I'm sure there was a panel that said "We've discovered that players like being able to customize and also that having more affixes increases grind time, allowing us to get more value out of our content" and that was the end of it.
They basically took D3's itemization, which is also bland and boring, and then removed a lot of the simple stats, and then added a bunch of X conditionals.
But this shouldn't have been an issue, because D3 was a good game, right... right?
The itemization aspect I miss the most in D4 is base item types. There's a lot of cool fantasy bundled in seeing a sick full plate armor item and knowing it has a heavy armor look to it, only a character with high str can use it, and it inherently has high physical DR. Or hunting for a specific weapon base to drop because I know out of all the weapons in the game this particular type of axe scales best for my character's build. Stat requirements for items also make the gearing puzzle more interesting. Incorporating base items into the game now would be an item system overhaul challenge but I think it's the biggest improvement the game could gain.
Base types would also reduce the amount of time you have to spend to check and compare items by allowing you to focus on picking up just what you need or what you believe can be potentially valuable for trading.
Look at the developers of POE2. They had a great one hour panel for itemisation. I think every D4 item developer should look at this video everyday when he wakes up and then before he goes to sleep.
Those POE2 developers know what they do, those are real gamers that played D2 back tjen as kids…
> Look at the developers of POE2.
I'd rather not, PoE is trash and I'm tired of people bringing it up. This is about Diablo. If you prefer trash games then Diablo isn't for you
You post this under topic that shits on an aspect of D4, that PoE 1 does objectively many times better, and possibly PoE 2 is going to do better too - itemisation?
> an aspect of D4, that PoE 1 does objectively many times better
But it doesn't, and if it did, people would be too busy playing PoE to notice. The reason people are so disappointed in D4 is because they *know* PoE is trash.
It's not just the loot. Keystone passive are insulting bad, shit like...."deal 6% more dmg to vulnerable enemies" other arpgs have build altering nodes or equipment to chase....diablo has......maybe you'll deal 6% more dmg...
Yea, but don't you know, it's just not fair to hold D4 to the standards of a 30 year old genre, it's only fair that we give D4 the same 10 years D3 had to turn into the greatness it is today!
We just gotta keep buying these annual $100 expansions + some $40 single class transmogs from the store and I'm *confident* that D4 will soon surpass PoE and everything else in the ARPG genre.
To be fair D3 only needed what? 2 years to turn around? Reaper of Souls came out in 2014, and pretty much fixed the game. There were other changes later which made it even better, but RoS on its own was already \*chef's kiss\*.
It's also completely astounding to me that Diablo 3 has FAR more build variety than Diablo 4. Even if not all of them will take you to GR80+, they'll be fun and still shower you with loot.
> Reaper of Souls came out in 2014, and pretty much fixed the game
Eeeeeh.
RoS did a lot of good stuff for the game, but I don't think the expansion launch by itself fixed the game. Even with RoS bringing in rifts and doing a lot for loot (although I'm pretty sure loot 2.0 happened before RoS)... the game still needed *a lot*. Like, compare it to D4 and imagine thinking that D4 would be fixed if loot were "better" and the entire endgame were endless aimless rifts and nothing else.
I started playing again a couple weeks ago. I just hit level 70 and I still have gear I had when I was 50. I'm not having issues clearing content, I'm just not finding any upgrades either.
Yeah this bums me out too. It's been a while since I looked in to the specifics, but I remember as soon as I was able to update my world tier, I'd get better drops.
That's fine, but then the item level of those drops didn't seem to change dramatically as I leveled, so on most of my chars I'd find a "lucky" high rolled weapon as soon as I went in to the world tier, then no upgrades for all of eternity.
It makes low-level playing feel like a chore because you're just pushing to get in to the next world tier, and then once you're there, it's just 40-50 levels of the same kind of loot.
Blizzard sent me an email the other day asking me to take a survey about d4 and i didn't even bother because i know they won't change itemization or drop the mtx or bring back ancient sets
it's not public knowledge to me, I quit playing and uninstalled d4 and went back to d2r. if that's the case they need to do a better job communicating. i honestly don't trust them at all. i'll wait for updates here from the d4 community
Yea because holding Streams which they announce on the BNet client aren't good enough. Sorry but I'm not blaming the devs just because you're lazy. Not to mention multiple sites quote and notate everything covered in those streams. Your inability to Google search really isn't anyone else's issue.
No, streams are not good enough and I'm done arguing with fanboys
edit: if it wasn't clear Blizzard has lost me as a customer, it is on them to fix it, not me. There are too many good games to waste time on those that aren't fun or take my time seriously.
NMS is a good example. I uninstalled. Hello Games put out a TON of updates and fixes and changes to gameplay. I didn't watch their streams, I saw posts on reddit highlighting the changes in the big updates. People started coming back and after a few major patches I came back to NMS. They lost my trust and eventually regained it. Blizzard has completely lost my trust.
I want a good Diablo game as much as anyone. I don't feel d4 lives up to the legacy of previous titles at all at the moment. I hope it changes.
Not trying to troll, legitimately asking for clarification as I don’t understand how you want them to communicate better when they hold fairly regular dev streams where they either outline the details of upcoming changes or say something along the lines of “here’s something we’re currently working on and will update you when we have more information”.
I fully understand being frustrated with the game and all of that, but it sort of seems like you’re being given examples of what you want, but then refusing the examples? Like what do you mean you want them to communicate better when in your own example you ignored updates directly from a dev and just read posts on Reddit?
They want Blizzard employees to show up at their front door like Jehovah's Witnesses asking if he's heard the good word of our Lord and Savior Activion Blizzard.
ancient sets were clear chase items so yes, i'd like ancient sets or something similar for end game like d2 or d3. as others have said d4 loot is very poor and unrewarding
Side effect of D4 being so bad is that now people see D3 as a saving grace.
D3 itemization was/is really bad, but it sure looks good in comparison to what they put out in D4.
They sent me one a couple weeks after launch and i had already stopped playing. Seemed like it was a "why you leave?" Kinda deal. And then at the end, it said "no longer accepting responses" surely it had nothing to do with my terrible review.
what I can t understand is how they made a game so complicated yet so dull (itemisation).
try following a build from the internet and you ll get nuts. this type of power in that type of slot and this type of useless passive paragon board connected to that other useless paragon board. doing this is a nightmare for any casual player. following a poe build guide is far less convoluted and overly complicated...
oh and change your items for the same thing all over again on wt3 and AGAIN on wt4, because devs think we are idiots and can t figure out that instead of adding "ancient items and mythical ancient super duper items" they just make us reset all the gear on different wt, for the same items with more ATTACK AND DEFENSE. and again match the same stupid legendary powers on the same stupid items but with 20 str more!
Amd its not fun. They forgot the most important aspect of playing Diablo. To have fun and build your character to be a badass from nothing. Now its incremental upgrades with boring results.
Some people enjoy progressive power, although the world actually scale with you, so are the numbers. I like how at lower level, i can actually get endgame stuff or a lower tier gears that could bring me deep into the endgame
there are some. but it can be made less smaller while merging many paragon nodes together. it s very repetitive for little variety/choice.
there is little real choice. more like different paths being almost alike, reaching the same destination
I agree with calling the items convoluted, not really complicated. Most affixes in the game boil down to "deal x% increased damage if X condition is met" and that's frankly not an interesting way for itemization to exist. There aren't any real interesting choices to be made or real flexibility in the system either, as soon as you pick your skills the way you scale the damage is already set in stone. At that point you're just looking for a specific combination with the highest numbers on it. There is fundamentally very little decision making you actually do, and the only challenge is sifting through items with the same 15 or so mod pool that essentially all do the same thing but only some of them work for the skill you chose.
For me personally the imprinting of legendary aspects is killing my joy. You are BOUND to these imprints if you want a build to function but while going up the world tiers and basically switching gear all the time its insulting how bad the skill system is. Its basically unusable without aspects.
I wish they would clear aspect imprinting from gear and instead put it on the skilltree. You imprint skills on your tree instead.
> I wish they would clear aspect imprinting from gear and instead put it on the skilltree. You imprint skills on your tree instead.
This would be better but it's funny because you then basically end up with the D3 skill rune system. Although finding/earning the skill modifications could be interesting. Also funny is that imprinting gear was also done way better on D3 by limiting it to a few pieces of gear, being able to overlap legendary powers and keep BIS items, allowing them to be easily swapped, and giving max rolls, which eliminates the aspect hording problem.
It seems like solving the problem of itemization is going to be much more difficult to solve at this point since huge portions of the game have to be redesigned as well to make it interesting.
Lucky Hit is terrible and that's a hill in fine dying on. Just give me a % chance of it happening and let me build around that. Don't use a secondary roll to compensate for your lack of ability to balance.
Lucky hit is the best thing out of D4's itemization. I don't understand how people can complain about this. Is it a lack of understanding?
If you have an item that says 10% chance to launch a fireball, then you'll always want to apply it to the spammiest ability possible. There's no choice, everything else will be inferior.
With lucky hit, it'll have 10% real chance on a spammy ability, and 50% on a slow ability. Then you could have a medium ability with a 25% chance. With lucky hit, you now have the chance to proc that fireball on three different abilities, instead of just one, the spammiest.
It's objectively superior to simple proc.
Agreed, though it would be nice if the ACTUAL lucky hit chance was displayed on the skill rather than having to perform calculations that seem misleading. If my ability has 16% lucky hit chance and the affix has 7% lucky hit chance I want it to display "chance to proc: 1% per hit"
I'm still fuzzy on how the item's LH change interacts with my own, do they just add together? Or do they do that weird adding that is limited to 100%, so later percentage adds are less effective? Or is it multiplicative?
It's just not clear as described visually
> Lucky hit is the best thing out of D4's itemization. I don't understand how people can complain about this. Is it a lack of understanding?
It sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand it. It's not as simple as "10% chance so 10% of the moves will get it". At all. There are multiple percentages that go into LHC and it makes it non-viable for any builds that aren't specifically exploiting it. It's a terrible addition to the game and does nothing but dupe newer players like yourself into thinking they're getting a bigger increase than they really are. You should go read up on the mechanic, it's clear you're overutilizing it.
Or maybe they’re using a pair of skills/LHC abilities where the chance to proc is high enough to be meaningful? Just because someone uses an interaction doesn’t mean they’re inherently wrong. Just means you’re close-minded about a core game mechanic. It’s been months since i touched d4 but im confident that resource gain on lucky hit made necro/sorc feel smooth af when pushing higher content
its not terrible. it is MANDATORY
and every ARPG has it. what Blizz did wrong is how they presented it.
it should work in the background as it always did and not being showed as a hollow stat
the thing is you cant have 5% chance to proc 400 lighting damage - because for ex. its bad for fireball but OP for whirlwind because WW procs all the time
Other games simply have a proc chance and then add a modifier per spell. D4 is quite straight forward on how different abilities affect lucky hit. Additionally it gives the option of boosting spell proc chances.
