The fact that I could kill final boss well undergeared is one. Sure it took a few dozen respawns but, the boss doesn’t reset
That’s because you were still playing the story, which is basically the tutorial stage of the game. The real final bosses of the game only give you 6 portals to kill them/complete the map.
Dumbing down Math as much as possible while enhancing min/maxing as much as possible is the way to go.
D4 itemization is fine and could get even better if they dumb down Math further.
I heard math is racist now.
Don’t worry Diablo: Immortal has been made just for you 
Mindless log in, kill, log out no worrying about having to think at all. Green good, red bad, if orange equip.
Yeah I was hyped when I saw runes and skill trees, but the more news there are about itemization, the more wary I am.
From https://www.diablofans.com/news/49145-diablo-iv-community-group-q-a:
“Magic and Rare items are designed as stepping stones to help players familiarize themselves with gearing and itemization as they level. Sets are designed for fresh characters that reached max level and to act as a guide to how items interact and buff skills with very set play styles. Legendaries are designed as the next step past sets where you have free reign on developing item loadouts to suit your play style.”
This isn’t how Diablo items should be. Diablo II got by without the build defining legendaries just fine. Windforce didn’t define any build, it just had great stats in general. It didn’t boost Multishot, or Strafe, or any other particular build defining skill. At max, it was just good to any physical bow builds.
Certain affixes just need to support certain builds more, not define them. This way random rare items that happen to roll a lot of useful affixes might actually be BiS. This is fine. Even some blue items were useful in D2, for example, +3 skills on amulets.
Maybe on Bnet experienced players could obtain all uniques in trading two weeks in, but that was because of bots and dupes. Most of my Diablo II history, I never even saw many of those BiS uniques, my entire game was among rares and mid tier uniques that and maybe one or two of those best items on the list. And I had tons of fun! My skill choices defined my build and I just picked items that were beneficial to my build.
This clear tier defined itemization feels oversimplification. Please, rethink going this route.
While I do agree with you having magic, rare and legendary items on the same tier will strengthen min/maxing, their current idea with D4 is to push Seasonal mode as much as possible and create a different experience with each new Season by shifting the meta game.
The above could be more properly done with their way of tiering the itemization aka magic → rare → set → legendary, because legendary items have special affixes and the meta shift will be greater to these than to the items in the other tiers.
What I am trying to explain might be hard to understand, but it is the right design philosophy if you aim to embrace Seasonal mode on all costs.
Their current version of trading also confirms this → dedicated NS players will be left behind, because they want to push Seasonal gameplay with new and fresh mechanics. The best way to achieve this is with THAT type of tiered itemization.
I think they really want to avoid having 5+ stats on items and forcing the grind of trying to find good stats, good rolls, good combination all at the same time and introducing so much complexity that there are hidden stats (ICD) needed to keep things inline and you essentially need a spreadsheet to calculate if something is an improvement.
I’m a fan of simplifying items, I genuinely NEVER want to have to check a spreadsheet to see if an item does what I want.
Although I will say they could have as many different types of stats as they want so long as they pare down the items because I think it was just HOW MANY moving parts were involved on a full build that was an issue more then the overall amount of things you could tweak.
If every item only had 1 or 2 stats it probably would have been far less degenerate and needlessly complicated in D3. Which would have let them tune stats more independently.
Removing Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence ruins the itemization immersion, and it wouldn’t be a Diablo game without those attributes. You can’t be a Barbarian and stack Strength items to feel ‘strong’. Instead you stack the generic Attack stat that will benefit a spellcaster the same way.
They just showed a bunch of + Attack / + Defense items in today’s panel. It’s so disappointing.
No, it is not. It is the right way to go. This approach serves for higher skill cap on min/maxing.
What do you honestly expect though?
Do you think they have experts that have a ton of experience in Itemization?
Highly doubtful.
Their goal will be to simplify everything as much as possible just like D3 to broaden their target audience and sell as many units as possible. Regardless of how it effects the quality and depth of the game. A Blue even said during development stages for D3 that it has to be easy enough so my grandma can understand it…
So ultimately don’t expect any mind bending elaborate well thought out Itemization. The best you can hope for is there won’t be any 1000% damage increase type set bonuses etc. I guarantee I’ll be shocked if they back out of the Attack / Defense / Life set up. Simply because the people working on this aren’t qualified to understand what great Itemization even is.
Yikes. Imagine playing D2 again where you just swap your gear between all your characters because the attack and defense are the best.
I never played the game much after they added the OP runewords that were pretty much bis for every class, but at one point in the game’s life using exceptional uniques (even normal ones for some builds) were possibly better than an elite version of a unique that had double the defense number. Reducing the game to looking at two stats is boring and caters to idiots.
Unfortunately this appears to be Blizzards target audience these days.
No one is doing this in D4. There are a lot of stat variations and the game is still in Alpha.
