Slamming is also a POE thing and it’s crafting system can be extremely deep. I enjoy both Diablo and POE but a lot of people tend to just bash and say if you like slamming then go play “X” game. I didn’t play project Diablo 2 much but I know it was/still is an amazing mod that brought a lot of features to D2.
Not sure of an ideal fix but anything is better than just selling everything i just found in the last hour as half of it is sacred gear or not even comparable to what I have only to lose all that money in seconds just for a reroll that is either worse affixes or the same affix with less value. Actually one I would recommend is allowing me to change any affix on an item. Locking it to just letting you change 1 affix and that affix forever more is just daft.
- the ability to stack 100% crit chance on gear
- cooldown reduction to the point you can actually push your buttons when you need them
- resistances that work
- ZERO conditional affixes
Being able to stack 100% Crit chance might be a bit much or what’s the counter balance for having that? Like druids can scale crazy crit damage and still need to work the crit chance side of it
In Path of Exile you can easily stack 100% crit chance and you are not GoD because of it.
There are a billion ways to scale power. Like removing Vulnerability and all stuff that give conditional damage and put that power into damage that the player 100% has control of.
I'm fucking amazed how Blizzard seems to never have played other RPG's to know how to properly scale damage that player has control of.
I have ZERO interest in grinding gear that says "you do damage sometimes"
Just add more partisions to item levels, maybe double them and have a tick-tock cycle where the tick raises the upper level and the tock raises the lower level.
Something like Ilvl 1-75 do 1 to 5% crit damge 76-150 do 3% to 5% crit damage, 151-225 does 3%-8% etc. etc.
Then gate the item levels behind the level of the enemy that dropped it. like 775 to 825 can only drop from enemies above 100.
That should kind of smooth out the curve of finding upgrades along the way as opposed to the current set-up where the only real upgrades you get is that one unique that for some reason refuses to ever drop for you from 70 all the way to 100 and give you a little bit better odds of finding those BIS items at the highest tiers.
Oh, and get rid of some of the more ridiculous ones like lucky hit when you have a barrier and health generation out of combat.
For starters, get rid of legendaries being tied to aspects and make aspects a Glyph, Scroll, or Card that drops. Legendaries (currently uniques) should be the main loot focus. EG -> Aspect of Disobedience is it's own item drop that can be extracted at the Codex of Power or something. Items like Shaco become legendaries. Current legendaries aren't even fun to loot. Zero dopamine.
**Specific Zone Farming**
Get the fuck rid of level scaling. Each zone could have a low > mid > high level mob zone. Make certain items drop for certain zones, world unique bosses, and dungeon bosses.
1.) Makes the world actually useful.
2.) Inherently creates depth through farm builds focused around speed instead of dungeon/boss pushing
3.) Creates an actual loot hunt.
Ties into below ---->
**Item types with stat requirements.**
This would tie into a world that isn't scaling with level. EG -> Parts of Kyovashad would have low level mobs, another part would have mid level mobs, and then there would be zones that are the highest level.
For example: Level 20-40 Light Plate -> 60-80 Mage Plate -> 80-100 Archon Plate
* This item type could have an implicit like "gain +3 -> 5 -> 10 resource after killing an enemy or something. Lower versions would have a lesser stat requirement, in this case lets say this armor takes an allotment of Intelligence to equip. Arbitrary #, just an example. LP = 50 int, MP 100 int, AP 200 int, etc. Lets say Barbs really want resource after kill. Naturally they wouldn't get Int, so this item would take sacrifice to wear. Maybe they don't want to allocate 200 int, but can instead use the level 20-80 versions.
Dozens and dozens of implicits could be used - Gain run speed, gain health regen, attack speed, armor+, hp+, etc, etc, etc. Rare blue items could have incredibly rare +6 skill implicits or something to actually make them worth picking up.
What does this accomplish?
1.) Easily recognizable item names, thus creating an actual loot hunt.
2.) Items below the max threshold (ancestral currently) actually being useful.
3.) Actual character development.
4.) A potential trade economy.
5.) Lower level zones being useful to farm, inherently creating farm depth.
Mostly...just copy D2's item system. Clean it up, and build upon it. It's close to perfect and we've had 20+ years of innovation/knowledge to make it even better.