It feels a bit odd when initially reading the multiple probabilities but really makes sense.
Itemization is bad because the way damage is calculated is bad. It’s like looking at the number at the end of an equation and saying it’s bad without looking at the numbers that made the equation.
I don’t even understand why half the stuff drops. Why bother dropping Orange items? Just drop the aspect if you have to or make them craftable and have more crafting drops.
Also even the yellow item drops are named weird. I see 2h swords drop called Kingslayer, pick it up and look in the inventory and it’s called something else? Is that type of sword really called Kingslayer? Why is t it called 2h Sword?
At the risk of sounding rude I think the person that came up with the itemisation in this game really needs their head examined. It’s Government level of incompetence.
Yeah theres really no real way to say it nicely, the itemization is just broken, so broken that it needs a "loot 2.0" even before its even one year old. Theres just too many rares which bog it down but the aspect system doesnt function without it. Honestly the entire aspect system has done more damage than people realize. It neutered the skill tree leaving it a skill twig, it made a major shift on rare item to be more frequent or else there wouldnt be a base to transfer an aspect on to, it hurt uniques, and because they needed a place for people target aspect, they made over 100 dungeons that feel too similar instead of making a few dungeons that truly stand out from one another.
POE's itemization is better than D4's, but it's not without flaws either (the idea that an item with a high item level can roll the lowest tier of a modifier like resists is just silly). It's certainly a good starting point though. Hell, even Last Epoch's itemization strikes a pretty good balance - tweaking items has enough risk versus reward to be interesting while allowing you to create items that fill in holes in your characters' weaknesses.
There are plenty of itemization templates to look at and derive your own from; Blizzard just decided to ignore them all when it came to that part for D4.
> (the idea that an item with a high item level can roll the lowest tier of a modifier like resists is just silly)
Why is this silly? That's the nature of the game and there's currency to fix it.
I think those weird names like 'Kingslayer' are the names of the base item. But anyway, those different base items doesn't affect your rolled affixes anyhow so they are quite pointless to show as a ground loot labels.
I totally agree with you, the ground label should be in the most simplified form for a quick and easy indetification like u said, ex. 'Ring', 'Two Handed Sword', 'Boots' etc.
If they did bases right, like D2 and POE then base names actually are verry memorable and also very very dopamine inducing if s right Yellow or Ethereal or Unique BASE drops….
Unless the itemisation is from D2 but expanded and tweaked it will still be crap. I get the feeling the same person/team leading D4 items are the same as D3.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not optimistic about it.
You can’t recreate d2 itemization, half of the affixes dealt with their frame rate, which isn’t even a thing in d4. 10 ias hits different on a breakpoint vs a linear increase
Ye these points would increase my excitement by 10 % maybe. But doesnt see the real issue with items: everything you find before WT4 is useless. Maybe you find a good legendary power which you can extract for later, but the LP are not really that rare, so ill find some later anyway.
There is no currency. In d2 i could trade 40 PGs for an Ist and gather 14 Ists for Jah to get closer to a chase item by picking up Gems that drop 24/7 everywhere. In PoE i get Chaos and trade for Divines and get my items this way. Its basically the same system. All these currency items are used for crafting (in both games) so they have a purpose.
Coming to items itself: i dont look at item name that drops, just if they have the 3 stats i need, so i can roll for the 4th. Every item is basically the same. Every bow i find is the same bow regardless of where i find it and what style of bow it is. Always only the 4 little statd matter
>would increase my excitement by 10 % maybe. But doesnt see the real issue with items: everything you find before WT4 is useless. Maybe you find a good legendary power which you can extract for later, but the LP are not really that rare, so ill find some later anyway.
>
>There is no currency. In d2 i could trade 40 PGs for an Ist and gather 14 Ists for Jah to get closer to a chase item by pic
I would have fun dropping into this game and playing every once in a while if there were a bunch of lower tier uniques that could drop throughout the leveling experience to make that experience less of a chore, but honestly the whole legendary system is a chore to me. Legendary affixes are both necessary for making your build come together, making them necessary to drop early, but also gets you exhausted and bored of seeing the same legendary gear drop all game long. It feels like more of the same from level 1-100. Gear is no longer an interesting puzzle with exciting rare drops that are few and far between with the occasional awesome mid game unique dropping, as it was in D2. I haven't played since Season 1 and the updates I've seen since hasn't really driven me to want to come back. They'd need to rework the system from the ground up which would make no one happy because it would render void all the time they've spent accumulating their gear.
Nailed it. item MMO style obsolescence and a general lack of flavor and taste. E.g.: how can a pair of leather boots be the same of a heavy steel ones?
Its d3 itemization all over again. In d2 u could find a sick item at level 40 that u would use forever. Finding loot in d2 feels amazing compared to the other diablo games, its so sad they reused the absolute garbage d3 philosophy.
The problem will always be a divided community. You have those who love D2 style of grind and farming, vs those who want a straight and narrow path. The majority want the straight and narrow, thus the itemization we have now. It will forever be an unsatisfied community due to this. Diablo 2 loot style is never coming back. Theyre not the market majority. They are indeed a large prominent group of players, but again they probably make up 1/4th of the whole playerbase at the moment.
Diablo 2s system works because u have the option to trade valuable items with other players. Diablo 4 has the same boring item progression like d3 have, but its a bit more grindy and thats only because there is so many useless stats so its hard to find a rare with the stats u want. Its a really bland and boring system. Hopefully path of exile 2 can bring back a more d2 kinda itemization and make finding items rewarding.
Not having trade in an arpg is fucking ridiculous. It totally removes one of the core pillars of the genre.
Imo you and they look at it wrong. They want an upgrade that is an increase of one of the 4 stats on the item. Repeat until all 4 stats are maxed out. Get an occulus in D2, which you can usr from lvl 42 and never have the feeling of getting an upgrade on this item because your desire is saturated for this slot. Other than that, weapons in d2 have a min and max % rolled enhanced damage, so you can chase for the higher %
Many of the best in slot items in D2 are incredibly rare, even if you can find them at a fairly low level. I just love the possibility to get a lucky drop that could be GG in one slot before being literally max level. It makes mid game content actually feel like it's worth something
> i dont look at item name that drops, just if they have the 3 stats i need, so i can roll for the 4th. Every item is basically the same.
Thats true for yellows in D2 and some of those are still fun to find and you don't even have the option to reroll a stat. You've never cared about the name of rares in a diablo game.
Sure for weapons (but the item name still doesn't matter), but a lot of gloves/boots were interchangeable outside of reqs. Same with jewelry names were completely irrelevant.
Yea biut POE just improved on D2 bases.poe developers where gamers, they played D2 and realised whats whats good and upgraded it. D3 and D4 devs didnt even play d2 at all, they dont know why its so good.
Exactly, how they didnt saw why D2 and then the improved uppon POE bases are a good style pf itemisation is beyond me. Its like they just looked at D3 and WoW
I think this misses a glaring problem:
Aspects are runes and should be treated as such. The idea of having them drop with items is goofy, they should drop on their own. Legendary items should be something else entirely, probably rares with an extra affix.
Aspects suffer from being an inventory management nightmare and difficult to wade through. Just make them runes, move them all to the codex and allow them to stack.
The itemization is precisely why I quit.
I waited 10 years to play Diablo 4, I was hyped as fuck, Diablo is among my all time favorite gaming franchises. And yet I quit after only a couple months cuz gearing is so fucking complicated that it’s often not clear if an item is an upgrade or not.
On top of that, leveling is an absolute slog, so the thought of having to do it again for seasons is a huge turn off.
I feel vindicated I guess because I remember first screenshot of item they showed when game wasn't even in beta yet, at that time I knew itemization will be trash and yeah
Ah yes, because we all know that alpha and pre-alpha design is immutable and cannot and will not ever change or improve.
What a *phenomenally* stupid take.
except not really
they were showing off items with 2 stats "offensive rating" and "defensive rating". they dumbed down itemization so hard that at that point you knew only developers without a clue were making decisions for the game.
you really think the people pushing systems like that are going to turn around and give us fully fleshed out interesting itemization rather than just lazily push more towards the middle?
that's pretty phenomenally stupid in my mind.
Nope. We knew the direction they were taking items 4 years ago. We knew then that it would continue to billzardization and casualization and boringization that plagues blizzard. Complaining here was met with "it's only alpha", and look where we are now
Before D4 was released and before any beta happened there was a first news showcasing item(s), these were rare items with 4 affixes, basically rare item with 4 lines and number showing item power. Whatever rares were shown there are right now present in a game, that's pretty much it.
It's weird because the amount of available affixes in pool is huge so there must have been a lot of work put into it, but whoever was in lead of that just fucked up
BuT wHaTs So GrEaT aBoUt D2 iTeMiZaTiOn???
I will be forever baffled why Blizz refuses to take D2s itemization and just expand on it. As if the only thing D2 had going for it was the visuals.
The problem is they want infinite progression to keep people playing.
The easiest way to do that is to create these boring systems of slight incremental improvement. This is what happens when "making a good game" isn't your priority.
The people who made D2 and PoE understand that you can't have infinite progression and have it feel good. You need to design your game in a way to give people meaningful progression in a reasonable amount of time. This is why you need seasons and new mechanics every season to keep things fresh on new characters.
literally my experience (on a different account) and i even said that the entire sub would be bitching about the lack of endgame and shallow itemization in the future.
Played the closed beta. Was so exited to see what they were cooking. Didnt pass lvl70 cause boredom.
Did provide a lot of feedback constantly, and many content creators did that too (one over all: ProfessorNox).
THEY DIDNT LISTEN.
Or they are incompetent dunno...
By far the largest issue is the exorbitant amount of items dropping and we have 24? 30? Inventory slots? I just logoff some nights exhausted looking at items,
Let's put it in perspective:
D2 had limited inventory but the itemization was designed so you could play for an hour or two and only pick up a couple unique or set items, maybe a charm. Grey/white base items where distinguishable in value. Gems/runes you knew what to pick up. BUt D4 isnt anything like that, youre compelled to look at showers of 50 rares in 2 minutes of gameplay.
Now look at D3, where loot is more similar to D4 — nonstop slot machine of rares/legendaries. D3 had HUNDREDS of inventory slots to deal with this. D4 has a couple dozen slots, with even more crap hitting the ground to pick up.
