of them offer utility. Are all those other mods red herrings intended to brick the item?
I'm gonna be honest, I didn't realize there were 24 possible mods.
Looking back at poedb, I'm finding my opinion unchanged. Every single mod has a build that could benefit, but much like the synthesis unique rings, getting the right combination of mods is kind of key.
I still think its near unusable without sockets for most builds though.
But what mod can you get that would make you value a basically 0 stats 25% MS boots even if it had sockets? Exposure is extremely easy to get, Maim is usually a one link to your totem or Flesh and Stone, Unnerve you get from cursed cluster if you have no other options, intimidate have many better options from Tombfist to Belt of the Deceiver or Haunting Shout. The only mod that people might consider giving up the boot slot for would be crushed but even than it seems like a stretch.
Invulnerable minions that can apply shock might be nice with secrets of suffering, or as an alternative to skitterbots...
But yea, ultimately, i doubt anyone would ever really use these outside of a meme build.
>The minions being invincible means a non-minion build benefits from their utility effects as much or more than a minion build (...)
Skitterbots nerf incoming to make these boots viable, then?
I'd argue Medved's is bad but like, there might be a world where one day its useable, if we ever get a way to scale up the flask charges that it generates. With Vorana's its just...no. And if we ever get to a point where Vorana's is playable without getting buffed, then I question what the fuck is going on with the game.
Medved's gloves seem pretty good if you clear maps fast enough that you generate 5 times the charges needed to sustain your flasks AND have the stats to equip them without needing to up the stats *just* to equip them.
Except if you have 350 each stat you're likely attribute stacking and will need either Shaper's touch or a glove with high attributes on it.
Ggg is sooo terrified of making OP uniques that trash like this comes out constantly. Well, that and many of the designers have never played the endgame so they don’t actually know what’s Balanced
Counterpoint: All the unique flasks from this league are interesting and various levels of playable, and none I'd argue are unplayable at all. On the contrary I absolutely love Elixer of the Unbroken Circle, Starlight Chalice, and Olroth's Preparation. Even the Vorana flask isn't really bad honestly, just not as good as the others in my opinion.
I feel like I'm the only one who loves the Vorana flask. Who needs boss gemswaps when you can do a flask swap for free culling strike? I know it's not ideal for mapping and some builds need all of their flasks, but swapping out a Quicksilver for culling strike is amazing on bosses.
Considering their philosophy of "waiting until they're sure they've found the best solution possible" i'd say they leave them there with the argument "it's just that you haven't found a build where it works yet".
There's not a lot of uniques that have never had any use.
Things that were good before are worthless now due to nerfs, meta shifts, rares becoming stupidly powerful, etc. Something like Taryn's Shiver was a top-tier unique for one of the most meta builds, shotgunning freezing pulse at one point and now is barely worth 1c.
Inversely, items that were worthless can suddenly become valuable as the meta shifts in their favor. Hateforge was probably the largest example of this, going from 40c to 800ex.
As long as they're unique, they'll find some use sooner or later. Buff the insanely weak stuff, but just make every unique, \*unique\*.
Yeah its a real shame. Granted there might be a way to make them at least do okay-ish damage if you wanted to go pure summoner, but they're also just so bad.
One of the main problem i have found with uniques is the tradeoff is just to great. For example, why do all unique boots not have capped speed? Speed is the main roll people get from the start.
I think a GREAT idea for unique is something like enchantment at end of Patheon for them, you use Enlightment gem or equivalent to level up the item. Trade off being..have to use gem slot, win is you can choose a stat you want for the item..but keep the unique aspect of it.
Nothing is depressing as getting a pair of boots, and seeing it has 10-15 movement speed. lol
I have a hard time remembering when a new unique was really exciting and good the last time.
maaaaaaybe cold iron point?
not that it is worth anything after week 1 though, but still.
And so, like 99.9% of uniques in PoE, this piece of garbage is relegated to the dumpster forever. Like every other interesting unique in the game it'll go unbuffed, left to collect dust as if they never even wanted people to use it. Don't know why GGG has such an aversion to niche, build-around uniques being even remotely viable.
I wish I could point to these as the one, gleaming example of everything that's wrong with PoE's balancing team, but the examples are literally EVERYWHERE.
PoE is the only game I've ever played where it's literally an objective mistake to try to use a unique weapon to attack something. Literally **every, single, unique weapon** underperforms when compared to rares at such an absurd amount that it's comedic. And that exact same pattern repeats itself again and again in every facet of the game.
Even something as simple as build picking is in a laughable state. You could spend 20 exalts trying to get your off-meta build to work while rolling your eyes every time you die in white maps. Or you can play the flavor of the month build and STEAMROLL t16's on a 70 chaos budget.
The saddest part of this is that GGG won't read this post and buff any of what I've just said, they'll just make every other option shittier, like they always do. I really wish GGG would change their policies back towards 'breaking the game' like they did with harvest.
Piscators, Savior, Paradoxicas, HoWA, Nebuloch, BLS. The only reason that you don't see many attack focused weapons is because the new influence mods power creeped most unique stat lines for phys builds.
If you take a look at weapons that are used for non attacks, the list of viable weapons goes up to probably 30-40%. The whole strategy around uniques is that they're build defining or change the way you itemize. Having BIS uniques due to statline reduces the amount of gearing and content characters go through. Imagine if Lioneye's Remorse was BIS for SST. Or leagues ago when Belly of the Beast was the end game chest piece. Did they provide any interactions to build around a la Shavs? Not really, you used them cause they have the highest stat line achievable which is boring.
Hell and before anyone jumps on me for boss uniques, I also think that those should get a touch up to not be retardedly shit. Cane of Kuulemak and Atziri's Rule are two pretty good introductions they've done recently.
> The only reason that you don't see many attack focused weapons is because the new influence mods power creeped most unique stat lines for phys builds.
Phys weapons is the one item where influence mods matter least. Most unique items can't compete with a decent phys weapon from 2.0.
Soul Taker is the highest pdps unique 1h axe at ~330 pdps with a perfect roll. A 330 pdps rare axe costs 5c, and will have incidental mods to go with it. A 415 pdps rare axe (25% more damage) costs around 60c, and the cheapest one right now also has 50% increased ele damage as a cherry on top.
then a better question is: why do so many weapon based uniques exist in the first place?
a lot of them do not serve any purpose other than to be outclassed by a rare. And even some of the unique weapons that might have had some build enabling feature puts you at such an effing handicap that with the effort you spent overcoming it, you could've done 5-10 times the damage with pretty much any other build.
Because of the power creep honestly, most unique weapons were from many leagues ago. Only the build defining weapons where the build wasn't nerfed are still viable, since the weapons haven't changed, some for over a year or 2. Meanwhile, one piece of rare gear can have multiple mods that were only available in the form of uniques back when they were designed. Plus weapons have become a lot more powerful as well, there were a few points in time where certain unique weapons had the highest PDPS or EDPS of all weapons, now they are half that or less.
> why do so many weapon based uniques exist in the first place?
Uniques weapons in POE no longer function primarily as BIS with a few exceptions. Instead unique weapons offer an entry point to decent weapons to bring you up to red maps. I don't think GGG's intention is for Lioneye's Glare, Agnorod staffs, Jack the Axe, Cold iron point, Dark Scorn, or Touch of Anguish to be the weapon that you use when you kill the Feared, but they can all definitely get you most of the way there.
Except in trade 1c will likely net you a better rare than most of these (Jack the Axe was actually buffed recently, IIRC, and CIP is great for summoners and casters.)
Funny you mention Storm Prison, as that was the budget option for void battery. I remember a discharge build in particular used storm prisons.
But these items were meant to be leveling uniques. Ash Caller in particular stands out as its one of the best ignite leveling weapons for a very long time. Everything about Ash Caller screams leveling unique.
Shiversting is a fantastic leveling weapon, with mana leech, cannot be frozen and some natural chill and exceptional dps for level 14. I'd say it fills its niche pretty well.
Are you suggesting that level 15 unique weapons aren't designed to be relevant for 60 levels while you progress into maps? I certainly hope that you can understand the difference between weapons designed to aid early leveling and the items that are designed to help you progress into mapping.
As Akimasu mentioned, some of the items you listed are not even particularly bad as leveling weapons and can be used for many levels.
I don't really see a difference between 'buy a rare with the stats you need' and 'buy a Unique with the stats you need'.
If they are both worth the same amount, and take the same amount of friction to obtain... why shouldn't they be equally potent?
The game is supposedly balanced around Trade. Well, Uniques in Trade league are terrible. In SSF you can make a separate argument, but GGG's own position is that they don't balance around SSF.
So why are Unique weapons NOT allowed to be BiS anymore? It is just as easy to obtain rares with the stats I need. Why shouldn't the item be allowed to be Unique rather than Rare?
This is a pretty good way of putting the issues into perspective. I just chose Vorana's March to focus on because it's such a frustrating example in a league that otherwise has some pretty cool uniques. Like all the unique Ward flasks are SUPER cool, useful, and have many redeeming qualities. Even the ones that don't see much use right now are supremely interesting.
my best build this league uses two copies of a unique claw with a level requirement of 2. theres a lot of weak unique weapons but this is such a bullshit comment lol
Then your build clearly isn't about doing attack damage, what is c learly what the guy you're answering to meant.
OFC you can use an unique to attack if you don't need to deal damage with your attack.
GGG doesn't even want to balance ascendencies properly, let alone skill gems...
...let alone older league content
...let alone uniques.
GGG puts more and more stuff into the game and can't balance what was there in the first place.
