Set Items - Where D3 took a wrong turn

General Discussion
1

I’m not sure why the developers wanted to focus end game builds around sets. From the get go they must have seen that it limited the number of viable builds because there are only so many sets that can be reasonably designed. However, did they intend to release more sets but the idea got cut short with the cancellation of the 2nd expansion?

I think they looked at D2 and didn’t know where set items belonged and instead made the wrong decision to pretty much make them end game gear. In my opinion, the best place for sets are what they are trying to do with them now. Make some of the farming builds more enjoyable and interesting, such as increasing death breaths drops, increasing key drops and the WD chicken build.

They seem to go half way now about undoing the dmg with the legacy of dreams gem, but I think it’s too little too late. The system is just too broke now unfortunately and to fix it, would require overhauling all the gear.

But the idea to go with sets and its pitfalls can be seen a mile away; very disappointed a big company with talented developers did not see it coming or if they did, they decided to ignore it.

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For whatever reason, I think that was the very reason. It seems from the player’s perspective that it was done to produce a limited number of builds with certain play patterns. However, given that the sets have been inconsistently balanced against each other, and in some cases the players have even voiced their dislike of the play patterns, I don’t understand what compelled them to want this.

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I can say that I have a good idea why they went with sets. It is easier to balance around sets because they know what each set buffs. Instead of trying to make legendaries or a mix of a variety of tiers of gear to get the job done.

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I don’t think sets are bad at all, they just need to be generic. How? Simple:

  • make a set that buff channeling skills
  • make a set that buff spender skills
  • make a set that buff primary skills
  • make a set that makes utility skills do damage
  • make a set in which using different element skills doubles damage of the next element skill ( fire-> 100* cold-> 100* lighting -> … etc)

My point is the old Diablo team had a blurry vision of what to do in this game when it’s so easy to come up with something much better that what we have now.

5

If we didn’t have such ridiculous Mobs HP per rift scalling there wouldn’t be such a headache balancing sets.

Just compare Baals HP on Hell (highiest difficulty) in D2 LoD, to a Greater Rift Guardian on GR 150:

  • Baal on Hell = 493,701 HP
  • GR150 Greater Rift Guardian HP = 16,899,710,380,000,000

Even ubers in D2 LoD had max 650,000-660,000 life…

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Because they had to build over already broken itemization.

Imagine you have to finish a building that has to become 100 floors and you took control when it had 60 built, but not by the highest standard. Your budget however does not allow you to destroy the building and make new by the accepted standard safeguarding its future inhabitants against the strongest earthquakes.

What you do then is finishing the building with the already applied architectural plan from the previous team who started it (and got fired). You know the plan is far from optimal, but you have to finish the building since that is your job.

Yep, for sure. I remember we had some dev post about the sets that clearly was signaling about such intentions. Let me check my archives…

EDIT: Ok, I found the thread and sources in question. These are from 5th of December 2015 - pretty much the perfect date that fits our theory about the scrapped second expansion.

Here is the original response from Wyatt at:

My opinion on the topic then was:
Right now Quin is right, but in the long term the current situation adopted by the design team is the better one. When they introduce more items with skill damage bonus to the same skill competing with each other the players will have more choices.

So, basically they clearly had done this with the intention of a second expansion! Oh WOW! This is another potential evidence the second D3 expansion got scrapped.

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7

Games are better when the items your character uses are yellow instead of green.

It’s science.

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IMHO the fundamental reason D3 went wrong was they wanted to divorce themselves from D2 instead of build on it. Sometimes it seems like D3 is a prequel to D2. There are lots of examples especially downgrading popular equipment while keeping the names, e.g. SOJ, Windforce, Maras etc. Oh yeah, and let’s kill Deckard.
I used to love teleporting in D2. Now I have a primal Aether Walker with “unlimited” teleporting. Technically that’s true sorta like an unlimited data plan with throttleing. True unlimited tp; it’s really clunky, really clunky. Arghh.
The auction house was a step upward; gobs are fun. But overall it failed to deliver under the franchaise.

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Yellows(and blues) are just crafting mats now, which imo is a shame.
It does seem like they divorced themselves from D2, which is also a shame.
And since there are ancients in the game, you get to the point where if it’s not ancient (which most leggos are not) it’s just crafting mats again.

I mean it’s like artificially extending the gear grind. Maybe things should be more rare. I don’t kno.

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Not sure about games, but for sure bananas are better when yellow instead of green. :banana:

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Why? What is the value of having those items as potential replacements to legendary items?

Read another way, the game design evolved past some of its superficial and sometimes detrimental designs over the past 20 or so years.

It’s worth noting that a lot of more D2-ish designs were in D3v and were subsequently removed. I could name a number of things I am glad are gone from D2.

That’s a good thing. Part of the purpose of ancients is that you can quickly sort through items. Having every item as a potential upgrade has the downside of needing to compare every item. As is, the game can ramp up drop rates as you gear up while not inundating you in end game with endless item sorting.

Everything in a game is artificial. You might consider that a lot of the the design choices in the game are because someone enjoys it that way specifically.

I enjoy the gear progression. Part of D3 is gaining power.

The idea of a “gear grind” seems silly to me. First of all, I enjoy playing the game. For the most part, I play the game the way I prefer to(solo pushing and extreme speed builds). And, for the most part, upgrade gear just shows up. It’s not a grind at all on the casual-ish level of play.