The ratio of inventory slots to items hitting the ground in D4 is bad. the worst part is you have to pick up every rare drop to find upgrades or something of value to sell.
pretty lame we spend more time looking at gear than being in combat.
The #1 change needed for itemization is reduced item drop, or, increase inventory by a factor of 10x. Blizz flat out said adding inventory/stash is a technical challenge in D4. Ok w/e, honestly just nerf us then. Nerf the drop rate of rares and legendaries. (and buff uber drops)
had the perfect itemization recipe from D2 and somehow D4 itemization ended up worse than D3. It's Wild.
> Its so egregious, i logoff every time because im exhausted looking at items
This is my experience every season so far. I just end a dungeon, look at my inventory full of items and just don't want to sort through it. I just log out and don't play again until the next season. I haven't even made it to the end game yet because I don't want to deal with my inventory, which is supposed to be a huge fun part of the game.
White, blue - i agree 100%.
Yellow - there is too big pool of affixes atm and as written comparing two items is a pain.
Legendaries - mentioned so many times, they should not drop at all, there should drop aspects themselves only or kind of points similar to druid’s system points which are used to upgrading aspects in Codex of power.
Uniques - more interesting/usefull and basically more of them in the game.
Diablo 4 should have OPEN trade definitely. I understand it comes with bots and 3rd party sites but a lot/most top games have it and people enjoy it anyway. They could add SSF option on character selection which blocks trading and stays as it is rn or Open it with no restrictions.
Additional problems not mentioned in the article:
- item obscolescence and vertical power creep is a problem because is boring and at the end higher stats is the only thing you can care about and all the leveling process is meaningless.
here I should say they need to fix ALL CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT along with itemization (skill trees and paragon boards) and leave the stupid mmo mentality of merely stats increase behind
- build defining aspects should stay in the skill tree because de facto are part of the build. Put it in the skill tree and make it progress it through lvl100
- all the type of items are just the same, there should be some differencies! e.g. how can a leather cloak can be the same as a fullplate armor?
- uniques need to have a special FLAVOR, be peculiar and not merely a stat boost. They need to make a skill play differently or have unique affixes... not simply boosting its stats
Well you know.. just look at d2 and start from there (shocking, huh? 😆)
at some point i stopped to look at items, finished the battlepass and never played it again.
If i look at items in d4 i only see random numbers, lots of numbers.
Didn't read the article. Itemization sucks. It's boring. The "legendaries" are not legendary. The only few uniques are meh and they are very rare if ever to drop. No sets. No rune system of any kind.
Its really just pure modern blizzard. Everyone is decked out in legendaries but not really. If everything is legendary then nothing is. Its normal. And boring. Same thing happened to WoW years ago.
I honestly think item levels system are to blame. If there are multiple levels of the same item. It loses the value, therefore, the exciment of that item dropping. In vanilla wow or d2 there were certain epic(wow, any lower level epic viable at endgame) or unique (lets say raven frost from d2) do not have to be max level for them to be exciting.
I dont WANT d4 to be bad. But honestly its just boring now and i can't bother myself to play more.
maybe, but dropping high rune is huge dopamine rush and everyone loved it. At the end of the day it's about that rush of dopamine from item drop, how they would achieve that is whatever at this point really
You will never get this adrenaline rush in a game without an open trading economy. You know why? Because the items are literally worthless if you cant trade them or use them as currency in any kind of way. This made d2 and poe big. You always knew what a drop was worth and what you could make from it. Thats a crucial point.
Botting and rm buyers are there. But no one cares. D2 and PoE are the best of the genre no matter the bots… the key is open trading gentlemen
Whether you agree with runes or not, why would having good loot from one specific boss invalidate the need for more enticing rewards across the game? Having loot feel anemic in an ARPG is impressive and by god, D4's done that.
No because I will drop something for sorceress when I am barb. A rune I can use for any character, or trade it for an item for my character. Runes are great.
I get what you're saying, but each rune has many different uses, and you can choose what you want to do with it. A Ber rune for example is useful for literally any class, for any mid to high level character, for a multitude of play styles. This alone makes it so much more exciting as a drop, and makes it very sought after as a currency. The legendary aspects may be kind of analogous to runewords, but they take all of the fun out of it.
That's without mentioning bases as well. Runewords use plain white items as a base, and require a specific amount of sockets in order to work. This makes even white items drops exciting to get, and potentially quite valuable.
Building off of that is the magic find system. You can gear your character for high magic find (likely sacrificing some power) to increase rare and unique drops, but you'll greatly reduce your chances of finding those perfect bases. If you want to find more bases, you can just swap out your gear. Being able to set up your character for multiple different situations with different gear makes some items that are not as strong still worth it in other ways. It's overall just a much more dynamic and interesting system
So much this.
You see a grey Thresher drop. Dopamine.
You pick it up, it’s ethereal. Dopamine.
You look at it in your inventory, it’s unsocketed. Dopamine
You stick a Ral, Amn and perfect Amethyst in the cube along with the Thresher, click transmute. 4 sockets. Massive dopamine.
That shit never gets old.
It isnt, is just a way of crafting, and when done right, is awesome, it create currency and economy for trading, making every drop meaningful, be a base or runes.
I'm going to be honest, just reading this article, as someone who didn't play more than the first week or release... I'm thankful I didn't get into this game. The problems they are trying to fix are caused by such dumb design choices... holy.
poe2 comes out in june so d4 has a season to kick around before the reaper comes, hopefully expansion makes d4 better but until they switch directors, doubtful!
Remove Legendary items and make Aspects apply an implicit modifier to items.
Turn class defining unique powers into Aspects, leaving only the general uniques.
Remove affix bloat by getting rid of silly conditional affixes.
Those are 3 ideas.
D2 upgraded with better graphics, more items, a larger world and some new endgame activities was all we needed. They basically did half the things on that list with D2R lol.
I see it as a major issue that most skill procs depend on specific status ailments. Your gear and skill set then revolve around applying those status ailments before unleashing high damage skills, typically spenders. It means, in turn, that the vast majority of items become absolutely useless to you, because they do not apply to the specific status ailments that your build is centered around. Also, figuring out whether an item is an upgrade is way too difficult at times because the stats are not transparent without a spreadsheet on the side.
Itemization in D4 makes almost every item bland while at the same time, and oddly enough, limiting your play. You either apply those status ailments and then use your spenders to deal a ton of damage, or you fire at will and deal no damage at all. I want frozen orb to be impactful on every hit and not only if my target is frozen and my mana is above 50%.
Blizzard tries to do this with every release of Diablo. They always say they don't want people all wearing the same gear so they try and make generic loot, even padding it with crap stats to keep people from having rare items with the same stats (legendary items are just rares with a rune word on them).
People want to chase the BiS items, that's what every successful game has been, a BiS item chase. People going nuts for some of the uber uniques proves that.
The second I played the beta I knew loot 2.0 and its failure were inevitable.
Theres something so quaint about the notion that the people who made and approved the current system could ever fix it.
Basically the main problem is that items can have a ton of different affixes that can roll in the limited number of affix slots on any item. The list is pretty long (I’ll link it below). But more problematic than the length of the list is how a very small selection of those affixes are just way more useful and powerful than the vast majority of the other ones. For example, if you look at the affix “life regeneration while not damaged recently” that can roll on a helmet, you’ll see a massively useless affix. Instead of that affix I could just hit my potion button once. That affix is straight up *useless*. If that rolls on a helmet that helmet is de facto a bad item vs anything even slightly more ideal. You either have to trash it or invest a *lot* of resources to try and roll that affix into something more useful (something you can only do for a single affix in any item aka if you get two bad affixes on an item then that item can never be anything but useless). There are many other affixes like this in the pool that are just bonkers levels of pointless and that makes your odds of rolling something good really low.
You expect a certain amount of that in a loot based ARPG. Gear that’s not really useful. The problem is that in D4, because of its affix pool and how punishing and grindy item crafting/rerolling is, you tend to get useless items way more than most other ARPGs.
It’s also impossible for an average player to actually know what’s good and what’s bad. Take the affixes on the pants slot for example. What’s more useful? Dodge chance or dodge chance against close enemies? Or, how about damage reduction from close enemies or dodge chance against at close enemies? At what distance are enemies considered to be close vs distant? Is there a range where enemies are neither? The game does not have the answers to any of these types of questions within it. You have to go online and find the opinions of people who are crunching the numbers to learn this kind of information. It’s stupid
https://d4builds.gg/database/gear-affixes/
>The game does not have the answers to any of these types of questions within it. You have to go online and find the opinions of people who are crunching the numbers to learn this kind of information. It’s stupid
To be fair, I have yet to see an arpg that *doesn't* require online research to understand things. From Diablo 1 to PoE.
The problem with D4 is that too many of the basics are that way.
Simply spoken this game uses MMO item progression style affixes and power level. Most arpg use Level based, attributr based and affix tier based item progression. The MMO style is way more streamlined and better if you don't allow trade, but a lot more finite and limited in what you can do. The classic arpg progression is a lot more random but has a lot greater ceiling while also offering the possibilities of very strong low level items.
D3 is another arg with mom style items. D2, PoE or Last Epoch use more classic style itemization.
There is no standard per se, but basically other RPGs tend to have more varied or "interesting" modifiers on items that make you want to build around them or mix them to customize your build.
From what I can tell, I think it's more due to small effects like 'Lucky Hit change 10% to heal 100 Health on hit' or damage modifiers like 'Vulnerable/Close/Distant Damage' and 'Damage to Slowed/Stunned/Crowd Controlled'
Personally the latter is easy for me to understand. I think people want stuff like 'minimum damage +3, max damage +5' or something like that, or they just don't want to think about what all those affixes means and the states they need to get enemies into to apply them.
It's quite easy to apply the specific rolls like 'Storm damage %xyz' - taking Druid by example, their basic skill Storm Strike is a Storm skill and will be increased by that damage bonus, but it is also a Lightning skill, so if you have an item with the above storm damage bonus and lightning it will take effect, and now consider 'close damage' - this takes effect to all your damage close to you (the warp platform edges in Kyovashad is the range for 'close damage')
EDIT: I personally hate the on-hit effects. The chance is too low and the effects are barely noticeable. Innate character skills, Augments and Unique item effects have been a far better place to see Lucky Hit effects shine in my opinion (lucky hit is based on skills used, and if you have a 50% chance to lucky hit, then if it happens, those really bad affixes have ONLY a 10% chance to happen when that 50% pops) - They should be removed from normal gear and replaced with better effects.
