By my estimation, this is what you want (and I do too). I just dont think invalidating the gear tier system is the way to do it.
And I don’t think that making Whites, Magics and Rares obsolete is the right path.
Try to think of it this way:
The color of an item merely indicates how many and what kind of stats you can expect to find on an item.
The “power level” is solely determined by how well those stats fit into your character build.
Every single Diablo Game so far had completely useless Uniques/Legendaries and this will most probably not change with D4, so item tiers have never been a reliable power indicator to begin with.
4 Likes
110% agree with you op
1 Like
Even the crappy legs in d3 were better than any rare or magic item.
I getcha, I just dont like using low tier items in endgame, it just feels bad.
It bugged me in d2 when I needed to use a white item to bust out a powerful runeword.
That said, I get where youre coming from. And I suspect you understand my position as well.
I suppose we’ll just have to live with someone disagreeing with us on the internet 
Its been a good conversation though.
100% agree.
Items should be multidimensional in their usefulness, not just a linear ramp in tiers.
There should be base items that are hard to obtain because the areas they drop in are hard to get to. There should be crafting systems and other ways to interact with that base to make something great out of it.
Let players find legendary crafting benches in the depths of hell that can only be used once.
Imagine the D4 trailer but instead of him saying “it’s a gate” he says “it’s a forge”.
Let players who are prepared and bring their great item base along with them to use it on the spot and maybe get something amazing.
3 Likes
Because that’s stupid ARPG design and it has never been the case until D3. Legendaries weren’t even a thing. Unqiue items in D2 would offer interesting affixes and even potentially had drawbacks which led to choices in gearing a player had to make. People seem to want Diablo to be an MMO like WoW where items are straight up better as you progressively go up the rarity chain. That type of boring design belongs in an MMO, not an ARPG.
6 Likes
I agree, they don’t need to make the legendary items so obvious of a power increase that they give them additional affix values. Give us decisions where even rares are competitive. The legendary’s will already be strong because of different +skills and the skill augmentation itself but it doesn’t have to be exaggerated further and completely stomp out rares or magic items.
4 Likes
Agree 100%, parallel itemization is the way to go. Multiple items classes should be able to compete for BiS.
A linear itemization as found in D3 is not the way to go. It’s one of the reasons everyone is done playing seasons after the 2nd day. The itemization system in D3 has literally no depth.
3 Likes
Some questions I see popping up in the thread that should have obvious and trivial answers:
- Why is “attack” and “defense” bad? They’re catch all stats that everyone will want, which will require no constraint and no thinking power. This is the low tier crap that’s on cell phone games (and I should know, I play craptons of cell phone games).
What they should do instead is have a slot that’s guaranteed a good damage affix from a pool and have it compete with attack speed, crit chance (no crit damage), area damage, DoT damage, etc. No stats are bad, no one stat is universal for all builds. This nonsense about “if the stats aren’t so simple that a 5 year old can figure out an M rated game, obviously just illusion of choice” is nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Did I mention that it’s nonsense? It’s nonsense. An exception to this is defense.
Defense is something that should just happen on armor, happens in D2 and most other ARPG’s. Def shouldn’t show up on weapons or jewelry. Def should not scale with rarity (rare, legendary, etc.) but should just scale with item level, denoting general quality of an item. Defense shouldn’t be so ridiculous as to override the magical affixes on the item. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to find a good level 32 helmet that lasts you a little into endgame at level 40.
- Why do people want yellows to be endgame items?
Because auto salvaging everything that’s not legendary is incredibly boring and again requires no thought. I’m not talking “spreadsheet” complexity here either. Part of the flow of ARPG gameplay is: Kill monsters, get loot, look at loot and see if it’s useful. If you get to a point in the game where only orange beams are useful, guess what? Either drop rates for orange beams have to go up to keep pace with how hard it gets to find particular legendaries, then particular legendaries with particular rolls, etc. or you’re going to have people getting bored out of their skulls because their gameplay has been boiled down to looking for only one kind of thing to drop.
My suggestions:
Blue items roll with 4 affixes, but the affixes can scale to double the values on usual items.
Yellow items can roll with 6 affixes (no double dipping on affixes).
Legendary items get 4 affixes and a legendary affix.
So what’s being compared then is a bunch more of the particular stats you want vs a variety of stats vs fewer stats in both variety / magnitude but a special legendary affix that gives you added skill utility / performance.