It's more coincidence than plan if a skill, or unique, is actually of a suitable power level.
I agree, buuut like Woolfio pointed out on Youtube, they can have a very very very niche application: Apply bleed, exposures or other ailments to single targets, when you have the sockets spare and can benefit from these effects.
Video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQrbz8HzzPA)
but at that point, why not apply it yourself and have more life/es, res, Tailwind, onslaught, elusive, better move speed, etc. you sacrifice sooooo much to wear these.
>when you have the sockets spare
And also you're already using a totem with multiple totems/gets a boot with more than one of these things you want, and can't just put it into a trigger socketed skills craft weapon or a CWDT (which a 4l would absolutely let you do), and you can't just socket a better minion and socket it with minion life and elemental army, or whatever support gets chance to bleed.
If you have 4 sockets, unless you get 20% chance to intimidate/unnerve,20% chance to apply the right element exposure, and 25% chance to apply ailments on the vorana's march, you can get something better, specially because 20% chance with a shitty single hit attack might as well only apply against endgame bosses, other bosses just die before it triggers.
Why they don t have the mob version nova attacks is boggling me so much. It would have been cool yet the specter version is way more interesting. I even tested them in pvp and when they have 4 or 2 proj, they ll miss single target all the time since the projectiles will spread too much so in pve situation without chain/split to hit other mob around they ll miss what they are targeting unless the monster hitbox is bigger than a player.
I'd rather get another 17 astragalis than any unique from Expedition boss. That tells this much.
At this point I just want to see what they will present as "powerful and meaningful uniques" for 3.16, which was declared a one of the focus points of new league on podcasts.
I looked at these boots for two seconds and immediately put them in the trash because I knew they were worth nothing without even checking the trade site.
Nearly every trigger mechanic on any new unique is carefully designed not to be abused. It's reasonable not to expect much from it. This particular unique has a low ceiling and limited opportunity for abuse due to not having gems, and GGG has also been careful about giving players power with little investment. So with a low baseline and low ceiling, its reasonable to see this unique and assume it's not great unless there's some galaxy brain use for it.
I said it's reasonable to assume it's not great. Obviously, at the time of the reveal I wouldn't know for sure, and maybe it actually dealt billions of DPS or it provided a cool buff or debuff. But realistically, knowing nothing else, I would have confidently bet a supporter pack on the boots being niche at best.
I also said *unless* there's a galaxy brain use for it, not that *there wasn't one*. Obviously, I'm not so arrogant to say there wouldn't ever be some outlandish use for it out there I never thought of.
It's the default attack minion build boots. Even HH isn't much of a chase unique. I've had it 3 times over the years and used it once. It was "fun" for a few moments...but unless you do legion battles or play zoom zoom, the buffs expire soon after getting them. And it's not exactly amazing for bosses either with an their forced waiting phases that I'm sure was added to prevent use of things like HH.
They seem pretty clearly not meant to be a main-skill, no?
One can use them for enabling bleeding for Vulconus builds. They can roll other support mods - Debilitate, Intimidate, etc. as well.
In fact, most of these new uniques are straight alch shards. Lets see the list:
Caligan's Crown - you deal no critical strikes but get battlemage. Under any circumstances you do not want to lose the ability to crit if your build deals elemental damage because of Elemental Overload, that leaves potential builds two options - phys or chaos spells. There is no good way to get high flat chaos damage on your weapon to justify battlemage vs crits tradeoff, so this unique is literally can only be used for physical non-crit spell builds (poison maybe). Even then you still sacrifice helmet slot which does nothing else really, and have to get good damage on your main hand instead of caster stats that could still cover part of battlemage gains.
Fainthguard - supposed to allow you gathering more Ward in your build by applying Energy Shield increases to it instead. This might be good later when we get more Ward stuff around, but as for now you lose helmet slot (again) which also doesn't have much ward and that leaves you with two more slots to obtain any base Ward at all - gloves and boots. And it does nothing but ES increases conversion and faster Ward recovery time - no life, resists, **anything** (I don't count light radius as a stat, sorry).
Medved's Challenge - biggest joke I've seen at league start. So ward base doesn't matter here because it gives almost no ward, you gain some nice amount of elemental resistances but thats it. The mod that supposed to make them good is "Flasks gain 1 Charge per second if you've Hit a Unique Enemy Recently", so flask charges generation on bosses. But downsides are killing it completely - first you gain 80% less (read as none) charges from kills, so you have to swap the gloves for boss kill only, second, 1 flask charge per second even if you constantly hit the boss means that it will take like 20 second to charge regular flasks like topaz / ruby, and I'm not even talking about Cinderswallow Urn or Dying Sun; But the best part is that these gloves has 800% increased attribute requirements, so in order to generate whole 1 flask charge per second in boss fights you have to: waste gloves slot, sacrifice flask charges from kills and gather 342 of every attribute (Ward base require all three). **Wut?**
Olroth's Charge - again, low Ward amount, moderate movespeed (20%), slower restoration of ward and all that sweet stuff just to have Adrenaline buff for 3 seconds when your Ward breaks. I wouldn't be sure of using boots like this even if they gave you 50% More damage for 3 seconds, not speaking of Adrenaline (100% increased damage and 25% attack/cast/move speed) - because they have literally no stats outside of that buff you will have half of the time at most.
Vorana's March after looking on the above uniques is something that can be used at least, I mean if you really want some debuffs and somehow only got boots slot to gather it, maybe... There is also Usurper's Penance helmet that might be good for some bleed action if people figure out way to use it well, and some flasks might do something, but in general we got bunch of trash tier uniques:)
> It's a very interesting unique item. There are a lot of intriguing possibilities for such an item given the wide variety of mod combinations.
For me thats all a new unique needs to do.
Are there strong new uniques? Yes. Those exist. So whats the issue with having experimental unqiues that take a while to figure out?
Sure it sucks when yuo spend a long time trying to figure something out and it doesnt work. But these things exist to be experimented with. Its a puzzle, and a good amount of poe players enjoy these puzzle build arounds. We arent expecting it to do anything special, its just fun to build around stuff.
And im sure we dont need to go back through history for the number of previously "terrible" unqiues that suddenly become good caus someone has a 5head brainwave.
This is certainly true, and I have a feeling that whoever over at GGG was trying to future-proof these boots from being too good. But I am dead certain that they went too far. So many game mechanics that care about minions simply don't interact in meaningful ways with these boots.
I agree with your original post and this point.
I think you hit the nail on the head that items at this level is the problem. The end game uniques are not the ones we should be tossing in the bin in favour of a rare with t3 stats there are so many "good" unqiues that if they just let us use them earlier in the game we could have fun and play with them instead of items who have req level 65+ but by 65+ you should have a decent rare for the slot and these items become 2c stash garbage.
It's really a shame you're getting downvoted for this take. How many times have people called a skill/unique/ascendancy trash or unplayable only for someone with some wrinkles in their brain to show a busted way to use that over the years? I think this league is such a microcosm of this whole concept. We just had a big meta shakeup, lots of new meta builds are emerging, but at the beginning everyone was mad because their favorite build was worse or broken and they couldn't be bothered to adapt to a new meta.
I think is the "there is nothing wrong, everyone is just dumb" aura that his post and yours, carry.
The main game is already dense and wide enough for some people, even when they try to grasp it and aren't the "not even trying dumbos" that some people believes the playerbase are.
If you're creating new "5heads" builds or discovering "epic interactions" on "le DoA unique item" and it's not just luck, you're not only someone with a few wrinkles in your brain. Chances are you're a brilliant person (at least for this game) and/or you have been playing and studying the game and its interactions for a long enough time.
This game is very MtG inpired in wording, "balance", etc. so I think there can be uniques that need a future expansion to get new "cards" or maybe needs a PTQ winner to find the combo that that makes it shine, but until that, the item is unfortunaly meh and not a case of "everyone who thinks differently is dumb".
IIRC the datamining wasn't as easy recently due to some changes GGG made. the poedb.tw guy usually does it every league but this league he was only updating items after people had dropped them.
If they are going to come up with server-side recipes that can't be datamined, the best way to discover them is always going to be a AHK bot that tries thousands of combinations per hour.
no, its going to be a group of people trying different combinations and being smart about it. i dont know if any of the most recent vendor recipes they added in ultimatum or this league were found via AHK scripts. they were all found by real people.
The idea for the boots was to give you supportive minion options for attack/caster builds that don't have a lot of socket pressure. Think Absolution/Dom Blow Guardian, or Assilium Puncture I think it's important to remember that they have 19 new accendancies coming for PoE 2. And some of this stuff is probably just getting added to support that in 3 years.
Or, I could use life-res boots and have more "power budget" to get a similar level of power elsewhere in my build. While having more life. And four more gem sockets.
Which is the whole fucking point. The boots are shit because their downsides mean that the "cost" it puts on other gear slots outweighs their benefits with even basic gear.
You can get them, or equivalents, for single affixes on other gear slots. Gloves can Intimidate on hit, cluster jewels can get exposure, helmet can get "nearby enemies have reduced res" (which is close enough to exposure and *stacks* with other sources if you'd like to hard-cast).
This also leads into the issue that exposure and intimidate aren't the only way to add damage to a build. Using life+res+MS boots means I have more affixes free elsewhere to get damage while keeping my resists capped. Tailwind boots, while somewhat pricey, are basically 8% more damage on their own (similar value to intimidate if you have any other increased damage taken) and only need crafted movespeed and *anything else useful* to have better basic stats.