Their itemization philosophy with legendary items affecting skills and serving for skill combos will strengthen the min/maxing aspect and bring unique experience with each Season. They have put enough time into it.
It’s such that both casual and dedicated players invest much time into min/maxing and optimizing builds without needing to refer to online tools for solving the Math.
D4 is going exactly in that way and while still not having the full list of item affixes as shown in the Demo, this would come at release.
This is from the devs themselves:
"So items have Attack, Defense, and some affix/s. Attack means damage, Defense means damage reduction. We want to simplify some of the math choices into these stats, and keep only the playstyle choices and add to the playstyle choices. What I mean is say you have a choice between 2 items, one is I deal 100 damage + 100 damage, and another says +10% damage, I don't really know which one does more damage unless I work out the math problem. But we have more damage affixes like say 'more damage against far enemies' or 'plus to talent affixes.' Plus to skill points as affixes. You can grab one of the Tier 4 talents thru items." They want to add as many playstyle affixes as possible, and make sure they're not math choices as much as they can.
Skill synergy? "Of course. especially with legendaries. Fully customize what you want to do with every single slot, and of course skill slots."
"Magic --> Rare --> Legendary. I like the idea of rares being possibly endgame items. Is this on the table?" "If many players feel like it's too much choice to decide legendary powers on every single item slot, then that could be a possibility. But where we think we want to start is they want to try giving players as much control with as many slots as possible, but if testing doesn't go well then they could try switching to that idea."
Feels like in D3 the devs dictate what the builds are going to be based on the set bonuses. That's not the direction youre taking in D4 right? "We want to create as many legendaries as possible so that people have enough options. And we want to create a scenario where we can intro new items to the game thru seasons. The most hardcore players love to discuss various things, so if there's an idea "this build would be really awesome if there was this one item.." and they can explore adding that. You'll have full customization, and we can work together with players to find what are some new types of builds you can play in future seasons."
I’m more concerned about the items losing their themes. At the very least I hope ‘Attack’ can be differentiated into physical power and spell power. For example, imagine some unique cloth robes that you typically see spellcasters wearing. That should not be worn by a damn Barbarian.
Items like your Rusthandle example didn’t change a player’s moment to moment gameplay decisions; rather all they did was give a player more numbers, e.g. +skills, +stats.
Good itemization will not only grant players more stats but also change a player’s decision making and gameplay. For example, Hexing Pants grants a bonus to damage and RCR while moving but decreases damage while standing still, which changes a player’s gameplay decisions.
In my opinion, after decades of playing RPGs, the numbers game is pretty boring because it starts and ends in a UI. What keeps me captivated is gameplay and finding different ways to enhance or modify the way my character plays and interacts with the environment. The Skill System should only be one component of gameplay with items being another component that can add gameplay elements to a build that the Skill System dosen’t have. This adds more variety in gameplay.
If items just buff or augment the stat sheet and skill system, then that’s a huge missed opportunity and a step back from where D3 is right now.
P.S. My fear for D4 is that the team will, just like the D3 team, try to reinvent the wheel and forget a lot of the important lessons they learned over the last 6 years.
Sounds like they never played their own games, because you can literally equip each item while looking at the character screen and see what your damage changes to. In D2 anyways. I don’t even remember how D3 is. Wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t show on 3
It’s not like it’s fun to spreadsheet, however optimizing is. Like when you know you need that extra attack speed or cooldown reduction to hit a breakpoint that allows for fluidity and more optimized gameplay. Sure in 99% of scenarios it isn’t even required, but it just makes a difference.
And that is what item depth is, it is the ability to enhance your characters traits and skills in ways that makes it more fluent, more effective, more optimized. That’s the geeky part where you disect and try to understand and learn how things work. D2 has tons of them, D3 a few. None of them are really required, but you can dwell deep into it and start seeing everything in a whole new way that lets you play with things in a new way. I’d seriously like D4 to have more of this.
Diablo 3 is already to simplistic in it’s Damage / Toughness view which often causes huge misunderstandings of how things work and why.
Those are true if you’re talking about caster builds. For melee and ranged things are more complicated than that.
Again, true if you’re a caster.
But don’t tell me runewords such as Grief or Breath of the Dying, that don’t grant you skill points are garbage.
I think there’s something to bear in mind here.
During a games development, its typical to see mechanics removed, or streamlined. Happens a lot, and not just with Blizzard. Rarely do I hear of a game becoming more difficult or complex during development. Aaaand the game is 2+ years from release. That’s plenty of time for ‘streamlining’.
I seem to remember this happening with Diablo 3 during its development. A certain amount of complexity was gutted before release.
Just a word of warning for everyone whose happy with it right now. There’s a good chance of itemization being made even more simplified down the road. Its happened before.
I was thinking the same thing. For testing purposes it’s often easier to use less complexity and add on later to achieve similar results.