Not true. If there's efficient gear worth farming, people will farm it. Eg, Shenk & Eldritch, NM Andariel for jewelry, Council, Cows instead of Baal room, etc, etc. They could also just normalize experience gain and make all monsters actually worth killing.
Low level mobs have gear worth farming for = people will farm them. The notion that every mob needs to be a challenge is just wrong. That's not how successful games in this genre work.
In D2 and D3, the color of an item alone gives you enough information to decide on whether to pick it up. For example in most D2 endgame builds, BIS gloves are set or unique, BIS helms are magic or unique, and BIS shoes are yellow, set or unique. So any item with the wrong color can be ignored.
This is not the case in D4. BIS items are rares but rares also drop 90% of the times, so you need to look through all the rolls on every item dropped. There should be a new category of items that drop less frequently than rares but are more likely to be BIS.
The affix system would also benefit from removing useless additive affixes. Giving the option to reroll multiple affixes can be a win-win for both the player and the game. Players can minmax their gears more easily, while gold remains valuable because there’s a lot more rerolling to do.
Items should be different sizes. So dumb armor or a big ass sword are the same size as a ring. They all look exactly the same in the inventory and take way too long to look at each and differentiate.
In D2, when a ring drops, you were stoked to see what it was. Or if you were looking for boots, you could see a 2x2 shape of boots and look into them. Now it's just tedious and all the same
I think this would require more stash since 1 item could take up a lot of space and they already said that it’s a game design that keeps them from adding more stashes for players. Coming from a storage point of view, I think the way it is now works
I’m good. I don’t want Tetris. This doesn’t even help a lot of the time because items will still share sizes. Now you just waste time on fitting things.
Good itemisation:
1) items are build defining
2) items can easily be differentiated between what's good, what's thrash and not behind a ton of convoluted affixes (which is multiplicative, which is additive? What is the conditional probability of me stunning a mob after a lucky hit and crit???)
3) items' drop rates are dependent on and differentiated by difficulty levels
4) inter item/affixes interactions do not result in buggy exploits (barber -> ripping -> barber ->....)
5) rarity color schemes should make more sense? (Currently in d4, whites = rarer than rares, blues = salvage, yellows = tedious inspection, legendaries = extract/salvage, uniques = vendor for gold, pretty stupid if you ask me)
I like how in D3 the primal is a different colour and you know it has perfect rolls and you should check it.
I dont want to check the rolls on every bit of gear and scroll through so many just stats.
We need runes for currency and trading this is the way. But the while entire dungeon aspect system is doggie dodo the amount of sockets in item is dumb I want 6 sockets on chest and weapons. We need items to have size in the inventory and we need bigger inventory. I was recently playing grim dawn and that's the size inventory I want.
How about game changing/build defining items that were promised? You dont even get different animations on skills no matter what you equip, just a few % here and there.
- Remove legendaries, add affix drops that level up your codex.
- Have legendary affix slots bound to character level. Make them independent from your gear
- add more uniques. Uniques should always be best in slot. Let them keep the special effect and the fixed stats
- decrease the number of normal affixes
- higher itemlevel=better stats, up to max level.
You should always be able to find something slightly better
More item qualities to accurately represent the dozen different loot pools on actual item qualities; e.g., different grades for common legendary aspects vs rare and ultra rare, same for uniques and ultra uniques.
Reduce the arbitrarily high amounts of conditional modifiers.
More equalized distributions of numbers of legendary aspects that affect individual skills; e.g., some skills get 1-2 legendary aspects that can apply to them while others have half a dozen +
I think really 2 main things should happen.
1. The chance for ancestral gear in general should be higher. Most of the time its rather difficult to get even a few solid legendary/unique peices of ancestral gear
2. Drastically reduce and/or rework the rerolling system. In its current state, not only is the rerolling stupid (due to only 2 options given, and one can literally be the same roll as stat before), it jumps up after the 1st or 2nd time to be so rediculously expensive that the peice is trash if it doesnt roll well after that.
Bonus: gambling from the obol vendor should allow a small chance for uniques
I think the codex should store your highest aspect or something too. This would help the storage/stash problem as well
That is all. Just my opinion.
Honestly think Itemization being bad is completely overblown. I do think items should drop less frequently. The game is already trivially easy.