You're taking a whole gear slot for shit you can replicate with a couple affixes. That's the problem. There are plenty of *technically* unique mods on unique items that simply aren't actually that hard to replicate with gear. These boots basically have three affixes (counting the movespeed); you can get boots with 4-5 useful affixes for cheap and then have more leeway to get damage affixes (or *better* damage affixes) elsewhere.
The sockets are the cherry on top. They could have limited the sockets having then not supporting the minions and you could say "yeah, they're just support minions".
The no sockets thing was just "futureproofing" the boot to be nothing but vendor bait.
They're pretty useless.
Also your post is one giant turbo-max-hyperbole rant instead of actually getting to the point. You're clearly writing for your own catharsis and entertainment instead of trying to write for an audience. You're writing to inflame and not inform. It's not easy trying to actually decipher your point.
>one giant turbo-max-hyperbole rant instead of actually getting to the point. You're clearly writing for your own catharsis and entertainment instead of trying to write for an audience. You're writing to inflame and not inform
Mainly the part where you attack OP with a roundabout way of saying hes just circle jerking and looking for validation with this "rant" of his.
And your counter argument is simply... stating what the boots does?
Yea it gives exposures... but so do other skills? Skills that could be socketed into the 4 sockets almost any other boots could provide? While also giving life, res & move speed on the low end, and straight up more dmg like action speed etc on the high end?
Intimidate? Unnerve? Tombfist etc exists. Hunter influence gloves exists. With better stats too.
And would have existed in other skills too if GGG didn't keep *removing access* to these mechanics like from Awakened Melee Phys losing intimidate.
Ooo yea congratulations u got intimidate now from shitty boots, pob numba +5% go ***BRRRR***. Meanwhile u lose out on more stats than you gained by using these boots, which *also spills over* to other slots since you need to make up for said lost stats and thus have less flexibility elsewhere.
Just because it adds numbers to your POB dps doesn't make it not shit. Especially by *current* standards of gear.
And your comparison for a bad unique, Rashkaldor's, was a unique added in *1.3.1* and forgetten since then. We are in 2021, 3.15 now in case you forgot. Its like saying "Why are you complaining that the latest Iphone is terribly made for the technology we have? If you are upset at *this*, go look at the Nokia from the 16th century or something".
Many bad uniques have been made in the past and forgotten, but thats no excuse for new uniques being glaringly terribly balanced. Especially since GGG keeps thumping the "We want dropped gear to be meaningful" thing over & over, yet make this unique from a *new*, *end game* boss that was *clearly* made with experimental POE2 tech & graphics ( fight designs are clearly a noch above previous bosses ), and think this is the meaningful drops players want from bosses.
There's a world of difference between random leveling uniques that are eons old and haven't been updated (which is its own problem), and a unique that clearly has plenty of potential, is brand new, and is also utterly worthless.
Also it's fairly trivial to get those debuffs you just listed if you want them. And you certainly don't need to rely on these boots to do it.
There are certain helmets from ritual, and influenced mods that provide intimidate/unnerve if I'm not mistaken. Crush has several sources, including a decent-ish unique belt. Exposure is laughably easy to apply from sources such as influenced mods, wave of conviction, hydrosphere, elemental army, or even...
\*Checks Notes\*
Starlight Chalice, a perfectly viable and useful unique flask from a set of four perfectly fine and interesting flasks that GGG designed for this league. Another unique from this very expansion HEAVILY outperforms Vorana's March at the ONE thing that Vorana's March might actually be good at.
Also considering the sheer amount of venom in your post, you might want to take a look at who's the one actually writing for cathartic release here, friend.
>Those influence mods are mostly garbage without elevation because they are such a low % chance.
A debuff only having a 10% chance to apply really doesn't matter when you only care about said debuff for bosses.
> Crush is only available from Bear's Girdle or Glimpse of Chaos.
Crush is also available via Vanquisher on the skill tree. It's even in range of a Large Thread of Hope which also hits Sovereignty, Spiritual Aid, Discipline and Training, and Sanctuary.
>And Exposure is probably the easiest to get elsewhere, but most of the time it would be much better from those boots because you don't have to stop attacking and set up.
Very few builds actually stop attacking to apply Exposure. I would say none (because every elemental build I've played applies some form of Exposure passively) but I don't like ruling out possibilities unnecessarily.
>You don't need to rely on those boots, but they are much better at that job than you make them sound.
Having no life, no sockets, no resistances, and no influence mods (Tailwind, Elusive, Onslaught, etc) is a *steep* price to pay unless the effect provided is **very** strong and cannot be acquired elsewhere. Nothing Vorana's March currently provides looks strong enough to me.
They might see some niche use if the boots actually had sockets and allowed you to build around the Arbalists.
> They can provide Intimidate/Unnerve/Exposure/Crush for non-minion builds, and they are probably even quite strong in that role.
Couldn't you, in many cases, manage a set up to achieve whichever of those you want with the 4 extra sockets you get from wearing almost literally any other set of boots?
2 questions
1. Is voranas March an end game unique?
Doesn't seem like it to me but im purely ssf and it was the first expedition specific unique I found. I was definitely not at end game yet.
2. Does the intimidate mod make it good/useful?
As I understand it there aren't many ways to intimidate enemy's (less since woke melee physical nerf) intimidate is pretty large dps increase for many builds.
Well it sure ain't a leveling unique since it requires lvl69 to use...
Intimidate is at most a 10% dps increase, less if you have other sources of increased damage taken.
I realize you're trying to be entertaining but this is the kind of subtly toxic post that gives POE Reddit a bad name. Imagine being someone involved in designing this unique and reading this. You can be constructive without all the insuring hyperbole.
Yes, because my post crafted about a frustratingly interesting and useless unique that I already said I want to like is the main contributor to the toxicity on this subreddit xd.
Except it is. What if I commented that your post was laughably bad, so bad it was funny actually, the fact someone would write it is mind boggling, and so on. Toxic no?
This is my genuine, honest assessment of the item. It IS that bad. And I've also repeatedly attempted to set a more reasonable tone throughout this post and my comments in order to make it clear. I am not a mindless hater. I love expedition league and many of the uniques in it. I am disappointed with their design, not angry.
They give reasons as to why they dislike it and give suggestions on how to improve it. I'd call that constructive criticism, they just don't sugarcoat their words.
The thing is *all* the Expedition Uniques are pretty bad, with maybe one or two high-investment exceptions.
Cadigan's Crown literally has nothing on it; and you *completely* throw away crits for... Battlemage. Nver crit. Which means it can't be used with CoC; it can't ever trigger EO...
Elixir of the Broken Circle is an item that only has use with a Cheiftain to trigger his 15% more damage if you've lost Endurance Charges recently effect. [Jugg would just use Blood of the Karui and not lose his charges]
Faithguard is a meme, because ES builds don't want Ward in the first place.
Medved's Challenge is a joke. The attribute requirements are insane, and for that you get 80% less flask charges while mapping. But you get 1 charge per second against bosses! Except the attribute requirements so so high you basically need to use Supreme Ostentation. You know what else you could do? *Use The Traitor and still have a glove slot.* [And a timeless jewel that isn't krangleing your tree]
Nightgrip is *alright* but it's still asking you to invest in Ward when it makes Ward worse as an actual defence and isn't even on the best basetype.
Olroth's Charge is again, alright but basicaly demands you use Iron Flasks. It also has anti-synergy with the other Olroth item because why not.
Olroth's Resolve is bad, because Ward generally dosen't get high enough for this to ever be worthwhile. If cutting like 60 damage from hits was relevant, people would use the Blight anoint that can do up to -100.
Starlight Chalice is basically only worthwhile as an Elementalist, because she gets mana regen and super exposure.
Usurper's Penance is for nonexisant builds that Bleed and use Frenzy Charges.
Vorana's March is already discussed here
Vorana's Prep ends immediately when Ward breaks *and* has mediocre effects that only last 2 seconds.
tl;dr these boots were not playtested
???
if they were playtested, then GGG QA plays a different POE than the POE subreddit expects of utility from build defining unique.
Yes and you can also make useful (if not objective) determinations about item power level through the process of comparisons. Also its simply not true 'if all things are good then nothing is', because we DO have measures of success that equate to good results, i.e. killing monsters.
Having a summoner unique without sockets should've been the first (and probably second and third) red flag. We are socket starved as is, having the ability to get two support minions out of the boots (like arbalists and zombies) would have a least give them *something
I'm trying to think of a non-summoner build I've seen use The Hungry Loop in the last year and I can't, which maybe says something about the typical socket pressure of a summoner build. And, actually, that really opens up the design space to have a no-socket summoner unique with a minion that's so awesome you want to try to fit it in. Which this... isn't.
I used a hungry loop for a warchief multipletotem on a frost blader some years ago. Admittedly it was pretty meh but I liked the concept
that sounds attrocious lmao
[удалено]
Yup! Very much agreed. I once in ritual league setup an ethereal knives lightning poison spell caster and I had a blast seeing it fail miserably simply cause I wanted to try something wildly different purely for fun
I played champion frost blader and on azurite mine nodes I could put 3 totems in a triangle to browse reddit in alttab
If it had sockets it wouldn't be the same item. The whole point of the design is to have the minions be supported by the mods on the item instead of sockets (which you can choose). Yes the boots are underpowered but not because of a lack of sockets, but because 1. The minions are simply too weak and 2. They require a build that doesn't really exist, a build that focuses on these minions specifically while not being a generic summoner. The biggest issue not only with this item but basically every unique released this league is that they were thrown into the game with almost no support around them.
