This is something that I frankly don’t understand. In every ARPG I have played (POE, GD, POE, LE, Wolcen, etc) item builds are made up of 2 levels of rarity… maybe 3 if set items are useful but not totally overpowered.
What exactly is it that people believe the game will gain by having more colors in the item build of characters?
Magic and Rare items are pretty much just stat sticks. If you make them more than stat sticks, that’s just a Legendary. There are already tons of venues for giving your character stats. Why should the D4 devs go out of their way to try and make these lower rarity items viable when it won’t add anything meaningful to gearing, character progression or character builds?
but if i have to speak for myself, i just find the idea more interesting that you are not only looking for combining the best 10 legendary powers you can find for your build and hope for good stats on the rest of the card
making all the rarities more distinct to eachother and giving them specific purposes, incentives people more to make trade offs and try to combine different kinds of gear on their character which is kinda the point of games. playing around with different stuff and trying to make out for the best results. not just clicking a button and praying for the best. so looking at the video above, i would actually make magic, rare and legendary items even more distinct from eachother, focus on the legendary power on legendary items, focus on the multitude of affixes on rare items and focus on the power of affixes on magic items, so that players easily understand these different items, can still just embrace the coolnes of legendary and unique items, but also give other players the possibility to create builds with different types of items.
But you are making choices with higher rarity gear all the time. This is why builds exist.
Coincidentally, the game which you believe the devs should take after, D2, is one of the most limited and uninteresting ARPGs when it comes to itemization. The only remotely interesting affixes are the +skill ones. Not only that, but a lot of builds use the same end game gear and runewords.
I guess it’s just very hard for me to take feedback like this seriously when you don’t have one single example of this mythical ARPG where all rarities are used in builds equally and claim that games which only use the highest rarity items have little or no decision making in itemization.
Well having magic and rare tier items to be relevant allows them to serve as viable alternatives to legendaries and perhaps even uniques. For example, if you’re going for a fire build, and yet you can’t find a legendary item with a legendary affix most beneficial to your build; your build will likely feel (and be) effectively incomplete (especially since you can’t just switch to another since respecs will be costly).
However, if magic and rare items were viable, then they could serve as effective temporary alternatives to help enhance your build until either, you find the legendary item you’re looking for, and/or you make that magic and rare item into a strong runeword (depending on how sockets work ofc).
Of course, this is all assuming some of the following:
Legendary and Unique items aren’t common items that drop on a regular basis.
There’s no kadala and/or kanai’s cube type npc that allows for easy legendary item acquisition.
Runewords are quite powerful and/or effective even more so for magic and rare items.
Some skills may not have a supporting legendary, meaning that investing in a skill without a legendary will result in a weak build, in which rare and magic items can help bring said build up to par.
So in other words, it mostly depends on how the developers intend the endgame builds scene to look:
Do they need to be relevant? If the developers intent for endgame builds to involve sets, legendaries, and/or uniques, and as such they provide means for players to quickly attain said items; then no there’s no point in making magic or rare items relevant.
On the other hand, if the developers intent is to have it where sets, legendaries, and/or uniques are scarce items that don’t drop very often, as such making it exciting when they do actually drop, then it would better imo to ensure that magic and rare items are relevant and close (not equal, but close enough) to the other item rarities in terms of power.
well as you say, we dont have this game existing yet, so it’s hard to bring up a literal example
if i have to exemplify it myself, you just missed reading my comment
I’m personally a fan of rarities being faded out for a thematic sense of progression.
You start as a scrappy young hero just barely able to scrape a few magic items together and by the end of your journey you have found exotic and rare items that have pushed you into the powerful zone.
I also like how rarity can effectively work as a pseudo-loot filter, you don’t have to read every item that drops if you get to a point where you know a specific rarity is simply outclassed now.
Given D4’s commitment to complex items, I expect we will see some form of loot filter.
All items are just stat sticks. They added legendary powers to the new “Paragon Board” and I’m sure we will have passive skill nodes that act essentially as legendary powers too. So why should the devs make Legendary powers on items? Why even have items? My character can get stat and skill upgrades already within a passive tree that fulfil the role of all item tiers.
Legendary items and Unique items shouldn’t fill every single slot. Sure by endgame one would expect in modern ARPGs to have most slots filled like this.
