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The original was posted on /r/pathfinder2e by /u/Iosis on 2023-10-06 18:52:23.

My group is new to PF2e and loving it so far, but my players are a bit sad about how unique magic items seem to work, in that they don’t really scale. The idea that generic weapons upgraded with property runes will pretty much already be better is cool, but they’d like unique weapons to put up a bit more of a fight, too, and they’re sad that if they find a cool unique weapon it’ll inevitably become obsolete in just a few levels.

I was trying to think of how to potentially address this, but I don’t want to fuck up the balance too badly, so I’m hoping I can get some advice on these ideas.

• First idea: players can use their class DC instead of the weapon’s DC for activated effects. This would mean that active effects with a save DC won’t become obsolete in a couple levels because the DC will scale with the PC’s level.
• Second idea: you may add a limited number of property runes as you upgrade a unique weapon’s fundamental rune. It’d work like this: let’s say you get a +2 unique sword with some cool effects you like. Because the weapon comes at a +2, it’s considered to have 2 property rune slots already filled. If you upgrade the fundamental rune to +3, you add an empty property rune slot that you can now fill with whatever rune you’d like.

But I actually wonder if the first idea is enough. I suspect that with a weapon’s DC scaling instead of being static, a weapon that starts at, say, +1 might not actually be any weaker than a weapon that starts at +2 or +3, so being able to add two whole property runes to it as you upgrade it might make it too good. But I’m not really sure about that.

Thanks for any advice anyone has!

(If neither of these ideas are a good idea, then I’ll probably just tell my players to give their custom weapons fancy names. That’d probably smooth it over somewhat on its own!)