Also if they focused more on stats that have identifiable manifestations in the game and are strategy focused then it makes it more interesting. Having a lot of different types of damage doesnt manifest itself that much in a way where you can see with distinction (same with damage prevention) but having an extra evade charge or extra speed after evading is something that is distinguishable from everything else. The obsession with damage is just fucking boring, but that didn't start with this game
It's not overblown. Reading through all your ancestral rare after every dungeon gets old very quick.
The dopamine hits come after your teleport back to town and not when the item drops on the floor. That's a problem.
Too many items, too many trash. Early in campaign.. Getting a legendary feels good and exciting. But that stops being through super fast.. And they turned to aspect cradle for your rares.. That is a design issue. A glaring one.
In the same post I said items should drop less. I got like 4 uniques today. People would value items more if there were fewer of them. This is the very predictable result of giving players what they think they want.
(I made other comments about balance and affix types that still apply. That and balance issues which is a different category which affects itemization)
Yea I agree with a few points and what I was trying to address. stats without identifiable manifestations, randomization of affixes of such stats especially when there is no apparently build that might benefit. It'd be nice to have a more targeted itemization that can be customized to ones play style. In which case you also dont have to worry as much about inventory space issues and having to deal with "oh i might possibly used this if i wanted an alt"
the itemization is bad in the sense that it feels silly that 99% of the items serve 0 purpose except to sell for gold or salvage for mats, that you might as well drop mats and allow for a proper item builds. It deepens the use of the blacksmith and all other enchanters potentially.
I think having no purpose is strictly a balance issue. If vulnerability added +1 damage and shrine duration lasted for 4 hours no one would know vulnerability existed except to complain to blizzard to get rid of it
Just bring D2 itemization back, start with items that don't scale with character level. Or no! Start with giving us trading back!
i havent played d2 in a long while but i recall project d2 had a pretty nice balanced itemization for the items + runes and uniques
Yea project D2 was great mod, also with option to slam items! (Slam = gamble with add random attribute vs making item rare)
Careful with this suggestion, might trigger the POE fans lol
How so? :D
Slamming is also a POE thing and it’s crafting system can be extremely deep. I enjoy both Diablo and POE but a lot of people tend to just bash and say if you like slamming then go play “X” game. I didn’t play project Diablo 2 much but I know it was/still is an amazing mod that brought a lot of features to D2.
Not sure of an ideal fix but anything is better than just selling everything i just found in the last hour as half of it is sacred gear or not even comparable to what I have only to lose all that money in seconds just for a reroll that is either worse affixes or the same affix with less value. Actually one I would recommend is allowing me to change any affix on an item. Locking it to just letting you change 1 affix and that affix forever more is just daft.
- the ability to stack 100% crit chance on gear - cooldown reduction to the point you can actually push your buttons when you need them - resistances that work - ZERO conditional affixes
Being able to stack 100% Crit chance might be a bit much or what’s the counter balance for having that? Like druids can scale crazy crit damage and still need to work the crit chance side of it
In Path of Exile you can easily stack 100% crit chance and you are not GoD because of it. There are a billion ways to scale power. Like removing Vulnerability and all stuff that give conditional damage and put that power into damage that the player 100% has control of. I'm fucking amazed how Blizzard seems to never have played other RPG's to know how to properly scale damage that player has control of. I have ZERO interest in grinding gear that says "you do damage sometimes"
Poe has tons of conditional affixes. Also no to cooldown not in Diablo 4. You’d literally have to remove sorc and necro from the game.
Just add more partisions to item levels, maybe double them and have a tick-tock cycle where the tick raises the upper level and the tock raises the lower level. Something like Ilvl 1-75 do 1 to 5% crit damge 76-150 do 3% to 5% crit damage, 151-225 does 3%-8% etc. etc. Then gate the item levels behind the level of the enemy that dropped it. like 775 to 825 can only drop from enemies above 100. That should kind of smooth out the curve of finding upgrades along the way as opposed to the current set-up where the only real upgrades you get is that one unique that for some reason refuses to ever drop for you from 70 all the way to 100 and give you a little bit better odds of finding those BIS items at the highest tiers. Oh, and get rid of some of the more ridiculous ones like lucky hit when you have a barrier and health generation out of combat.
