D4 Improving Item Affixes

General Discussion
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So far we’ve seen some examples of what weapons might look like in the future. Examples of affixes etc that unfortunately seem a bit lackluster.

Adding energy or % damage increase seems kinda boring.

Diablo dev team mention that they want items to be easily readable without having to do too much of anything, other than look at the item stats and affixes to know whether it’s better than what you’re carrying or not.

I think this could be a mistake. I’m not saying it should be the enigma code! The basic item stats should be easily readable, but I think it’s actually more interesting finding a complicated item and not knowing completely what it does or how good it is without further research.

One reason for this is because of the information age we live in, people will definitely be drawn to making guides about these subjects. Anything that is more complicated and not easily knowable at a glance drives content creation and mystery, making items more fun imo. And people FOR SURE end up looking this stuff up, people KNOW when they’ve found something rare and if they don’t understand it, this creates intrigue. Very rarely does someone simply throw an item away without seeking to understand all its modifiers. And if they do, well, that’s not exactly a high skill play is it.

It could also create another gameplay loop, perhaps unlocking a full tome of knowledge that explains every Affix. Ofc you could go to google, but it’s still nice having things like this to unlock for fun.

I DO have some interesting suggestions here that I haven’t seen appear on items, that I think could bring some of the flavour Diablo players are looking for.

In D2 there are 2 very interesting Affix words that promote mystery but without being overly complicated. They also manage to bring down the amount of words needed to be written on an item.

These words are CRUSHING BLOW and DEADLY STRIKE.

I mention these first as they are exactly the kind of cool ways to make items more interesting I would be happy with. I think they are great examples of what could be done for D4. D4 could make up completely new words that encapsulate a complicated math problem or exciting combination of affects into one single word or phrase.

I would really like a bunch of cool keywords like CRUSHING BLOW and DEADLY STRIKE to exist in D4. Rather than the boring 2x damage or crit chance.

Some other interesting words you find on items are:

  • Lower Resistances (very cool because it doesn’t seem that powerful, but after research you learn it’s one of the most powerful keywords you can find!)
  • Attack Rating (how much hit chance you have, most people think this adds to damage without research, I think this is a cool moment when you find out what it actually does)
  • Magic Find
  • Light Radius (sounds cool, ends up not being, knowledge is powerful!)
  • Cannot Be Frozen
  • Life/Mana steal
  • Faster Run Walk
  • Spell Procs (literally procs a spell like free hydras or a lower level Feral Rage maybe. Still useful if you’re getting for free and could make a whole build around something like this!)
  • Piercing (it gives a projectile the chance to pass through a target and continue on to hit a second target for full damage, again something you could make a whole build around perhaps trying to stack this on every item or a hybrid pierce/lightning bounce perhaps!)
  • Knockback
  • Prevent Monster Heal
  • Slain Monsters Rest in Peace

I felt like perhaps the devs need a little help here as we haven’t seen any examples of cool Affixes like these on items yet. I especially would love to see a bunch of new damage specific words like CRUSHING BLOW and DEADLY STRIKE.

If anyone else has good ideas here I would love to hear them and I think the dev team would too.

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afaik hit chance doesn’t exist anymore

power vs. convenience is a sensitive topic

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I think I read somewhere that they were considering adding things like Magic Find and I guess maybe Light Radius would fall into this category as well, onto items but without them REPLACING damage keywords.

I like this idea. I think Magic Find is something cool to have on items that could be added to them through crafting maybe or just found natively on items. Making amazing damage items also be really good at Magic Find without nerfing them by an entire Affix.

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Hit chance is not a good idea. Maybe they should remove it. There is a better idea: “hit precision”. The idea is that you have randomized damage <min,max>. With precision 0% your damage is <0, max>. With 100% precision your damage is <max, max>. Now, THAT’S something interesting. It’s also very logical and natural: your attacks have some randomness (sword swings are not the same in the real word), so your damage varies. Various cool mechanics can be implemented around this concept. This can also apply to shots and to spells.

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This is exactly the kind of thing I would like to see on a weapon. The elegance of finding the simple keywords HIT PRECISION but knowing in your head or looking in the “tome of knowledge” what the maths is behind this decision.

Trying to stack more of this keyword as opposed to DEADLY STRIKE would mean more consistency in hitting your full damage everytime, but less crit. A cool decision and definitely flavourful build creation.

