Why is gear still "unique"?

[Mawlzy]

Pretty sure it's precisely targeting the casual crowd, so they either do normal mode raid or grab a ring from a crafter.
Raid folks don't care, one ring from savage + one ring from tomes, case closed.

Good point, although I'm not sure why the devs feel there's a benefit to the game if I craft the second ring.

[LilimoLimomo]

Under the current system, there are multiple problems with gear being unique. It's needlessly inconvenient to get a second ring. If they want to keep the Unique system, all they need to do is make rings Unique(2), meaning that you cannot have more than 2 of a single ring. Problem solved.

But honestly, Unique is also painful from a glamour perspective. If I have 4 max-level casters, they can't easily share the same gear without also sharing the same glams. If I want each of them to have a custom glam and I also want to be able to switch between classes anywhere, I need each class to have its own set of gear. Which is hard to do with Unique. Not saying Unique is the thing that needs to go away to solve this (changes to Glam would be more ideal, but seem less likely), but it is exacerbating the issue.

[Naychan]

The only reason I can think of is they want to give people a reason to get the raid jewelry which is a small bump, but quickly quickly overshadowed. Or if you had two rings when they came out you would be too uber for the way they design fights. Either way that's the only reason I have ever come up with in 8 years.

[SDaemon]

This always leads to the same issue - fully gearing up in a set leaves us one ring short.

I've always interpreted this as the Devs wanting players to use a combination of both raiding and tomes to get every slot max ilvl. It doesn't really bother me personally. I just fill the second ring slot with a HQ crafted ring, pentameld it and go about my activities. As for the "unique" factor of it. Other than rings and glamour it isn't much of an issue. If someone truly wanted multiple copies of unique items for whatever reason throw them on your retainers. As for the glamour, glamour plates sort of get around the issue but glamour as a whole is a clunky mess in this game.

[Collin_Sky]

Rings are unique to encourage you to actually do content and not just cap tomes each week.