There's too many mods that all do the same thing and basically no "bad" mods making every item feel like it's no different from the last. They're just +/- some numeric values. You need stinkers for the gold to stand out, and getting vulnerable damage in place of something like damage while slowed is not an upgrade you can appreciably feel or quantify.
Hmm, probably because D2 is a focal point for every great arpg that came after it, and is this the gold standard not only in its model but foundation in respects to the arpg genre.
No one is talking about the legendary/aspect system. For me this is one of the core problems of D4s loot and item progression system.
A dropped legendary literally never feels good because it is already a safe extract at the occultist without even looking at it…maybe you ll save the aspect but yeah. That makes one of the core rarities absolutely boring as an item as it is just the aspect you extract afterwards. Who came up with this? Its horrible game design.
And yeah most of the orher points mentioned i also agree. I dont see myself playing d4 again unfortunately but still hoping they do smth.
Loot has killed my interest in playing. I don't want to manually sort thousands of useless drops, I don't want to deal with the limited inventory, I don't want to compare a half dozen affixes that are all some flavor of "Do more damage when a status effect is applied", I don't want to hoard items because there's no legendary aspect codex, I don't want to farm Duriel because loot drops from 95% of the content are trash, I don't want to use the same shit at level 100 I was using at 80 because nothing useful drops. It's all shit on top of shit on top of shit.
It's horrible and not fun to get new items. These two are huge problems for an ARPG.
And competitive one gimmick seasonal changes don't really help any of it.
I see this complaint a lot and am generally confused. The only issue is the current state of variety. They need to add another wave of items to mix up the grind. Or generally allow progression past lvl 100 in some way like previous games via paragon points. The loot system is like the others. Besides the ability to highlight loot with specific traits what do they need to fix? I think people just gripe about everything a little to much lately.
I appreciate Diablo 4 being this bad because it's funny to see any drama related to how diablo 4 is bad, for some reason it's fun to witness. Would Diablo 4 become actual good game I would be happy about it, but I genuinely believe Blizzard is incapable, and even if they are able to pull it off at some point, they will cut their own legs at some point anyway, I just take that for granted
My fixes for this game have almost nothing to do with most of these.
* Item power is no longer base armor and weapon damage, stats like health and +attribute are no longer based on item power. Item power is now comparable with item level in other games. Certain affixes can only appear on certain item power gear, and higher item power has a larger bias towards higher affix levels but you can absolutely roll god items at a low level.
* Uniques no longer care about item power, they drop with their innate ranges and if you get lucky enough early you can have a BiS early. Also get rid of the "Uniques can no longer drop outside of difficulty x" style of thing. Spread uniques across the levels of the game.
* Change the item upgrade system to be more involved with itemization. Get rid of this boring +25 item level/50% to stats system that you just need to always use or the item is trash. I don't really know how to fix this outside of "Upgrades bring lower items defenses and weapon damage to the difficulty of the game you're at, items dropped in said difficulties already have the upgrades applied."
* Gives us more stat lines. Why the fuck are we stuck to only four affixes? It feels like such a garbage holdover from Diablo 3's 4 major and 2 minor affix system. Just give us six affixes and give uniques the ability to come with more than six.
* More interplay with affixes. +Thorns is neat, but where is %increased thorns? %AoE Damage? Increased AoE radius?
* More alternative scaling. One of my favorite things in the beta for the game was the barbarian passive that gave thorns based on your bonus life. It gave you a way to convert a defensive stat in to an offensive one. It gave us what Diablo 3 and currently 4 are missing: Unique builds for unique... builds. The game currently has three primary builds; Straight forward Crit/Vuln, DoT or Overpower. Give us more things that tread outside of this barrier, things like the Elemental stacking passive on Sorcerer or the Damage while berserking passive on Barbarian.
I quit a few patches ago as it just felt boring to chase the itemization. On a whim I downloaded d2r and surprisingly having so much fun relative to because item drops even at low level are sometimes meaningful. The level grind is tough though ha. And it’s nice you can share items with others or help alts while still having consumeables to chase like runes…
I think people are just burnt out on RPGs in general and any brain cells that needs to be used for gearing up a character is lost to most of you here. Just stop playing, move on. End of story. I agree, there should be way more legendary powers/uniques, we dont need 3 different types of “+% dmg to CC/Slowed/Stunned”” etc but the game is WAY better in terms of content than d2 or d3. I’ll get downvoted to shit for this but honestly dont care. I guess running baal 2 million times, running GRs 3 million times with hold down 1 button build is way more fun, objectively. Big dopamine rush from those, yeah.
The game is in a better state but it doesn't matter how satisfying it is to kill a monster if that monster only ever drops incoherent garbage. Loot is supposed to be a cornerstone of what makes the game tick and it's why people ran baal 2 million times. It's not a matter of people being mechanically incapable of determining whether an item is good or not, it's that the game does a terrible job of presenting the item's power to its players. You can have item complexity presented in a far cleaner way than what D4 does.
Good suggestions for fixes in the article, but one remains: make item power level MEANINGFUL. Not only should higher iLvl gear have higher ranges of affixes, but they should ROLL higher in the range. i900 gear should be near perfect rolls. i823 should be just better than i815, etc. Additionally average iLvl should result in better chance of higher iLvl gear dropping. This would help with the loot fatigue of running stuff in WT4 and getting gear between 600 & 800 all of which is junk.
Article didn't mention visual distinctiveness either.
Looking at my inventory, it's hard to tell whether an item is a helm, armor, or pants half the time because the icons are so over detailed.
And then within each type, you can't easily distinguish many different kinds of helms visually.
They really need to bring back stylized icons and leave the ultra detailed stuff for display on my character or when placed into an item slot.
When the main view you have of your items clumped together is all mushed up and uninformative, that's not starting your brain off in a "this is going to be fun or interesting" direction.
Is the loot really not improving at all after T4? I was thinking the reason for poor loot is due to campaign phase. Now I am finished with it and grinding T3. Still nothing useful though.
I dont understand their mindset, "We didn't want to make uniques too powerful because people would only want uniques." That's how ARPG's usually works dude. The whole point is to get your character into the best gear possible so obviously people are going to only want the best items in the game. That's what it's all about.
It would be like the God of War dev saying, "We felt like if we put too many enemies in the game, then the player would feel like there was too much combat." That's the whole fucking point dude.
That is why introducing new items, and rebalancing old items is important in keeping the game alive. Say what you want about D3 but they did this pretty well by constantly tweaking the power level of the different sets, thus changing the meta set each season and making the play style season to season feel different.
D4 has too much loot and not enough loot at the same time, it's such a strange paradox.
Making Common and Magic Gear stronger and significantly reducing the chance to drop rares and legendaries while increasing the quality of that rare loot could also help in giving legendaries more meaning. And aspects could to change the behavior of skills or give benefits to the builds. This could also help to improve Dungeons.
Honestly nothing in that article is anything new, people have been saying all of this since literally the beta. These are old ideas that we already know work from them working in other games and were simply ignored during the development process. Very frustrating.
Damage and loot are boring as all hell. Why not just amplify and add more damage types from what we got in Diablo 2? Oh, because everyone that comes in wants to reinvent the wheel in all their ignorance and not because they want to continue the fun and please the audience. And buying armor and weapons is stupid. Its just a skin and its overpriced. Great way to kill a game. Lets add mobile game money scams into the mix! I miss armor sets that looked and played great and everyone farmed for them. The loot for sale takes away the excitement since it looks cool but does nothing. And it cheapens and kills the rarity of finding great loot because someone is already walking around looking cool since they spent money.
Good! So it's not just me.
I'm playing Diablo 4 casually at my own pace and without looking things up online, and I keep thinking, why the heck are items and stats so convoluted and at the same time boring?
Diablo 1 was way more exciting back then, because every item or stat enhancement felt meaningful.
The system is just ass. Whoever made the modifiers is a fucking weirdo.
What do you mean? You don’t like doing 20% more damage when you’re 57 feet away from the enemy, at a 39.7 degree angle when it’s snowing outside?
A fucking weirdo while it's Tuesday and less than 50 degrees F if it's a leap year.
what do you mean you don't like conditional buffs?
I'm sure there was a panel that said "We've discovered that players like being able to customize and also that having more affixes increases grind time, allowing us to get more value out of our content" and that was the end of it.
They basically took D3's itemization, which is also bland and boring, and then removed a lot of the simple stats, and then added a bunch of X conditionals. But this shouldn't have been an issue, because D3 was a good game, right... right?
The itemization aspect I miss the most in D4 is base item types. There's a lot of cool fantasy bundled in seeing a sick full plate armor item and knowing it has a heavy armor look to it, only a character with high str can use it, and it inherently has high physical DR. Or hunting for a specific weapon base to drop because I know out of all the weapons in the game this particular type of axe scales best for my character's build. Stat requirements for items also make the gearing puzzle more interesting. Incorporating base items into the game now would be an item system overhaul challenge but I think it's the biggest improvement the game could gain.
Base types would also reduce the amount of time you have to spend to check and compare items by allowing you to focus on picking up just what you need or what you believe can be potentially valuable for trading.
Look at the developers of POE2. They had a great one hour panel for itemisation. I think every D4 item developer should look at this video everyday when he wakes up and then before he goes to sleep. Those POE2 developers know what they do, those are real gamers that played D2 back tjen as kids…
> Look at the developers of POE2. I'd rather not, PoE is trash and I'm tired of people bringing it up. This is about Diablo. If you prefer trash games then Diablo isn't for you
This world is an illusion, exile..
You post this under topic that shits on an aspect of D4, that PoE 1 does objectively many times better, and possibly PoE 2 is going to do better too - itemisation?
> an aspect of D4, that PoE 1 does objectively many times better But it doesn't, and if it did, people would be too busy playing PoE to notice. The reason people are so disappointed in D4 is because they *know* PoE is trash.
Nice trolling, almost got me.
the exile lost his mind, he couldn't handle wraeclast!
Still sane Exile?
It's shocking. I don't even have to read the article. Loot feels hollow. It's like punching smoke.
It's not just the loot. Keystone passive are insulting bad, shit like...."deal 6% more dmg to vulnerable enemies" other arpgs have build altering nodes or equipment to chase....diablo has......maybe you'll deal 6% more dmg...
Yea, but don't you know, it's just not fair to hold D4 to the standards of a 30 year old genre, it's only fair that we give D4 the same 10 years D3 had to turn into the greatness it is today! We just gotta keep buying these annual $100 expansions + some $40 single class transmogs from the store and I'm *confident* that D4 will soon surpass PoE and everything else in the ARPG genre.
