I know a lot of this will come down to “feel” and preference. The goal is to stir up discussion of what we actually want in D4 and why. This will deal with randomness in item generation, damage, and the combat system itself (ie dodge, block, missed attacks, etc).
How much randomness is too much randomness?
Background: Why is this an issue?
There has been some discussion about items and item progression over the past few months, including about primals, and it occurred to me that we probably need to go back to the core concept here, randomness, and talk about it.
I remember when D3 was initially released, Jay Wilson and crew touted their random item generator as a big selling point. They could generate something like 40 quadrillion (or some obscenely large) number of potential items with the loot table. You’d calculate that by simply multiplying the probability of every possibility in the loot tree together: item quality x # of affixes x the range of possible values of each item, etc. It was a huge search space and the idea was you’d never see the exact same item twice. Fundamentally, a Diablo idea.
It turned out that within that search space, the overwhelming majority of those items were garbage items that no one wanted. Only a tiny fraction of them were any good, and those that were made some lucky people big money on the RMAH. Variability is good, but not too much.
This was eventually recognized as a problem and we got Loot 2.0, the Smart Loot system. Now, the game would preferentially drop items your class could equip, with a set of affixes that made sense you might want to equip, and with ranges for the affixes that were more tightly constrained to the item’s level. Mathematically, they simply closed the search space a bit and removed a huge portion of junk items from being able to spawn. This has been one of the most popular and successful changes they’ve implemented, since it enabled people to play with gear they found themselves from killing monsters. Play the game, not the market.
Eventually, Smart Loot was successful enough players were capping out their builds and getting bored too early in the seasons. The power treadmill needed another setting, so they added Ancient items. Take the search space of legendary items and multiply by 10% drop rate for ancients. Play 10x as long to fully gear your character. And when even that wasn’t enough, they added the primals to ensure not even the bottiest of bots or sun-parched of no-lifers would ever fully gear their character. The catch of course is that for the non-botters among us who might have jobs and/or lives, when we found primals, we wanted them to be exciting things we’d want to equip, not disappointing vendor trash, and far too often, we got the vendor trash. With primals, the devs had effectively undone what they had gained with Smart Loot.
Randomness in Items
As I played through D1, 2, and 3, it occurs to me that we want a wide range of randomness as we level. We’re getting high drop rates of blues and yellows. We’re leveling up, so we want to replace the gear as we get access to more powerful affixes and higher values for them. If you play through without the gimmicks or the power level, you appreciate the constant rewards as you progress and often find upgrades. This is a good thing. It makes all those little quests in the story and all those little fights with elite monsters you run into exciting and potentially rewarding. Here, because of the high drop rate and high rate of upgrades, we can tolerate a high amount of randomness in the gear.
In D2, as you hit the end of nightmare and certainly in Hell difficulty, you’d pretty much figured out your build at this point. The D3 equivalent here might be T10-16ish. You have a build. You’ve got the core items that make it work. You still see upgrades, but they’re fewer and farther between. You need very specific items and you need good rolls on them. Here is where Smart Loot 2.0 shone. You needed less randomness on the items because the chance of you finding anything that was an upgrade was so small. In D3, if it wasn’t your specific set or legendary, you didn’t need it. So on the rare chance the game actually did drop you something you might use, you simply couldn’t treat it like a Powerball ticket (ie, you’re nearly guaranteed to lose) or even a Pick 4. It needed to have the core power to be usable, then some variability to accommodate different gearing strategies.
But at the end-game is where we ended up with problems. In D2, the uniques and runewords all had very constrained potential values. Once you had the items, you might see a side-grade to get perfect rolls on it, but generally, even a poorly rolled one was very usable, and you’d want that because ever seeing the thing in the first place was the result of many dozens if not hundreds of hours of play.
In D3 we had a different model. The game threw sets and legendaries at you so you could make your build, and baked a long loot hunt into moving from low quality legendaries to ancients to primals. And when that “best item in the game” red beam dropped, we didn’t get the D2 equivalent of those great uniques or runewords. Usually, we got a trash legendary we’d never want or use. It could have the best stats in the world, but in a SSF Smart Loot world where the builds are item-dependent, none of this mattered unless it was the right item. Instead of being exciting, the red beam usually meant an angry, resentful trip to Haedrig for 15 souls you didn’t need or want. What needed to happen was that those red beams lived up to being the best items in the game - for your character (again, there’s no trading). Make them rare if you have to, but they should’ve felt like an incredible reward and instead, felt like a slap in the face. We needed even less randomness because so few items at that point could ever have been upgrades.
What I think we need:
| Stage | Upgrade Drop Rate | Randomness in the Item Generator |
|---|---|---|
| Early game | High | High |
| Mid game | Middle | Smart Loot 2.0 |
| End game | Very low | Highly Constrained |
When the drops are frequent, the randomness of the items dropped needs to be high so you have to look for a while to find a good one. As drops get rarer, you don’t need highly random affixes. The rarity’s in the drop rate itself. Let the item be decent at baseline. If you add ultra-low drop rate items, they need to be guaranteed to be useful, because otherwise, if you get one of those and it’s useless, it just feels terrible.
Randomness in Spells/Skills
This is a little different and gets into the combat system. In Diablo, weapons have a range of damage they can do. A base roll comes from the RNG for each attack, that feeds into the damage calculation and that damage is applied. You don’t do exactly the same damage each time, but it’s within a basic range.