To make even normals interesting, you could introduce a very organic crafting system. Suppose that normal items started out with 4 sockets. To put in those sockets, you put gems, but instead of generic stats like D3 gems, suppose the gems had affixes on them, like you’d find on gear. So you’d put the 4 sockets you want (one of each kind fo gem, just like the double dipping rule) and voila. Over time, you could craft the precise affixes you want for the specific slot you want. No Mystic crafting or any gambling like that. You find the mats and put the gear together.
Now suppose you could craft or find scrolls as drops that allowed you to take a normal piece of gear and enchant to to be “as if” it were a certain quality of gear (only one kind of enchantment allowed). A blue enchant would double the potency of your sockets for that item. A yellow would increase the sockets to 6, and perhaps you could find random legendary enchantments that would put that legendary ability on that piece of gear.
No extra crafting UI, no super complicated crafting mats increasing “complexity” (where do I find these mats, and where do I find this recipe, and how do I put it together in this UI interface to make these kind of items, and what kind of item do I make to get the quality stats I want?). The crafting system is organic, player driven, and works based off stuff you find in the game. It’s a good mitigator against RNG, allows even normals to be interesting, etc.
So when you’re playing the game and gear drops, you kind of know what it’s for and if it’s useful to you. Maybe you really like attack speed and bracers come with an attack speed slot. For your build, no legendary power is super interesting to you in the affix spot, so you can either get double attack speed (blues) or attack speed and more affixes (maybe elemental damage and CDR or something) and you can just work on crafting bracers you like (normal bracers, gems, scrolls).
This idea that legendaries are the best kind of items by default is just boring and makes huge swaths of game content and drops obsolete by design.
2 Likes
Wow. Lots of you are just negative trolls aren’t you.
Firstly, MASSIVE thanks to blizzard for making Diablo 4 as well as Diablo Immortal. As a long time lover of diablo for almost 30 years, I am super pumped to have two new diablo games, still in the isometric style and not going first person, that I love.
You all should be very happy to start with that the series is continuing and not getting thrown away, going first person or some other dumb change.
They have said its going darker as well, which is what the community wanted.
The biggest issue for D3 for me was the skills. No skills points just kills an RPG for me. So super glad that they are fixing this (although when D3 was first announced it had skills points…)
Re the items lots of complaints about.
D2 next to no one end game was running around in rares. Be serious. Most people were running around in ridiculously OP runewords (e.g. Enigma) that were built with duped runes. Add in a few legandaries. Maybe, just maybe a rare jewellery piece in some specific instances if a godly one dropped (and only because there were no rune word jewellery).
So now we will have Mythics (one), plus a real choice between set or legandaries. There is little difference. End game is only going to be the best items.
There is no point in having common or magic items be end game viable. You could argue for your rares back, but that just means doing away with a tier. The new rares are the basic legendaries.
Who on earth wants to have to pick up every single item that drops and read its affixes to see if it is good?
That makes no sense to me.
I don’t want to have to pickup white and blue trash, because I know it is trash.
You would turn the game into hack and read. You hack up a few mobs, then you stop and look at the 5 white items and 3 blue items that dropped and you needed to pickup, see if they are good, then decide if you want to drop them or head back to town and sell them.
Hell No! Only stop and pickup items of certain tiers that you know might actually be useful to you.
Arguably this is only the case because runewords got out of control. But until you found runewords, rares with affixes relevant to you were better than uniques without affixes relevant to you. But with this system, legendaries roll any affixes a rare could roll with a free affix on top, so there is no choice. Any legendary is automatically better than any rare because they have the same potential affixes.
Which were crafted from normal items, making even normal drops interesting to look at end game.
The point is choice between more raw stat power vs legendary affixes. If that choice isn’t interesting, legendaries are just too strong. If legendaries do everything AND give an extra affix, there’s no constraint there and it’s pointless having the other gear slots in the game. They literally only exist to “not be legendaries” which is a giant waste of potential.
2 Likes
You shouldn’t know it’s trash. That’s the problem. Trash just shouldn’t be in the game period. Bottom line is that bots shouldn’t be able to sort your gear for you. Gearing should be a fundamental aspect done by the player. if you could program a bot to just say “lol just get orange beams kthx” then why not bot? What do you get from playing that a bot wouldn’t just do for you?
