[2022] Community Designed Unique: Unique Effect

Hello Travelers, and welcome to the fourth round of voting for the Community Designed Unique event!

Last Week we polled for the Community’s decision regarding the item theme. It turned out to be an extremely close race. While they were all great thematic options for the Unique item, two options were constantly fighting for the top spot, often tied, other times one would pull ahead by a single percentage, then the places would reverse. Eventually, in the final hours, one choice emerged the victor.

In one corner was the theme of “Tri-Elemental”. Sporting one of the core themes of the Mage class itself, Tri-Elemental would focus around, this particular class theme as the item theme. There were a lot of great ideas for what kind of unique effects we might see out of a tri-elemental weapon: True displays of why the Elders of the College are so revered for their mastery of this art.

In the other corner, was The Lost Refuge (also known as Rat City). The Lost Refuge represents one of the final bastions of humanity against the ever-encroaching Void before the final End of Time. The valiancy, bravery, and dire straights of this area emboldened many community members with strong unique effect ideas to try to stem the tide of the void.

However, there could only be one top pick for the poll, and that winner was: The Lost Refuge! Even in a poll, the last remnants of humanity would not give up the fight to emerge victorious. Sadly, The Lost Refuge in Eterra was not as successful, though with the Community Designed Unique, we will be immortalizing their efforts within Last Epoch!

Over the last several weeks, we’ve had you all submitting your ideas for unique effects, and adding likes to those unique effects so we can compile a list to be voted on. We’ve reviewed this list, and have picked out the ones to which the community provided the greatest response, as well as ones we enjoyed the most. With the options below, we’ve provided some brief outlines regarding them - though keep in mind the exact effects may be adjusted for balance, and complementary affixes will be selected by our design team to ensure the item fits into the game balance. Scroll below to find the unique effects, and decide: Which Unique Effect will this unique Mage-focused Spear from The Lost Refuge have?

Unique Item Effect

• Cast Meteor on Critical Hit with Mana Strike
  (this effect has a 1 second cooldown, expends Meteor’s Mana cost)
• Cast Elemental Nova on Melee Critical Hit
  (this effect has a 1 second cooldown, expends Elemental Nova’s Mana cost)
  +(Item to have complementary scaling stats per level)
• Firebrand is converted to Void damage
  +Fireball is converted to Void damage.
  +Chance to cast Fireball on Firebrand Hit
  (expends Fireball’s Mana cost)
  +Fireball has a +X% chance to pierce targets
• Firebrand is converted to Void damage
  +Firebrand deals X% more Void Damage
  +When a hit leaves you below endurance threshold, gain X% increased attack speed for 4 seconds
• Volcanic Orb is converted to Void damage
  +Directly Casting Volcanic Orb grants a stack of Corrupted Heraldry
  +Chance to gain a stack of Corrupted Heraldry when hit by Volcanic Orb Shrapnel
  +Gain X% movement speed, X% increased mana regen, and +X spell void damage per stack of Corrupted Heraldry
  +All stacks of Corrupted Heraldry are lost upon using a movement skill

0 voters

Next week’s poll will be for the Item’s 2D art! We’re going to have our designers come up with 3 options for everyone to pick between. I know for myself it’s going to be really hard to pick out just one from the amazing art they tend to produce. For the future polls, make sure to start getting your ideas in for the Item’s Name, and/or Flavour Text for the May 13th Poll!

Again, as with every Friday, you can catch us live on Twitch 2022-04-22T20:00:00Z to ask questions about the poll, the game in general, or just hang out!

April 8th - Community Designed Unique Kick Off
April 15th - Community Designed Unique: Item Type
April 22nd - Community Designed Unique: Item Theme
April 29th - Community Designed Unique: Unique Effect
May 6th - Community Designed Unique: Item Art
May 13th - Community Designed Unique: Item Name and Flavour Text
May 27th - Community Designed Unique: Reveal!

That particular unique effect would convert both Firebrand, and Fireball to void, chance to cast Fireball on Firebrand hit, and provide Fireball a chance to pierce

When we were reviewing the submissions for the unique effects, we certainly discussed if we wanted to add additional options of our own that were more generic since the community submissions were more limited by particular skills. However for a few reasons, one of which was the integrity of it being a “Community Designed Unique”, we decided to only put forth suggestions submitted by community members. However we will continue to internally design more unique items which have stronger cross-class potential.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the chosen unique effect will not be the only modifier on the item. If a spell oriented modifier is chosen, then it will probably have flat spell damage to go alongside that. If there’s a strong community desire for the spear to have a melee aspect to it, despite a spell only modifier being chosen, then that can be incorporated.

When we have any sort of unique ideas we have to process, they have to go through our senior game designers to a.) ensure they ‘can’ be made to work in the game world, and b.) they make sense to exist within the game world. The problem with submitting “a full unique” as a suggestion, is that it almost certainly couldn’t be implemented. When we create Supporter Uniques, it usually takes a couple of weeks of back and forth and internal iterations and tests to result in a unique to be implemented. That’s for one item.

However, we did to an extent have this. Throughout all previous posts, users have been able to submit unique effects for this poll. Other community members then voted for top options by ‘liking’ those suggestions (leaving a heart). All of these options in this poll are unique effects submitted by community members, which we then went over with our design team and tweaked to a “base” implementable form. We’ve left the implicit and other affixes to our design team so they can do what they need to to make the item as a whole work (whether the other stats on the item need to buff up to compensate for a weaker unique effect, or lower the power of a more powerful unique effect). To submit a ‘full unique’ means our design team wouldn’t have this ability to the same extent and thus would be far less implementable. I like the idea in theory though, it’s a fun idea!