[2019] Grades of Legendary Items

Howdy!

Unique items are intended to have either affixes - or at the very least, combinations of affixes - which you cannot find on Rare items. While many affixes are balanced individually to be made available in the pool of affixes which items can roll randomly, some are too powerful for this, and thus must be balanced as part of an entire item. The intention is not for Unique items to be superior to Rare items, but to offer more choice and to enable new builds.

Item Sets are a natural evolution of Uniques. They take the concept of finding ways to permit powers too powerful to be made available normally; they come with a higher opportunity cost than Unique items, but come with modifiers not even a Unique item can offer.

Rare items are designed to be the bread and butter of equipment in Last Epoch. Unlike higher rarity items, they can be crafted upon to be made better - if their owner accepts the inherent risks involved with doing so, of course. In the same patch we introduced the first Item Sets - Alpha Patch 0.6 - we also implemented Set Affixes. They are rare affixes which can spawn on Rare items, and become more powerful as you equip more items featuring them. For example, if you have a pair of gloves and a belt with “+5% increased armour per equipped item”, the game would check how many of those items you have equipped (2), multiple +5 x2, and then have both your gloves and your belt increase your armour by 10% for a total of 20%. These set affixes are intended to help rare items to scale into the endgame and compete with chase Uniques and Item Sets - both in terms of power, but also in terms of difficulty to acquire.

Legendary items have gone through a few different iterations internally, and we’ll be talking more about them (probably in a Developer Blog) closer to them being made available. They are scheduled for inclusion in Phase 3 of our Early Access Development Forecast.