Unity: Drop / Farming / Explanations

Last updated on Oct 30, 2016 at 10:28 by Deadset

Table of Contents

1.

What is Unity?

Unity Unity splits incoming damage between wearers of this item within the same party. The shared damage is split after it gets mitigated by the initial target, and the split amount will directly affect the health pools of the remaining wearers. This prevents any potential double dipping on mitigation between party members. There is one notable exception of this rule; splitting damage with your follower by equipping both of you with Unity Unity, and then equipping the follower with an immortality item for a permanent 50% damage reduction to the player. Note that this tactic is only available in solo play, since followers leave your side in multiplayer.

2.

How to farm Unity?

Like most Diablo 3 items, Unity Unity cannot be targeted from specific enemies or events; it is found by random chance as you farm normally: killing monsters and looting chests, corpses and other containers. Nevertheless, you can vastly improve your chances of finding Unity Unity with the following steps:

  • Increase difficulty — Increasing in-game difficulty also improves your chances of obtaining legendary and set items. Make a point to only bump up the difficulty to the highest you can handle while still being efficient — killing elites in less than 10 seconds is a good metric.
  • Farm in a party — Grouping up is universally considered the best way to farm in Diablo 3, due to the scaling Magic Find bonus for every additional player in the game. With monster health not scaling proportionally to player number and player's ability to share drops when partied up, the result is a significantly faster and efficient way to attain and divide loot.
  • Farm rifts — While campaign mode is fun to experience the story and bounties are important for materials and certain bounty-exclusive legendaries, the best content to do when your goal is strictly to obtain the item discussed in this article are regular Nephalem Rifts. These normal rifts offer a higher legendary drop rate than bounties, scaling with your selected difficulty. If you are looking to strike a balance between experience (for Paragon levels) and item gain, the second best content are Greater Rifts.
  • Spend shards at Kadala — Gambling the blood shard currency (obtained from the Rift Guardians in normal Nephalem Rifts and Greater Rifts) at the Kadala NPC in town gives you an exclusive chance to target a specific equipment slot. With realistically about a dozen legendary items per slot, this reduces the RNG pool significantly, and is regarded as an excellent way to target class-specific Offhand items (shields, quivers, orbs, mojos) due to their low price. Gambling offers a 10% chance to roll a legendary, regardless of Magic Find stats or difficulty settings. Note however the difference in Blood Shard price between slots, as it affects the efficiency of gambling for that slot: 25 for Armor pieces and Offhand items, 50 for Rings, 75 for Weapons, and 100 for Amulets. Unity Unity is a ring gambled at the medium price of 50 Blood Shards, marking it as a relatively efficient item to gamble for — as long as you do not have other priority pieces for your particular build obtainable at a lower price.
  • Upgrade rares — You can transform Rare (yellow) items to random legendary or set items of the same slot with the Upgrade Rare recipe in Kanai's Cube. The Hope of Cain recipe (1 rare item, 25 Death's Breaths, 50 of white, blue and yellow crafting materials) will chew through your crafting materials, and is generally used for build-defining, class-specific weapons. Unity Unity are a cross-class medium rarity legendary item, marking it inefficient as a legendary to Upgrade Rares for. Nevertheless, Unity Unity can be obtained through this method and it can be considered for endgame, if your particular build requires this item for damage mitigation in solo GRs.
  • Gamble with a low level alt — While a good number of legendary items will not drop before level 70, the majority are gradually introduced to the loot table prior to max level in order to spice up the leveling process. You can look up the level at which a certain legendary starts to drop by visiting its battle.net page and looking in the upper right corner (the Requires level: X field). You can then utilize a strategy of leveling an alt up to, or to a minimum of 7 levels below, the listed required level. Since Blood Shards are shared between characters, you can farm up Blood Shards on your main, and spend them on the low level alt to further minimize the gambling item pool. Note that this strategy will yield an item with stats appropriate to the low level alt, making them extremely subpar for endgame. This strategy is mostly used for low level requirement, build-defining items whose powers are extracted in Kanai's Cube, since item stats are disregarded by cubing. Unity Unity starts dropping as late as level 60, marking it inefficient as a legendary to make a gambling alt for.
3.

