Dude, I read your whole linked post, but you’re not reading anything past my first sentence. I agree that the legendary property that makes a build should be priority. Neither me nor OP are talking about that. It’s that after we get the legendary item effects, the Attack/Defense stat are the only stat that matter. No matter what other secondary affixes roll, Attack/Defense take precedence. Therefore there’s no reason to have attack speed or all resist or crit chance if the attack/defense of an item is lower.
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We don’t know that and that is quite simple to tune. No worry at all here.
I definitely understand the concern that you’re raising. Visually having the metric seemingly focused on just attack/defence as a comparative measure for items will infer that the other stats are less important. Especially to those less informed which apparently is why they are moving towards that concept.
Whether the other stats (+Mana, recovery, etc) prove to be less important however is dependant on the way the combat ends up. If monster resistances vary and champion monster affixes promote other stats/builds then players will find value in these other stats regardless of the attack/defence metric. This simplified rollup could have the unintended effect of creating additional confusion to those that don’t understand the deeper systems. Also to not negatively impact the game it will necessitate that Blizzard builds a system of layers that supports multiple avenues towards character improvement in the world that characters live.
However, I am in favor of math being rolled up to simplify comparisons whenever possible. I know we do this all the time in science research and it doesn’t take anything away any of the complexity behind the aggregated numbers. Sometimes I don’t want to crunch all the math myself when I’m playing a game. I love games like Grim Dawn but the investment in discerning item worth is sometimes tedious. There needs to be a sweet spot between necessary complexity and ease of understanding.
I agree its a poor/lazy way to create item tiers though I doubt it’d ruin the game. That said I’d be in favor of them dropping the ancient tier since its just a max rolled legendary.
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Ancients make all non-ancients worthless as soon as you find an ancient. You’ll only ever look for ancients afterwards.
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I mean this is kinda true for all item tiers. Magic makes common unwanted, rare>magic etc. But I do agree that its not a very imaginitive design. I’d rather there be more overlap between tiers.
But legendaries are the final tier (besides Mythics, but they are exceptional). Ancients are the exact same thing but just better, nullifying regular legendaries, and you can’t tell them apart until you ID them. So you’re always hoping for an ancient and it’s depressing when it’s not.
Wrote a post about it: Please no more USELESS legendaries
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I can agree with that.
They did say they had a new tier above ancients called Mythic. I think you’re only able to equip one mythic item though so its not really a full tier.
Ultimately we need better itemization for sure. So I’m all on board with making that happen.
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I agree with OP. Armor should be roughly divided into cloth, leather, and metal. In general, cloth and leather should provide less armor value while metal is a bit more cumbersome (impairs movement or attack speed or dodge chance). They would come with one of several “inherits” but there might be hybrid armors, like studded leather, that gives more armor than leather for less strength than metal and an inherited property from either class.
I hate the attack/defense model. The only purpose it serves it to create tiers of gear. Completely get rid of that idea. Its the equivalent of WoW’s item level system. Making gear irrelevant by virtue of the fact that now there is a tier with more attack and defense. That is crap. Crap design. I’d even say get rid of D2’s tiered loot style system - there is only the normal item tier and its all available from level one and as soon as you meet the attribute requirement you can wear it. Barbarian may start off with enough strength for chain mail but the sorceress might not be able to get enough until level 10 if she dumps all points there. Then the game is just about finding the rare magic affix combinations.
Skelos defense is awful. Everything you said is the antithesis of ARPG. Legendary items should be interesting niche items. You get 2 or 3 and they are all really good in an area and might work together but they need to be supplemented by magic and rare items because they aren’t filling all the traditional gaps. Rare items are a FUNDAMENTAL DEFINING ASPECT OF DIABLO. Diablo 2 was so cool because of the rare items and the crazy/awesome names that they got like Grim Noose. Legendary should be awesome but should not overshadow rares.
