Ascending your Uniques - New Currency

Here's the thing. One of the major gripes of ANY player no matter who it is are the uniques.
Universally every player agrees that 90% of them are bad unless you are specifically building it for one niche build or interaction.
However in order to achieve that interaction, you are dragging around an useless waste of a slot that later into the game gets outscaled by a random drop from a white mob.

It would feel less bad if they actually had some good stats.
99% of weapons are just bad in this game. Majority of players don't use them for their damage. They use them for their unique effects. But even those unique effects are terrible because they lack stats.

What I propose is a new currency:
Orb of Ascension
New chase currency similar to lock of Hinekora and such.
Gives item a new tag 'Ascended' which makes it easier to search on market.

What it more importantly does is to ascend an unique item into an endgame variant that has stats comparable to what you'd expect from a mediocre/good endgame weapon while keeping its unique effect.

1. It sets the required item level to 78 like majority of the uniques tend to be in endgame
2. It increases its base stats to match what endgame gear would have. Meaning a crappy 20 energy shield boots would become at very least 200.
10 dex would become 35 and so on.
3. If required, its unique effect also increases in power IF AND ONLY IF there is simply a more viable thing you can do with combination of other items or just pure damage output.
4. It does not set the item to be unupgradable. Meaning while it will be ascended, you can still increase its quality, add sockets, sanctify it or corrupt it. Having it be the same way as sanctification/corrupting would entirely devalue the Orb of Ascension.
Some items like for example Widowhail are borderline usable only IF you corrupt them to have higher unique base stats.

What this does is to create a new, valuable currency that actually is worth chasing for.
- It instantly makes majority of uniques viable
- It VASTLY improves the diversity of builds in the game
- It eliminates majority of complaints about uniques due to competitive stats
- It creates a new currency to trade for
- It gives new players safe currency to sell
- It gives lucky players some nice currency to trade if they want some easy divines to start off their build

The positives outweigh the negatives. Negatives being that if you're going to design an early game item, developers will need to create ascended version of it. But in grand scheme of things, it's absolutely worth.