How i designed my unique - Skyforth Sorcerer Boots

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CharanJaydemyr schrieb:

But since everyone loves your boots for their power, you may well be right. ^_^

I didn't realize that I loved his boots.. <_< They're op, yes, but I don't like them aside from the Mana-Chayula effect, that part is cool. :P

I don't like them.

Unique items in my opinion were always about niche cases, or items that enabled a build to be more accessible but always outshined by a good rare. These boots are overpowered to the level of being a no-brainer best-in-slot item.

Here is my reasoning. Clearly, these boots are designed for low life spellcasting builds.

1. It takes the one drawback of low life builds i.e. being prone to getting stunned and totally throws it out of the windows. What's more, the stun chance isn't even based on just your mana but 500% of it. That means that any build going low life would easily benefit more from these boots in terms of stun immunity than depending on life.

2. Free 25% power charge on critical gives you an extra link on your item. For those saying that it's more of a QoL thing and that you can use heralds linked to assassin's mark instead, in a game centered on killing as many monsters as fast as possible, having a mechanic to easily enable that isn't QoL. Sure you could use assassin's mark, but that is both unreliable, reserves 25% of mana and most importantly, will not have a chance to go off before most builds kill all the monsters on screen anyway.

3. If the two above points weren't reason enough to use these boots (which they would be, even without other mods on the boots), 6% reduced mana reserved is a very nice bonus. Not gamebreaking but definitely more reason to use these.

4. The bonus mana and move speed are some miscellaneous additions that provide value as well.

5. The "downside" of the boots i.e. having no life regen isn't a downside for any low life builds that relies mostly on ES anyway. It's a pseudo-mod that is there just to avoid the controversy of having an overpowered item without a downside while really not impacting the builds that it caters to in any negative way.

6. As for the item level of the boots being high, that is pretty much a non factor. Gating overpowered items behind rng or difficulty was never a smart design decision, since it has been proven time and again that players will obtain the item no matter what. Uber atziri's items are an obvious proof. There are hundreds, even thousands of those overpowered items circulating around, inspite of being gated behind heavy rng. So, that downside is not really a downside.

I don't mean any offense to the person that designed these boots; I just think that the design itself is pretty bad.

I think these are swell boots.
Will be difficult for many people to obtain but it is nice
to have good unique items you are actually dreaming to find/chance.

They do seem to very strong but again, im not 100% sure so strong
that it ends up being a bad thing..

Personally I would not want for my CI build because I am resolute
technique and my tree moves right through unwavering..
Without the pcoc bonus and many passives or amulet saved from stun
they are simply cool boots with low es / no resist.

However I will probably still try to chance a pair lol.
Gonna be worth a pretty price. :)

the boots go against the very design of poe uniques. this and the new unique flask are retarded op, sorry. you dont want a unique being a bis item for a fuckton of builds.

Man, I hate this item. It's actually good. I want to see people pay thousands of dollars just to get so much disrespect they will quit the game like Myrmi, not this.

I’ll admit, I blinked a few times when looking at these.

So I watched about ten minutes of the video before deciding that what it amounted to was a narrated overview of the e-mail conversations that produced the item (hint – a regular forum write-up rather than a low-res video that makes it difficult to read the mails in question whilst you’re complaining about GGG rejecting your original, outlandishly overdone ideas would make for smoother discussion). What I got from it was that this item solves one problem with Path of Exile uniques (i.e. the inexplicably popular player notion that “ALL UNIQUES MUST BE ABSOLUTE GARBAGE, RARES SHOULD ALWAYS BE BIS FOR EVERYTHING BUT WEIRD NICHEY BUILDS NOBODY ACTUALLY PLAYS XO”)…but it slams face-first into a bigger problem.

The best uniques (in my eyes, anyways) tell a story; they follow a recognizable theme, they have a definite purpose, and they feel like they have a history behind them in the game world. I’m not one of those yayhoos above who believes that uniques should be Inherently Bad and only useful to random weirdo niche builds whilst being 100% outclassed by half-decent rares, but I do feel that a unique item should have some weight and meaning to it.

