Diablo's Advocate: The Case for Ancients

General Discussion
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I’m a big believer in the red-team-blue-team concept of brainstorming. You need someone who is willing to argue the opposing case in order to really understand the issue under debate, and I’m going to attempt to do that here for the sake of discussion.

Ancients are the result of two key systems in the game:

  • Build-defining legendaries (which are generally popular)
  • Solo self-found

After the disaster that was the RMAH, the development team recognized there was a huge flaw in the concept of trading, and that is that players very quickly figured out that the fastest way to gear up their characters and progress was to go to the AH and buy whatever you wanted. Why spend literally weeks farming for a good weapon when you can go buy it (or trade for it) right now? This is not what Diablo is about. You’re supposed to enjoy playing.

This is how we got the solo self-found concept. You played your character. You ground your gear. Smart Loot was added to make sure you had a reasonable buffer against the inherent chaos of RNG and players were generally happy with it. You could in fact have seasons where players could gear up and play the end game within a few weeks and a 3-month season seemed good. Players played. You could find good items. You could try out new builds. Players benefited, even the casual ones.

This situation created a problem in that you could relatively quickly get a decent legendary and sure enough, you’d have nearly maxed out your character very quickly and got bored, with no reason to keep playing. Enter the Ancients and Primals. These were added to give endgame players a source of power and progression in the endgame - a reason to keep playing.

Ultimately, you need a system that allows players to reasonably quickly get access to the core gear that defines a build. No one wants to sit there and endlessly grind with substandard gear just so they can get enough gear to try out a new play style. And stash space is never going to be large enough to allow players to collect 1 of every build-defining legendary and set item in the game. Players will react to rarity by hoarding - but if you could quickly get a new one on demand (even if it’s lackluster), you don’t need to.

You also need to give players a reason to play the endgame, and it needs to provide enough power to justify the endless grinding. That’s what ancients and primals are for. They’re an incentive to keep playing even after you’ve mostly min/maxed your build and are happily enjoying it.

Alternate solutions and why they’re poorer choices:

Increase Legendary Rarity 10x (or More) and Enable Trading

As any player who played those games knows, the player experience was similar to that with D3: Vanilla’s RMAH. The best items that you needed for your build were too hard to find and so you just sat in trade all game (if you were legit). SSF was a painful and miserable experience. Then we got the duping. Because players figured out how to beat the system and make the items you needed more available. Players are creative. And they will cheat to find the items needed to play the way they want.

Even if you were able to perfectly secure the game from duping, you’re going to end up with a “wealth gap” problem just like in the real world, where a handful of skilled traders and exploit the lucky and end up controlling the majority of the good items. They’ll be able to enjoy the game. The rest will have to pay their prices (40 SoJ, lol!) or grind using whatever the RNG drops. The incentive to the player is to beat the system, not to play the game.

Increase the RNG Search Space for Affixes (removing Smart Loot)

The idea here is to give players the one legendary buff, but gate the rest of the item behind a much wider search space, more like in D2. Essentially, you’re reversing D3’s Smart Loot. The idea is that you can get access to the “build defining” part of the legendary, but you’ll have to keep playing to find one that doesn’t have its stats clogged with affixes like +1 light radius.

This solves both problems of making the gear accessible and giving players a reason to keep playing, but it does so by baking in a system where players will intentionally and deliberately be given crap items over and over and over. When you get a weapon, you know you want high damage, attack speed, and crits on it, but this system is designed to give you +life, +armor, +anything other than what you actually want. Ever try rerolling a quiver and going up against the literal army of +skill damage for skills your build doesn’t use? Same concept, and it’s not fun.

The WoW Solution

The idea here is gate access to items behind the ability to kill bosses, make the drops reliably good with fixed stats, make the drop rates high, but restrict the number of times you can kill the boss over time to control the rate of power progression. Endgame push requires strict adherence to the schedule and continued progression from tier to tier of next-level bosses. Casual players can kill whatever their skill level and time commitment allows, and get appropriate gear, but will never have the same gear as the hardcore player. Catch-up mechanics to can be implemented to help for players who get too far behind the curve of progression.

This solution works. WoW makes boatloads of money and has a loyal player base which loves the game and keeps playing. The catch is that it is not Diablo. Diablo has always included an element of RNG. Removing it in favor of this type of solution would be met with the same sort of reception that Diablo: Immortal’s mobile-only rollout received. It should not be considered because it is not consistent with the Diablo IP.