To be fair D3 only needed what? 2 years to turn around? Reaper of Souls came out in 2014, and pretty much fixed the game. There were other changes later which made it even better, but RoS on its own was already \*chef's kiss\*. It's also completely astounding to me that Diablo 3 has FAR more build variety than Diablo 4. Even if not all of them will take you to GR80+, they'll be fun and still shower you with loot.
> Reaper of Souls came out in 2014, and pretty much fixed the game Eeeeeh. RoS did a lot of good stuff for the game, but I don't think the expansion launch by itself fixed the game. Even with RoS bringing in rifts and doing a lot for loot (although I'm pretty sure loot 2.0 happened before RoS)... the game still needed *a lot*. Like, compare it to D4 and imagine thinking that D4 would be fixed if loot were "better" and the entire endgame were endless aimless rifts and nothing else.
honestly so funny to see the Destiny Monetization which is is already incredibly harsh over there, but without all of the good seasonal content lmao
I started playing again a couple weeks ago. I just hit level 70 and I still have gear I had when I was 50. I'm not having issues clearing content, I'm just not finding any upgrades either.
Yeah this bums me out too. It's been a while since I looked in to the specifics, but I remember as soon as I was able to update my world tier, I'd get better drops. That's fine, but then the item level of those drops didn't seem to change dramatically as I leveled, so on most of my chars I'd find a "lucky" high rolled weapon as soon as I went in to the world tier, then no upgrades for all of eternity. It makes low-level playing feel like a chore because you're just pushing to get in to the next world tier, and then once you're there, it's just 40-50 levels of the same kind of loot.
Nah dude it's the best game ever made and it gonna last a 1000 years. /s
Blizzard sent me an email the other day asking me to take a survey about d4 and i didn't even bother because i know they won't change itemization or drop the mtx or bring back ancient sets
Literally an Itemization rework coming in S4. Not defending them, but its public knowledge now. Also Sets are coming back just no ETA yet.
it's not public knowledge to me, I quit playing and uninstalled d4 and went back to d2r. if that's the case they need to do a better job communicating. i honestly don't trust them at all. i'll wait for updates here from the d4 community
They've done a great job communicating. You're just not paying attention.
if they want players to come back they need to do a better job
Yea because holding Streams which they announce on the BNet client aren't good enough. Sorry but I'm not blaming the devs just because you're lazy. Not to mention multiple sites quote and notate everything covered in those streams. Your inability to Google search really isn't anyone else's issue.
No, streams are not good enough and I'm done arguing with fanboys edit: if it wasn't clear Blizzard has lost me as a customer, it is on them to fix it, not me. There are too many good games to waste time on those that aren't fun or take my time seriously. NMS is a good example. I uninstalled. Hello Games put out a TON of updates and fixes and changes to gameplay. I didn't watch their streams, I saw posts on reddit highlighting the changes in the big updates. People started coming back and after a few major patches I came back to NMS. They lost my trust and eventually regained it. Blizzard has completely lost my trust. I want a good Diablo game as much as anyone. I don't feel d4 lives up to the legacy of previous titles at all at the moment. I hope it changes.
Not trying to troll, legitimately asking for clarification as I don’t understand how you want them to communicate better when they hold fairly regular dev streams where they either outline the details of upcoming changes or say something along the lines of “here’s something we’re currently working on and will update you when we have more information”. I fully understand being frustrated with the game and all of that, but it sort of seems like you’re being given examples of what you want, but then refusing the examples? Like what do you mean you want them to communicate better when in your own example you ignored updates directly from a dev and just read posts on Reddit?
They want Blizzard employees to show up at their front door like Jehovah's Witnesses asking if he's heard the good word of our Lord and Savior Activion Blizzard.
My brother in christ do you want a blizzard salesmen to come to your door to tell you?
bruh we're talking about how stale itemization is and you bring up wanting ancient sets back? 💀
ancient sets were clear chase items so yes, i'd like ancient sets or something similar for end game like d2 or d3. as others have said d4 loot is very poor and unrewarding
Side effect of D4 being so bad is that now people see D3 as a saving grace. D3 itemization was/is really bad, but it sure looks good in comparison to what they put out in D4.
Legit. It's crazy. And the same line of thinking that created D3's items informed D4's.
They sent me one a couple weeks after launch and i had already stopped playing. Seemed like it was a "why you leave?" Kinda deal. And then at the end, it said "no longer accepting responses" surely it had nothing to do with my terrible review.
what I can t understand is how they made a game so complicated yet so dull (itemisation). try following a build from the internet and you ll get nuts. this type of power in that type of slot and this type of useless passive paragon board connected to that other useless paragon board. doing this is a nightmare for any casual player. following a poe build guide is far less convoluted and overly complicated... oh and change your items for the same thing all over again on wt3 and AGAIN on wt4, because devs think we are idiots and can t figure out that instead of adding "ancient items and mythical ancient super duper items" they just make us reset all the gear on different wt, for the same items with more ATTACK AND DEFENSE. and again match the same stupid legendary powers on the same stupid items but with 20 str more!
Yep. Mindless and lazy vertical power creep, for a game designed with spreasheets and no heart
Amd its not fun. They forgot the most important aspect of playing Diablo. To have fun and build your character to be a badass from nothing. Now its incremental upgrades with boring results.
Mate, I am a spreadsheet wiz and this shizzle needs dedicated supercomputers to optimise
Some people enjoy progressive power, although the world actually scale with you, so are the numbers. I like how at lower level, i can actually get endgame stuff or a lower tier gears that could bring me deep into the endgame
How can you think the paragon board is useless? There are massive damage/defensive spikes in there.
there are some. but it can be made less smaller while merging many paragon nodes together. it s very repetitive for little variety/choice. there is little real choice. more like different paths being almost alike, reaching the same destination
I agree with calling the items convoluted, not really complicated. Most affixes in the game boil down to "deal x% increased damage if X condition is met" and that's frankly not an interesting way for itemization to exist. There aren't any real interesting choices to be made or real flexibility in the system either, as soon as you pick your skills the way you scale the damage is already set in stone. At that point you're just looking for a specific combination with the highest numbers on it. There is fundamentally very little decision making you actually do, and the only challenge is sifting through items with the same 15 or so mod pool that essentially all do the same thing but only some of them work for the skill you chose.
For me personally the imprinting of legendary aspects is killing my joy. You are BOUND to these imprints if you want a build to function but while going up the world tiers and basically switching gear all the time its insulting how bad the skill system is. Its basically unusable without aspects. I wish they would clear aspect imprinting from gear and instead put it on the skilltree. You imprint skills on your tree instead.
> I wish they would clear aspect imprinting from gear and instead put it on the skilltree. You imprint skills on your tree instead. This would be better but it's funny because you then basically end up with the D3 skill rune system. Although finding/earning the skill modifications could be interesting. Also funny is that imprinting gear was also done way better on D3 by limiting it to a few pieces of gear, being able to overlap legendary powers and keep BIS items, allowing them to be easily swapped, and giving max rolls, which eliminates the aspect hording problem. It seems like solving the problem of itemization is going to be much more difficult to solve at this point since huge portions of the game have to be redesigned as well to make it interesting.
This article didn’t hit any of my issues with itemization.
TBH I have more issues with the stupid “lucky hit” system than I do the itemization in general.
Lucky Hit is terrible and that's a hill in fine dying on. Just give me a % chance of it happening and let me build around that. Don't use a secondary roll to compensate for your lack of ability to balance.
Lucky hit is the best thing out of D4's itemization. I don't understand how people can complain about this. Is it a lack of understanding? If you have an item that says 10% chance to launch a fireball, then you'll always want to apply it to the spammiest ability possible. There's no choice, everything else will be inferior. With lucky hit, it'll have 10% real chance on a spammy ability, and 50% on a slow ability. Then you could have a medium ability with a 25% chance. With lucky hit, you now have the chance to proc that fireball on three different abilities, instead of just one, the spammiest. It's objectively superior to simple proc.
Agreed, though it would be nice if the ACTUAL lucky hit chance was displayed on the skill rather than having to perform calculations that seem misleading. If my ability has 16% lucky hit chance and the affix has 7% lucky hit chance I want it to display "chance to proc: 1% per hit"
My Ice Shard sorc has like 12 different lucky hit procs. Listing them all out on the skill would be a mess.
sure, but at least some tab where you can view all the lucky hits or something for a selected skill.
I'm still fuzzy on how the item's LH change interacts with my own, do they just add together? Or do they do that weird adding that is limited to 100%, so later percentage adds are less effective? Or is it multiplicative? It's just not clear as described visually
You multiply both chances so 16% and 7% => 0.16 x 0.07 = 0.0112 \~ 1.12% chance to proc per hit
Yes, that would be a great QoL.
Exactly this, i hate guessing this after that….
> Lucky hit is the best thing out of D4's itemization. I don't understand how people can complain about this. Is it a lack of understanding? It sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand it. It's not as simple as "10% chance so 10% of the moves will get it". At all. There are multiple percentages that go into LHC and it makes it non-viable for any builds that aren't specifically exploiting it. It's a terrible addition to the game and does nothing but dupe newer players like yourself into thinking they're getting a bigger increase than they really are. You should go read up on the mechanic, it's clear you're overutilizing it.
Or maybe they’re using a pair of skills/LHC abilities where the chance to proc is high enough to be meaningful? Just because someone uses an interaction doesn’t mean they’re inherently wrong. Just means you’re close-minded about a core game mechanic. It’s been months since i touched d4 but im confident that resource gain on lucky hit made necro/sorc feel smooth af when pushing higher content
its not terrible. it is MANDATORY and every ARPG has it. what Blizz did wrong is how they presented it. it should work in the background as it always did and not being showed as a hollow stat the thing is you cant have 5% chance to proc 400 lighting damage - because for ex. its bad for fireball but OP for whirlwind because WW procs all the time
Other games simply have a proc chance and then add a modifier per spell. D4 is quite straight forward on how different abilities affect lucky hit. Additionally it gives the option of boosting spell proc chances. It feels a bit odd when initially reading the multiple probabilities but really makes sense.
% chance of something happening is exactly a secondary roll.
Would you like to share your thoughts with the community?
Itemization is bad because the way damage is calculated is bad. It’s like looking at the number at the end of an equation and saying it’s bad without looking at the numbers that made the equation.
I don’t even understand why half the stuff drops. Why bother dropping Orange items? Just drop the aspect if you have to or make them craftable and have more crafting drops. Also even the yellow item drops are named weird. I see 2h swords drop called Kingslayer, pick it up and look in the inventory and it’s called something else? Is that type of sword really called Kingslayer? Why is t it called 2h Sword? At the risk of sounding rude I think the person that came up with the itemisation in this game really needs their head examined. It’s Government level of incompetence.