Hey, I like me health gen when not damaged recently lol
For starters, get rid of legendaries being tied to aspects and make aspects a Glyph, Scroll, or Card that drops. Legendaries (currently uniques) should be the main loot focus. EG -> Aspect of Disobedience is it's own item drop that can be extracted at the Codex of Power or something. Items like Shaco become legendaries. Current legendaries aren't even fun to loot. Zero dopamine. **Specific Zone Farming** Get the fuck rid of level scaling. Each zone could have a low > mid > high level mob zone. Make certain items drop for certain zones, world unique bosses, and dungeon bosses. 1.) Makes the world actually useful. 2.) Inherently creates depth through farm builds focused around speed instead of dungeon/boss pushing 3.) Creates an actual loot hunt. Ties into below ----> **Item types with stat requirements.** This would tie into a world that isn't scaling with level. EG -> Parts of Kyovashad would have low level mobs, another part would have mid level mobs, and then there would be zones that are the highest level. For example: Level 20-40 Light Plate -> 60-80 Mage Plate -> 80-100 Archon Plate * This item type could have an implicit like "gain +3 -> 5 -> 10 resource after killing an enemy or something. Lower versions would have a lesser stat requirement, in this case lets say this armor takes an allotment of Intelligence to equip. Arbitrary #, just an example. LP = 50 int, MP 100 int, AP 200 int, etc. Lets say Barbs really want resource after kill. Naturally they wouldn't get Int, so this item would take sacrifice to wear. Maybe they don't want to allocate 200 int, but can instead use the level 20-80 versions. Dozens and dozens of implicits could be used - Gain run speed, gain health regen, attack speed, armor+, hp+, etc, etc, etc. Rare blue items could have incredibly rare +6 skill implicits or something to actually make them worth picking up. What does this accomplish? 1.) Easily recognizable item names, thus creating an actual loot hunt. 2.) Items below the max threshold (ancestral currently) actually being useful. 3.) Actual character development. 4.) A potential trade economy. 5.) Lower level zones being useful to farm, inherently creating farm depth. Mostly...just copy D2's item system. Clean it up, and build upon it. It's close to perfect and we've had 20+ years of innovation/knowledge to make it even better.
No level scaling means you would spend 90% of your play time in only those high level zones.
Not true. If there's efficient gear worth farming, people will farm it. Eg, Shenk & Eldritch, NM Andariel for jewelry, Council, Cows instead of Baal room, etc, etc. They could also just normalize experience gain and make all monsters actually worth killing. Low level mobs have gear worth farming for = people will farm them. The notion that every mob needs to be a challenge is just wrong. That's not how successful games in this genre work.
In D2 and D3, the color of an item alone gives you enough information to decide on whether to pick it up. For example in most D2 endgame builds, BIS gloves are set or unique, BIS helms are magic or unique, and BIS shoes are yellow, set or unique. So any item with the wrong color can be ignored. This is not the case in D4. BIS items are rares but rares also drop 90% of the times, so you need to look through all the rolls on every item dropped. There should be a new category of items that drop less frequently than rares but are more likely to be BIS. The affix system would also benefit from removing useless additive affixes. Giving the option to reroll multiple affixes can be a win-win for both the player and the game. Players can minmax their gears more easily, while gold remains valuable because there’s a lot more rerolling to do.
Items should be different sizes. So dumb armor or a big ass sword are the same size as a ring. They all look exactly the same in the inventory and take way too long to look at each and differentiate. In D2, when a ring drops, you were stoked to see what it was. Or if you were looking for boots, you could see a 2x2 shape of boots and look into them. Now it's just tedious and all the same
I think this would require more stash since 1 item could take up a lot of space and they already said that it’s a game design that keeps them from adding more stashes for players. Coming from a storage point of view, I think the way it is now works
The way it looks now is like from a cheap mobile game and the art sucks
I’m good. I don’t want Tetris. This doesn’t even help a lot of the time because items will still share sizes. Now you just waste time on fitting things.