Say you’re playing Whirlwind Barbarian. Most of the items are going to compliment whatever Whirlwind playstyle you are going for. But maybe you wanna boost the skill rank a bit higher. Magic can roll the highest, so you find a good Magic with +4 Whirlwind since you don’t have any other power that is used in your build and overall your stats are pretty good. This would make that Magic item more viable than some random Legendary power that does nothing for your build.
The idea is that as you get further through the game these lower tiers become less important but don’t become completely useless. Which is what having Magic roll higher affix values than other tiers can do in very niche cases. It gives you a strategic choice. In the example above maybe your damage is fine and you don’t need the skill ranks. But now you could collect some other items like a 20% fire res item for a specific dungeon you know will have a lot of fire damage.
You can also add in item modification to make it more interesting. By endgame create new item tiers that you wouldn’t view as below you. Turn a Magic item into a 3-4 Affix Epic with the high value rolls of a magic item!
Turn a Rare into a 6-7 affix (PH)Ascended item.
Overall I don’t think it hurts the game to keep lower tiered itemspotentiallyviable in some capacity.
This is wrong. The whole point of the highest rarity items is that they often provide affixes that can vastly alter the way you play the game. Either through a passive effect or an entirely new mechanic.
Honestly I did not bother to read the rest of your post after seeing such a blatantly wrong opening statement.
Nope. Wanting yellow gear that strictly a stat stick in your endgame build is like arguing that people need to have/carry an outdated button phone over a smartphone in the present.
I am glad that D4 developers made that you can insert “legendary power” to yellow gear.
It would be better they just remove the color tier for gear though.
So we shouldn’t have any lower tier items?
Every item should drop with a power that has a passive effect or new mechanic to change the way you play?
So passive trees should simply be the way to increase your stats? no powers that change a skill or mechanics that shift the way you play?
Good question, I really don’t see the point either. If everything is on the same level of power there’s no reason to have a distinction between them at all.
The said stats of magics should be higher as on rare and stats on rare should be higher, than on legendaries, so you need to evaluate do you wand less higher stats or more lower stats.
Now you can pull the essence from a legendary and put it on an rare (with higher stats). So if the rare stats stay at the same hight during the transfrm to legend, every legend will end by upgrading a rare. This way at least rares will stay relevant. Am I right?
There is still the question, if you can pull the essence from the upgraded rare again, to upgrade anonther rare (to switch weapon slot or upgrade a better rare) or if you may use occultist only once per legend.
First of all you won’t get legendary and unique items as often as in D3, so you’ll need substitute items in different slots. Second as the rareity goes up the stat values go down. You’ll need to make hard choices. And it gives more flavour to the item hunt, and the game in general.
Strictly speaking not everything in a game needs to be useful. However constantly raining garbage on you is a problem from a game optimization perspective. It’s like all the useless trash mobs. You reach a point where they’re just white noise loading down the game with lag.
Every item should be possibly relevant until you get one that is more so. Every item is a “stat stick” for some reason or other - you’re only choosing between what boosts are applied.
The colors are irrelevant. It is about having different item rulesets. More item diversity, more choices in how to make our builds.
Rares should not become more like legendaries indeed, they should be their own thing. Their own purpose, their own strengths and weaknesses.
D2 is not a good example of what the goal should be, rares in LoD are rarely able to compete.
Grim Dawn. Really well-rolled rares are some of the BiS items.
Anyway, even if no A-RPGs had managed to do something properly, it doesn’t mean it is bad to reach for better design.
There is still so much room for improving itemization in A-RPGs to be honest.
It just got less itemization decision making than it should have. And less diversity in item designs.
Nothing prevents normal affixes from altering how you play.
That very much should be the goal.
As long as the different types still existed that would be fine. Albeit unnecessarily confusing to new players. The colors themselves are irrelevant.
The distinction is how the items are generated, number of affixes, which affixes they can get, random vs. handcrafted etc.
Nope, and this is a topic I’ve dabbled in repeatedly in the past. As a gross summary, I’d just say chasing this kind of ideal makes loot boring. And it gets even sillier when you start looking at the numbers needed to pull it off and potential abuses that follow, typically through ranged and pet classes.