Conclusion
You need a system that gives players access to the endgame and to one of the best selling points of the game design. You need a system that enables the RPG part of the ARPG, accommodates those of us with jobs and limited time to play but who still want to have a Diablo experience, while always giving the player a reason to come back and hack and slash more demons. Ancients are a compromise system born from years of experience with player behavior and power systems that accomplishes the compromise of competing interests above.

Feedback and counterargument, of course, is welcome!

Final Addendum

I do not actually support ancients or primals. They should be removed. A system of item augments should be in place for endgame players to progress with diminishing returns similar to the Caldeann’s Despair concept in game. Lots of possible implementations here without making “Legendary” mean “substandard”.

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I think that the ancients were created due to the issue with the dependency on legendaries in D3s endgame, on D2 good rares could easily be used on endgame, but that isn’t the case for D3, the need for legendaries and lack of trading on the game forced Blizzard to increase their drop rate in an attempt to satisfy the wish for meaningful loot.

But, by increasing the drop of legendaries and making them more common, they became less “special” and not longer cause that reaction on players of “oh cool a legendary”, so ancients were made to fill this gap.

So no ancients don’t need to exist as long as legendaries aren’t mandatory and easy to get.

4 Likes
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Great feedback!

Diablo’s Advocate: The D4 team has already stated that they like the concept of build-defining legendaries because it’s fun and something they are going to keep in the game. Players are always going to have a strong incentive to get these and to use them.

You do pose an interesting alternative with rares. I’m assuming you’re talking about D2-style where top-end hell base item rares, perfectly rolled, could be better than D2 legendaries? Remember that it was a different game with a different balance on the item affixes. They didn’t have “build defining” legendaries in the way D3 does. The best you might get was +2 to all skills or something along those lines. Would you take a stat stick like Pig Sticker over a 1H with a D3 build-defining affix?

The only way what you’re suggesting would work is if legendaries are rebalanced against the linear-progressing stat system, so that your stat stick could at times actually be better. “Build-defining” is going to have to have a lot less multiplicative bonuses and go back to linear power progression affixes. If it does this, the items no longer really become “build defining” so to speak. You might be able to keep an item like Unstable Scepter (wand) that makes arcane orb explode twice (100% power boost), but you couldn’t keep Carnevil which creates 10 darts (1000% power boost). Those types of bonuses would have to be built into the skill system. Any legendary of the type we’re talking about now would be “build supporting” rather than “build defining”. While this is something I support, I don’t think the team is going that direction at the moment, from what I’m reading.

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I’m totally okay with the existence of build defining legendaries, like the one shown in the demo that splits the fireball.

My issue is that not every item you equip needs to be build defining, you could for example be using 3 items that affect the skills you are using and your other items could be more generic (rares) instead of stacking specific effects.

D3 also leans way too much of the power into items, the absence of stat distribution and skill points makes so that every bit of your strength seems to come from items, the exaggerated multipliers also make such items even more needed for a successful build.

From the David Kim update he mentions that some affixes would be on pair with the legendary effects and that’s something I’m happy to hear but still somewhat doubtful.

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I think the best way to take on itemization is to scrap the concept of ancients, make the BiS very rare, add some “low budget” alternatives which are easier to obtain and giving the characters more built-in power in return.

This system comes some major advantages:

  1. It doesn’t take away the “OMG I JUST FOUND A SUPER RARE ITEM” feeling. Super rare items do exist and are not just a boring “ancient” upgrade of the same item you already have.

  2. “Casuals” won’t be left behind because the super rare BiS items aren’t so far away from their low budget alternatives in terms of power.

  3. It helps to create build diversity because without stuff like huge damage multipliers it is much easier to balance skills.

  4. It allows to keep rare items openly tradeable without giving players who buy items for money a huge advantage.

  5. With open trade of all items there is no need for “intelligent” loot.
    If you find a really rare item that isn’t useful for your build or class you can trade it for something else that is equally powerful but benefits your playstyle.

Regarding build defining items:
Balancing them right is a really tough one.

D3 is a pretty good example of what can go wrong if you completely overdo it.
Having or not having just a single item with a damage multiplier can make or break a build and that is definitely not healthy for the build diversity, because it eliminates many other possible ways to play the game.

An example for a good build defining item would be the “Chaos” Runeword in D2.
It allowed the Assassin to use the Barbarian skill Whirlwind and enabled her to play in a completely new way while not making other Assassin builds weaker in comparison. It added to the game diversity without taking anything away in return because it didn’t majorly improved an existing Assassin skill, but added a new one that complemented the rest of her kit.

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