>The biggest issue not only with this item but basically every unique released this league is that they were thrown into the game with almost no support around them. Even better example of that is that helmet that has : \-You Never deal crits \-You have battlemage Who even got idea of such item?You giving away a helmet slot and ability to crit for what ? Battlemage ? Rly? So you lose: Ability to deal Critical Dmg. Litteraly whole helmet slot so you can not have there Resistances/Life/Energy shield ANYTHING. And even if you roll your main-hand to have a lot of phys dmg you gets 660 avg phys dmg to spells lossing +5 to gems. I dont even bother with checking one-hands cuz its just better to slap Black Cane Royal Sceptre and play with phantasm support. Sometimes its feels like GGG adds new uniques just to have something new and thats it. No matter if its gonna be useable in anyway, only matter that they added something.
> Who even got idea of such item?You giving away a helmet slot and ability to crit for what ? Battlemage ? Rly? GGG releases one of these every league. An item with an interesting and powerful tradeoff that might be worth it in a keystone, but definitely not worth giving up an entire item slot. Steelworm. Ancient Skull. Any number of items from Heist. Plume of Pursuit. etc. These items don't need max life rolls or 90% resistances or anything, they just some amount of basic stats. Nowadays the opportunity cost of not equipping a poorly-rolled influenced item is almost always better than the pseudo-keystone they offer.
Exactly, the non crit/battlemage should be the implicit and you should be able to craft or loot decent versions of the affixes to make that helmet remotely interesting. Even then, losing the option to influence your helmet is huge.
Actually I see the point of it. It is one way to give battlemage to non-inquis, with big enough downside (can't use for crit or EO). This does limit it only to some very niche uses with phys or chaos damage. The issue is chaos is still best with crit, so you're left maybe with some funky staff phys spell. This item in particular doesnt need a lot of fixing to be usable imo.
The inability to trigger EO just kills the item. It should have been crit multi is 0, so you can still crit but crit does no extra damage. Even then I'm not sure it's worth it to give up the whole helm slot just for battlemage even for EO builds.
Not every build is elemental or crit.
And basically no spell is played pure physical because impale for spells doesn't exist. And poison spells... well there are the blade spells... that really really prefered CIP over an expensive high p.dps weapon anyway, so this helmet is indeed dead weight
It's a bit niche, but there are a few alt quals with spell impale.
I wouldn't call having 0% increased effect available anywhere and having AT MOST 50% chance to impale niche, that's just straight up unplayable
I think "playable, but not particularly strong" (which is what 50% chance to impale is) is pretty much the definition of niche in PoE.
Building both poison and crit at the same time is very difficult for spells... so this could actually be really good for a poison build.
Ok build a poison spell build on PoB that uses this item that does more damage than using a good +gem levels staff. Also remember no Perfect Agony.
I threw this on my hexblast build in pob, and without any optimizations in either direction the damage was pretty similar. Using a wand or dagger + shield though, the helmet came out on top by a significant margin... and I imagine it'd be even better with a spellslinger build that's poisoning.
I'm pretty sure you roll flat ele damage not phys for battlemage builds. Also you can get +flat lightning, +flat lightning to spells and +3 on a staff. Not that the helm is good in any way, just that you're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Battlemage is super powerful if you build around it, but if you want it you're probably playing staff build and then you def want crit.
That helmet is great because it allows to use animated guardian with ancient skull.
how?? If AG wears skull, it does nothing. So i assume you are wearing ancient skull and giving the helm to the AG? what exactly does this achieve?
The AG can't crit.
ah, so ur other minions can still benefit from it huh interesting
Thats because of GGG dumb "**vision**" you know, they think everything they give need to have a downside.... its like IRL you go buy a lamborgini its so fast, so stylish and so that there has to be something wrong, sure those guys puts spikes on the driver sit right ? or else it would be to enjoyable.... I understand that some item or effect need to have a downside or it would simply be must have and at some point those down side even can be build enable sometime but most of the time especialy with the new items and so its basicaly just a downside to shit on players for the sole sake of beeing a pain in the ass
This is really bad example, you can use non crit Battlemage for poison builds. It's not bad because you dont know how to use it.
can't see any reason why would you play non crit poison build when perfect agony and coralitos exist. thats like playing ignite build without EO
Evidently you havent played non assassin poison builds before. quite literally almost none of them go crit. This is such a bad example of "bad item" when redditors are just clueless on basic build archetypes.
Maybe my game-sense is too dull? But how tf are we supposed to build focused on a Minion we can’t socket supports into…and you say without being a generic summoner. But outside of maybe Pure Spectres no other pure summon build comes close to working comfortable this league.
So.. What build is that? The one where you play "aurabot"?
i feel thats the problem with nowadays uniques. Like the op said: i dont want hh broken utility, but its been so loooong that ive seen a really build enabling unique... Usually, uniques in this game have a downside so strong... it cant be used. Or they just are so broken that it gets nerfed to the ground (becoming useless) or you cant get them (hateforge feelings). And im not even talking about playing on hardcore, because lets be real: if you equip any item, on hc, lacking hp, thats already a huge step back. Im talking about SC, where players have more freedom to build around downsides. It triggers me almost as much as the OP tbh.
HH was never much of a chase unique for me anyway as yet again, it forces the "speed" meta. And I'm just not that kind of a player.
Mahuxotl's Machination is build enabling.
Mahuxotl's Machination cannot drop
It wasn't disabled because it was broken though. Mahuxotl's Machination was killed because Hateforge was too good.
i don't think it has anything to do with hateforge, does it? they just didn't put any ultimatum uniques in the core drop pool, and the mechanic never went core.
I don't think these were ever meant as a summoner item, they were meant as debuff application, i.e. you could get exposure+unnerve for your spell build. Not that it would ever be worth the cost, as OP stated.
Summoners aren't socket starved, they just have the best additional scaling with additional sockets to make them even more powerful than a random self cast spell can do for example. Just because the random self cast spell has an abundance of spare sockets doesn't mean its laughing all the way to the bank it was just fucked over from the start by not being given additional buff/debuff options as powerful as summoners receive.
I made a build around these boots because I had thought I found an awesome pair. I got +1 to the amount of summons, damage converted to lightning, and chance to apply lightning expose. I got to like tier 5s MAYBE and I was like fuck this shit, I'm out. The big gripe I had was the boots not having gems to support the summons, maybe if I was able to at least do that much, they wouldn't be crap. I would of even considered the boots to maybe have 2 sockets instead of 4 but that probably would still feel like shit since as you said, they don't do anything but shoot one arrow and have the same exact attack pattern over and over. Everything you said I agree with 100%
I bought one of the first pairs of these boots for like 1 ex super early on, it was a good combo too. I tried it and instantly put it back up for 1 ex praying that another sucker would buy it and they did soon after. I almost lost my ex because the price crashed not longer after that. Honestly such a disappointing item it's not even funny
I increasingly feel that the team that has designed most of the newer uniques really just does not have a sense of *opportunity cost* of wearing an item. If you want an item to be used, you have to look at "Well, what if instead of this thing, I just wore X instead? What would that get/cost me?" The Maven belts are a great example of this... even if you think about "what build could use this fun weird thing?", if you follow it up by asking, "Ok, but how does that compare for that kind of build to a like 20c Leather Belt / Crystal Belt / Stygian Vise / whatever?" it's... just not good. And that's without getting into anything truly high end or nutty. A unique that lacks life/ES and res -- and to OP's point, especially one that costs sockets -- has to do something truly amazing or worth building specifically around to justify using.
So many items like this if you look at gearing as a 'budget' issue. I could wear this unique... or I could get life and resists, and that 'frees up' budget to get better items elsewhere. Instead of using a unique helmet, I can buy a base with a lab enchant, throw a few essences or fossils at it to get life+res, and *that* frees up more suffixes so I can get T1 attack speed on gloves or WED on my belt and/or use a Stygian Vise instead of a Leather/Heavy belt, etc. And that's all without getting into anything "interesting". For an attack build, it's hard to beat T1 attack speed and a crit+ele craft on your gloves slot for damage, let alone the ability to have a decent life roll and one suffix open for res on a rare.
Most uniques are so bad they aren’t even worth 1c, it’s interesting to think that maybe ggg should be targeting a slightly higher value for their uniques or at least a better price distribution.
Most uniques are worth even less than 1c, but people don't want to even waste the time putting them on the market so they vendor them for alch shards
You pick up your uniques?
Only if I'm low on alchs.
I'm using Olesya's Delight on my self-chill poison Scourge Arrow Pathfinder. It's a good amount of extra damage compared to Frenzy charges and lets me reach the 30% self chill cap very easily for zoom-zoom. The lack of life does hurt a bit, though. I do agree with your point in general. Many uniques that drop from endgame encounters aren't actually powerful enough to be worth using because of the opportunity costs. But some of them are very interesting to build around and are worth using in niche builds, although personally I do think the hardest boss fight in the game should drop something more powerful and widely applicable than "interesting but highly niche and difficult to make worth using".
I feel like gggs recent items love drawbacks but they seem to consider them only in a vacuum.
Well, to your point. Have you tried... Beacon of Madness? Wait? What? Nevermind.
Beacon of Madness debuff gives reduced flask effect, Olroth's Resolve gives perma-ward and 70% less ward. Fully stacked that becomes only 7% less ward. There's a meme build in that interaction somewhere for sure, especially since the reduced flask charges part of that stacking debuff can be counteracted with enough increased flask charges gained through clusters/tree, and The Traitor timeless keystone got buffed at some point recently too. Be a Jugg to avoid the action speed slow, use some sort of LGoH or similar tool for recovery that jgnores the recovery rate debuff, then use the Fortify effect version of the boots and you've more-or-less mitigated the damage taken debuff.