These…look like somebody drew up a list of all the mods they wished they had for their favorite CI build but couldn’t manage to find anywhere else. Stun threshold based on mana rather than health is a cool idea and is somewhat suggestive of the physically frail but mentally overwhelming classical wizards of yore who’d shrug off trauma with sheer discipline and strength of mind. I can see the reservation reduction effect pairing with that idea of a piece of gear evoking mental discipline and mastery of mana as a resource, as is the extra flat mana provided…but where the blue hell does the power charge generation come in? How is that related to what is otherwise looking like a defensive/utility set of boots?

It’s just…kinda there, like it was bolted on because the designer was sick of using PCoC on his favorite CI build. And yeah, the ‘no life regen’ on an item which is clearly aimed at CI/low-life/MoM/other such mana-centric, negligible-life builds seems kind of like phoning it in. Who cares if you can’t regen; that’s what Vaal Pact is for. And to top it off, the things get a max-level speed mod to boot. I mean yeah, boots without any movespeed are a sad, sad thing, but the whole 30%? Yeesh.

I suppose it’s cool, though. Heh, as far as I’m concerned Path of Exile could use a significantly larger pool of really badass uniques one can hang a build on, and while these aren’t really build-enabling or build-defining, they are sure as absolute shootin’ build-enhancing. If I found a set I’d sell it for a large shiny pile of exalts and fund my next ten characters’ endgame mapping gear absolutely look into restarting some of my old EK prototypes, but…

Well, I suppose it’s just that these look like they were built by a player looking for power, and not like a piece of Wraeclast’s history. I’ve honestly thought about what I’d do if I’d been around when they were selling the option to design a unique; to me, the very first thing you do is decide what the story behind your item is. These…just don’t tell a story.

Which is kind of a damn shame, given their power.

Congrats on getting your item into the game, is there any story to the item?
The flavour text is kind of... vague.

Also, is there any chance of putting up a summary of the emails for those of us who'd rather read than listen?

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Darth_Silegy schrieb:

Man, I hate this item. It's actually good. I want to see people pay thousands of dollars just to get so much disrespect they will quit the game like Myrmi, not this.

I always thought they'd pretty much quit the game due to... other reasons.

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CharanJaydemyr schrieb:

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Darth_Silegy schrieb:

Man, I hate this item. It's actually good. I want to see people pay thousands of dollars just to get so much disrespect they will quit the game like Myrmi, not this.

That has to be one of the nastiest things I've ever seen on these forums, and I've seen it all. I'm sorry nobody knows you and that you have to attack high-end supporters just to get noticed.

Pathetic.

Sorry for the slight derail, Skyforth, but this person made me almost physically gag in disgust.

dont take it to seriously your Excellency (you of all people know that by now lol)

the forum bottom dwellers are below your grace

I can almost forgive the fact that they're BiS by design due to the rarity argument. I adamantly think rarity does not a balance make, but there are not going to really be enough of these to even exist for it to have wide chilling effects on build choice. Designing a unique for the 1% (or less) is a bit of a waste of a unique design since it will never have the mass usage that something like Facebreakers do, but it's Skyforth's decision to make.

The truly inexcusable thing with these boots is how little theme they have. They tell no story.

Stun on mana (read: effective immunity), power charge on crit, and reduced mana reservation could each be their own unique. The drawback of 'no life leech' also seems unrelated to the rest. Nothing really ties these concepts together at all. It was the equivalent of walking through the candy shop and picking this one and that one and DEFINITELY this one.

When first announced, I was quite hype for the shoes. I thought that they'd flip mana (and/or eshield) on its head in a simple way, like "Maximum Life and Mana values swap". The end result just feels really hollow, and overly focused on rarity instead of making an interesting item.