Consistent high damage all the time, or moments of burst damage with high crit possibilities! +1

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i think magic find is something that would fit easily in an endgame system since it would not power creep the game but simply act like a pitty timer for finding the items you are looking for

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It shouldn’t be called “Magic Find”. That’s… weird. In the real world we call this LUCK or FORTUNE. Having such a stat is a good idea in a game where you are focused on finding amazing items.

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Improving D4 item affixes? More like “please use D2 item affixes lol” :rofl:

As for the topic itself, the answer is “nope”.

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you are always focused on finding amazing items and you are always focused on dealing as much damage as possible without dying

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D4 itemization definitely seems very lackluster.

It remains a mystery for just about 2 seconds while you google it. Trying to make item affixes obscure serves very little purpose tbh.
The game should try to make sure all game mechanics are explained in-game. The moment people alt-tab to google what something means or the basics on how it works, the devs have failed.

Especially since respecs should be really expensive/rare, we should not have to spend skill points etc. blindly. It just serves no purpose other than telling people to go google stuff before they choose.

Which imo is why it should not exist. Monster resistances should exists for a very specific reason. We should not be able to circumvent them.

Yeah, that could work fine.

I am very much in favor of unlocking information on how things work. But imo it makes a lot more sense that you unlock how enemies etc. work, by fighting them (their health, resistances, weak points, special drops etc.) than unlocking info on how your own skills work.
Also, offer actual combat bonuses as part of those unlocks, so you cant just google it all.

Too binary I Win affix. Nothing should offer permanent immunity against anything.

Yep, stuff like that is good.
If say, reduce monster heal rater than prevent monster heal. Prevention is again too binary imo.

It can be great, but imo it sucks if the spell procs are taken from other classes. Diminishes the class identities. New abilities gained from items should be unique to items. Like how Grim Dawn handles it.

In general, Grim Dawn has the best itemization in the genre (which does not at all mean it is perfect however), it should be one of the first places to go for inspiration.

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“The moment people alt-tab to google what something means or the basics on how it works, the devs have failed.”

Have you read D2 build guides back in the day? Was it FUN? It was for me and I SURELY want to read LONG and INTERESTING and in DEPTH guides for D4 builds. Agreed? Or maybe you want to learn everything from the UI? XD

Not everything can be explained in the UI in DEPTH. Unless… we do it D3 way and… it CAN be explained in the UI, because systems are so UTTERLY PRIMITIVE AND SHALLOW, that it can be done. :confused:

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a max DPS build guide is something different than affixes and skills not telling you what they are doing in the game

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I HOPE that there will be something MORE than “max DPS build guides”. For ex. “tanking guide”, “healing guide”, “support guide”, “2v2 arena/PvP guide”, “best hero combo guide” and on and on.

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Indeed.
Tell people what everything do. Dont tell people how to play, or how to maximize.

Yes.

Like, breakpoints. Tell people about those in-game. Both what it is, but also the nitty gritty of what the actual breakpoints values are. Nothing is gained from keeping it secret.
How valuable it is to reach certain breakpoints under different circumstances? That is for the players to figure out.

Different guides for different kinds of builds, sub builds and all kinds of amazing nuances, yeah, hopefully!
But I sure hope we dont get the holy trinity of dps, tank, healing. And also not support. No MMO please :smiley:
There can be plenty of nuances in how to DPS, how to survive, and how to balance those two. Without different characters having different roles. All our roles should be to “kill monsters” at the end of the day!

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I mean that there should be some kind of “soft” specializations for team play. Not hard roles like in old MMO’s. For ex. you could build a Barb so that he is your main puller which keeps aggro. Something like that. Guild Wars 2 removed the trinity and it FAILED hard. That’s an MMO though.

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I really hope there is no concept of aggro that magically allows some characters to keep monsters on them. But a tank in the sense of placing yourself in between the enemy with a huge axe, and your fragile sorceress, maybe taking advantage of bottlenecks in the environment. Sure. That kind of tanking by using the environment in clever ways is fine. So is using CC to prevent dmg (though perma-CC should of course not be anywhere close to possible).

Monsters should be smart though. A weakling sorceress throwing fireballs at a distance? Better try to reach it. Ignore the silly low dmg barb in front.