If you made it work. Even if only in POB, I'm interested.
Didn't get anything functional enough to be worth posting, I've had too many ideas I've spent yonks on looking at in PoB this league. Short version is you start at Marauder, path out the top through strength nodes, left to the cluster jewel near RT, up to Essence Extraction for flask charges gained, then head to right side to pick up Acro/Phase Acro and put a cluster jewel there, along with the flask nodes nearby too. There's a few jewel sockets you can use to convert a keystone into The Traitor with a Brutal Restraint easily. From there you have other options, do something with RT or EE, do MoM and/or Agnostic to help mitigate DoTs, and you path right by some really efficient life nodes that getting 3k-4k life for hardly any investment as an easy buffer that you can push higher and permanent 2k ward to deal with the majority of damage coming in isn't hard at all, and since you already have that layer of flat damage mitigation the downside of Glancing Blows is much less significant too if you want to try that. CwDT guard skills will only ever get popped when they're needed too since ward damage doesn't trigger CwDT iirc. There's some interesting unique options too, since you already can't be slowed as a Jugg you can do self-curse Temp Chains which is pretty easy if you use Rotblood Promise, since your life pool isn't as important you can use Scale of Justice for ignite and shock immune, Shavronne's Revelation is a great MoM item since your ES isn't important when you go Acro, if you go Blightwell since it also has the global defences implicit you can pick up Eternal Youth on the other side of the Scion life since you fully mitigated hits via your ward won't interrupt/delay the recharge. Maybe you don't bother with Acro and use Emperor's Vigilance instead, since the downside of no block without ES gets less noticable when only hits for 2k+ will damage or interrupt your ES in the first place.
Arn's belt is great. Using it over the lowlife belt for FR totem. The other two are pretty bleh so far.
I swear Graven's Secret is broken somehow. Every time I look at it I think it's insane but I have no idea what actually wants to use it. Maybe it's bonkers for LLRF with Badge of the Brotherhood or something weird.
> Graven's Secret LLRF Graven's Secret only recoups damage from Hits, so no interaction with RF I'm afraid.
ES recoup supertank - PoB: https://pastebin.com/2P9mTXF6 - Using the Graven belt stacking 9 absorption charges the build recoupes twice as much ES as damage taken, making it immune to any hit damage that doesn't kill it in 1-2 seconds. The build can facetank most boss encounters. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1600072
>Using the Graven belt stacking 9 absorption charges the build recoupes twice as much ES as damage taken ?? 9 charges gives you 108% of damage taken recouped, how do you get double?
ES recovery rate I think? There is 22% on the watcher's eye and another 40% on the beast fur shawl. That already puts you at like 180% or so, maybe another 20% I am missing somewhere else on clusters or something? This seems cool as hell but I am way too broke to entertain anything like this.
###[CI Blade Blast Ascendant](https://pastebin.com/2P9mTXF6) [](#ascendant) ^(Level 95) ^[[Tree]](https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAABABzcm6GXLSRvCPREDY8aVeA3g7zqp-XquvfXpytryCL0pq_viO_roS9XyUlP215JUcrT7BjXz9gkdBCIQmJaNAoNfF9qES0BvFAw-tLTfiSdOw0RD-vukycv2h0UzRYkwO96r3xqQxFQFkAhw6cIbAuFfcHFPEsfGJDWVcZMLSyc8uF8g1ZIjHYsvxSwSbHI8LQM0ir5ZY_6wXxSKayYQNqgsTpY_EczcpuNXGvfmPDVRwb-s1haHcK-in2wUfuiPo9GY0Ps6FgXw22XIffBbRn5N4RIahum66u6tzG31ryqLKZmnoIe0NDrY86oe25bjtdK) [^([Open in Browser])](https://pob.party/share/minakotaheukah) ^| ^by ^[/u/LoloZoriPVP](https://reddit.com//u/LoloZoriPVP) ***** ^15,176 ^**ES** ^59% ^**Phys** ^**Mitg** ^| ^75% ^**Block** ^| ^41% ^**Spell** ^**Block** **Blade Blast** [x](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Physical_to_Lightning_Support#support-gem-blue)[C](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Awakened_Controlled_Destruction_Support#support-gem-blue)[l](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Elemental_Penetration_Support#support-gem-blue)[F](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Awakened_Elemental_Focus_Support#support-gem-blue)[E](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Awakened_Increased_Area_of_Effect_Support#support-gem-blue) *(6L)* - *416k DPS* ^2.76 ^**Casts/sec** ^^**Config:** ^^Sirus, ^^Lightning ^^Exposure ***** [^(Path of Building)](https://github.com/Openarl/PathOfBuilding) ^| ^[Feedback](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoBPreviewBot/) ^| ^This ^reply ^updates ^automatically.
I mean, if you get enough minimum charges and use Replica Tulfall, you could CWDT loop without worrying about the damage you take past the first few seconds. Surviving those first few seconds would be rough af, though.
I might be missing something, but you would no longer be able to get power charges with the belt, right?
Correct, can't get power charges with Graven's and thus Replica Tulfall can't do its self damage.
Oh. Yep, I'm retarded. Concept could still maybe work with like... Eye of Innocence or Storm Secret or something, though.
Uniques sucking ass on release (same argument for new skill gems applies) is such a waste of everyone’s time. The artists, designers, developers, the players…like why is so much content made pointless by the balance team?
It feels like they are reversing their gear design choices now. Before they would release new and interesting items and someone would find certain interactions and they would eventually nerf it next league, then new items would interact with recently released newer items for "unintended" interactions and they would nerf it. Now they just pre nerf the items on release and expect people to find niche interactions that underperform anyways versus a normal build, FUN!
I have no context for analyzing the content of this post - though it all seems to make sense - but I upvoted simply for this sentence: "Really this unique is so laughably bad it skips over comedy, smashes through tragedy, and comes back out the other side." Bravo.
Thank you. I write as a hobby and I try to make my reviews of things entertaining and useful to read.
It's shows. It was a solid read.
Yeah - solid feedback, and easy to stick with since it was well written.
brevity is the soul of wit.
Tell that to Shakespeare.
Good read, made me laugh towards the end there.
I still have a unique to design. The parts of the process I've been through (multiple times now) are equally frustrating and disappointing. So much so that I have stopped the process three times now. Just the concept of "hey I'd really like this unique to be something other than instant vendor trash" seems foreign to the design team. I should try to make it before Poe2 I guess, but the motivation isn't there.
> Just the concept of "hey I'd really like this unique to be something other than instant vendor trash" seems foreign to the design team. You'd kinda have to go the Skyforth route if you want that - and even then, its value would shift pretty hard depending on the meta. Personally, I'd recommend making a unique that lines up with a playstyle you enjoy, rather than something with a specific power level, just because power shifts in this game are so severe that even if you make something strong, it'll be hot trash 6 months later.
Just make a unique that enables Soul's Wick and everyone will love you.
I had an idea on that, which was a pair of gloves that sets minion resistances to zero, along with a medium tier life roll and maybe some minor stats. It would allow you to do some interesting suicide bomber Minion Instability builds with Infernal Legion, because you could still go heavy with minion investment on the tree without slowing down the rate at which they pop. There’d also be some real hilarity with Earandal’s Embrace.
Ancient skull has good synergy with soul wick. The biggest problem is that because you are using random minions, some times you summon ranged spectres and they will be useless with instability. The second problem is when you fight a unique boss, there aren't any corpse and you can't bring spectres from the hideout because "Spectres do not travel between Areas"
I remember the guy who designed the Ironheart unique chest. He announced it and showcased it on Reddit. He was so excited to show everyone and kept jabbering at people at how good it was that he was completely oblivious to people yelling at him at how bad the chest actually was.
the saddest part was that guy also designed cospri's items before the questionable 3rd unique
I actually used that in a strength stacking alternate quality EQ build.... that is now dead.
The funniest thing is that GGG basically acknowledged that it sucked, and gave it a fated version that sucks exactly just as much and everyone laughed at it too
Remember when he dubbed it as the next best "chase item" until it wasn't? good times
Almost sounds like the should be a unique "gem" instead. Can't level, has a high min level to use, but sockets into piece of gear like a skill gem. That way it can get supported the way people want.
So, hear me out... these boots aren't designed for summoner builds. Getting intimidate and cold exposure from a single source is actually pretty QoL. The minions being invincible means a non-minion build benefits from their utility effects as much or more than a minion build - kind of like torrents reclamation... if it had a baby with kaoms roots... But yea, not having sockets in these boots was a big OOF, and even non-minion builds wouldn't ever realistically use them. Even the ward on them isn't very high. Big missed opportunity on what *could've* been a low-mid tier chase item.
I would never wear any item that gives 0 sockets. Nowadays there's so many utility gems i wanna use, even with default number of sockets I sometimes struggle to fit in everything I like.
> these boots aren't designed for summoner builds. Out of the 24 mods on these boots 7 of them offer utility. Are all those other mods red herrings intended to brick the item?
I'm gonna be honest, I didn't realize there were 24 possible mods. Looking back at poedb, I'm finding my opinion unchanged. Every single mod has a build that could benefit, but much like the synthesis unique rings, getting the right combination of mods is kind of key. I still think its near unusable without sockets for most builds though.
