Disclaimer
This is a long post. Its purpose is to brainstorm in enough detail that we can weed out bad ideas and explore good ones. If you don’t want to read a long post, move on. Otherwise, I welcome honest thoughts and constructive feedback.
TLDR
This discussion includes suggestions on:
- Item power balance
- Stopping ground clutter
- Each item should have a purpose
- Defining “build-defining”
- Weapon types that matter
- Charms
- Crafting
- Opposing the Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral concept
I had intended to write this sooner, but the latest Developer Update gave me a swift kick in the backside to finally sit down and write it. Itemization is critical to get right if D4 is to succeed. Diablo is a franchise based on the loot hunt. D1’s items are so memorable they’re in the 20 year tribute in D3. Many of D2’s are fondly remembered as well. D3, meanwhile, has been so limited to sets and legendaries that a significant portion of the player base sees the itemization as a problem rather than an iconic part of the game. D4 needs to do better.
Player Power
Before we can talk about items in any detail, we have to understand that the player gains power for his character through various game mechanics: levels which provide stats, items, various item augments like gems and runes, and in D2, charms which turned the inventory into a source of player power. Those sources comprise a portion of all of the player power. In D3, they shifted the overwhelming majority of player power to items with massive multipliers, with a significant portion retained in the emerald in the weapon and the 3 legendary gems. This devalued the entire leveling process and made gearing a largely static choice.
What we want is for player power to be far more evenly distributed. Levels matter when they grant a significant power boost. D4 is supposed to have only 40 player levels, and I’m inferring that it’ll be more like D2 where the end-game starts well before you actually reach max level. I’m hopeful this will be the case.
We also need augments to be more evenly powered. Having gems in the game is pointless if you only need a small subset of them. We don’t want to go back down the route where you auto-socket an emerald in the weapon, you main stat gem in everything else but the helm, then helm varies based only on whether you need CDR or not. The best gems should be able to compete with legendary gems if they make a return, or else there is no choice. D4 is going to see the return of runes with the working concept being setting a trigger and an effect. If this event happens to your character, get this powerful effect. It’s a good idea, and whatever power they add to augments should have parity with other options, so players have viable choices.
Finally, the power gain from levels and items+augments needs to be balanced much more closely to each other than in D3. Again, this is part of making levels matter.
Stopping Ground Clutter
Traditional Diablo itemization includes a progression from common/white to magic/blue to yellow/rare to green/sets or gold/legendaries. The problem is that the power budget for each class was not the same. It increased stepwise, so you started with whites and moved up, then never went back. The game, however, continued to drop these items long after they had become completely useless and they served only as ground clutter. The game had to generate the objects, the player had to deliberately avoid clicking them to keep them out of the inventory. This is bad design.
The easiest solution would be to simply tweak the item generator algorithm so it dropped level-appropriate gear and no ground clutter. Or you could do what D3 did and turn all that vendor trash into salvage for a second-chance crafting system that was largely unused because the craftable items mostly sucked. Neither of these was a great solution.
Items with a Purpose
I think that if something is in the game, it should be there for a reason. Good itemization means items have a purpose. An idea popped into my head a couple of weeks ago.
- Yellow items - linear scaling stats/affixes
- Blue items - multipliers
- Legendaries - “build defining” affixes that change how skills work, other affixes scale linearly
- Sets - “Build defining” affixes as set bonuses, other affixes scale linearly
With this setup, each item has a distinct purpose. If it drops, it’s affixes roll at an appropriate item level, and the player has an incentive to pick it up and look at it. You won’t need a full set of legendaries, just a couple that enhance the key skills in your build. You’ll need yellows for the raw base power that linearly scaling stats provide. But, you may also want magic items for things like attack speed, crits, crit damage, or crushing blows. They’re all potentially useful, so you don’t have to worry about ground clutter. Just reduce the drop rates such that when things do drop, you want to pick it up and look at it. If you need “filler,” use gold, gems, runes, or various crafting materials.
Defining “Build Defining” Affixes
One of my biggest pet peeves of the D3 itemization was that legendaries were basically just huge multipliers. You pick a skill, then get the +500% damage items to go with it. Usually this was defined by sets which offered even more multipliers on the same skills, so your optimum choice boiled down to a single skill and often a single rune of that skill, which would be spammed. I hope D4 can do better.
I think “build defining” needs to include broadly applicable affixes so they don’t lock you into using a single skill. If you do a one-skill item, it should change how the skill works in a compelling way rather than just adding a multiplier. A few examples:
- Dervish - “whirlwind taunts the target for x seconds the first time it hits”
- Greek fire - “fire skills also burn the target for an additional x damage over y seconds”
- Pyroblast - “your fire projectiles are 2x bigger and ignite the ground on impact, burning all who stand in it for x damage over y seconds”
- Death’s Hand - “your cold skills drain the strength of your enemies, reducing their max hp by x% for y seconds”
- Grizzled - “while in bear form, gain +x% armor”
- Ballistic - “all your projectiles now have +x% chance to pierce the target”
- Icepick - “x% of your critical hits become deadly strikes doing 3x damage instead of 2x”
- Shank - “Critical hits apply poison for x damage over y seconds (stacks up to z times)”
Weapon Types That Matter
One of the things I liked about D2 was that your weapon was a strategic choice in that game. You could pick the fast attacking dagger or the slow, but 5 range spear. Crossbows and bows differed without having to take a passive skill (DH’s Archery passive). There were trade-offs with each one that made the choice about more than just the stats or legendary multiplier du saison.