In D2, we had certain elements, like lightning, that had massive ranges, literally 1-x. You could have attacks which were absolutely devastating and you’d watch enemies melt, and some which didn’t even tickle the monster. It was a highly erratic system, that over the long run, balanced out at a reliable number, but in practice could be highly frustrating when damage you needed and counted on didn’t materialize.
In situations like PVP or even highly competitive PVE (think D3 GR pushes), you want things you can rely on so you can make strategic choices on the battlefield. You need to conserve your DPS and avoid overkill damage. Highly erratic damage is a bad thing here.
This I think is ultimately going to be a matter of preference. I think there should be spells/skills that offer both strategies to the player. I think the weapon types themselves could have different amounts of randomness as well. Perhaps a dagger might have a wide range (from weaker slashes to devastating stabs to critical organs) whereas a 2H maul might have a narrow range (if that thing hits you, its going to hurt). Randomness here adds an interesting variable to combat that players may like and gives some unique options for game play.
Randomness in Combat System
This is the last section, so hang with me here. I know it’s been long. Think back to D2, you had a hit and miss system. You could dodge, block with a shield, etc. You could hit, miss, glancing blow, crushing blow, or crit. These are all elements of combat that we simulate on a computer with a random roll. 10% of the chance, your attack will miss, so roll a dice, etc.
Modern games now have the ability to detect position, use complex physics to determine hits or misses with projectiles, and create complex areas of effect for spells to apply. We saw that highlighted in the latest D4 update where they’re using these types of things to make spells feel more impactful and life-like. We don’t need to simulate these aspects of combat with a dice roll anymore. We can make the battlefield more interactive and fights more tactical. If you want to block, your shield needs to face the attack. If you want to dodge, move faster, Grasshopper.
The question here is do we even need randomness here? Do we need to simulate with RNG rolls when we can do it interactively with the player in real time? Randomness has advantages. It’s far less demanding on the CPU. And critical hits are certainly a fun part of Diablo game play I’ve never heard anyone complain about. But it has big disadvantages too. It doesn’t reward skillful game play and it can be streaky. If you’ve got a 30% chance to dodge and hit a lucky streak, you could be untouchable for a very long time (frustrating as hell in PVP), getting an unintended large survivability bonus, or you hit bad luck and you’re getting squished - the price of a simple combat model.
Do we want or even need the return of an RNG-based combat model?
2/5/22 - Added Summary: Posts 1-145
Summary at 145 Posts
Randomness in Items
- Items should have some element of RNG
- Common items can have a high amount of randomness, but rarer items should be much more reliably good, so that when you get them, they feel like a reward that you’d want to use
- Very wide ranges on the values “must-have” affixes or “must-have” items are very frustrating for players. A single bad roll can render the entire item worthless, which feels terrible, especially if it’s a very rare item. Dawn and Short Man’s Finger were given as examples. There is strong support for strictly limiting ranges on legendary affixes, even if it means making them rarer.
- There is support for having fewer items drop overall so long as the ones that do drop are good enough to be worth using.
- There is also support for having less randomness in the drop chances overall. Targeted farming where certain areas or monsters had higher chances to drop particular items was widely suggested.
- There is strong support for second-chance mechanics in general, recognizing that RNG is an essential part of the Diablo experience, but still wanting to be able to exert some control over “bad” rolls. Another supporting reason is the desire to be able to customize items more easily to the needs of your specific build.
- Players do understand that high quality things should require effort and/or time to earn and are not simply asking for more gear faster, just more reliability in knowing what you have to do to get x item.
- Players are asking drop rates to be balanced around a reasonable investment of time to fully gear a character, so that botting and “no-lifing”/obsessive playing is not encouraged. The definition of “reasonable amount of time” varies a lot.
- There is a desire for a smoother progression in gear throughout the life of a character. Players enjoy upgrading in a step-wise fashion rather than going straight to the best item in the game.
Randomness is Spells/Skills
- There seems to be consensus that skills should have a variety of ranges of damage in order to allow the player to customize his character’s attacks they way they like, whether it’s a very reliable attack or a highly random one like D2’s lightning damage.
- Players want reasons to use a variety of skills in combat rather than relying on just one, though this always comes with a statement that single-skill builds should be viable for players who want them.
Randomness in Combat
- Players seem to want much more reliability in combat regarding their own performance. Very little support for the idea of bringing back hit chance and misses. Instead, players want to make use of a more active combat system, where they control the dodging and similar mechanics with positioning.
- Players want monsters to be much more interactive in general. Support for more monster abilities on each monster type, whether scripted or randomly cast, to make fights more interesting and challenging.
Environment
- There is a lot of support for highly random maps in this thread to encourage exploration.
2/7/22 - Added Summary: Posts 145-240
General thoughts
- Players are willing to have very good items be very rare, making something too rare can make it de facto inaccessible, like the highest runes in D2. All drop rates must factor in the length of “seasons” and the amount of time a player might be able to actually benefit from the ultra-rare item.
- Having highly specialized legendary/unique items that break the pattern (ie armor with good offensive affixes or a weapon with defensive affixes) are interesting choices to offer to players looking to customize/specialize (presented as an argument against D3’s Smart Loot guaranteeing each legendary has key affixes from the start)
On Second-Chance Mechanics
- Some see these mechanics as unnecessary. Their presence is an attempt to fix an issue with too much randomness. Fix the root cause problem by reducing the unnecessary randomness and you won’t need second chances at the roulette wheel.
- Second chance mechanics have to be carefully designed. Moving affixes on items makes them feel like Legos rather than objects with some permanence. Adding power to items (ie socketing, augmenting w/ another affix, etc) is seen as a better approach.