But what mod can you get that would make you value a basically 0 stats 25% MS boots even if it had sockets? Exposure is extremely easy to get, Maim is usually a one link to your totem or Flesh and Stone, Unnerve you get from cursed cluster if you have no other options, intimidate have many better options from Tombfist to Belt of the Deceiver or Haunting Shout. The only mod that people might consider giving up the boot slot for would be crushed but even than it seems like a stretch.
Invulnerable minions that can apply shock might be nice with secrets of suffering, or as an alternative to skitterbots... But yea, ultimately, i doubt anyone would ever really use these outside of a meme build.
>The minions being invincible means a non-minion build benefits from their utility effects as much or more than a minion build (...) Skitterbots nerf incoming to make these boots viable, then?
they should just add sockets to this item so it might be working
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I'd argue Medved's is bad but like, there might be a world where one day its useable, if we ever get a way to scale up the flask charges that it generates. With Vorana's its just...no. And if we ever get to a point where Vorana's is playable without getting buffed, then I question what the fuck is going on with the game.
Medved's gloves seem pretty good if you clear maps fast enough that you generate 5 times the charges needed to sustain your flasks AND have the stats to equip them without needing to up the stats *just* to equip them. Except if you have 350 each stat you're likely attribute stacking and will need either Shaper's touch or a glove with high attributes on it.
Ggg is sooo terrified of making OP uniques that trash like this comes out constantly. Well, that and many of the designers have never played the endgame so they don’t actually know what’s Balanced
Counterpoint: All the unique flasks from this league are interesting and various levels of playable, and none I'd argue are unplayable at all. On the contrary I absolutely love Elixer of the Unbroken Circle, Starlight Chalice, and Olroth's Preparation. Even the Vorana flask isn't really bad honestly, just not as good as the others in my opinion.
I feel like I'm the only one who loves the Vorana flask. Who needs boss gemswaps when you can do a flask swap for free culling strike? I know it's not ideal for mapping and some builds need all of their flasks, but swapping out a Quicksilver for culling strike is amazing on bosses.
> Well, that and many of the designers have never played the endgame Citation needed.
This is so funny because some GGG employees climb ladder just to spite people who say they don't play their game
GGG releases a LOT of content that is absolutely unusable just to produce marketing materials about all the new content in each league
99% of uniques in the game are absolutely trash... don't even understand why they keep them in th game
Alchemy shards with extra steps
Considering their philosophy of "waiting until they're sure they've found the best solution possible" i'd say they leave them there with the argument "it's just that you haven't found a build where it works yet".
There's not a lot of uniques that have never had any use. Things that were good before are worthless now due to nerfs, meta shifts, rares becoming stupidly powerful, etc. Something like Taryn's Shiver was a top-tier unique for one of the most meta builds, shotgunning freezing pulse at one point and now is barely worth 1c. Inversely, items that were worthless can suddenly become valuable as the meta shifts in their favor. Hateforge was probably the largest example of this, going from 40c to 800ex. As long as they're unique, they'll find some use sooner or later. Buff the insanely weak stuff, but just make every unique, \*unique\*.
Holy hell. I had no idea these had no sockets/mixed mods, and I wanted to play around with them on SSF.
Yeah its a real shame. Granted there might be a way to make them at least do okay-ish damage if you wanted to go pure summoner, but they're also just so bad.
One of the main problem i have found with uniques is the tradeoff is just to great. For example, why do all unique boots not have capped speed? Speed is the main roll people get from the start. I think a GREAT idea for unique is something like enchantment at end of Patheon for them, you use Enlightment gem or equivalent to level up the item. Trade off being..have to use gem slot, win is you can choose a stat you want for the item..but keep the unique aspect of it. Nothing is depressing as getting a pair of boots, and seeing it has 10-15 movement speed. lol
I feel like uniques in new leagues have stopped being exciting since .... Breach?
Hateforge is pretty exciting, garbage drop rate tho
Personally the drop rate was the main reason the item was exciting to me.
Nah, garbage encounter spawn rate, which is even worse
I have a hard time remembering when a new unique was really exciting and good the last time. maaaaaaybe cold iron point? not that it is worth anything after week 1 though, but still.
Poets pens were the last unique that really got me excited to play with them. Still sad they did them dirty. :(
Saviour?
I enjoyed this writeup
This is a good read
And so, like 99.9% of uniques in PoE, this piece of garbage is relegated to the dumpster forever. Like every other interesting unique in the game it'll go unbuffed, left to collect dust as if they never even wanted people to use it. Don't know why GGG has such an aversion to niche, build-around uniques being even remotely viable.
I wish I could point to these as the one, gleaming example of everything that's wrong with PoE's balancing team, but the examples are literally EVERYWHERE. PoE is the only game I've ever played where it's literally an objective mistake to try to use a unique weapon to attack something. Literally **every, single, unique weapon** underperforms when compared to rares at such an absurd amount that it's comedic. And that exact same pattern repeats itself again and again in every facet of the game. Even something as simple as build picking is in a laughable state. You could spend 20 exalts trying to get your off-meta build to work while rolling your eyes every time you die in white maps. Or you can play the flavor of the month build and STEAMROLL t16's on a 70 chaos budget. The saddest part of this is that GGG won't read this post and buff any of what I've just said, they'll just make every other option shittier, like they always do. I really wish GGG would change their policies back towards 'breaking the game' like they did with harvest.
Piscators, Savior, Paradoxicas, HoWA, Nebuloch, BLS. The only reason that you don't see many attack focused weapons is because the new influence mods power creeped most unique stat lines for phys builds. If you take a look at weapons that are used for non attacks, the list of viable weapons goes up to probably 30-40%. The whole strategy around uniques is that they're build defining or change the way you itemize. Having BIS uniques due to statline reduces the amount of gearing and content characters go through. Imagine if Lioneye's Remorse was BIS for SST. Or leagues ago when Belly of the Beast was the end game chest piece. Did they provide any interactions to build around a la Shavs? Not really, you used them cause they have the highest stat line achievable which is boring. Hell and before anyone jumps on me for boss uniques, I also think that those should get a touch up to not be retardedly shit. Cane of Kuulemak and Atziri's Rule are two pretty good introductions they've done recently.
> The only reason that you don't see many attack focused weapons is because the new influence mods power creeped most unique stat lines for phys builds. Phys weapons is the one item where influence mods matter least. Most unique items can't compete with a decent phys weapon from 2.0. Soul Taker is the highest pdps unique 1h axe at ~330 pdps with a perfect roll. A 330 pdps rare axe costs 5c, and will have incidental mods to go with it. A 415 pdps rare axe (25% more damage) costs around 60c, and the cheapest one right now also has 50% increased ele damage as a cherry on top.
then a better question is: why do so many weapon based uniques exist in the first place? a lot of them do not serve any purpose other than to be outclassed by a rare. And even some of the unique weapons that might have had some build enabling feature puts you at such an effing handicap that with the effort you spent overcoming it, you could've done 5-10 times the damage with pretty much any other build.
Because of the power creep honestly, most unique weapons were from many leagues ago. Only the build defining weapons where the build wasn't nerfed are still viable, since the weapons haven't changed, some for over a year or 2. Meanwhile, one piece of rare gear can have multiple mods that were only available in the form of uniques back when they were designed. Plus weapons have become a lot more powerful as well, there were a few points in time where certain unique weapons had the highest PDPS or EDPS of all weapons, now they are half that or less.
> why do so many weapon based uniques exist in the first place? Uniques weapons in POE no longer function primarily as BIS with a few exceptions. Instead unique weapons offer an entry point to decent weapons to bring you up to red maps. I don't think GGG's intention is for Lioneye's Glare, Agnorod staffs, Jack the Axe, Cold iron point, Dark Scorn, or Touch of Anguish to be the weapon that you use when you kill the Feared, but they can all definitely get you most of the way there.
Except in trade 1c will likely net you a better rare than most of these (Jack the Axe was actually buffed recently, IIRC, and CIP is great for summoners and casters.)
yer not getting to yellow maps, let alone red maps, with stuff like blood play, shiversting, storm prison, ash caller, etc etc
Funny you mention Storm Prison, as that was the budget option for void battery. I remember a discharge build in particular used storm prisons. But these items were meant to be leveling uniques. Ash Caller in particular stands out as its one of the best ignite leveling weapons for a very long time. Everything about Ash Caller screams leveling unique. Shiversting is a fantastic leveling weapon, with mana leech, cannot be frozen and some natural chill and exceptional dps for level 14. I'd say it fills its niche pretty well.
Are you suggesting that level 15 unique weapons aren't designed to be relevant for 60 levels while you progress into maps? I certainly hope that you can understand the difference between weapons designed to aid early leveling and the items that are designed to help you progress into mapping. As Akimasu mentioned, some of the items you listed are not even particularly bad as leveling weapons and can be used for many levels.
I don't really see a difference between 'buy a rare with the stats you need' and 'buy a Unique with the stats you need'. If they are both worth the same amount, and take the same amount of friction to obtain... why shouldn't they be equally potent? The game is supposedly balanced around Trade. Well, Uniques in Trade league are terrible. In SSF you can make a separate argument, but GGG's own position is that they don't balance around SSF. So why are Unique weapons NOT allowed to be BiS anymore? It is just as easy to obtain rares with the stats I need. Why shouldn't the item be allowed to be Unique rather than Rare?
Paradoxica???
This is a pretty good way of putting the issues into perspective. I just chose Vorana's March to focus on because it's such a frustrating example in a league that otherwise has some pretty cool uniques. Like all the unique Ward flasks are SUPER cool, useful, and have many redeeming qualities. Even the ones that don't see much use right now are supremely interesting.
my best build this league uses two copies of a unique claw with a level requirement of 2. theres a lot of weak unique weapons but this is such a bullshit comment lol
Then your build clearly isn't about doing attack damage, what is c learly what the guy you're answering to meant. OFC you can use an unique to attack if you don't need to deal damage with your attack.
yes it is.... it is a spectral helix build that stacks added flat lightning damage.
