Is copying traditional folklore the solution to our gear issue?

Ignoring class balancing (which isn't an issue as much a never ending process), gear seems to be the big issue.

In story after story, the great ring / the magic sword / the hoobajoob of probing is either taken from the conquered foe or lost to time. Could that help with some of the gear issues?

What would that look like?

1. Instead of just making more rares, make more uniques. I don't mean that the item X should have more copies. I mean that more rares should be turned into single copy uniques - a lot more. What if the top 10% of gear was limited to 1 copy? (10% is just an example.)

2. The problem then is how do we keep said items in circulation? Uniques could/would/should behave differently. After a pdeath, uniques would appear on the ground in a bag only accessible by the killer. After 3-4 ticks, any gear not picked up disappears.

Additional ideas

1. Any gear that disappears reappears on a random mob (at least for gear found on mobs). Could be limited by area or mob rank... or not. It might be interesting to test security through obscurity.

2. Gear doesn't immediately reappear. You can't just go kill Bob twice to get Bob's magic hoobajoob. But waiting for the purge might be too long to wait. Force players to explore.

3. Maybe add a board announcing when items are back in the lands. Or a bard sharing rumors. Buy him a beer and he'll say "I heard that someone saw the Hoobajoob in Haon Dor".

Good idea. 

But make it held that 10 good pieces now only  by one person? You ever heard of kortag?

I think gear balance and rarity will always be a thing. I dont mean to hate on the thread. There will be days I support this, days I will not.  Forsaken lands fun as hell tho.

Why do you think there's a gear issue?

13 minutes ago, f0xx said:

Why do you think there's a gear issue?

I certainly didn't set up a spreadsheet to track thread count, word, count, etc. But after digging through the forums, class / cabal balance and gear seem like the top 2 topics.

And after reading solutions which could be grouped under "the same but more", I wondered what it would be like if the opposite was tried.

Reducing the rare count drastically has been tried out twice now, both times with catastophic results (I could at least say I told you so the second time ;) ).

It results in far fewer chars being decked to their teeth, while the rest have nothing.

Now, we did NOT go the more of the same stuff approach, as you are saying, but instead went the offer interesting alternatives rout.

Thanks for the feedback, @Anume

"More of the same" wasn't meant as a dig. I was referring to changes mentioning increasing count of existing rares.

Out of curiosity,  how many unique items are there? How many unique rares are there?