Where and when to use Unity?

While it can be taken in multiplayer to share incoming damage between multiple party members, it is highly advisable that you do not employ such strategies. This is due to the fact that only the initial recipient of the damage mitigates it with his defensive stats, leaving the remainder of the damage to be directly distributed among the healthpools of the other wearers. In the exponentially scaling damage numbers of higher difficulties, this will easily wear down your party. Still, due to the great stats of the ring (natural increased damage against elites and critical hit chance, ability to obtain crit damage and socket on top of these) it is acceptable for one party member to wear the ring, which ignores the legendary effect. If you have a well rolled Unity Unity, make sure you clearly communicate to your group that you want to be the sole wearer in the party.

The best known (and recognized by developers as legitimate) tactic to wear Unity Unity is in solo play, pairing it with one on the follower and equipping him with an immortality item (Enchanting Favor Enchanting Favor for the Templar, Smoking Thurible Smoking Thurible for the Enchantress and Skeleton Key Skeleton Key for the Scoundrel). Since immortality follower items do not simply prevent the follower from dying, but completely negate any and all damage done to him, this effectively results in a permanent 50% reduction of damage to the player.

4.

With a popular combo that cuts incoming damage in half during solo play, Unity Unity synergizes well with other solo Greater Rift pushing-oriented items. When using Unity Unity, you can refer to our synergistic items list to find other related legendaries that enhance or work well with it. Uniquely to Unity Unity, we will also list items that work similarly to, or better than this ring — in order to provide you with alternatives for damage mitigation.

  • Enchanting Favor Enchanting Favor, Smoking Thurible Smoking Thurible and Skeleton Key Skeleton Key — As previously mentioned, follower items that grant immortality to him are especially potent with Unity Unity on both yourself and the chosen companion.
  • Aquila Cuirass Aquila Cuirass reduces incoming damage by half as long as your reserve does not dip below 90-95% of its max, depending on the roll of the item (the lower, the better). This item is better than Unity Unity for builds with cheap spenders, or ones relying purely on generator attacks, because it can be used to full effect in groups as well as solo.
  • Band of Might Band of Might is the Barbarian-specific equivalent of Unity Unity; at the cost of using one of several popular Barbarian attacks at least once every 8 seconds, it will provide with up to 10% more mitigation than Unity Unity. This item is better than Unity Unity, because it can be used to full effect in groups as well as solo.
  • Elusive Ring Elusive Ring is the Demon Hunter-specific equivalent of Unity Unity; at the cost of using one of several popular Demon Hunter defensive skills at least once every 8 seconds, it will provide with up to 10% more mitigation than Unity Unity. This item is better than Unity Unity, because it can be used to full effect in groups as well as solo.
  • Justice Lantern Justice Lantern is a class agnostic (but Crusader-oriented) equivalent of Unity Unity, providing damage mitigation based on stacking Block Chance — up to 5% more than Unity Unity. This item is better than Unity Unity, because it can be used to full effect in groups as well as solo.
  • Halo of Arlyse Halo of Arlyse is a Wizard-specific answer to Unity Unity; aside from increasing the damage reduction potential of your Ice Armor Ice Armor, it adds the unique mechanic of answering incoming damage with Frost Nova Frost Novas — free, immediate and devoid of internal cooldowns. Since Diablo 3 counts freezes for stuns, this ring can be coupled with Ancient Parthan Defenders Ancient Parthan Defenders to provide far more mitigation than Unity Unity. On top of that, it can be used to full effect in groups as well as solo.
5.

Builds That Use Unity

To find out the list of builds on Icy Veins that use Unity Unity, please consult our Salvage Guide.

6.

Changelog

  • 30 Oct. 2016: Item article added.
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