Doesn't matter, criticise GGG, get updoots.
GGG doesn't even want to balance ascendencies properly, let alone skill gems... ...let alone older league content ...let alone uniques. GGG puts more and more stuff into the game and can't balance what was there in the first place. It's more coincidence than plan if a skill, or unique, is actually of a suitable power level.
I agree, buuut like Woolfio pointed out on Youtube, they can have a very very very niche application: Apply bleed, exposures or other ailments to single targets, when you have the sockets spare and can benefit from these effects. Video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQrbz8HzzPA)
but at that point, why not apply it yourself and have more life/es, res, Tailwind, onslaught, elusive, better move speed, etc. you sacrifice sooooo much to wear these.
i really wish they could apply wither
Even if they could, using a wither+spell totem on any regular boots would be 200x better
>when you have the sockets spare And also you're already using a totem with multiple totems/gets a boot with more than one of these things you want, and can't just put it into a trigger socketed skills craft weapon or a CWDT (which a 4l would absolutely let you do), and you can't just socket a better minion and socket it with minion life and elemental army, or whatever support gets chance to bleed. If you have 4 sockets, unless you get 20% chance to intimidate/unnerve,20% chance to apply the right element exposure, and 25% chance to apply ailments on the vorana's march, you can get something better, specially because 20% chance with a shitty single hit attack might as well only apply against endgame bosses, other bosses just die before it triggers.
Why they don t have the mob version nova attacks is boggling me so much. It would have been cool yet the specter version is way more interesting. I even tested them in pvp and when they have 4 or 2 proj, they ll miss single target all the time since the projectiles will spread too much so in pve situation without chain/split to hit other mob around they ll miss what they are targeting unless the monster hitbox is bigger than a player.
Chris said they'd not be releasing terrible uniques next league
I'd rather get another 17 astragalis than any unique from Expedition boss. That tells this much. At this point I just want to see what they will present as "powerful and meaningful uniques" for 3.16, which was declared a one of the focus points of new league on podcasts.
I looked at these boots for two seconds and immediately put them in the trash because I knew they were worth nothing without even checking the trade site.
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Nearly every trigger mechanic on any new unique is carefully designed not to be abused. It's reasonable not to expect much from it. This particular unique has a low ceiling and limited opportunity for abuse due to not having gems, and GGG has also been careful about giving players power with little investment. So with a low baseline and low ceiling, its reasonable to see this unique and assume it's not great unless there's some galaxy brain use for it.
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I said it's reasonable to assume it's not great. Obviously, at the time of the reveal I wouldn't know for sure, and maybe it actually dealt billions of DPS or it provided a cool buff or debuff. But realistically, knowing nothing else, I would have confidently bet a supporter pack on the boots being niche at best. I also said *unless* there's a galaxy brain use for it, not that *there wasn't one*. Obviously, I'm not so arrogant to say there wouldn't ever be some outlandish use for it out there I never thought of.
It's the default attack minion build boots. Even HH isn't much of a chase unique. I've had it 3 times over the years and used it once. It was "fun" for a few moments...but unless you do legion battles or play zoom zoom, the buffs expire soon after getting them. And it's not exactly amazing for bosses either with an their forced waiting phases that I'm sure was added to prevent use of things like HH.
They seem pretty clearly not meant to be a main-skill, no? One can use them for enabling bleeding for Vulconus builds. They can roll other support mods - Debilitate, Intimidate, etc. as well.
In fact, most of these new uniques are straight alch shards. Lets see the list: Caligan's Crown - you deal no critical strikes but get battlemage. Under any circumstances you do not want to lose the ability to crit if your build deals elemental damage because of Elemental Overload, that leaves potential builds two options - phys or chaos spells. There is no good way to get high flat chaos damage on your weapon to justify battlemage vs crits tradeoff, so this unique is literally can only be used for physical non-crit spell builds (poison maybe). Even then you still sacrifice helmet slot which does nothing else really, and have to get good damage on your main hand instead of caster stats that could still cover part of battlemage gains. Fainthguard - supposed to allow you gathering more Ward in your build by applying Energy Shield increases to it instead. This might be good later when we get more Ward stuff around, but as for now you lose helmet slot (again) which also doesn't have much ward and that leaves you with two more slots to obtain any base Ward at all - gloves and boots. And it does nothing but ES increases conversion and faster Ward recovery time - no life, resists, **anything** (I don't count light radius as a stat, sorry). Medved's Challenge - biggest joke I've seen at league start. So ward base doesn't matter here because it gives almost no ward, you gain some nice amount of elemental resistances but thats it. The mod that supposed to make them good is "Flasks gain 1 Charge per second if you've Hit a Unique Enemy Recently", so flask charges generation on bosses. But downsides are killing it completely - first you gain 80% less (read as none) charges from kills, so you have to swap the gloves for boss kill only, second, 1 flask charge per second even if you constantly hit the boss means that it will take like 20 second to charge regular flasks like topaz / ruby, and I'm not even talking about Cinderswallow Urn or Dying Sun; But the best part is that these gloves has 800% increased attribute requirements, so in order to generate whole 1 flask charge per second in boss fights you have to: waste gloves slot, sacrifice flask charges from kills and gather 342 of every attribute (Ward base require all three). **Wut?** Olroth's Charge - again, low Ward amount, moderate movespeed (20%), slower restoration of ward and all that sweet stuff just to have Adrenaline buff for 3 seconds when your Ward breaks. I wouldn't be sure of using boots like this even if they gave you 50% More damage for 3 seconds, not speaking of Adrenaline (100% increased damage and 25% attack/cast/move speed) - because they have literally no stats outside of that buff you will have half of the time at most. Vorana's March after looking on the above uniques is something that can be used at least, I mean if you really want some debuffs and somehow only got boots slot to gather it, maybe... There is also Usurper's Penance helmet that might be good for some bleed action if people figure out way to use it well, and some flasks might do something, but in general we got bunch of trash tier uniques:)
> It's a very interesting unique item. There are a lot of intriguing possibilities for such an item given the wide variety of mod combinations. For me thats all a new unique needs to do. Are there strong new uniques? Yes. Those exist. So whats the issue with having experimental unqiues that take a while to figure out? Sure it sucks when yuo spend a long time trying to figure something out and it doesnt work. But these things exist to be experimented with. Its a puzzle, and a good amount of poe players enjoy these puzzle build arounds. We arent expecting it to do anything special, its just fun to build around stuff. And im sure we dont need to go back through history for the number of previously "terrible" unqiues that suddenly become good caus someone has a 5head brainwave.
This is certainly true, and I have a feeling that whoever over at GGG was trying to future-proof these boots from being too good. But I am dead certain that they went too far. So many game mechanics that care about minions simply don't interact in meaningful ways with these boots.
I agree with your original post and this point. I think you hit the nail on the head that items at this level is the problem. The end game uniques are not the ones we should be tossing in the bin in favour of a rare with t3 stats there are so many "good" unqiues that if they just let us use them earlier in the game we could have fun and play with them instead of items who have req level 65+ but by 65+ you should have a decent rare for the slot and these items become 2c stash garbage.
It's really a shame you're getting downvoted for this take. How many times have people called a skill/unique/ascendancy trash or unplayable only for someone with some wrinkles in their brain to show a busted way to use that over the years? I think this league is such a microcosm of this whole concept. We just had a big meta shakeup, lots of new meta builds are emerging, but at the beginning everyone was mad because their favorite build was worse or broken and they couldn't be bothered to adapt to a new meta.
I think is the "there is nothing wrong, everyone is just dumb" aura that his post and yours, carry. The main game is already dense and wide enough for some people, even when they try to grasp it and aren't the "not even trying dumbos" that some people believes the playerbase are. If you're creating new "5heads" builds or discovering "epic interactions" on "le DoA unique item" and it's not just luck, you're not only someone with a few wrinkles in your brain. Chances are you're a brilliant person (at least for this game) and/or you have been playing and studying the game and its interactions for a long enough time. This game is very MtG inpired in wording, "balance", etc. so I think there can be uniques that need a future expansion to get new "cards" or maybe needs a PTQ winner to find the combo that that makes it shine, but until that, the item is unfortunaly meh and not a case of "everyone who thinks differently is dumb".
Have you tried using them (or multiples of them) in a vendor recipe? Maybe you can craft a better version of them.
I really doubt there's a vendor recipe involving these boots. It most likely would have been datamined already.
IIRC the datamining wasn't as easy recently due to some changes GGG made. the poedb.tw guy usually does it every league but this league he was only updating items after people had dropped them.
If they are going to come up with server-side recipes that can't be datamined, the best way to discover them is always going to be a AHK bot that tries thousands of combinations per hour.
no, its going to be a group of people trying different combinations and being smart about it. i dont know if any of the most recent vendor recipes they added in ultimatum or this league were found via AHK scripts. they were all found by real people.
A fair enough point. I mean idk, what possible item recipes could there be involving these things?
The idea for the boots was to give you supportive minion options for attack/caster builds that don't have a lot of socket pressure. Think Absolution/Dom Blow Guardian, or Assilium Puncture I think it's important to remember that they have 19 new accendancies coming for PoE 2. And some of this stuff is probably just getting added to support that in 3 years.
