Current Itemization - The thing that could totally ruin D4

General Discussion
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Hello everybody
First of all I didn’t came here to speak trash or something, this is intended to be constructive, but I may use a bit a harsh just to express how important this could be.

This is something that it has already said by MrLlamaSC on Youtube but I just want to give a simplier approach to everything that he said.

He exposed his thoughts to get a D4 similar to D2, and I like that, I totally approve that but I know that developers will not feel happy or satisfied to just copy the systems that others created before because that would be like saying “Ok we suck lets just do exactly what the ones who know did”.

That’s not correct because I know that nobody wants that, so is ok if they want to do new stuff the people like equally or more than the systems that were good in the past.

That being said all items having “Attack” and “Defense” is a mistake, not only because it will probably take away importance to other affixes but also because it takes diversity out of itemization.

You dont really need to completely change this, this is known as “Implicit” in other games, and its cool, only if there is more than one and different ones per item type.

For example, in gloves some family of gloves, lets say low def silk gloves could have implicits of Mana, Faster Cast Rate (Yes it totally needs to be separated from Attack Speed), Fire/Cold/Lightning Spell Damage %. On mid defense Leather gloves it could be Evasion, Attack Ratting, Attack Speed. On high defense steel guantlets Life, Phys Damage, Phys Damage Reduction %. On rings you could have rings of Fire resist, Cold Resist, Lightning Resist. On Amulets you could have amulets with All Resist, % Life, % Mana, Defense.

There is a huge pool of possibilities there that could be explored, but definitely going for a Attack/Defense for all pieces model is going to totally ruin itemization the same way it was ruined in D3, most players leave D3 for its itemization only, the game and it’s mechanics were not that bad to leave the game but the itemization was definitive.

So I just don’t want this to happen again, please change that model, take away the importance of getting “more and more attack/defense” on items that should not matter AT ALL.

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Hi Ayax,

I defend the Diablo 4 itemization in my post here. There are things with it that the streamers who commented it and the community miss. I hope the post will be of help to you and make you understand why we would have diversity with the current Diablo 4 itemization.

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So none of the rest of your post is relevant to the attack/defense discussion that OP is talking about besides this part. However even this part doesn’t address his main concerns. Even if we agree that attack/defense can lower the barrier to figuring out which item is better, it doesn’t alleviate the fact that the secondary traits (+Faster Attack Speed, +Mana, +cold resist, etc) are now deemed insignificant compared to Attack/Defense. Regardless of what rarity the item is, if Attack/Defense is lower on one item than the other, why would the player even care about the other affixes?

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It’s all relevant.

Special legendary property > the rest of item properties.

You min/max the special legendary properties and after that the other.

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Here is the thing that would make most people happy. I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume here.

  1. Open Trading
  2. Combat bots aggressively
  3. Close online shops
    4: 100% self found/ bargained for

This foundation would put value on items for trade/worth
Remember being “Rich” in D2 minus all your duped HR’s and unperm .08 valks?

Think D2 but without perming out of everygame and 0 bots and 0 JSP
That would be the wet dream of Diablo 4.

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Ancients will ruin the game.

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Maybe I’m confused and am missing something…

But why would Atk/Def overshadow other affixes like Attack Speed/Mana/Resists etc etc?

If you only keep slapping on Atk / Def upgrades, your character isn’t going to have synergy with itself and the content may out-scale you. If you need Attack Speed, what’s stopping you from looking for an Atk/Def upgrade with Attack Speed? Or if you need tons of Mana, why wouldn’t you seek out or upgrade to items with Mana?

I’d be more concerned with legendary powers and set bonuses making other stats irrelevant tbh.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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