I started taking a look at the breakdown of stats that epics have and their viability here in the last few months and had to ask, "why are the epics used in multiple aspects at lower levels, but neglected for anything aside from stamina gain past a certain threshold?" That caused me to investigate into what the reason behind that might be, and the results? Fairly shocking.
As seen by the above, the stat point allocation per level exponentially decreases until it eventually levels off to roughly 2 stat points per level of the epic item. But what if it's just the old epics bringing the average down?
Given this graph, we see the same general shape, and these are only epics with item numbers of 14000 or greater; that means items added to the game within the last four years or so.
Both of these show the decrease in stat point value for epic items, but that still doesn't show why they aren't necessarily used - let's take a deeper look into this as well.
Below are a series of graphs that show stat point allocation per level based on rarity of items across a select few levels. These levels were selected to show the variation in stat point allocation for the rarities, however, all levels where an epic is located were conducted.
Disclaimer: For items that belong to a set, the set bonus to the item was applied by taking the total number of stat points in the set bonus and distributing them equally across the number of items in the set. Why was this done? The use of Coordinated Buffs is too much for epics to make up for losing.
As seen by the graphs, at level 100, the epics are valued higher than even items with set bonuses, which greatly increases their viability in those other aspects outside of "stam gain use," however, at level 300, only 200 levels higher, that gap shrinks considerably. And at 1000? Epics have the same value as a Unique Set Item.
The later two levels provided then show just how skewed the stat points are away from epic items as Legendary set items have a full stat point extra per level at 3900 than an epic, and at 4500, our highest epic before the recent release of the Snorra Amulet is even slightly less than Unique Set Items.
What's the fix? Well, I would suggest making a flat Stat Point Allocation per Level to Epics at 4x the level and distributing them that way. This would immediately increase epic viability in arena, offline use (aside from stam gain), and add another variable to work around even in regular PvP or 1-Hit usage. Multiple +7 items in the same slot where players "don't necessarily care" about the upgrade because of the stam gain being the same now becomes a nearly "must-have" for other uses as well.
A simple fix in making them 4x would drastically improve the market demand for the items immediately, and circulation would be at an all time high; increased activity for these items is only good for the game.