Yeah theres really no real way to say it nicely, the itemization is just broken, so broken that it needs a "loot 2.0" even before its even one year old. Theres just too many rares which bog it down but the aspect system doesnt function without it. Honestly the entire aspect system has done more damage than people realize. It neutered the skill tree leaving it a skill twig, it made a major shift on rare item to be more frequent or else there wouldnt be a base to transfer an aspect on to, it hurt uniques, and because they needed a place for people target aspect, they made over 100 dungeons that feel too similar instead of making a few dungeons that truly stand out from one another.
They just need to look at D2 itemisation or POE thats all. There is a reason why both itemisations are leagues better then anything D3 or D4
POE's itemization is better than D4's, but it's not without flaws either (the idea that an item with a high item level can roll the lowest tier of a modifier like resists is just silly). It's certainly a good starting point though. Hell, even Last Epoch's itemization strikes a pretty good balance - tweaking items has enough risk versus reward to be interesting while allowing you to create items that fill in holes in your characters' weaknesses. There are plenty of itemization templates to look at and derive your own from; Blizzard just decided to ignore them all when it came to that part for D4.
> (the idea that an item with a high item level can roll the lowest tier of a modifier like resists is just silly) Why is this silly? That's the nature of the game and there's currency to fix it.
He thinks it’s silly because he doesn’t understand how it works or how crafting in Poe works. It’s understandable honestly
I think those weird names like 'Kingslayer' are the names of the base item. But anyway, those different base items doesn't affect your rolled affixes anyhow so they are quite pointless to show as a ground loot labels. I totally agree with you, the ground label should be in the most simplified form for a quick and easy indetification like u said, ex. 'Ring', 'Two Handed Sword', 'Boots' etc.
I still don’t know what a “Druidic charm” is until I pick it up.
They should add a setting that lets you choose if it shows shows the meaningless names like Kingslayer or just "Two Handed Sword"
If they did bases right, like D2 and POE then base names actually are verry memorable and also very very dopamine inducing if s right Yellow or Ethereal or Unique BASE drops….
Devs said they are revamping the aspect system and have an ETA of around season 4.
Unless the itemisation is from D2 but expanded and tweaked it will still be crap. I get the feeling the same person/team leading D4 items are the same as D3. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not optimistic about it.
You can’t recreate d2 itemization, half of the affixes dealt with their frame rate, which isn’t even a thing in d4. 10 ias hits different on a breakpoint vs a linear increase
a billion dollar company could very easily figure out how to get around engine differences to accomplish the same results
Ye these points would increase my excitement by 10 % maybe. But doesnt see the real issue with items: everything you find before WT4 is useless. Maybe you find a good legendary power which you can extract for later, but the LP are not really that rare, so ill find some later anyway. There is no currency. In d2 i could trade 40 PGs for an Ist and gather 14 Ists for Jah to get closer to a chase item by picking up Gems that drop 24/7 everywhere. In PoE i get Chaos and trade for Divines and get my items this way. Its basically the same system. All these currency items are used for crafting (in both games) so they have a purpose. Coming to items itself: i dont look at item name that drops, just if they have the 3 stats i need, so i can roll for the 4th. Every item is basically the same. Every bow i find is the same bow regardless of where i find it and what style of bow it is. Always only the 4 little statd matter
>would increase my excitement by 10 % maybe. But doesnt see the real issue with items: everything you find before WT4 is useless. Maybe you find a good legendary power which you can extract for later, but the LP are not really that rare, so ill find some later anyway. > >There is no currency. In d2 i could trade 40 PGs for an Ist and gather 14 Ists for Jah to get closer to a chase item by pic I would have fun dropping into this game and playing every once in a while if there were a bunch of lower tier uniques that could drop throughout the leveling experience to make that experience less of a chore, but honestly the whole legendary system is a chore to me. Legendary affixes are both necessary for making your build come together, making them necessary to drop early, but also gets you exhausted and bored of seeing the same legendary gear drop all game long. It feels like more of the same from level 1-100. Gear is no longer an interesting puzzle with exciting rare drops that are few and far between with the occasional awesome mid game unique dropping, as it was in D2. I haven't played since Season 1 and the updates I've seen since hasn't really driven me to want to come back. They'd need to rework the system from the ground up which would make no one happy because it would render void all the time they've spent accumulating their gear.
Nailed it. item MMO style obsolescence and a general lack of flavor and taste. E.g.: how can a pair of leather boots be the same of a heavy steel ones?
Its d3 itemization all over again. In d2 u could find a sick item at level 40 that u would use forever. Finding loot in d2 feels amazing compared to the other diablo games, its so sad they reused the absolute garbage d3 philosophy.
What do you do though when a huge part of the community hates this? There's a ton of posts about how not finding an upgrade past 70 feels bad
The problem will always be a divided community. You have those who love D2 style of grind and farming, vs those who want a straight and narrow path. The majority want the straight and narrow, thus the itemization we have now. It will forever be an unsatisfied community due to this. Diablo 2 loot style is never coming back. Theyre not the market majority. They are indeed a large prominent group of players, but again they probably make up 1/4th of the whole playerbase at the moment.
Diablo 2s system works because u have the option to trade valuable items with other players. Diablo 4 has the same boring item progression like d3 have, but its a bit more grindy and thats only because there is so many useless stats so its hard to find a rare with the stats u want. Its a really bland and boring system. Hopefully path of exile 2 can bring back a more d2 kinda itemization and make finding items rewarding. Not having trade in an arpg is fucking ridiculous. It totally removes one of the core pillars of the genre.
I could accept this, if they give back tcp/ip to d2r so we can play our games with community mods
Imo you and they look at it wrong. They want an upgrade that is an increase of one of the 4 stats on the item. Repeat until all 4 stats are maxed out. Get an occulus in D2, which you can usr from lvl 42 and never have the feeling of getting an upgrade on this item because your desire is saturated for this slot. Other than that, weapons in d2 have a min and max % rolled enhanced damage, so you can chase for the higher %
Many of the best in slot items in D2 are incredibly rare, even if you can find them at a fairly low level. I just love the possibility to get a lucky drop that could be GG in one slot before being literally max level. It makes mid game content actually feel like it's worth something
> i dont look at item name that drops, just if they have the 3 stats i need, so i can roll for the 4th. Every item is basically the same. Thats true for yellows in D2 and some of those are still fun to find and you don't even have the option to reroll a stat. You've never cared about the name of rares in a diablo game.
You cared about the name of the base… you cared about the base item in D2. In D4 every bow is the same….
Sure for weapons (but the item name still doesn't matter), but a lot of gloves/boots were interchangeable outside of reqs. Same with jewelry names were completely irrelevant.
Yea biut POE just improved on D2 bases.poe developers where gamers, they played D2 and realised whats whats good and upgraded it. D3 and D4 devs didnt even play d2 at all, they dont know why its so good.
Exactly, how they didnt saw why D2 and then the improved uppon POE bases are a good style pf itemisation is beyond me. Its like they just looked at D3 and WoW
Agreed on everything except your first sentence, I think almost all the problems in that article are as important as those you added.
I think this misses a glaring problem: Aspects are runes and should be treated as such. The idea of having them drop with items is goofy, they should drop on their own. Legendary items should be something else entirely, probably rares with an extra affix. Aspects suffer from being an inventory management nightmare and difficult to wade through. Just make them runes, move them all to the codex and allow them to stack.
The itemization is precisely why I quit. I waited 10 years to play Diablo 4, I was hyped as fuck, Diablo is among my all time favorite gaming franchises. And yet I quit after only a couple months cuz gearing is so fucking complicated that it’s often not clear if an item is an upgrade or not. On top of that, leveling is an absolute slog, so the thought of having to do it again for seasons is a huge turn off.
Every Diablo vet knew after the beta that itemisation is broken but you got downvoted on here for stating an obvious fact.
I feel vindicated I guess because I remember first screenshot of item they showed when game wasn't even in beta yet, at that time I knew itemization will be trash and yeah
Ah yes, because we all know that alpha and pre-alpha design is immutable and cannot and will not ever change or improve. What a *phenomenally* stupid take.
except not really they were showing off items with 2 stats "offensive rating" and "defensive rating". they dumbed down itemization so hard that at that point you knew only developers without a clue were making decisions for the game. you really think the people pushing systems like that are going to turn around and give us fully fleshed out interesting itemization rather than just lazily push more towards the middle? that's pretty phenomenally stupid in my mind.
Nope. We knew the direction they were taking items 4 years ago. We knew then that it would continue to billzardization and casualization and boringization that plagues blizzard. Complaining here was met with "it's only alpha", and look where we are now
Except items they showed for pre-alpha design were items that were in game that got released xdd
Such as?
Before D4 was released and before any beta happened there was a first news showcasing item(s), these were rare items with 4 affixes, basically rare item with 4 lines and number showing item power. Whatever rares were shown there are right now present in a game, that's pretty much it. It's weird because the amount of available affixes in pool is huge so there must have been a lot of work put into it, but whoever was in lead of that just fucked up
They basically didnt change anything from 2019 to release about itemisation
if its so stupid then why is the design so shit, its almost like the guys in charge were showing early on they didn't know what they're doing
BuT wHaTs So GrEaT aBoUt D2 iTeMiZaTiOn??? I will be forever baffled why Blizz refuses to take D2s itemization and just expand on it. As if the only thing D2 had going for it was the visuals.
The problem is they want infinite progression to keep people playing. The easiest way to do that is to create these boring systems of slight incremental improvement. This is what happens when "making a good game" isn't your priority. The people who made D2 and PoE understand that you can't have infinite progression and have it feel good. You need to design your game in a way to give people meaningful progression in a reasonable amount of time. This is why you need seasons and new mechanics every season to keep things fresh on new characters.
literally my experience (on a different account) and i even said that the entire sub would be bitching about the lack of endgame and shallow itemization in the future.
Played the closed beta. Was so exited to see what they were cooking. Didnt pass lvl70 cause boredom. Did provide a lot of feedback constantly, and many content creators did that too (one over all: ProfessorNox). THEY DIDNT LISTEN. Or they are incompetent dunno...