I would like to see this back in the game, but in order to do that, each weapon type needs a passive bonus that makes it compelling. I’ve been very careful to avoid multipliers as much as possible and to suggest that when they are added that they be offset by significant opportunity costs for base power. Weapon type, however, offers a practical place to add some specific multipliers that create meaningful choices. One-handed weapons might look like this:
- Dagger - fastest attack speed, shortest range, passive: +5% crit chance
- Short sword - fast attack speed, shorter range, passive: +5% chance to cause the target to bleed for x damage over y seconds
- Long sword - fast attack speed, longer range, passive: +5% chance to parry incoming attacks
- Club - normal attack speed, medium range, passive: +25% crit damage
- War hammer - normal attack speed, longer range, passive: +3% crushing blow
Two handed weapons might look like this:
- Great sword - Longer range, slow attack, passive: +20% chance to cleave enemies in front of you
- Polearm - Longest range, slowest attack, passive: +5% chance to hamstring (slow) enemy for x seconds on hit
- Staff - Longer range, slowest attack, passive: while equipped, grant a magic shield for x hp
- Maul - Longest range, slowest attack, passive: attacks ignore target’s armor
Again, the goal is to give people a reason to pick certain weapons and to actively seek them out and pick them proactively instead of just grabbing the thing with the biggest numbers.
Me Lucky Charms
Charms have been a hotly debated topic here on the forums. Many D2 fans strongly want them to return. Many D3 veterans don’t want their inventory being sacrificed to properly gear their character. I think charms have a place as a dedicated space on the character sheet (not in the bag space), and more importantly, they can serve as gearing “rule-breakers.”
Link to my previous suggestion for charms
Some examples of charm affixes:
- +x maximum elemental resistance
- +1 skill(s) (to individual skills, a full skill tree, or all skills)
- +x% magic find (assuming there were no other MF items in the game)
- +attacks ignore x points of armor (assuming no other armor penetration in the game)
- +x% chance of health globe (or mana or rejuv globes if in the game) spawn on kill
These can be strong because they’re constrained by the number of slot available to the player on the character sheet. Also, this removes the annoying problem from D2 of having to have a set of MF gear. Here, you can simply swap out the charms.
Make Crafting Great Again
No one wants to be the NPC picking up trash on the battlefield. There’s nothing heroic about that. The D3 salvage concept was ok as a second chance mechanism, but ideally, we’d reduce the need for such things. With the system I’m suggesting where item types matter and where blues and yellows compete with legendaries and sets for BiS status, crafting now can become an optimal way to gear. Not for hand-me-down or throw away gear til the good stuff drops, but actual BiS gear.
Crafting recipes should be created such that the player can control the item type, item quality, and at least one affix that rolls. This allows the player to target what kind of gear he wants, without giving so much of a guarantee that it kills the replayability aspect of the system.
Further, this allows developers to make use of this beautifully gloomy new open world D4 will have by scattering reagents all over it. This gives players incentive to explore different parts of the world to get the reagents they need, gives players things to “run” other than the same 4 bosses or the 1000th randomly generated “kill 500 monsters and the loot piñata” rifts. Also, these reagents can be made to be tradeable to create an economy with a solid source and sink that also encourages players to save the rare reagent they found and trade it for what they need rather than simply stockpiling everything.
But Joat, doesn’t that just mean you now have an incentive to go farming like a peasant? No. It means now you have a noble quest to go slaughter the minions of hell in a certain part of the open world in order to get valuable loot and real rewards. And if you don’t like that quest, you let someone else do the quest and you get to be the NPC quest giver offering a reward for his bounty by trading.
I could also envision a “honing” option that allows the player to invest further reagents to reroll 1 affix (similar to how Kadala works in D3), as well as a “reforging” option that costs nearly as much as the initial crafting recipe, is usable say 1-3 times, and allows the player to reroll all non-fixed affixes. These were good features of the D3 system which should be preserved in some fashion in D4.
The Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral Elephant in the Room
You may have noticed I didn’t touch on this yet. That’s because I hate the concept. It a system that creates “mini-sets” and with random requirements, so you might min-max your character, then have a really good Ancestral piece drop. It’s an upgrade. Sweet! But you need 27 Ancestral power and you’ve got 26 so you effectively have junk because if you do equip it, the affix you care about are inactive and you’d have to completely regear your character to use it. That sucks. It’s a bad idea and they should get rid of it. Let sets be sets and let them have predictable requirements so you can plan to include or exclude them easily.
The idea of Angelic, Demonic, or Ancestral alignment as a character development choice is interesting and well worth adding to D4, but it needs to be done in a different way, and with ways to realign your character that aren’t linked to your gear. There are Star Wars games where your story line choices aligned you with the Jedi or Sith and it’s a great idea, though the D4 devs might have a better idea how to do it, so you’re not chained to the story line. However it’s included, I’d prefer a sense of permanence in this decision, where any effort to change your alignment should take significant work given that it’s part of your character’s identity and reputation in the world.
Final Thoughts
We’re early in the process, so I’m trying to toss a lot of ideas out here. None of the numbers matter at this point, other than that they reflect balancing decisions, and hopefully don’t end up getting too big. As always, constructive feedback, thoughts, and additional suggestions are welcome. The goal is to provide some brainstorming data for Blizzard early enough that some of these ideas could find their way into the game.