Diablo IV Quarterly Update - Q2 June 2020

[Shadout-2849]

@MazerRackham-1634

I think my main hope here is that when they use Angelic/Demonic/Ancestral stats as a prereq for other affixes they let it be random. For example, I don’t want Crushing Blow affixes to always be tied to a high Ancestral score, because then you can’t experiment with Demonic Crushing Blow builds, etc. So if an item can roll a Crushing Blow affix with any of the three as a prereq, that could potentially be fine (albeit annoying) because then you just need to grind to find a version of that item with the affix that fits your build.

I can see two main solutions here.

1. Random. Sometimes Crushing blow requires Ancestral power, sometimes Demonic. On the other hand, why bother with the system at all then? It only adds RNG.

2. Tiered affixes.
   (a) Like 1-5% crit chance do not require any ADA power. But 6% crit chance affix requires Angelic Power or whatever. That way, if you want that last step on the affix tier, it comes with a cost/tradeoff, but you can do perfectly fine with just the second highest affix tier too.
   (b) An alternative to this version would be scaling affixes, if you have 0 Angelic power, the affix gives 3% crit, if you have 30 Angelic power it might give 4.5 crit, if you have 60+ angelic power it might give 6% crit. That way, you have soft scaling instead of hard breakpoints. Both systems can work imo, just a matter of preference.

In any case, yes, it would be really bad if each affix is tied to a specific ADA power. That would be D3 sets all over again. By locking players into a few pre-defined paths of where they can go with their builds.