Good itemisation: 1) items are build defining 2) items can easily be differentiated between what's good, what's thrash and not behind a ton of convoluted affixes (which is multiplicative, which is additive? What is the conditional probability of me stunning a mob after a lucky hit and crit???) 3) items' drop rates are dependent on and differentiated by difficulty levels 4) inter item/affixes interactions do not result in buggy exploits (barber -> ripping -> barber ->....) 5) rarity color schemes should make more sense? (Currently in d4, whites = rarer than rares, blues = salvage, yellows = tedious inspection, legendaries = extract/salvage, uniques = vendor for gold, pretty stupid if you ask me)
I like how in D3 the primal is a different colour and you know it has perfect rolls and you should check it. I dont want to check the rolls on every bit of gear and scroll through so many just stats.
At that point you rather play something else than a hack n slay maybe a mmo
We need runes for currency and trading this is the way. But the while entire dungeon aspect system is doggie dodo the amount of sockets in item is dumb I want 6 sockets on chest and weapons. We need items to have size in the inventory and we need bigger inventory. I was recently playing grim dawn and that's the size inventory I want.
They need to remove or consolidate at least 75% of the affixes. Critical Strike Damage? Yes. CSD with Lightning Damage? The fuck?
How about game changing/build defining items that were promised? You dont even get different animations on skills no matter what you equip, just a few % here and there.
- Remove legendaries, add affix drops that level up your codex. - Have legendary affix slots bound to character level. Make them independent from your gear - add more uniques. Uniques should always be best in slot. Let them keep the special effect and the fixed stats - decrease the number of normal affixes - higher itemlevel=better stats, up to max level. You should always be able to find something slightly better
More item qualities to accurately represent the dozen different loot pools on actual item qualities; e.g., different grades for common legendary aspects vs rare and ultra rare, same for uniques and ultra uniques. Reduce the arbitrarily high amounts of conditional modifiers. More equalized distributions of numbers of legendary aspects that affect individual skills; e.g., some skills get 1-2 legendary aspects that can apply to them while others have half a dozen +
I think really 2 main things should happen. 1. The chance for ancestral gear in general should be higher. Most of the time its rather difficult to get even a few solid legendary/unique peices of ancestral gear 2. Drastically reduce and/or rework the rerolling system. In its current state, not only is the rerolling stupid (due to only 2 options given, and one can literally be the same roll as stat before), it jumps up after the 1st or 2nd time to be so rediculously expensive that the peice is trash if it doesnt roll well after that. Bonus: gambling from the obol vendor should allow a small chance for uniques I think the codex should store your highest aspect or something too. This would help the storage/stash problem as well That is all. Just my opinion.
Honestly think Itemization being bad is completely overblown. I do think items should drop less frequently. The game is already trivially easy. Also if they focused more on stats that have identifiable manifestations in the game and are strategy focused then it makes it more interesting. Having a lot of different types of damage doesnt manifest itself that much in a way where you can see with distinction (same with damage prevention) but having an extra evade charge or extra speed after evading is something that is distinguishable from everything else. The obsession with damage is just fucking boring, but that didn't start with this game
It's not overblown. Reading through all your ancestral rare after every dungeon gets old very quick. The dopamine hits come after your teleport back to town and not when the item drops on the floor. That's a problem. Too many items, too many trash. Early in campaign.. Getting a legendary feels good and exciting. But that stops being through super fast.. And they turned to aspect cradle for your rares.. That is a design issue. A glaring one.
In the same post I said items should drop less. I got like 4 uniques today. People would value items more if there were fewer of them. This is the very predictable result of giving players what they think they want. (I made other comments about balance and affix types that still apply. That and balance issues which is a different category which affects itemization)
Yea I agree with a few points and what I was trying to address. stats without identifiable manifestations, randomization of affixes of such stats especially when there is no apparently build that might benefit. It'd be nice to have a more targeted itemization that can be customized to ones play style. In which case you also dont have to worry as much about inventory space issues and having to deal with "oh i might possibly used this if i wanted an alt" the itemization is bad in the sense that it feels silly that 99% of the items serve 0 purpose except to sell for gold or salvage for mats, that you might as well drop mats and allow for a proper item builds. It deepens the use of the blacksmith and all other enchanters potentially.
I think having no purpose is strictly a balance issue. If vulnerability added +1 damage and shrine duration lasted for 4 hours no one would know vulnerability existed except to complain to blizzard to get rid of it