Just did some mandatory bounties in order to re roll some gear and it made me think, is everything with loot a chore now?
I don’t often make any comparison between D2 and D3, but for me the game is about loot, the excitement of finding the rarest of rare drops, but that’s gone now.
It used to be there, but it’s not now. I found a red star the other day. A green ring, which I knew would be a crappy compass rose with terrible stats, and it didn’t disappoint.
650 int,
130 all res,
20 area damage,
12 movement speed and
a socket.
That’s not how you are supposed to feel about this game.
Red stars, especially with gear that you use, are supposed to be end game.
The holy grail, the likelihood of finding another is virtually non existent, you don’t want to feel as though you are expecting it to be completely awful.
I’m a witch doctor, so I’ll use the example of the SMK. Used to be a super rare drop as it was the key to the build at the time. Now it’s not only useless because of mandatory sets, it’s as common as anything.
I hope D4 brings back the excitement of “FINDING” epic loot once more.
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In a word? Yes.
The excitement absolutely has gone out of it for me as well. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reroll items to correct the seemingly-purposely terrible stats on what should have been a treasured artifact necessary for my build.
I can give you an example. By the way, all you “RNG IS LORD” guys in the peanut gallery, please don’t feel the need to chime in on this. We know. Trust me, we know all too well that RNG routinely negates the utility of a given item 99% of the time it drops. Doesn’t need to be said. Continuing with the example.
I’ve been trying to get the right Stone of Jordan for…well…let’s call it “an unreasonable amount of time”. It can roll with a number of elemental bonuses. No matter how many times it dropped, ancient or not, never rolled the bonus I wanted. Never seemed to roll with a socket either; at least, not at the same time. Well, I got wise to it eventually and just used the best-rolled ring I had, rerolled a stat for a socket, and then rerolled every other elemental bonus on every other piece of gear I had. Everything’s the same element, I get what I want. Didn’t have to go that way, though.
Should I have had to rework every other piece of gear I had into a technicality in order to get one lousy item to benefit my build? I don’t think I should have. But that’s the RNG aspect I was talking about earlier. What a wonderful idea that was. Let’s turn the gear hunt from “Excessively grindy” to “Crap, it’s JUNE? Where did the time go? Oh, that’s right, I was rerolling a ring for 6 months.”
There was a time, long ago, when I got excited to see something green drop. Or something red, or something orange; doesn’t matter what. That time is over. You know why? Because almost all of it goes in the garbage. I see all these different colored beams on the ground, and sometimes I don’t even bother to pick them up.
One guy said “Diablo III is not an ARPG: It’s an arcade blaster with RPG elements.” I say it’s also a recycling simulator.
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Since they add so few items with each season, of course the ‘thrill’ is gone. It’s the same song and dance as last time. Old sets are still pretty weak. Many legendary powers have never moved past their original release form (in a game that has long since changed beyond recognition). Many many skills have no supporting legendary items at all, or items so pathetic or useless that they might as well not exist.
In short, too much needs to change to keep the loot hunt exciting, and it requires more developer time than D3 was ever going to get. Especially when it repeatedly failed to live up to sales expectations.
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I still excited to find a useful Primal for my character in D3.
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Blizzard made the loot hunt near non-existent nowadays. In the early RoS days, there’s genuine excitement seeing a legendary drop because they were decently rare. Then they keep power creep the game, adding kanai cube that made acquiring legendaries easy and the rest is history. The game kept making two steps forward and one step back.
Both Haedrig Gift and challenge rift reward at start of new season also significantly shorten build progression. Full class sets lets players quickly get to farm content that rain legendaries. So what happens is the game went from being finding exciting loot and gear up, to mindlessly running content to gain exp in endgame.
Really, the progression is just so ****ed at this point. I just hope D4 doesn’t repeat the same thing. There needs to be more gradual curve to the progression. Stop relying so much on instant gratification and giving players freebies.
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OK there is no denying that the excitement of seeing a legendary or set item drop is gone. Being able to get 15 in 3 minutes by doing a speed 90-100 means that sound (man that used to be thrilling) and the beam isn’t special at all.
But to me, there is still excitement. Sure the only time the orange or green is exciting in itself is the starting time when you don’t get them that often and you are still looking for any basic piece to finish your set or that required legendary. But after that I am still excited when I see I have a new version of a required item, knowing that the current one is crap and the new one can give me a few extra percent of damage. That part is exciting to me.
And then when you get to looking for ancients it starts again.
After that it does taper of quite a lot of course. If you have your whole character decked out in pretty damn good gear except for that one damn amulet and you keep getting no amulets or some other random one or just another crappy one. Knowing that the time required to find one specific item that rolls great instead of the decent one you have means there is little excitement.
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Two methods to keep the loot excitement going.
- Play seasons.
- Play hardcore.
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I still remember the early days of D3. I was happy to find a legendary looting a dead body on the ground. Yup I am that kind of player. I would loot everything. Everything, just like I did in D1 and D2. It didn’t matter if it was a loose stone, a dead body, an armor stand, a weapon rack, anything. I would smash every item I could. I would look through every part of the map for secret rooms or hidden stash areas.
Then later in D3, still prior to RoS, I would go through the sweet spots of the story and look for goblins and kill bosses. I remember searching for all of the parts for the Staff of Hearding. I remember starting Nightmare mode in the early 40s. Hardcore was really fun in the early days of D3. It was challenging and I died so many times, but always went back for more.
