15-20 hours is a ridiculous expectation to set for playtime in a week or interest in a game. If you were around to play d2 chances are you’ve got a full time job, married, kids, etc.
1-3 hours in a day if you’re lucky.
Alright, lets say 3-5 hours a day. 21-35 hours a week. not saying that people don’t game that much, I hit that mark for sure. BUT I don’t play ONE game for months. JUST to get geared… For ONE item. nah… Also, an ancient chest rn in d3 at 90% is 585 out of 650 (Intelligence for example) it’s lowest is 550. 85% is 552.5 meaning 85% is about as low as it gets. so you don’t only want to make Leg items better items essentially by making them more usable, but also by getting rid of the RNG and make it so you get a 90% drop minimum? lets break this down a bit:
Okay, so lets say we lower the drop rate and make it a standard D3 roll on intelligence since that’s about what we would be doing with this example (80%-100%). Every 4 average gaming sessions/days (given 3-5 hours is average) would drop one Leg item with 80-100% roll. This would be similar to what some people experienced in d3vanilla. Exceeept they would be a more pertinent Leg that you can keep till endgame, giving you essentially 1-9 or 1-12 for a full Leg BIS set (Leg set… Not set set. If that makes sense…) which we can probably all agree is what they will go with since we have heard nothing of magics or rares being better than even normal Legs.
And with the ~50% damage boost added to the Leg Sorc staff in the stage beta I think most of us can agree that Legs will be BIS (until they state otherwise. Every Dev interview I’ve heard on this just deflected the question with how cool Legs will be… I’m just hoping rares and magics aren’t garbage like d3s drops so we will pretend that they are better for this example)
Going on you will still have a fraction of a chance that the legendary will be what you want it to be or have it even work with you current build (remember 100s of Legs). The problem is that respec points arn’t being planned for the skill points (but they will be for the talent tree)… Welp that doesn’t help because you COULD spend a permanent skill point on a Leg that dropped just because you happened to get it even though it isn’t what your building.
Say, for example you get the fireball staff. welp i don’t use fireball so i guess that’s a waist of a 20-25 hour average drop rate. I doubt that people would be happy with this. d2 may have had some uniques that really weren’t that good. but it had a high enough drop rate that you could get the ones you wanted within a reasonable time frame.
This is the problem with being able to appease the crowd that wants a harder style game and the ones that have only played d3. d3 players would hate this system. And honestly I probably would too, but not because it isn’t rewarding. Because I like to finish my builds and I know that with this roadmap, I wouldn’t finish a season where i would want to. That is TOO much of a time dump for me while keeping my job.
The fact that they are making 100s of legendaries just enables them to lower the drop rate and raise the quality. You shouldn’t be able to choose your drop, but at least the drop is guaranteed to be good. This opens up the potential for years of replayability, without flooding the players with bad legendaries. However, I do think they should cut down the count to around 50 to start, just to really focus on making them all very good. Then maybe over the years gradually add more. 100+ sounds like overkill and in fact makes me VERY worried that they will be exactly that I’m afraid of being mostly useless, maybe 20/100 being good. That’s a very bad sign.
I think fundamentally we just think differently and that’s fine. It’s good that we’re voicing our opinions. If you haven’t noticed, I said there shouldn’t be ancients. That’s why I’m pushing all legendaries to be like ancients. And I’ve also specified a rate for mythics as well, which is once a month.
You also said that it would take you a month to get one item, that’s not what I am saying at all. In one month, at the rate of 20-30 hours each week, you get 4-5 near perfect legendaries, and one mythic.
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Sorry, it wasn’t very clear here. I think one mythic per month is very reasonable, for a 1-slot item that’s basically like a primal, but even better.
Well, the whole basis of my post reasoning that drop rates should be lower but higher quality is that there should NOT be ancients. I assure you, I will 100% not play if there are. Several others have also shared my sentiment.
I think at this point you’re just nitpicking my rates, I’ve expressed several different ranges as examples, and also pointed out the variance in RNG-streaks. I’m not going to go over a very simple ballpark range. I am sensing a lot of tension in this conversation. I’m sorry if I offended you somehow. I’m going to leave it here.
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I agree with OP on the subject of legs.
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Good, then maybe I can play more than one character per year and actually have some variety in the game. Then after 3 years I’ll have finally played everything the game has to offer and I’ll be ready for the expansion. Then the next, and then the sequel.
