Affliction League New Uniques
Here's a look at some Unique items coming with the Affliction League mechanic and Ultimatum.
New Affliction Uniques
Affliction League brings new Unique items, so far the items revealed interact with Sockets, and enemy damage.
This Unique Chestpiece offers players a new way to interact with Gems. Socketed Skill Gems gain +12 levels. At the same time though, socketed Skill Gems lose 2 levels per Socketed Gem and it has 6 Sockets.
- 1 Socketed Skill Gem +10 levels.
- 1 Socketed Skill Gem with 1 Support +8 levels
- With 2 Supports +6 levels.
- Add a third Support +4 levels.
- With 4 supports +2 levels.
- A full 5 supports gives +0 levels, but hey at least you didn't lose anything.
If an enemy's damage type matches your own this could be a great item to pick up in the Campaign before you have Curses or Exposure. But most enemies don't do tri-elemental damage, and needing to be hit every 4 seconds is not ideal.
Even worse, it's pretty easy to get Enemy resistances below 0% so they may become more Resistant to your damage when the helmet activates.
A Unique Amulet which looks purpose built for the Warden of the Maji Wildwood Ascendancy. A Warden's Oath of the Maji offers bonuses when you don't socket any Gems in an Equipment Slot.
The Untouched Soul gives a bonus for each colored Socket on any equipped item. So for example, if you leave your Helmet empty for the +50% to All Elemental Resistances bonus, you can get the following;
- +160 to Maximum Life
- +900 to Accuracy Rating
- +160 to Maximum Mana
- +72% to All Elemental Resistances
With 4 empty White Sockets on gear you get 122% of the 135% Elemental Resistances needed to cap after defeating Act 10 Kitava, freeing up Suffixes on gear for Attributes or damage modifiers. Of course, you can mix and match socket colors as needed, grab 225 Accuracy, 80 life and 18% Resistances with a G-R-R-W Helmet!
Tenkiei's Thoughts
The first 2 items shown don't look too strong, but The Untouched Soul is interesting. GGG is experimenting with different ways to utilize resources on gear. In Trial of the Ancestors we had Tattoos which converted Attributes into other bonuses. This made Attributes extremely competitive as Suffixes on items because they could be converted into other more useful stats. Similarly, we're seeing the same happen with sockets.
If a build doesn't scale well off of utility skills it's time to empty those sockets for extremely flexible bonuses. Personally, I think the best option is a helmet with R-R-W and an Abyssal Socket. You get +80 to Maximum Life, and +86% to all Elemental Resistances. This offers almost as much character building freedom as Pathfinder which can cap Resistances using Flask. This is the most useful of the new affliction unique we've seen so far, though Ixchel's Temptation from Ultimatum has a lot of potential too.
New Ultimatum Uniques
When Trialmaster returned he brought all of his boss drop Ultimatum Uniques with him, so exiles have been using Uniques like the Mahuxotl's Machination for several leagues now. But with the complete Ultimatum mechanic making a triumphant return, we're getting some brand new toys to play with.
Ixchel's Temptation
A Unique Gold Ring with an extremely random assortment of stats, so that the item benefits from every Catalyst Quality type. The Tainted Catalyst gives a random percentage of a random quality when used on a corrupted item. If you use this on Ixchel's Temptation it results in 1-200% of a random quality instead of the normal 1-20% thanks to the line; "Maximum Quality is 200%".
For example, if the Tainted Catalyst rolls the Fertile Catalyst effect it enhances the Maximum Life and Mana. In short, this item is a huge gamble but a tempting one.
Gamblesprint
On the other hand, Gamblesprint lets you gamble with your movement speed instead of your currency. The item's stats are extremely poor and losing all your movement speed when hit could lead to disaster. It averages out to 30% movement speed which is worse than the Tier 1 Hellion's modifier on boots, so this item adds a lot of risk for very little payoff.
Tenkiei's Thoughts
Ixchel's looks like it has a lot of random unrelated stats, but a surprising number end up overlapping. Critical Strike Multiplier in particular is a valuable stat on Rings, and before was only possible with Deafening Essence of Scorn. Even if 17% is the top roll, that scales up to 51% with perfect quality offering a solid amount of damage. Assuming anyone hits that before burning through all the Catalysts in the League anyway. Gamblesprint on the other hand looks like a terrible idea to wear, going fast is fun and suddenly going really slow isn't. Using Unstoppable prevents you from going below zero but still leaves the average at 30% because it continually attempts to go below 0 on bad rolls.
Stay Up to Date
The Maxroll Team is hard at work updating our Build Guides, Currency Strategies and Resources for the new League. Are you looking for more news on Path of Exile builds, events, and upcoming patches? Then head over to our Discord and select the Path of Exile role in #roles to stay up to date with our content development. Stay sane, Exile!
Written by: Tenkiei
Reviewed by: Dredscythe
