[2019] The Fang needs a change

Thanks for the suggestion - we’ve been discussing it.

Here’s a quick summary of how that discussion has gone;

 
Arguments In Favor

• A more minion-focused implicit (e.g. making The Fang a Turquoise Amulet) might generally make most people interested in using The Fang happier to find / use it.

 
Arguments Against

• The Turquoise Amulet base type already has a unique (Death Rattle), while the Brass Amulet base type does not have another unique. Due to how unique item drops work, making The Fang a Turquoise Amulet would result in unique drops being slightly more rare.
• While melee-focused Beastmasters are an obvious example of a build which this unique would be useful for, Summon Wolf that is not the only build which uses the skill.
  • Also Cast Speed is not, strictly speaking, entirely useless for such builds. Due to Companions having Activatable Abilities, even melee-orientated Beastmasters will have spells. Summon Wolf’s Howl is a Spell and benefits from Cast Speed.
• The design goal for uniques in Last Epoch is for them to be interesting alternatives to magic items, with the latter being easier to mix-max, but the former having interesting properties which cannot be readily replicated by magic items. To make The Fang a Turquoise Amulet would move it to the base type which people are likely to use when crafting minion-focused magic amulets, and thus makes it less interesting.
  • Please note that this is not an objection to increasing the power level of the item - it’s just that were we to do so, we would prefer to come up with an interesting explicit property for the item than to simply change the implicit.

 
Current Stance

• The Fang is currently in an okay place and we’re not in a hurry to make changes to it.
• It could probably be made stronger without becoming overpowered.
• We’re not opposed to changing the implicit, but we’re not excited about doing so.

 
While we’re talking about The Fang, we’ve identified a bug affecting the 20% Increased Minion Damage per active Wolf affix which is non-trivial to resolve, and in the next patch we’ll be changing The Fang to instead grant minions flat Melee Physical Damage.

To clarify, having base types without unique variants results in fewer unique drops.

If the game decides that a dropped amulet will be a brass amulet, it cannot then decide that this item will be a unique item if there are no eligible uniques for the brass amulet base. We plan for most / all base types to have unique variants, but that’ll take time.

That is correct.
 

We try to focus unique item development to spread uniques over base types so unique item drops aren’t artificially rare. There is a small number of base types with multiple uniques.