Second of all, what are you grinding for? To be teh best? I don’t see the problem with starting at one level of power and, if you enjoy doing so, advancing over time to a higher level of power. There’s no content gated behind that level of power and yet it progresses for a very long time in a diverse number of contexts.

Everyone roll a wisdom check to see if you have ever heard of an RPG that gates power behind time as a basic mechanism of enjoyment.

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I think D3 is more what Diablo Immortal should be. Lots of action, items everywhere, pre-defined sets of skills (class sets) etc.

A PC Diablo should follow the path of the first 2 diablos I guess. It takes TIME to build your character, you cherish every unique (legendary) item you come across, they don’t rain from sky. Rarity is a thing.

You carefully select which skills are you going to use. You invest in them. you can reset your character but at a cost.

D3 is too much action and too little RPG. Graphics are great. High numbers everywhere… not so much. 16 torments…

Sets are ok, but they will be better if they where like 2-4 pieces max, that are useful on their own and get different bonuses the more items you have from that collection of items.

Adventure mode… i don’t feel any sense of adventure unless I play solo and extra chill. Bounties, Rifts… pubic games are speed based. It stresses the hell outta me.

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Yellows should be much rarer. What is a legendary? Just a rare, rare? And an ancient leggo is that a rare, rare, rare? And a primal leggo? That’s a rare, rare, rare, rare?
And we get to a point where we ignore the rare and the rare-rare just leaving the rarest and the one a tier just below it. It seems a bit unnecessary to have all these tiers, kinda like the first 70 GRs.
I understand not wanting to filter loot all day, and yea we don’t have to do that now, but neither would we have to do that if rares were indeed rare and legendaries were the rarest. Plus if there was trade people could share their finds they didn’t exactly want/need. The gear curve would still be there, anyway…

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I remember way back when Diablo 3 was still in development, they said you can easily swap your skills in town so that you can freely play around with builds.

It seems like even those developers understood early on that players would want to retain the ability quickly and easily to try out different play styles. I very clearly remember Jay Wilson showing off his melee wizard. So, it would only make sense that they would have also taken gear into consideration for this same line of thinking. Why it was ultimately decided to primarily stick to sets? I can’t remember if anything was said about that or not, or if that was a decision made by the next group of devs that took it over.

I do remember Jay saying something along the lines of - You are free to play around with different builds, and for the most part the game will let you play that build. However, there WILL be builds that will be a MARGIN better than the rest of the builds. He said this in a way that seemed intentional.

So honestly, it seems like they wanted to cookie-cutter players from the beginning, if you want to be the best absolute of your class, then you will have to play that build. Where sets came into this, I can’t recall, but the general thinking of cookie-cutter was there from the beginning, I believe.

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Sets only began gaining traction some time after RoS release. Prior to that time, rather than being the mandatory gear choices that they are now, sets were actually optional. As such, There was actually some freedom when building your character to handle Torment 4 to 6 (which was the pinnacle of the game’s difficulty at the time), as legendaries either founded or crafted were almost just as viable at that time.

However, once greater rifts were released a couple of months later, that’s when things started taking a turn to the current situation.

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Seems convenient that D3 is considered a classic game then. Basically, it’s “if you don’t like it, tough! We’re done here! If you want to watch us take another stab at balance and variety, buy our new title: Diablo4. See you in stores!”

– though to be fair, you can kind of see things from their perspective. You’re asking for a complete overhaul on a free game. Maybe you can justify to them why they should be spending at least tens of thousands of dollars while getting nothing in return, because you’ve already bought the game.

17

I remember you had to have high crit chance, high crit damage, and life on hit were the 3 most important stats, so you had to build around those. I also think +elite damage was really good, and The Furnace being one of the best items in the game at the time for that reason. Pretty sure my wiz was running around with one, lol. But maybe that was post RoS? Can’t remember exactly.

18

I believe CD/CC/Main Stat were called “the Trifecta” (after attack speed was retroactively nerfed on all gear) and since legendaries largely didn’t have notable affixes, it was mainly irrelevant if you chose a legendary, or a rare, as long as it gave the most damage.

Talk about build options…

“Can you tell us a bit more about your character, Phil.”

“Yes, Steve. Here, you see I went with the ‘trifecta’ build, maximizing main stat, crit damage, and crit chance. As you can see, it has definitely paid off since before I did that, I could not kill as easily in this difficulty.”

“Can you elaborate on your gear a little more, Phil? What was made you choose your equipment?”

“Well, Steve, I actually can’t elaborate. That’s literally it. More damage = more kills. Some people do more damage than me and therefore have more kills. You can see I have a lot of yellow items, a brown item, and a green item. While I have found many other brown and green items, it just turns out I can do more damage with these yellow items.”

“Surely your character abilities enter into this at all.”

“Yes, Steve. Actually, the ability that does the most damage is the one that I use the most. I could choose the one that does the second-most, but then I wouldn’t be doing the most.”

“Interesting stuff, Phil. Absolutely riveting.”

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19

Sets should have been a good mid-progress choice for new players, new classes/characters, trying new builds, normally lackluster builds/skills, and for casual play.

The end game should be focused on finding the best unique items that tops off your build, not build-defining sets. Change the focus of top-tier play, and you recapture that sense of awe in finding the next upgrade. Instead we have “meh, it’s nice, but I don’t want to lose my set bonus”.

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Critical chance and damage had always been mandatory when gearing. Life on Hit on the other hand, while effective for some builds, wasn’t needed as much, at least I hardly made use of it for most of my builds at the time.