Secondly, the idea of meta shift makes me want to vomit. The idea isn’t to shift the meta, the idea is to make a really great game… if you have to do that over time with updates that naturally shift the meta a bit… thats fine. How legendary is an item when its constantly being moved in and out of the meta every season because of an intentional “meta shift”.
And all this non sense about simplying math… PhD nonsense… There should be loads of affixes. Critical hit, % chance to do the maximum damage weapon, crushing blow, faster attack, culling strike, x% chance for yyy% damage over 0-z seconds. Faster hit recovery, defense, armor, resistances, physical and magic flat damage reduction, dodge, absorb, life, life %, block, block rate, block amount. You don’t have to do the math. You can try it. Are you killing faster or slower? Are you dying more easily or not?
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There is still a lot about itemization that we don’t know about. So there is no way of knowing the importance of each offensive and defensive affix will be in D4. There might be many ways of setting up your defenses and offenses in D4’s itemization other than just attack and defense.
My biggest concern is I hope that we don’t end up with nearly as many useless affixes on gear as we have right now.
That is not a good idea to lock out so many affixes that could be useful to other armor types. Extra life might be the way someone wants to go for casting as a defense. Add some regeneration or life on hit and it might be strong enough to protect you.
I don’t think that attack and defense will do as much harm as you think it will. We need a lot more info because we can reach a conclusion.
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no, ins certain circumstances in d2 magic>rare and unique. Magics could roll only a few affixes but they were able to roll higher than rares. rares could have way more affixes but rolled lower. uniques had mixes. some magic items in d2 are godly.
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I don’t have issue with much of what you bring up here. Interesting layers of item affix/suffix behaviour is a good thing for a game built on item hunt coupled to character building. It does create a healthy ecosystem of item diversity for people to theory craft.
BUT, as you point out, much of these affixes amounts to are you killing faster or slower so why not also just roll up that number into an easily viewed metric. Not saying to get rid of the affixes on the backend. This isn’t the first ARPG to do that either. And there is the counter-argument that much of this is only perceived complexity without adding any real depth of gameplay since many of the metrics are straight DPS adds. This has been my issue with D3 all along, the lack of strategic choice in dealing with enemy hitpoints and lack of threat variety.
Anyways, I agree that interesting items are the selling point of any ARPG and this take serious effort by the designers because it amounts to a complicated matrix of trajectories of power growth for a multitude of builds. Hopefully the new development team understands that. Random number generators do not make for good itemization and any added complexity must be warranted.
Your absolutely right. That was how D2 worked. I was referring to Diablo 3 itemization which I should add isn’t as good as it was in D2. I absolutely loved the fact that you could find use for commons late game for runewords or that magic items could roll max damage at the sacrifice of fewer prefix/suffixes.
I’ve posted a few times that the item tiers need to have longer-lifespans of worth than they are currently built for in D3.
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Hi all, I have read all your comments.
Not going to quote cause I’m going to go crazy lol.
Skelos, you are right, all your post is good, but as said by JayL, it does not necesarilly answer my concerns.
See, all you have said is great, but there should be an understanding of what each items does, for example:
You’re going to have a head piece, a weapon or two (OR FOUR!!) or a weapon and a shield, I hope belts, gloves, boots, armor, maybe pants and shoulders, maybe bracelets, rings and amulet.
It’s borring in my opinion if everything is “Ok lets go to a legendary and all legendaries will change the way I play”, I mean, ok I will equip an armor legendary that changes how a defensive skill work, I will equip boots that change how a movility skill works, I will equip a mythic weapon with lots of damage that changes how my main skill works.
All good but it is really fun to have all pieces of gear changing something?, so what I was saying is that, blue items shouldn’t be out of the question, some niche blue item that have a change in a million to roll good should be the best Damage OR Defense option that you could equip, por example 3 jav 30 ias gloves in D2.
Now you equiped those gloves and droped and awesome rare that gave you resist, ok, then you should find that in another piece of gear, so now you have choices.
The point is to have options that makes you make another chained decision, as things looks to stand now that doesn’t seem to be the case, you equip an item that item is better than the one before and the rest of your items remain the same.