“You would turn the game into hack and read. You hack up a few mobs, then you stop and look at the 5 white items and 3 blue items that dropped and you needed to pickup, see if they are good, then decide if you want to drop them or head back to town and sell them.”
White items would be easy. Sockets, yes or no? Blue items would be easy. Is it the kind of slot with affixes that interest me? Say I only want blue bracers. Turn gear filter on so that if a blue item drops, you only see it if it’s blue bracers.
Yeah that’s the point. All items should potentially be useful to you, else why are they in the game? I mean every problem you have with the system could just be solved by advanced loot filter systems which games like Grim Dawn already have.
Filter by quality by slot by affix, etc. I only want to see blue bracers with crit, for example. If blue pants drop, you won’t see them. If blue bracers without crit drop, you won’t see them. No checking to see if the item is “good” because you, the player, decide what potentially good items you’re interested in picking up which means you pick up trash less often.
But the stats vs legendary affixes trade of SHOULD be a thing. Otherwise we’re all just lolbotting legendaries and getting bored in a month again.
4 Likes
Meanwhile, PoE doesn’t have half a dozen rarity tiers and is never going to need to add one because they understood the solution to this pitfall 9+ years ago.
You pretty much want the rarity with the highest standard number of affixes to be the bread and butter of the itemization while any other end-game tiers should be lateral extensions by providing utility and mechanics at a trade-off to what rares typically provide. This way most builds will be made using both thus making each tier have long lasting value. On top of that the lower tiers such as normal and magic should be the foundation for crafting and not the recycled resource.
That’s how value can exist all along the spectrum without any part of it just immediately dying because its inherently superseded.
7 Likes
The answer is…right…there… just…just…LOOK. It WORKS! WELL!!!
You’re absolutely right.
https://i.imgur.com/OdcOwGA.png
Just look at the inventory setup they have compared to D3’s. It looks even more simplified and insulting than D3’s did.
https://i.imgur.com/rc8fElt.png
What was wrong with this layout? Each item had it’s own size to fit in your inventory and they looked larger, making me appreciate their appearance more. Why can’t they just take this and expand on it?
Are you really sure you’re going back to the roots of Diablo 2’s gameplay and legacy, (Activision) Blizzard?
So far the only thing you’ve gotten down nicely is the atmosphere. Congrats.
2 Likes
Think of it this way. There are 3 possibilities
- make gears you want more accessible. Problem is once you get your item, loot hunt is over, and it will be over fast
- make good legs extremely rare. You be overjoyed when a leg drops but may live with long period of frustration of not being a able to play with the build defining legs you are farming for .
- a middle ground. A more common base legs that easier to find so you can start playing the build you want. While having a higher tier rarer version of the base leg for you to chase for.
Personally I am in favor of option 3. I remember pre Kanai cube days. I played wizards and cannot get the last piece of Tal Rashe ( the amulet) after almost a week of farming greater rifts and rage quit.
I have a hunch that Diablo 4 spring boarded off of Diablo 3 and started Development very soon after 2018 Blizzcon. Same engine but enhanced/changed, assets reused but enhanced/changed so as to speed up development. Gameplay Trailer and Demo were probably handcrafted so as to present the idea that they have a lot done already when in fact they don’t.
Diablo Immortal back lash with Blizzard not using Diablo 4 confirmation/hints to calm the angry masses. Why not confirm the game’s development? Absolute secrecy at the expense of a fan back lash and an increase to falling stocks? Not worth it to greedy Blizzard/Activision. They had nothing imo.
The “soon” but not “Blizzard soon” which means Diablo 4 will be released in probably 1.5, 2 or more years. A lot of features asked about from Q&A were met with “probably” and “maybe” because there isn’t any base right now - they are still super early on in development because Blizzcon 2018 caught Blizzard with their pants down and forced them to make D4.
Diablo 3’s gameplay trailer / showcase was completely fabricated with a lot of shown features being scrapped (death animations, talisman, using ladders/jumping across ledges, etc…).
edit: A new engine would be really expensive and would take a long time to make. Grim Dawn (2016 arpg) used Titan Quest’s engine (2006) but heavily modified which had it’s own pros and cons just like how reusing Diablo 3’s engine would have it’s pros and cons.
They began hiring for the “Unannounced Diablo Project” as far back as 2016. Development would have started around then.
Partly because they somehow thought that a mobile game would be enough.
It’s not like Blizzard doesn’t have the resources to do such a thing.
Game development often starts years in advance.