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Yup, no group mechanics or skills. Let every class have their own defensive and regen skills or access to affixes that help with that. The moment you introduce it is the moment the community forces specific builds to group or you have a harder time geouling if you wanted to play a high damage Paladin as opposed to a DPS healer you’re screwed.

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I personally prefer aggro instead of abilities that allow you to pull everything towards you. Being able to spam monster gather on every target leaves no room for the gameplay you describe here:

With aggro the monsters still have the ability to decide who to attack. This could be based on range, damage, cooldowns, monster type making some powerful monsters always ignore this and other things. Leaving room for enemies to act differently and not have control taken away from them with spammable pull abilities.

I think tank, healer, dps is called the holy trinity for a reason. It’s the foundation for which all classes are built upon. Trying to avoid this and making everything pure dps is pretty boring. If people want to make classes like this I think it adds way more options than just nuking everything down.

Why not? I would argue gathering abilities are group mechanics and skills, you don’t want stuff like this to exist? What about group buffs, plenty exist in D2. If not then all we’re doing is nuking everything. That’s boring imo.

I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist. I’m fine with every class having builds that cater for this type of gameplay. But why not have builds that also cater for others?

And again, why not? I don’t think they should go as far as FORCING people to have to play certain builds but I do absolutely feel there should be positives and negatives to certain builds grouping up together. Otherwise you fall into the trap of “every build and class does everything” there ends up being no uniqueness to any class and no specialisation.

People are so averse to having Diablo turn into anything that resembles an mmo but I really think it’s too late for that and it’s time to let go. I don’t think Diablo will be an mmo but I do want it to be a much more social experience because Diablo 2 and 3 are not this. They are very lonely to play games considering they are multiplayer because there’s really no reason to group up with people outside of killing monsters a little quicker but receiving less loot.

I want a reason to group up with people and use cases that make my class unique and feel powerful at certain moments but weaker in others. That way when I do group up with a build that is filling the gaps I’m not so good at, like grouping up enemies and taking damage for example, it feels great to complete content together! And why not have healer builds or defensive buffs. Singer Barb is a very succesful build in D2. It could mean you can run really dangerous glass cannon builds alongside a dedicated support/healer.

I don’t see any issue with giving people more options and ways to play if that’s what they choose. It’s not taking away from there being the existing gameplay style that others like yourselves wish for. Everyone nuke everything!

And just to be clear, I’m not advocating for holy trinity and a complete turn to mmo gameplay. But quasi holy trinity style builds I think would be a great addition. Everyone should be killing monsters though I agree on this.

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My takes

Light radius-Does anyone care for this? Waste of stats imo.

Magic find. I am okay with with, okay without it. One problem with D2 is some classes/builds you can get high MF without nerf to power that much, (like sorc) while harder on some classes/builds.
I am not sure I like the idea of creating a build/class for MF. cough D2 Sorc

Cannot be forzen- It will end up with half of builds using an item with the stat, *Cough “Raven frost” for most melee. Its not a meaningful choice if its a must have. I rather items with reduce CC/Freeze duration (stackable), & you have to decide how much the reduction you want from gears. Instead of one too good to pass off stats from a single gear.

Not as obvious as “cannot be frozen” but same feeling with “prevent monster heal”. A reduce monster heal will be better for similar reason.

Spell /attack Procs is fine, like in D2 & D3. I would be surprise if this do not make a return in D4.

knockback & pierce are fine, as %, not 100% but can stack.

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1, Groups already have the innate advantage of player coordination and efficiency, providing group benefits through skills on top of that you might as well go the D3 route and give them far more xp, drops, and everything else. Classes themselves can bring their own benefits just from their own strengths without needing group buffs/benefits. If you want a Druid you should want the druid becasue it may be better at CC than your Barb not becasue it can heal the whole group or provide the group with an armor buff.
2, See my original comment and the one below. The moment you have builds that cater to the group is the moment the playerbase forces players to play that way to join groups.

3, Blizzard wouldn’t be forcing, it’s the playerbase. The moment a list of optimal builds for groups pops up, if a “support” class build is not being used, that player who wants to group will have a harder time finding others to group up with. We all know this and have 20+ years of seeing it in online games.

Diablo doesn’t to be anymore of a social experience than it already is with a in game chat. There are plenty of other games that fill that niche. Unfortunately Blizzard wants it to be a pseudo-social experience. However that really has nothing to do with grouping per my comments.

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