For a brief intro:
- Weapons and armor have quality tiers, going from Common +0 all the way to Legendary +3.
- Each tier improves the item's stats, and if the "tier difference" between you and your opponent is large enough (4), the one with the better equipment gets an additional 35% bonus. As in, my weapon is so much better than your armor that on top of the impressive damage my upgraded weapon is doing against your weak armor, I get an extra 35%.
- So, having upgraded gear makes the game a lot easier. And, to go between tiers, say from Fine +3 to Exceptional +0, you need Adra or its upgrades (Awakened Adra etc). This is a bottleneck. Update: Only applies to uniques. Since uniques are pretty much objectively better than plain equipment however, we still want to do this.
On my first playthrough I tried to upgrade my starting gear... I spent all of Dawnshore struggling to reach Fine (while a lot of monsters have Fine equipment). Then I spent all of Emerald Stair struggling to reach Exceptional (which monsters tend to have there). Then I just started buying upgraded equipment as soon as I got into a new zone instead, and started preaching this method too.
People discovered that uniques you loot will scale up to whatever you currently have equipped (or maybe in your possession). You have Exceptional armor; you loot Exceptional unique armor. Someone on Reddit galaxy brained how to best take advantage of this. Inspired by this post, I started a PotD run. I avoided all uniques until I was able to buy a Fine armor and weapon (Update: If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, I've been informed it's cheaper to upgrade plain items to Fine, and that requires no Adra). Then I selected one weapon and one armor that would be my equipment for Dawnshore and broke down all other uniques. Since I looted them as Fine, breaking them down gave me Adra, which I turned into Awakened Adra, which eventually allowed me to (combined with buying Adra from merchants and looting it here and there) upgrade my weapon and armor to Exceptional before even leaving Dawnshore.
Had I played normally, I would have had Common equipment when looting these uniques and not received any Adra for scrapping them. I also would have probably saved some of them because hey, maybe I'll want to use them, or I want to keep them for transmog. And this is where you say, hey that's what I'm doing and experiencing. I feel you. You're struggling to upgrade because you didn't metagame. Anyway, it gets a little worse.
What I'd done in Dawnshore wasn't even fully optimal. Even better would be to pick one slot to focus on (I choose armor because I'm very passionate about not getting oneshot), looting my desired armor, then looting all the uniques for the other slot (weapon). Not until I had upgraded my armor to Exceptional would I loot all the other unique armor, which would then, you guess it, drop as Exceptional. What's it matter? Well, Exceptional armor breaks down into Awakened Adra directly - if I loot it as fine I only get 1/3 of that since it takes 3 Adra to make 1 Awakened Adra. That would make it a lot easier to upgrade my weapon and I'd finish the zone with more [Awakened] Adra. I'm even thinking about starting over and doing this. I will, either way, play Emerald Stair like that.
I expect to finish Emerald Stair with Superb +1 or +2 equipment. I expect anyone who is playing Emerald Stair right now without research or metagaming is struggling to reach Exceptional (unless they bought it). Which I am about to waltz in there already sporting.
The light at the end of the tunnel here is that playing like this doesn't actually get you something you cannot get with a sane playstyle, but you get there sooner and you have a more pleasant journey except for the starting ritual of avoiding uniques. "There" meaning Legendary +3 equipment.
I'm not looking to start a riot here. I don't believe Obsidian are happy with this either. Let this post inform your decisions, and feel free to post ideas for how to solve this mess. I can think of an easy one - let transmogs just be a catalog of appearances you've looted rather than requiring you to keep the item around. I like how my armor looks right now, but I will be replacing it in Emerald Stair, and keeping the old one afterwards means I'm not getting Awakened Adra out of it.
P.S. You want to get even more degenerate? Loot no uniques in Dawnshore at all, buy Exceptional equipment in Emerald Stair, then loot Dawnshore 
Edited by omgFIREBALLS
