For the first week or two of Diablo 4, players began to wonder if certain items supposedly in the game were ever actually put in at all. These were classic Diablo items like The Grandfather and Harlequin Crest, but no one in the entire game had found them.
Then, a couple level 100 people got Harlequin Crest (Shako) and confusion began to emerge. When could these items drop? Just how rare were they? Were there more? Now, Blizzard has stepped in to answer those questions, and it turns out there are actually six Uniques in this category.
Lead Class Designer of Diablo 4, Adam Jackson, took to Twitter to lay out some facts about the six items:
They only drop from level 85+ enemies in the game. You do not have to be level 85 yourself, just the enemies, so in theory you can get them from mid-level Nightmare dungeons.
There are six total, drop wherever any Unique can drop, so not from specific bosses or locations, and are always 820 item level, current max.
The six uniques are:
- Doombringer (One handed sword) – Lucky Hit: Up to a (15-25%) chance to deal 5,822 Shadow damage to surrounding enemies and reduce their damage by 20% for 5 seconds.
- The Grandfather (Two handed sword) – Increase Critical Strike Damage by (60-100%)
- Ring of Starless Skies (Ring) – Each consecutive Core skill cast reduces the Resource cost of your net Core skill by (8-12%) up to a maximum of 40%
- Andariel’s Visage (Helm) – Lucky Hit: Up to a (15-20%) chance to trigger a poison nova that applies 10,077 Poisoning damage over 5 seconds to enemies in the are (also 1.3-2% life steal).
- Harlequin Crest (Helm) – Gain (10-20)% Damage Reduction and +4 to all Skills
- Melted Heart of Selig (Amulet) – Gain 30% Maximum Resource and when you take damage, drain (8-3) Resource for every 1% of Life you would have lost instead.
All of these have also boosted stats that synergize with the abilities for the most part.
The problem is even the hardest core of Diablo players are wondering if these six items are just…too rare. There are millions and millions of players and only a scarce handful have found these items at all. You simply cannot “farm” for them in the traditional sense as you could probably take ten characters to level 100 and never see them at all. It’s a “struck by lightning” chance.
This is not the first time we have seen ultra-rare items in a Diablo game, as something like Windforce was like this previously. However, past games had more robust trading systems to acquire those items and they were integrated into the economy. These items cannot be traded in Diablo 4, so that’s out the window.
Given the total number of Uniques, and frankly how underpowered most Uniques are currently, hiding the best ones behind this level of luck is rubbing many players the wrong way. There seems to be little point to the items even existing if maybe dozens or at most a few hundred players in the entire game will get them. And it’s not just one, it’s six. Eventually, you would no doubt be able to get items like Shako, Grandfather or Andariel’s in past games, but the drop rates here seem infinitely lower. Some may think they like the existence of ultra rare items like these, but we’ll see how they feel after a thousand hours and no drops of any of them. We’ll see if Blizzard adjusts these rates in the future.
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