So there is when I say ok then “Attack/Defense” to all items is bad, because, lets say I have a pair of gloves with 100 Attack 100 Defense and awesome 30 IAS and 3 to bow skills (you guys realize that there is going to possibly be an Amazon because bows can’t be out of the question right?), thats great, but now I found a 500 Attack and 500 Defense…
So how do I know if 30 IAS is better than an Increase of 400 Attack and 400 Defense?, well “math” or you will just have to compare DPS.
Well thats boring, having legendaries that change everything is great, but also having stat items is also good, the point is to play with the balance of both.
Having Attack and Defense on all items is like giving those stats on all items and then just select the most powerfull combination of “Game changing” legendaries. My concern is that… that is exactly what D3 was doing with Sets.
If there will be the need to have seasonal game changing changes to legendaries that means that there always will be the only one way of doing things for each class and that’s not fun.
Lets make an example with D2 of some choices that you had regarding theorycrafting that make the game interesting.
You have a Sorceress, and the Sorceress is really good with Blizzard, so you go for Nightveil and DF, and then you play with different armors like CoH, Viper Magi, Enigma, Arkaine, and each of those choices will make you put other different gear on other places, like, if you go for CoH, Enigma or Arkaine you dont have FCR so you may go for Spirit Shield (Runeword), but if you go for Viper Magi you may go for SS, if you go for SS you then put points into Dexterity to make it “Full block”, if you go for Enigma you may equip Spirit Shield without putting points into Strenght then you go full Vitality and because of that you may say “Ok its not necesary for me to put a Jah rune in my Nightveil, I will put a Um rune for Resist”, or maybe because you have all that Vit you actually go for a Jah because is % of Life, same for Arkaine, but if you go for CoH you have all the resist, so Jah gives you low life, Um does nothing to you, maybe a Perfect Ruby will give you more life than Jah in that particular situation, or maybe you went for Arkaine or Enigma but you have a pair of godly tri-ress boots then you dont go for Um and Vit is enough so you go for Eth Rune the Mana Regen or Shael for the Faster Hit Recovery.
Do you see how many options do I have there because of such different factors?, I change my armor for another one, and that changes my whole strategy for the REST of my gear, and I still have those amazing Legendaries that impose me to use a Cold Skill, in this case Blizzard. Don’t even get me started if you go for Fire between Meteor, Fire Ball and Hydra… or if you go for Enchant and Beast Runeword.
Itemization should be a matter of changing one item and thinking “This item is better for this, but is worst for this and THEN”… the “THEN” part is what is important, as I see things right now with Attack/Defense you have just 2 options, “This item is better for attack worst for defense, I choose equiping it for Damage and I loose defense cause I dont need it” or not equiping it because I have enough damage and I’m dying too fast. The “Then” part is the part where you say “Ok is better for damage, but I need the defense that I lost there so I will go and change this and this and this and at the end I will have a better result”.
After all that you should be able to choose between more damage, more defense or another thing, I want to be able to drop one or the other to go for something else, maybe I have enough defense, and mobs die fast regardless if I drop or not an item cause “I dont need more because I have a new level of greater rift” So I just want more movility to go faster, or I wanna play with my friend and be the tanky, provide him with defense and he do the damage.
TLDR:
The point is to have it all, without sacrifices, making a Attack/Defense model is sacrificing complexity and the complexity is something that an ARPG needs, it shouldn’t be needed to enjoy the game but it should be needed to master the game.
Best regards and sorry if I made some english mistakes hehe
EDIT/ Oh, sorry for the long post u.u I’m an impulsive writter and also I found it fun to at least practice my english.
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Ugh, why not just give armor like in d2 to defensive items like helm, gloves, boots, belts?
The itemization mix of D2 and PoE seems to be spot on without sacrificing builds for your character.
As stated from others, let different items slots have different affixes roles.
