Now that Ancient Items are live in Patch 2.1.2, I’ve been talking to players to gauge their impact. Most people don’t test on the PTR and lots of players don’t really follow the news about coming soon features, but it seemed like pretty much everyone had at least heard about Ancient Weapons before the patch went live. Lots of people hadn’t absorbed the strategic implications though, which is why we keep getting forum posts and questions in chat about ancient jewelry.

For the better informed fans (like you guys), it was no surprise that Ancient rings and amulets were pretty much irrelevant, that Ancient armor had good potential, but that Ancient Weapons were the place to focus your attention.

Of course you’ve got to find one, and that’s the hard part. I haven’t found one yet (7 ancients so far, all armor or jewerly, none worth using), but thankfully you don’t have to “find” an ancient weapon… you can craft or gamble. Gambling a legendary weapons is hard enough and it’s 10x harder to gamble an Ancient one, which is why Crafting is the loophole. It was for me at least, and the first thing I did when I got online after Patch 2.1.2 went live was head to not-Griswold for some item-makin’.

My luck was good, since it took just 8 tries to get an Ancient version of both the crafted bows. You can see them in the screen to the right. (I didn’t try with the xbow or hand xbow, since they’re kind of suck unless you’re doing Hallowed set, and xbow/shield isn’t exactly my ideal DH gear option.) They’re not idea and I certainly hope to find better, but both were enormous DPS upgrades over the 2600 DPS Calamity I’d been using, and gaining 43% DPS with the Unbound Bolt was plenty enough to offset the loss of the Marked for Death proc from Calamity. The damage rolls on both bows are good but not great, and neither can be an ideal weapon since the crafting recipe gives each 3 inherent affixes (damage, IAS, and +Elite damage / Crit Damage) so it’s very hard to get mainstat and +damage% and a socket. I didn’t, since the Unbound Bolt rolled with Vitality. I was able to Enchant that into Dex though, and with a socket from a Gift of Ramaladni, it was a nice new weapon. My unbuffed DPS went from 880K up to 1200K DPS, and that much improvement was very obvious in the gameplay.

So how are you guys doing on your Ancient Weapons? Pre-patch we kept urging the strategy I just detailed; save up materials so you could craft a legendary weapon right away, and it worked for me, even though I didn’t have that many souls to spend. The problem for a lot of players is that their builds *require* a specific legendary weapon.

Just this morning two guys in the clan were on with their WDs, both were using Starmetal Kukuris, and though they were doing fine on T6 with their current gear, they couldn’t help but salivate over the idea of adding 300k DPS with a new weapon. They couldn’t craft any of the one-handed weapons to get it though, since they required the Starmetal proc for their builds.

That’s the hard part about Ancient Weapons; amazing if you find one, great if you craft one, but for every build with a lot of weapon options, there’s another build that requires one specific legendary weapon. Is that fair? Okay? Should there be some change to upgrade existing items into Ancient versions, as fans often requested pre-patch? Or is the whole point of a Diablo game the struggle to seek out a great new item, thus enabling amazing things to happen when you hit the jackpot?

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