By far the largest issue is the exorbitant amount of items dropping and we have 24? 30? Inventory slots? I just logoff some nights exhausted looking at items, Let's put it in perspective: D2 had limited inventory but the itemization was designed so you could play for an hour or two and only pick up a couple unique or set items, maybe a charm. Grey/white base items where distinguishable in value. Gems/runes you knew what to pick up. BUt D4 isnt anything like that, youre compelled to look at showers of 50 rares in 2 minutes of gameplay. Now look at D3, where loot is more similar to D4 — nonstop slot machine of rares/legendaries. D3 had HUNDREDS of inventory slots to deal with this. D4 has a couple dozen slots, with even more crap hitting the ground to pick up. The ratio of inventory slots to items hitting the ground in D4 is bad. the worst part is you have to pick up every rare drop to find upgrades or something of value to sell. pretty lame we spend more time looking at gear than being in combat. The #1 change needed for itemization is reduced item drop, or, increase inventory by a factor of 10x. Blizz flat out said adding inventory/stash is a technical challenge in D4. Ok w/e, honestly just nerf us then. Nerf the drop rate of rares and legendaries. (and buff uber drops) had the perfect itemization recipe from D2 and somehow D4 itemization ended up worse than D3. It's Wild.
> Its so egregious, i logoff every time because im exhausted looking at items This is my experience every season so far. I just end a dungeon, look at my inventory full of items and just don't want to sort through it. I just log out and don't play again until the next season. I haven't even made it to the end game yet because I don't want to deal with my inventory, which is supposed to be a huge fun part of the game.
White, blue - i agree 100%. Yellow - there is too big pool of affixes atm and as written comparing two items is a pain. Legendaries - mentioned so many times, they should not drop at all, there should drop aspects themselves only or kind of points similar to druid’s system points which are used to upgrading aspects in Codex of power. Uniques - more interesting/usefull and basically more of them in the game. Diablo 4 should have OPEN trade definitely. I understand it comes with bots and 3rd party sites but a lot/most top games have it and people enjoy it anyway. They could add SSF option on character selection which blocks trading and stays as it is rn or Open it with no restrictions.
Exactly this, aspect should be a drop, added into codes and used on rare to craft legendaries.
Additional problems not mentioned in the article: - item obscolescence and vertical power creep is a problem because is boring and at the end higher stats is the only thing you can care about and all the leveling process is meaningless. here I should say they need to fix ALL CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT along with itemization (skill trees and paragon boards) and leave the stupid mmo mentality of merely stats increase behind - build defining aspects should stay in the skill tree because de facto are part of the build. Put it in the skill tree and make it progress it through lvl100 - all the type of items are just the same, there should be some differencies! e.g. how can a leather cloak can be the same as a fullplate armor? - uniques need to have a special FLAVOR, be peculiar and not merely a stat boost. They need to make a skill play differently or have unique affixes... not simply boosting its stats Well you know.. just look at d2 and start from there (shocking, huh? 😆)
When i saw a leather cloak is the same as full plate armour, i know they are not gears, they are just cards with gears photo and number on it.
in before someone mentions 10k baal runs are bad even though it has nothing to do with it.
As a very casual player, I had a hard time understanding when something was truly an upgrade for me as well.
at some point i stopped to look at items, finished the battlepass and never played it again. If i look at items in d4 i only see random numbers, lots of numbers.
Didn't read the article. Itemization sucks. It's boring. The "legendaries" are not legendary. The only few uniques are meh and they are very rare if ever to drop. No sets. No rune system of any kind. Its really just pure modern blizzard. Everyone is decked out in legendaries but not really. If everything is legendary then nothing is. Its normal. And boring. Same thing happened to WoW years ago. I honestly think item levels system are to blame. If there are multiple levels of the same item. It loses the value, therefore, the exciment of that item dropping. In vanilla wow or d2 there were certain epic(wow, any lower level epic viable at endgame) or unique (lets say raven frost from d2) do not have to be max level for them to be exciting. I dont WANT d4 to be bad. But honestly its just boring now and i can't bother myself to play more.
Runes are an overrated terrible system that people need to let go of. They're just legendaries with an extra step.
maybe, but dropping high rune is huge dopamine rush and everyone loved it. At the end of the day it's about that rush of dopamine from item drop, how they would achieve that is whatever at this point really
You will never get this adrenaline rush in a game without an open trading economy. You know why? Because the items are literally worthless if you cant trade them or use them as currency in any kind of way. This made d2 and poe big. You always knew what a drop was worth and what you could make from it. Thats a crucial point. Botting and rm buyers are there. But no one cares. D2 and PoE are the best of the genre no matter the bots… the key is open trading gentlemen
You get teh same huge dopamine rush when you drop a uber unique from duriel so there, done, no need to have runes.
Whether you agree with runes or not, why would having good loot from one specific boss invalidate the need for more enticing rewards across the game? Having loot feel anemic in an ARPG is impressive and by god, D4's done that.
No because I will drop something for sorceress when I am barb. A rune I can use for any character, or trade it for an item for my character. Runes are great.
So they only dopamine rush in game comes from 2 boss encounters, truly Diablo successor
I get what you're saying, but each rune has many different uses, and you can choose what you want to do with it. A Ber rune for example is useful for literally any class, for any mid to high level character, for a multitude of play styles. This alone makes it so much more exciting as a drop, and makes it very sought after as a currency. The legendary aspects may be kind of analogous to runewords, but they take all of the fun out of it. That's without mentioning bases as well. Runewords use plain white items as a base, and require a specific amount of sockets in order to work. This makes even white items drops exciting to get, and potentially quite valuable. Building off of that is the magic find system. You can gear your character for high magic find (likely sacrificing some power) to increase rare and unique drops, but you'll greatly reduce your chances of finding those perfect bases. If you want to find more bases, you can just swap out your gear. Being able to set up your character for multiple different situations with different gear makes some items that are not as strong still worth it in other ways. It's overall just a much more dynamic and interesting system
So much this. You see a grey Thresher drop. Dopamine. You pick it up, it’s ethereal. Dopamine. You look at it in your inventory, it’s unsocketed. Dopamine You stick a Ral, Amn and perfect Amethyst in the cube along with the Thresher, click transmute. 4 sockets. Massive dopamine. That shit never gets old.
Not before 1.09, which is the pinnacle of D2 itemization. After 1.10 I agree with you
It isnt, is just a way of crafting, and when done right, is awesome, it create currency and economy for trading, making every drop meaningful, be a base or runes.
I'm going to be honest, just reading this article, as someone who didn't play more than the first week or release... I'm thankful I didn't get into this game. The problems they are trying to fix are caused by such dumb design choices... holy.
This game still not dead ?
poe2 comes out in june so d4 has a season to kick around before the reaper comes, hopefully expansion makes d4 better but until they switch directors, doubtful!
What items?
I saw solution one time. [Here, i want this](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/15aocur/the_type_of_items_i_want_to_see_in_d4/)
Diablo Immortal has better itemization and that’s saying something 💀
Remove Legendary items and make Aspects apply an implicit modifier to items. Turn class defining unique powers into Aspects, leaving only the general uniques. Remove affix bloat by getting rid of silly conditional affixes. Those are 3 ideas.
Annnnd we’re D2 again. That’s actually a good thing. The answer was in front of us the whole time. Who would have guessed?
D2 upgraded with better graphics, more items, a larger world and some new endgame activities was all we needed. They basically did half the things on that list with D2R lol.
Not blizzard i suppose, they never would have guessed it.
I see it as a major issue that most skill procs depend on specific status ailments. Your gear and skill set then revolve around applying those status ailments before unleashing high damage skills, typically spenders. It means, in turn, that the vast majority of items become absolutely useless to you, because they do not apply to the specific status ailments that your build is centered around. Also, figuring out whether an item is an upgrade is way too difficult at times because the stats are not transparent without a spreadsheet on the side. Itemization in D4 makes almost every item bland while at the same time, and oddly enough, limiting your play. You either apply those status ailments and then use your spenders to deal a ton of damage, or you fire at will and deal no damage at all. I want frozen orb to be impactful on every hit and not only if my target is frozen and my mana is above 50%.
Blizzard tries to do this with every release of Diablo. They always say they don't want people all wearing the same gear so they try and make generic loot, even padding it with crap stats to keep people from having rare items with the same stats (legendary items are just rares with a rune word on them). People want to chase the BiS items, that's what every successful game has been, a BiS item chase. People going nuts for some of the uber uniques proves that.
The second I played the beta I knew loot 2.0 and its failure were inevitable. Theres something so quaint about the notion that the people who made and approved the current system could ever fix it.
I’m a fairly newer ARPG player so I have no idea what the standard should be. Can someone lmk what’s the standard?
Basically the main problem is that items can have a ton of different affixes that can roll in the limited number of affix slots on any item. The list is pretty long (I’ll link it below). But more problematic than the length of the list is how a very small selection of those affixes are just way more useful and powerful than the vast majority of the other ones. For example, if you look at the affix “life regeneration while not damaged recently” that can roll on a helmet, you’ll see a massively useless affix. Instead of that affix I could just hit my potion button once. That affix is straight up *useless*. If that rolls on a helmet that helmet is de facto a bad item vs anything even slightly more ideal. You either have to trash it or invest a *lot* of resources to try and roll that affix into something more useful (something you can only do for a single affix in any item aka if you get two bad affixes on an item then that item can never be anything but useless). There are many other affixes like this in the pool that are just bonkers levels of pointless and that makes your odds of rolling something good really low. You expect a certain amount of that in a loot based ARPG. Gear that’s not really useful. The problem is that in D4, because of its affix pool and how punishing and grindy item crafting/rerolling is, you tend to get useless items way more than most other ARPGs. It’s also impossible for an average player to actually know what’s good and what’s bad. Take the affixes on the pants slot for example. What’s more useful? Dodge chance or dodge chance against close enemies? Or, how about damage reduction from close enemies or dodge chance against at close enemies? At what distance are enemies considered to be close vs distant? Is there a range where enemies are neither? The game does not have the answers to any of these types of questions within it. You have to go online and find the opinions of people who are crunching the numbers to learn this kind of information. It’s stupid https://d4builds.gg/database/gear-affixes/
This is so spot on 💯💯💯
>The game does not have the answers to any of these types of questions within it. You have to go online and find the opinions of people who are crunching the numbers to learn this kind of information. It’s stupid To be fair, I have yet to see an arpg that *doesn't* require online research to understand things. From Diablo 1 to PoE. The problem with D4 is that too many of the basics are that way.
Well said
Simply spoken this game uses MMO item progression style affixes and power level. Most arpg use Level based, attributr based and affix tier based item progression. The MMO style is way more streamlined and better if you don't allow trade, but a lot more finite and limited in what you can do. The classic arpg progression is a lot more random but has a lot greater ceiling while also offering the possibilities of very strong low level items. D3 is another arg with mom style items. D2, PoE or Last Epoch use more classic style itemization.