For example give a magic melee/ranged weapon min and max Damage with the chance to roll high enhaced damage/attack rating/attack speed only to your weapon with a max of 2 affixes for physical damage and rare staves a common roll 3-4 weaker affixes between increase spell damage/mana regen/ faster cast rate/ maximum mana to wands and staves for casters.
This way we arent flooding items with 2 character main stats and we open different chances to customize our char depending on the item rolls.
White, Magic and Rares definetely need to make a comeback and not be salvage/recycling material so that we can expand build diversity.
Sacriffice more affixes for better item stats, or sacrifice item stats for more affixes.
Maybe give white items more max sockets than blue, blue more than rares, and rares more than legendaries/uniques.
And so on, there should be a balance between all item tiers, sacrificing perks to gain something specific for your build.
I dislike the attack/defense thing as much as everyone, but it also feels like people are entirely convinced that those two stats will beat out all others item stats (IAS, crit etc) which there isn’t that much reason to assume.
Anyway, D3 already “solved” the math issue with the dps and toughness calculation, as misleading as they could be. Could be improved by having a dps calc for each active skill maybe.
Doesn’t seem smart to simplify the items on top of that.
Ancients items are such a terrible and lazy system. It doubles the amount of items which makes development easier but at expense of the quality of gameplay.
The first problem is that finding the non ancient version is no longer a big deal. Second problem is finding the ancient item item after already having the original isn’t very exciting either since… you already have the item. The solution is to simply allow us to upgrade our original items with rare crafting materials, same stats but higher values. Keep legendary drop rates low and make the items big upgrades and finding one will remain a big deal.
(post deleted by author)
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There are two points in the last 4 comments than I want to address.
First, Shadout. As I said in the title “The thing that COULD totally ruin D4”, why I said that instead of “WILL”?, simply because as you stated we don’t know that, BUT…
They say “We want to take away the need to do math” so that phrase and the fact that we have “Attack/Damage” on all items makes me think the following:
You could have a pair of gloves with 10 IAS, 30 Enhanced Damage, 1-150 Lightning Damage.
So the math is, the average between 1 and 150 is 75.5, then the 30 Enhanced damage will enhance your global damage, but to make it simply lets say it only affect the gloves damage so 75.5 is 98.15, and lets keep it simply we have a base attack speed of 1, so a 10% increase will be 107.96 Average DPS.
So lets erase all that math that I just did, so now the gloves will give 108 Attack period.
So that could mean the end of those affixes, Attack/Defense could mean that you wont have them at all, so yes in that scenario Attack/Defense will take precedence because of the inexistence of the others if everything gets reduced to what… Steve Said and here I start my second point
As I said before it is great to have interesting legendaries and stuff that changes things in fun ways yes, but I dont want a system that if you look at it is a reduced Gem System from PoE but instead of an interesting and complex system of sockets, colours and links with currency that change the amount of sockets, the colours of the sockets and the links you just reduce that to… every piece of gear is just a “Supporter Gem” so you have reduced a tiny piece of a PoE system into the totality of the itemization of D4.
Being said like that do you realize now why is that not fun?, because, first is something already done and second is a reduced system of a piece of another system.
D4 has to think big and do big, I understand that Blizzard will always want to sell copies to everybody but you can have a balanced game that is easy enough to introduce new people, and fun enough to be enjoyable for casuals, but if there is no depth the game will not retain the hardcore players, and the hardcore players are the remaining fans that still want our D2 succesor, you cannot make a simplier system than the one in D2, you take the D2 system you take it apart and you improve on it, not just take everything away and reskin a part of a system of another game just like that.
I completely agree with that.
Just saying, that based on the demo, it seems like we will have those other stats.
That doesnt mean attack/defense on everything is fine though. It feels completely silly to have it baked in on all gear. And potentially very problematic for item progression - looks like Blizzard got a wet dream of endless item scaling, with the same items dropping again and again in key dungeons, just with more and more attack/defense, which is a terrible idea.
“a wet Dream of endless item scaling”
Lol that actually made me laugh hard. I tend to think in pictures and Imagination when reading something like this