Hey everyone, here is my opinion from this Q4 D4 blog:
I have good feelings with the statistics that come back to diablo again. I feel confident with the statistics even if they still need some work to be be done. My greatest fear for them is to have a statistic that erase all other ( like + life in D2 and +X% damage in D3) developpers have to work with this in mind to make sure to have a performant system. To resume for this part go ahead you are doing well for now.
Now the items.
To begin with i want to talk about what i loved in diablo 2 items.
In Diablo 2 i loved the fact that most of the item (white/ blue/rare) you find can be at least usefull and even godly if you find the perf stats ( i have in mind those monarch 4OS FBR increase chance of block, 4OS 100 life elite armors or rare circlet +20%FCR + skills +@res+str, etc.)
Most of the items have a goal such as white for runewords blue for craftings rare for endgame gear.
Uniques works mostly with rare base with a stat you can’t find normally on this kind of item ( such as +skills and fcr for arach pelt ) or good stats defined (i mean no RNG). And when you dropped a unique you say " Ah god, i know this item is good even before ID".
Runeword was great in Diablo 2 but finally when you look to this 20 years later : that’s just crafted items with crap you found in Sanctuary. I don’t want them to come back in diablo 4 for this reason : The developers can provide us a similar system to RW : a wonderful crafting system. Extremely important.
Now my feelings about the actual system of Diablo 4.
Developers got the good philosophy with the items in diablo 4. Make every items usable and important. However, the RNG is scaring me a lot for the legendary affixes and seems still to much powerfull compared to other affixes you can only find in rare and magic items.
They have to work on the basics affixes that roll on the items to make them simple. MRLlamaSC explained this in his reaction video to the Q4D4 and i’m fully joining his point of view.
The second thing that scares me is the RNG. i got the feeling that developers doing too much with this on items and do the same mistake that they’ve done in D3.
to synthetize my opinion : developers have to get back on basics once again and work hard on based affixes that rolled on items. They need to work the RNG of the affixes in general. I really hope they will bring us a solid crafting system (mix from d2 and d3).