Upgrade a Weapon AS SOON AS YOU CAN !!!

[Lonlon]

Hey, playing PotD (I'm about 20h into the game) and just realised something-I-really-wish-I-knew-before regarding quality of dropped unique weapons (I'm pretty sure it works the same with armor, I didn't tested it though).

Here it is :
If you own a Fine quality weapon (unique or not, does not matter), all unique weapons you will drop will be Fine quality too !!! So you need to upgrade at least one weapon to Fine as soon as you can ! This will save you tons of materials (especially adra because unique gear requires adra to upgrade !)

I was hoarding my materials while looking for all unique gear in the first zone and thought I would upgrade the weapon I like the most after I get everthing. This was terrible idea because now all my unique gear is common quality and I need tons of adra to upgrade it to Fine Quality !

As I said I only tested it with weapons, but it's probably the same with armors.

Bad design imo but it is what it is.
Hope it saves you some frustration

EDIT after further testing : It seems that the quality of an item is set forever as soon as you display its tooltip. Even if you let it on the ground and come back later to pick it up, its quality will remain the same. On the other hand, if you manage to not "see" the item (i.e. to not display its tooltip), the game will not lock its quality and it will continue to upgrade as you upgrade your own items.

Edited Sunday at 05:29 PM by Lonlon

[omgFIREBALLS]

This probably also means those uniques will sell for more money too. I went back to Dawnshore to grab a unique I'd missed and was surprised to see it drop at Exceptional quality (worth 2k), knowing I could have gotten it at like level 3 if I'd known where to look.

So in other words, uniques you don't need immediately should be left behind until you do need them for cash/reagents, because they will magically evolve if left alone. And you have to keep a list of which ones you've yet to collect, across zones. Yeah, this is no good.

Edited Sunday at 06:37 AM by omgFIREBALLS

[Lonlon]

Yes, imo uniques should be a fixed quality drop (prob the same quality as the mob they drop from or something like that) because this design encourages weird and non-intuitive metagaming.
The difference between having all blue and all green unique weapons and armors is huge in term of versatility and wealth management (at least in the first act/zone). Upgrading all uniques to blue quality costs tons of materials...

If you say they continue scaling while you progress into the game, then it's even worse  

Beeing forced to not loot uniques is just bad.