Upgrading unique ethereal helmet bugged?

Recently got my hands on on an ethereal

Crown of Thieves and thought I might as well up it since I had the runes to spare but I'm not sure if it worked as intended.

Pre-upgrade it had 465 total def from 172% ED, a pretty low roll but I didn't mind, after upping it from a

Grand Crown to a

Corona I ended up with 473 total def, an increase of only 8def which seems weird because just the increase in defense in the base item is 52def (

Grand Crown 78-113 vs

Corona 111-165). From my understanding a unique item will always have the highest def of the base item so in my case I should have ended up with just north of 670 total def (165 base def + 50%

Eth bonus + 172%ED).

Is there some hidden rule when upgrading I'm not aware of? I've only upgraded my vipermagi armor earlier in D2R and ended up with the expected total defense.

EDIT: Nevermind, found the answer myself with some more googling, apparently the base defense of the item will be randomized when upping to Exceptional/Elite, so in my case I just had the bad luck of a low roll, managed to roll the base item somewhere areound 116, 5 off from the lowest possible.

Pirazy wrote: 2 years ago

EDIT: Nevermind, found the answer myself with some more googling, apparently the base defense of the item will be randomized when upping to Exceptional/Elite, so in my case I just had the bad luck of a low roll, managed to roll the base item somewhere areound 116, 5 off from the lowest possible.

Well thanks for the information! At least we know now.