Diablo IV has six Uber Uniques that are the rarest and some of the most powerful items in the game. Players have spent hundreds of hours without ever coming across them—until now. A trick for easily earning them was recently discovered and Blizzard has now removed the items from the game entirely to try and stop the madness.
Previously only farmable in Nightmare dungeons, Uber Uniques were added to the game’s Helltide event in the latest patch, an in-game event where a particular zone on the map turns blood red and fills up with extra tough enemies. Players quickly found out that there was a way to significantly increase their chances of getting the Harlequin Crest, better known as Shako, one of, if not the, most powerful item in Diablo IV. That’s because characters like Barbarians don’t have many Unique helmets, meaning Helltide chests that only give out helmets are much more likely to grant those players Shakos instead.
Tbh this seems like an entirely predictable consequence of not having enough good endgame equipment. Barbarians don’t really have other unique helms, you say? How weird! It was definitely like that the day before the patch, too. You know, when everyone was complaining about the lack of variety and interestingness in endgame loot.
Seriously, I’ve had rares that were more useful than the uniques I’ve gotten. Not only that, but they keep giving me the same damn ones. I have 3 of those silly Frostburn gloves.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel about most of the uniques. I don’t think I have a single character actually wearing any. They’re cool, yes, but I tend to look at them and go “cool” and then stick them in my stash and keep my better boots on.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but I think what you’re describing is a better system. If unique items are too strong, when you find one you’re basically done with that entire gear slot, which limits your upgrade paths. Conversely, if a strong rare with perfect stats is better than every unique for that slot, that leaves the door open for a hypothetical future upgrade that could reshape your build, even if it’s incredibly rare to hit those BiS stats. Path of Exile does this well, in that there are only a couple unique items that are so strong they’re useful for every build (HH, Mageblood). Most unique items fall on the ‘weird/cool’ side, where they enable certain builds or skill combinations that otherwise wouldn’t have any chance of success, but they’re almost always significantly weaker than a perfect rare item.
So they removed the items from the game temporarily because the game was working as intended? Seems a little lame to me.
I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t an always online game if they would have cared as much or acted this fast to fix it.
Wait. People are having… fun!? They’re getting overpowered loot and mowing down the hordes of hell as if they were nothing!? We can’t let this stand!!
Yeah, I don’t understand why they have to make the endgame grind so boring and tedious. Like, hey, maybe instead of capping your loot so much, why not just…oh I dunno, add a few more challenging bosses between capstone Elias and Uber Lilith?
Challenging content isn’t a big part of arpgs because when you look closer at it you realize that the gameplay really isn’t cut out for it. It’s not like a souls game where you dodge and carefully time your attacks. They’re not balanced for this at all. If you play on a difficulty that would be considered challenging this game kinda falls apart. As a barbarian there’s no elegant way of dealing with elite range mobs that drop multiple effects on the ground and then shoot you. You deal with them by having gear good enough to just blast through them. If you actually have to dodge all those things it gets incredibly clunky and frustrating. Tldr; the gear grind is all they have.
Its true that gear grind is all they have, but making the chase items so rare and unfarmable, just makes me not want to farm them.
For shako being the rarest item in the game, it’s so utterly boring.
I think Blizzard’s response was appropriate for this stage of the game – removing all harlequin crests from the game until they fix the issue. Right now, removing the item completely doesn’t really disrupt that many people outside of the exploiters because it was a pretty rare find, but as time goes on and the game is out longer, this option is less and less viable.
What I think is screwed-up is how something like this got past their “world-renown”, “follow the sun” QA that “needs time to test everything exhaustively to make sure things that are implemented as fast as possible are done right.” It kind of blows the whole excuse of why they can’t iterate faster on some of the quality of Life improvements that would be mostly innocuous, out of the water…
It also goes to show how smart-loot is a lot more work than just the old MF days of D2… something they should have been more aware of.
This whole thing has been a roller coaster. I swear I was seeing posts of people getting extremely rare uniques in hell tide before the last patch. Then I heard about the patch and started doing more helltides to try to get some new rares. Now I find out that “Uber unique are a thing,” and I could have found a lot if only I was a different class.
Imagine pulling items because the small item pool makes them too easy to get. Some gigabrain strategies at play here.
