As I had expected, Blizzard decided not to do anything; a rollback was naturally out of the question while allowing those who found them to keep them (they said only 142 accounts managed to obtain the items). So even with an erroneous drop rate percentage, these things are extremely rare to the point where that rarity is unreasonable. The other negative about this is it messed up the ability to target farm uniques from Helltide chests since they can drop from any chest (target farming only works for rares and legendaries).
This D4 team has a somewhat deluded perspective when it comes to rare “chase” items like this. This is really dependent on the rest of the game as well as the grind, being fun and engaging. Additionally, D4 itemization is meh (this design again is out of necessity given the wide demographic Blizzard is going after where the average person can understand it). Yes, there’s a percentage of players who are extremely happy with D4’s end game and its loot hunt. But there are also many others (including myself) who find it underwhelming. These ultra rare items aren’t enough of a carrot on a stick to keep most of the players who are in this latter group, sticking around to try and get those items.
This line of designer thinking (make it rare, and players will spend a lot of time in the game to try and get them) is systemic however because you see vestiges of this design mantra spread across the game. Re-roll enchanting costs rising exponentially is a prime example of this. Yes, gold sinks are good so long as they are reasonable. However, re-rolling a property in D4 can quickly grow into the hundreds of million gold if RNG isn’t on your side. Sure, you can quickly go back into grinding again for gold to keep trying your luck at gambling at the occultist to get the property that you need (and hope that it is also near the top of the range). RPG min/maxers will keep at it but others like myself (where again, I no longer enjoy this type of grind) satiate ourselves with “it’s good enough” to clear content (because this is how I play these type of games now).
Example: last night, I finally hit level 85 and got three decent upgrades (running Helltides) for my weapon, offhand (both were rare 820 item power) and a ring that had +mana as well as vulnerable damage (this property has been eluding me for awhile; it was also on my new wand). Prior to this, I went without ANY vulnerable damage on any gear (but what I had did the job; having it now makes most mobs one hit in the open world). I re-rolled the least desirable properties on the weapon and offhand (the ring had everything I wanted) but didn’t bother shooting for the highest roll once I got what I wanted because at that point, I was at the 500K gold per re-roll on each item (and I only had 52 million gold at that time; I was down to 44 million after these re-rolls). And now that I’ve imprinted them, I definitely don’t want to continue trying to enchant them because the costs are even higher (and go up exponentially faster) for legendary items.
I deliberately don’t burn through all of my gold this way because I prefer having this cushion when considering how much it costs to extract an aspect from an Ancestral item, how much it costs to socket, etc. And while I’ve yet to see anything decent by the vendor NPC’s, I want to make sure I have gold in case one of them happens to be selling a really good item (since those can be over a million). Unlike the 1-70 journey where I forced myself back into the way I used to play these type of games, I’ve since slowed to the casual potato sort of play time (I’ll be playing season 1 casually as well). So whatever I get in terms of drops and gold are from these sessions (and I have no intention of grinding for gear, mats, and gold beyond what I get when I do play).
Thus from my point of view, these Uber Uniques are items I will likely never see and they effectively don’t exist for me. And that is fine; except why bother wasting development time on items that the vast majority of the player base will never get? Again, they are taking these elements from Diablo II (which has a completely different itemization system; one that made the loot hunt interesting from the start even if it too, wasn’t perfect since there were a whole bunch of less than useful affixes on them) and trying to force this level of rarity into D4’s loot hunt (it just isn’t the same). I then have to remind myself that this explains why Andariel and Duriel were thrown into the Act VI campaign that way, as well as why too much of the game world is shades of dark; it was an attempt of trying to go the other extreme of D3 with all of these D2 throwbacks for obvious nostalgic reasons considering how it has remained as the standard bearer for ARPG’s. While D3 had a ton of problems and was often criticized for it’s color palette, I did understand the design rationale (they did it for visual clarity). In D4, I find myself often running into dead spots due to most everything being dark. And a lot of D4 is just facade that borrows from systems used in D3 like Tree of Whispers borrowing from the bounty system while Nightmare dungeons borrowing elements from Greater Rifts (but thankfully without a timer). Plus another thing that gave D2 infinite replayability was the modder community; something that was made off-limits for D2R and unsurprisingly, D4 given this insistence of not having this completely separate offline mode.
As someone who was not planning to purchase and play D4 (again, this was gifted) even after trying the open betas, being able to play the actual live service has not changed my mind that it would have been a wrong decision. What exists now clearly was not ready for release (they decided to take a “fix it as we go approach” by pushing this live service angle, but little do they realize they will now be tasked with trying to address these issues in the live game, but also having to push out new stuff without the proper internal QA testing like what happened with these Uber Uniques dropping in higher quantity from Helltide chests; basically players will be ongoing testers as it has been since launch).