There will always be “useless” uniques. It’s practically unavoidable to design hundreds of them and not make some of them useless.
Maybe the intent is not to make them useless, but if the build or skill they are designed for is not any good then that unique item will be useless.
Maybe you don’t REALIZE the type of GAME you’re PLAYING, but it turns out THAT every item of ANY tier is going TO eventually be USELESS after YOU start finding BETTER stuff. THAT’S called item proGRESsion. Also, your RANDOM capitalization TYPING technIQUE is KiNDa HARD to gET used tO. aM I dOInG It RigHT?
Also dislike the idea of ancients, they just make legendaries feel bad when they drop…never could understand their purpose.
Mythics seem like the right design though and make a great deal of sense.
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This guy gets it. No character should be fully equipped with legendaries because it destroys build diversity. Legendaries should offer interesting affixes that lead to player choice about how to build/play their character.
I agree here. I want the “godly” rares like what you’d have in Diablo 2. If I’m going to be finding thousands of rare items I don’t want them to be purely salvage material. I miss the old days of “Imp Shanks” and “Raven Spiral”. Bring those rares back.
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Then I guess you need 500 stash tabs.
On second thought maybe some useless legs are necessary for mats to craft with. 
You’re playing a Barb - primal Deathwish drops = useless.
That’s not the kind of useless he’s talking about for one thing.
D3 has an entire design around raining legendary’s from the sky because most of them are intended to be useless for various reasons. That design should really be intended for rare quality items where many of them will not be ideal but you’ll come across plenty that will be end-game usable. If they move that philosophy an item-tier lower it would be more appropriate.
The whole raining legendary’s and them being useless had to do with the band-aid after band-aid attempts to fix a broken item system where legednary’s in D3 vanilla were ALL useless because they had no idea what to do. T
Not true because if all legendary’s are amazing they won’t be designed with a drop rate that allows them to be raining from the sky like in D3, they’ll modify their drop rates to be more appropriate with their consistency in power.
I agree here. I want the “godly” rares like what you’d have in Diablo 2. If I’m going to be finding thousands of rare items I don’t want them to be purely salvage material. I miss the old days of “Imp Shanks” and “Raven Spiral”. Bring those rares back.
I agree with this as well. Finding amazingly stat’d rares was just as exciting as finding uniques. Like I said in a post above they should move the design philosophy they have for D3 legendary’s an item-tier below to rares. Where you will have plenty of rares dropping, they will be end-game competitive, but not all of them will be on the same level as legendary’s.
And you still will be a hoarder keeping them all rather than using them in crafting.
So NO to your idea which can never happen.
Some useless gear is necessary.
Wake up bro, this is how games are made.
My idea already did happen. It happened in D2 where hoarding in D2 was vastly different to hoarding in D3. I couldn’t have 10 different harlequin shako’s and 10 different arkaines valor chest pieces because I couldn’t even find more than 2-3 of each of those if I was lucky probably in an entire year.
So nice try again, but if you understood the systems of D2 you’d know you’re wrong.
Mule friend… mule…
I played D2 over 12 season resets.
Okay well I’m not sure if you’re saying there should be a design that CAN make legendary’s you don’t want into crafting mats, that I don’t see a problem with per say. I see a problem with how often they drop in D3.
If they want to make them part of crafting mats some how then they can make just having 1 or 2 being as valuable as 20 or 50 in D3. The scaling needs to be toned down.
If the scaling in drop rate is toned down however it means the consistency in item power has to be adjusted. The point is however, we shouldn’t have a bad taste in our mouth if a legendary drops. Some people have said if a barb finds wizard spike, sure that would be useless to someone leveling their first character as barb, but don’t forget they’re supposed to be bringing trading back, so turning that wizard spike into a crafting item should not be the first go-to choice in a players mind, they should have the option to trade it for something they want.
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I agree 100% useless legionaries that you just salvage is extremely boring. I remember keeping all sorts of different gear in D2 that I even had to make bank characters to store it all. That was more fun. Also, bring runewords back and rare crafted items. Honestly, runewords were a huge reason I played D2 for countless hours.
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If all legendaries were amazing, it would also incentivize cross-class play a lot more, because if you find a legendary for another class, it’ll allow you to also make a great build for another class.
By making legendaries inherently powerful and much less common, it will make players more methodical and also selective in the ones they end up salvaging for materials, which would yield a much greater amount of materials, and since they are high quality, players are more focused on which legendary works best with their build rather than which one has simply greater power.
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