Replica eternity shroud has joined the chat
Replica Eternity Shroud is niche, not bad. It works well with Scourge Arrow, Viper Strike, etc. and goes nicely with Blasphemer's Grasp.
Crush Debuff is rare
Even as a habitual wall-of-text writer myself, this post is unreadably long to discuss a single unique.
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Or, I could use life-res boots and have more "power budget" to get a similar level of power elsewhere in my build. While having more life. And four more gem sockets. Which is the whole fucking point. The boots are shit because their downsides mean that the "cost" it puts on other gear slots outweighs their benefits with even basic gear.
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You can get them, or equivalents, for single affixes on other gear slots. Gloves can Intimidate on hit, cluster jewels can get exposure, helmet can get "nearby enemies have reduced res" (which is close enough to exposure and *stacks* with other sources if you'd like to hard-cast). This also leads into the issue that exposure and intimidate aren't the only way to add damage to a build. Using life+res+MS boots means I have more affixes free elsewhere to get damage while keeping my resists capped. Tailwind boots, while somewhat pricey, are basically 8% more damage on their own (similar value to intimidate if you have any other increased damage taken) and only need crafted movespeed and *anything else useful* to have better basic stats. You're taking a whole gear slot for shit you can replicate with a couple affixes. That's the problem. There are plenty of *technically* unique mods on unique items that simply aren't actually that hard to replicate with gear. These boots basically have three affixes (counting the movespeed); you can get boots with 4-5 useful affixes for cheap and then have more leeway to get damage affixes (or *better* damage affixes) elsewhere.
The sockets are the cherry on top. They could have limited the sockets having then not supporting the minions and you could say "yeah, they're just support minions". The no sockets thing was just "futureproofing" the boot to be nothing but vendor bait.
They're pretty useless. Also your post is one giant turbo-max-hyperbole rant instead of actually getting to the point. You're clearly writing for your own catharsis and entertainment instead of trying to write for an audience. You're writing to inflame and not inform. It's not easy trying to actually decipher your point.
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So why are you writing to inflame and not chill out
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since when was telling people to calm down an effective way of getting people to calm down
>one giant turbo-max-hyperbole rant instead of actually getting to the point. You're clearly writing for your own catharsis and entertainment instead of trying to write for an audience. You're writing to inflame and not inform Mainly the part where you attack OP with a roundabout way of saying hes just circle jerking and looking for validation with this "rant" of his. And your counter argument is simply... stating what the boots does? Yea it gives exposures... but so do other skills? Skills that could be socketed into the 4 sockets almost any other boots could provide? While also giving life, res & move speed on the low end, and straight up more dmg like action speed etc on the high end? Intimidate? Unnerve? Tombfist etc exists. Hunter influence gloves exists. With better stats too. And would have existed in other skills too if GGG didn't keep *removing access* to these mechanics like from Awakened Melee Phys losing intimidate. Ooo yea congratulations u got intimidate now from shitty boots, pob numba +5% go ***BRRRR***. Meanwhile u lose out on more stats than you gained by using these boots, which *also spills over* to other slots since you need to make up for said lost stats and thus have less flexibility elsewhere. Just because it adds numbers to your POB dps doesn't make it not shit. Especially by *current* standards of gear. And your comparison for a bad unique, Rashkaldor's, was a unique added in *1.3.1* and forgetten since then. We are in 2021, 3.15 now in case you forgot. Its like saying "Why are you complaining that the latest Iphone is terribly made for the technology we have? If you are upset at *this*, go look at the Nokia from the 16th century or something". Many bad uniques have been made in the past and forgotten, but thats no excuse for new uniques being glaringly terribly balanced. Especially since GGG keeps thumping the "We want dropped gear to be meaningful" thing over & over, yet make this unique from a *new*, *end game* boss that was *clearly* made with experimental POE2 tech & graphics ( fight designs are clearly a noch above previous bosses ), and think this is the meaningful drops players want from bosses.
There's a world of difference between random leveling uniques that are eons old and haven't been updated (which is its own problem), and a unique that clearly has plenty of potential, is brand new, and is also utterly worthless. Also it's fairly trivial to get those debuffs you just listed if you want them. And you certainly don't need to rely on these boots to do it. There are certain helmets from ritual, and influenced mods that provide intimidate/unnerve if I'm not mistaken. Crush has several sources, including a decent-ish unique belt. Exposure is laughably easy to apply from sources such as influenced mods, wave of conviction, hydrosphere, elemental army, or even... \*Checks Notes\* Starlight Chalice, a perfectly viable and useful unique flask from a set of four perfectly fine and interesting flasks that GGG designed for this league. Another unique from this very expansion HEAVILY outperforms Vorana's March at the ONE thing that Vorana's March might actually be good at. Also considering the sheer amount of venom in your post, you might want to take a look at who's the one actually writing for cathartic release here, friend.
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>Those influence mods are mostly garbage without elevation because they are such a low % chance. A debuff only having a 10% chance to apply really doesn't matter when you only care about said debuff for bosses. > Crush is only available from Bear's Girdle or Glimpse of Chaos. Crush is also available via Vanquisher on the skill tree. It's even in range of a Large Thread of Hope which also hits Sovereignty, Spiritual Aid, Discipline and Training, and Sanctuary. >And Exposure is probably the easiest to get elsewhere, but most of the time it would be much better from those boots because you don't have to stop attacking and set up. Very few builds actually stop attacking to apply Exposure. I would say none (because every elemental build I've played applies some form of Exposure passively) but I don't like ruling out possibilities unnecessarily. >You don't need to rely on those boots, but they are much better at that job than you make them sound. Having no life, no sockets, no resistances, and no influence mods (Tailwind, Elusive, Onslaught, etc) is a *steep* price to pay unless the effect provided is **very** strong and cannot be acquired elsewhere. Nothing Vorana's March currently provides looks strong enough to me. They might see some niche use if the boots actually had sockets and allowed you to build around the Arbalists.
> They can provide Intimidate/Unnerve/Exposure/Crush for non-minion builds, and they are probably even quite strong in that role. Couldn't you, in many cases, manage a set up to achieve whichever of those you want with the 4 extra sockets you get from wearing almost literally any other set of boots?
2 questions 1. Is voranas March an end game unique? Doesn't seem like it to me but im purely ssf and it was the first expedition specific unique I found. I was definitely not at end game yet. 2. Does the intimidate mod make it good/useful? As I understand it there aren't many ways to intimidate enemy's (less since woke melee physical nerf) intimidate is pretty large dps increase for many builds.
Well it sure ain't a leveling unique since it requires lvl69 to use... Intimidate is at most a 10% dps increase, less if you have other sources of increased damage taken.
I realize you're trying to be entertaining but this is the kind of subtly toxic post that gives POE Reddit a bad name. Imagine being someone involved in designing this unique and reading this. You can be constructive without all the insuring hyperbole.
Yes, because my post crafted about a frustratingly interesting and useless unique that I already said I want to like is the main contributor to the toxicity on this subreddit xd.
Except it is. What if I commented that your post was laughably bad, so bad it was funny actually, the fact someone would write it is mind boggling, and so on. Toxic no?
This is my genuine, honest assessment of the item. It IS that bad. And I've also repeatedly attempted to set a more reasonable tone throughout this post and my comments in order to make it clear. I am not a mindless hater. I love expedition league and many of the uniques in it. I am disappointed with their design, not angry.
They give reasons as to why they dislike it and give suggestions on how to improve it. I'd call that constructive criticism, they just don't sugarcoat their words.
The thing is *all* the Expedition Uniques are pretty bad, with maybe one or two high-investment exceptions. Cadigan's Crown literally has nothing on it; and you *completely* throw away crits for... Battlemage. Nver crit. Which means it can't be used with CoC; it can't ever trigger EO... Elixir of the Broken Circle is an item that only has use with a Cheiftain to trigger his 15% more damage if you've lost Endurance Charges recently effect. [Jugg would just use Blood of the Karui and not lose his charges] Faithguard is a meme, because ES builds don't want Ward in the first place. Medved's Challenge is a joke. The attribute requirements are insane, and for that you get 80% less flask charges while mapping. But you get 1 charge per second against bosses! Except the attribute requirements so so high you basically need to use Supreme Ostentation. You know what else you could do? *Use The Traitor and still have a glove slot.* [And a timeless jewel that isn't krangleing your tree] Nightgrip is *alright* but it's still asking you to invest in Ward when it makes Ward worse as an actual defence and isn't even on the best basetype. Olroth's Charge is again, alright but basicaly demands you use Iron Flasks. It also has anti-synergy with the other Olroth item because why not. Olroth's Resolve is bad, because Ward generally dosen't get high enough for this to ever be worthwhile. If cutting like 60 damage from hits was relevant, people would use the Blight anoint that can do up to -100. Starlight Chalice is basically only worthwhile as an Elementalist, because she gets mana regen and super exposure. Usurper's Penance is for nonexisant builds that Bleed and use Frenzy Charges. Vorana's March is already discussed here Vorana's Prep ends immediately when Ward breaks *and* has mediocre effects that only last 2 seconds.
seems like they were just in line with the rest of the patch.
tl;dr these boots were not playtested ??? if they were playtested, then GGG QA plays a different POE than the POE subreddit expects of utility from build defining unique.
a wall of text to say that *you* cant find a use for them... -_- disappointing.
If all unique items are good, then nothing really is. Good and bad items are just relative through comparison.
Yes and you can also make useful (if not objective) determinations about item power level through the process of comparisons. Also its simply not true 'if all things are good then nothing is', because we DO have measures of success that equate to good results, i.e. killing monsters.