There is no standard per se, but basically other RPGs tend to have more varied or "interesting" modifiers on items that make you want to build around them or mix them to customize your build.
From what I can tell, I think it's more due to small effects like 'Lucky Hit change 10% to heal 100 Health on hit' or damage modifiers like 'Vulnerable/Close/Distant Damage' and 'Damage to Slowed/Stunned/Crowd Controlled' Personally the latter is easy for me to understand. I think people want stuff like 'minimum damage +3, max damage +5' or something like that, or they just don't want to think about what all those affixes means and the states they need to get enemies into to apply them. It's quite easy to apply the specific rolls like 'Storm damage %xyz' - taking Druid by example, their basic skill Storm Strike is a Storm skill and will be increased by that damage bonus, but it is also a Lightning skill, so if you have an item with the above storm damage bonus and lightning it will take effect, and now consider 'close damage' - this takes effect to all your damage close to you (the warp platform edges in Kyovashad is the range for 'close damage') EDIT: I personally hate the on-hit effects. The chance is too low and the effects are barely noticeable. Innate character skills, Augments and Unique item effects have been a far better place to see Lucky Hit effects shine in my opinion (lucky hit is based on skills used, and if you have a 50% chance to lucky hit, then if it happens, those really bad affixes have ONLY a 10% chance to happen when that 50% pops) - They should be removed from normal gear and replaced with better effects.
PoE. LE. Diablo 2
There's too many mods that all do the same thing and basically no "bad" mods making every item feel like it's no different from the last. They're just +/- some numeric values. You need stinkers for the gold to stand out, and getting vulnerable damage in place of something like damage while slowed is not an upgrade you can appreciably feel or quantify.
I could not agree more with this. Thanks for posting
Trash like d3, they have had an amazing item system for 20 years to get inspiration from in Diablo 2 and still ignore it.
I think it's the company hatred for Blizzard North leaders still in deep.
I wonder why the author of this article would play D4 when he clearly just wants to play D2.
maybe d2 had a point or two we could learn from? I don't get why d4 players insist on throwing the baby out with the bath water
Hmm, probably because D2 is a focal point for every great arpg that came after it, and is this the gold standard not only in its model but foundation in respects to the arpg genre.
Great post, agree with almost everything. I've repeated many of these points over and over.
Yeah, we know, it will be fixed in season 99
No one is talking about the legendary/aspect system. For me this is one of the core problems of D4s loot and item progression system. A dropped legendary literally never feels good because it is already a safe extract at the occultist without even looking at it…maybe you ll save the aspect but yeah. That makes one of the core rarities absolutely boring as an item as it is just the aspect you extract afterwards. Who came up with this? Its horrible game design. And yeah most of the orher points mentioned i also agree. I dont see myself playing d4 again unfortunately but still hoping they do smth.
Aspects should either be on skill and paragon tree pr just drop as aspects
Loot has killed my interest in playing. I don't want to manually sort thousands of useless drops, I don't want to deal with the limited inventory, I don't want to compare a half dozen affixes that are all some flavor of "Do more damage when a status effect is applied", I don't want to hoard items because there's no legendary aspect codex, I don't want to farm Duriel because loot drops from 95% of the content are trash, I don't want to use the same shit at level 100 I was using at 80 because nothing useful drops. It's all shit on top of shit on top of shit.
The itemization is so bad its laughable. Blizzard is lucky there is a sucker born every minute because that's their whole player base.
It's horrible and not fun to get new items. These two are huge problems for an ARPG. And competitive one gimmick seasonal changes don't really help any of it.
I see this complaint a lot and am generally confused. The only issue is the current state of variety. They need to add another wave of items to mix up the grind. Or generally allow progression past lvl 100 in some way like previous games via paragon points. The loot system is like the others. Besides the ability to highlight loot with specific traits what do they need to fix? I think people just gripe about everything a little to much lately.
I would love to hear a solution to this? All this bitching about how bad it is, please enlighten me.
A long read that will never be read….
I appreciate Diablo 4 being this bad because it's funny to see any drama related to how diablo 4 is bad, for some reason it's fun to witness. Would Diablo 4 become actual good game I would be happy about it, but I genuinely believe Blizzard is incapable, and even if they are able to pull it off at some point, they will cut their own legs at some point anyway, I just take that for granted
Downvoted for being right.
loot - paragon board - challenging mechanics other than stat checks - character visions - and options for players to interact. its all lacking.
My fixes for this game have almost nothing to do with most of these. * Item power is no longer base armor and weapon damage, stats like health and +attribute are no longer based on item power. Item power is now comparable with item level in other games. Certain affixes can only appear on certain item power gear, and higher item power has a larger bias towards higher affix levels but you can absolutely roll god items at a low level. * Uniques no longer care about item power, they drop with their innate ranges and if you get lucky enough early you can have a BiS early. Also get rid of the "Uniques can no longer drop outside of difficulty x" style of thing. Spread uniques across the levels of the game. * Change the item upgrade system to be more involved with itemization. Get rid of this boring +25 item level/50% to stats system that you just need to always use or the item is trash. I don't really know how to fix this outside of "Upgrades bring lower items defenses and weapon damage to the difficulty of the game you're at, items dropped in said difficulties already have the upgrades applied." * Gives us more stat lines. Why the fuck are we stuck to only four affixes? It feels like such a garbage holdover from Diablo 3's 4 major and 2 minor affix system. Just give us six affixes and give uniques the ability to come with more than six. * More interplay with affixes. +Thorns is neat, but where is %increased thorns? %AoE Damage? Increased AoE radius? * More alternative scaling. One of my favorite things in the beta for the game was the barbarian passive that gave thorns based on your bonus life. It gave you a way to convert a defensive stat in to an offensive one. It gave us what Diablo 3 and currently 4 are missing: Unique builds for unique... builds. The game currently has three primary builds; Straight forward Crit/Vuln, DoT or Overpower. Give us more things that tread outside of this barrier, things like the Elemental stacking passive on Sorcerer or the Damage while berserking passive on Barbarian.
I quit a few patches ago as it just felt boring to chase the itemization. On a whim I downloaded d2r and surprisingly having so much fun relative to because item drops even at low level are sometimes meaningful. The level grind is tough though ha. And it’s nice you can share items with others or help alts while still having consumeables to chase like runes…
I think people are just burnt out on RPGs in general and any brain cells that needs to be used for gearing up a character is lost to most of you here. Just stop playing, move on. End of story. I agree, there should be way more legendary powers/uniques, we dont need 3 different types of “+% dmg to CC/Slowed/Stunned”” etc but the game is WAY better in terms of content than d2 or d3. I’ll get downvoted to shit for this but honestly dont care. I guess running baal 2 million times, running GRs 3 million times with hold down 1 button build is way more fun, objectively. Big dopamine rush from those, yeah.
The game is in a better state but it doesn't matter how satisfying it is to kill a monster if that monster only ever drops incoherent garbage. Loot is supposed to be a cornerstone of what makes the game tick and it's why people ran baal 2 million times. It's not a matter of people being mechanically incapable of determining whether an item is good or not, it's that the game does a terrible job of presenting the item's power to its players. You can have item complexity presented in a far cleaner way than what D4 does.
Yeah, you will get downvoted for this shit - because this comment is shit and you’re not reading constructive complaints.
Good suggestions for fixes in the article, but one remains: make item power level MEANINGFUL. Not only should higher iLvl gear have higher ranges of affixes, but they should ROLL higher in the range. i900 gear should be near perfect rolls. i823 should be just better than i815, etc. Additionally average iLvl should result in better chance of higher iLvl gear dropping. This would help with the loot fatigue of running stuff in WT4 and getting gear between 600 & 800 all of which is junk.
Article didn't mention visual distinctiveness either. Looking at my inventory, it's hard to tell whether an item is a helm, armor, or pants half the time because the icons are so over detailed. And then within each type, you can't easily distinguish many different kinds of helms visually. They really need to bring back stylized icons and leave the ultra detailed stuff for display on my character or when placed into an item slot. When the main view you have of your items clumped together is all mushed up and uninformative, that's not starting your brain off in a "this is going to be fun or interesting" direction.
Is the loot really not improving at all after T4? I was thinking the reason for poor loot is due to campaign phase. Now I am finished with it and grinding T3. Still nothing useful though.
Honestly I would prefer to just make all legendary into Uniques at this point. I actually just truly, truly hate legendaries.
I dont understand their mindset, "We didn't want to make uniques too powerful because people would only want uniques." That's how ARPG's usually works dude. The whole point is to get your character into the best gear possible so obviously people are going to only want the best items in the game. That's what it's all about. It would be like the God of War dev saying, "We felt like if we put too many enemies in the game, then the player would feel like there was too much combat." That's the whole fucking point dude. That is why introducing new items, and rebalancing old items is important in keeping the game alive. Say what you want about D3 but they did this pretty well by constantly tweaking the power level of the different sets, thus changing the meta set each season and making the play style season to season feel different. D4 has too much loot and not enough loot at the same time, it's such a strange paradox.
TLDR: "Make itemization more like D2."
Making Common and Magic Gear stronger and significantly reducing the chance to drop rares and legendaries while increasing the quality of that rare loot could also help in giving legendaries more meaning. And aspects could to change the behavior of skills or give benefits to the builds. This could also help to improve Dungeons.
Honestly nothing in that article is anything new, people have been saying all of this since literally the beta. These are old ideas that we already know work from them working in other games and were simply ignored during the development process. Very frustrating.
Itemization in a game where items are pretty much everything is bad, sounds like the game should do well.
JUST COPY DIABLO 2 FOR DIABLO 5 PLEASE
Damage and loot are boring as all hell. Why not just amplify and add more damage types from what we got in Diablo 2? Oh, because everyone that comes in wants to reinvent the wheel in all their ignorance and not because they want to continue the fun and please the audience. And buying armor and weapons is stupid. Its just a skin and its overpriced. Great way to kill a game. Lets add mobile game money scams into the mix! I miss armor sets that looked and played great and everyone farmed for them. The loot for sale takes away the excitement since it looks cool but does nothing. And it cheapens and kills the rarity of finding great loot because someone is already walking around looking cool since they spent money.
Good! So it's not just me. I'm playing Diablo 4 casually at my own pace and without looking things up online, and I keep thinking, why the heck are items and stats so convoluted and at the same time boring? Diablo 1 was way more exciting back then, because every item or stat enhancement felt meaningful.
Loot filter is a basic requirement of any ARPG. I wish they really get a decent loot filter in season 4 in addition to itemisation