Then all the changes, then RoS, then more changes, etc. Yeah, the game is still fun, but it was more fun back in the day. Blizzard really turned its back on D3 for so many years because of WoW. When it did decide to grace it with a little love here and there, it really wasn’t the same. A lot of the magic, literally and figuratively, is gone and gone forever.
I hope D4 is more along the lines of D1, D2, and the beginning days of D3.
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When I was playing d2 and doing mf runs, after awhile the thrill to find loot was gone as now in d3. D2 has a name for the item before it was id. Like how d3 just has “sword” when it drops and it can be any of swords. D2 had a very specific un Id name and then the full name once id. I wouldn’t even pick stuff up because I knew what it was and it is worthless.
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That 
HoT new game shine, yeah. Yeah! Bring it on!
But only if it’s ready…
Ever since ancients and damage multipliers came into the picture, yes, the thrill of finding rare epic loot has disappeared. It’s now all about finding the item, rolled well on both the affix and stats, and hoping it’s ancient at the very least so it can be augmented. And some items you just want it to drop regardless of how bad the affix roll is because it’s only going into the cube which will give the max affix roll anyway.
Is this bad game design though?
Arguably no… hear me out.
The first and foremost aspect of a game is that it needs to be fun and not super tedious.
Was earlier iterations of D3/RoS tedious? I’d argue yes. Not only was it hard to find certain items, it would be nigh impossible to find it and have a good roll too. Back when T6 was the highest difficulty, it took me 6 months to get a calamity… even longer for a SMK. But when I got them, the rolls were so bad, it honestly felt like a downgrade.
Remember the original M6 design? You would either equip Etrayu for more cold damage and let the sentries do all the attacking, or you could use Kridershot so that you could squeeze in some attacking with Frost Arrow and actually feel engaged. I originally got Etrayu… really well rolled. A month later, I got my first Kridershot but it was such a huge damage downgrade, I just continued using Etrayu. Hooray for rare epic loot hunt… not!
These days, they’ve swung the other way a bit too much. It rains legendaries. But with builds, power and progress tied so heavily to legendaries, rolled as ancients with good stats, it kinda has to drop so frequently to statistically have a chance of giving us what we need before the game gets tedious.
That’s the unfortunate nature of having gear determine power and progress to the extent it has in Diablo 3. But it does dumb things down for those of us who just want to chill, kill stuff, and gear up without thinking too much.
Gone ages ago. All loot is crap.
Welcome to the treadmill. Loot hunting doesn’t exist unfortunately.
Just the never ending grind for the exact same reward. Bigger numbers are better right?
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Hell yeah, no stars, no beams of light. Just good old keeping an eye out for them on the ground.
Lazy players and trying to accommodate everyone meant they changed direction to keep people playing by giving them more and giving it easier.
I remember our original group of 4, one guy found a legendary plan, we didn’t even know they existed as we’d never seen one. Unless it was on the Auction house.
Now you have them all after 2 bounty runs.
even at the start of reaper of souls and loot 2.0 it was gone or never there for several reasons… does it matter if you get 15 legendaries each run or just 1 each hour if the items suck?
if d3 vanilla would not have been such a disaster on itemization and endgame ros could have been great…
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Been gone for years really.
But I think they can bring it back fairly easily. Reduce RNG. Introduce a way to farm specific items types (spear, chest armor, etc), and let us roll more than just 1 attribute on an item. I’d love to see the ability to roll 2 attributes on ancient items, and 3 on a primal.
That alone should get hype up imo.
2-3 years ago we suggested something like that… connected to a legendary gem lvl x sac as requirement and to unlock the recipe somehow… tbh if they introduce this all you have to do is get the primal you want roll it and you can not find upgrades anymore… so all thats left is paragon…
The very least would be rerolling a primary and a secondary and a cube recipe to reroll only the legendary power without reforging the whole item.
Or just remove the entire affix range madness from the legendary powers. They can’t be rerolled, resulting in otherwise perfectly rolled ancients being utter trash when the legendary power happens to be low. Makes it insanely hard to get certain items in a usable state. I do remember getting a dreamlike ancient Etched Sigil with close to perfect rolls and absolute perfect affixes (even better than my primal that I got eventually) only to see it bear a whopping 126% damage roll for the legendary power and no way to change it => a really nice item turned into 3 FS instead. That’s not cool.
Another approach would be to just make some of the key items and affixes less random. A good example would be amulets. What affixes do you want on those? Normally it’s the obvious four… elemental %, CHD, CHC, socket. So do we really need random stats like Armor or Life% and whatnot on these kind of items? Not really. Removing some randomness or even just replacing guaranteed rolls on certain items with actually desired ones would greatly improve the situation. I mean, try finding a decent Flavor of Time, ugh.
Next is Ramaladni’s Gift and sockets… man, come on devs, just allow those to be used on jewelry (removing all guaranteed socket rolls prior to that, obviously) or simply add guaranteed sockets to every damn jewelry item already. That little bit of power creep does not really harm any more and sockets on jewelry are just plain mandatory these days, just like the are on weapons. And then something similar applies to chest armors or pants… why can legendary items even roll less than max sockets on these types?! Set items always roll 3 sockets and hell I feel mocked everytime I see a 1 socket roll on Aquila Cuirass or a Cindercoat… they should just roll 3 sockets, like set gear. Period. Heavens, just allow Ramaladni to add +1 socket to those kind of items until the maximum number of sockets for the gear slot is reached. Make that a cube recipe, whatever. Add an even more rare gift if you must… whatever. Please just do something about this, devs.
There’s so much annoyance regarding affixes, it really makes me wonder why they don’t do something small like that. It wouldn’t really hurt anymore.
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