Having played about as much POE2 as I did for D4 S6, I thought it might be interesting to compare the experiences from an itemization perspective. I am comparing the first 40 hours of progression in both games, not the sweatlord final-form itemization.
tl;dr POE2 has a lot more options for how to push your items in different directions, but most of them boil down to adding higher top-end results at the cost of much more randomness in getting them. With far fewer multipliers, items can be more varied and more powerful. D4 needs POE2’s itemization high-rolls, but having a baseline of control like D4’s would also benefit POE2. So D4 should dramatically rein in multipliers and add a layer of double-edged randomness beyond the current power levels in exchange for smoothing the edges of tempering and masterworking failures.
In D4, we have the following systems available:
- Finding drops
- Vendor surfing
- Gambling
- Imprinting aspects
- Tempering
- Enchanting
- Gems / Prisms
- Runewords
- Uniques
- Masterworking
- Mythic Crafting
- Glyphs
In POE2, there is not a 1-to-1 equivalent to each of these, but here’s a rough list:
- Finding drops
- Vendor surfing
- Gambling
- Finding uncut skill, support, and spirit gems, using jeweler’s orbs
- Essences/Transmutes/Augs/Regals/Exalts/Alcs/Vaal orbs
- Chaos Orbs
- Runes / Artificers
- Trigger skills
- Uniques
- Quality-improving currencies
- Chance orbs
- Jewels
- Charms + flasks
Comparing these one at a time:
- Drops in POE2 have a much slower progression from white to blue to yellow to yellows with more affixes at drop. They allow a wider range of affix tiers, making top-end drops at any given level significantly stronger than average ones even without considering the garbage stats. However, they also allow stats for all classes to drop on shared item bases and all bases can drop, making the typical drop far less likely to be useable by your class. Certain stats are way stronger than others, some (like rarity and movement speed) to the point of being mandatory on certain pieces. This typically feels frustrating more than it feels good, but creating soft caps so they can spread these affixes to more items would fix that.
- Vendors in D4 are rarely useful: magic items are useless, and you blow past looking at rares very quickly. In POE2, vendors can end up giving you amazing items, not only rares that compete with the best drops you’ve found, but because of the crafting system a magic item with a single really good affix can turn into something amazing also. There are more interesting/build-defining affixes available in the base pool, so finding the ones you need from vendors is a more important aspect of the game. Since the vendors only reset when you level, I think this is a good thing. If you could reset them by instance hopping or relogging, it would be a very bad thing.
- Gambling is similar in both, but D4 lets you get aspects and gives you a gambling currency, which I think makes it stronger overall
- Aspects vs. support gems is an interesting debate. I think D4 launched with far too few aspects and that it continues to have too few partly because you can slot all the aspects that affect a skill all at the same time, so it’s not really a choice. The layered expansion of character power you get from adding support gems, unlocking higher level skill and support gems, and adding sockets to skill gems is more fun than the expansion of the codex. I think D4 could enhance this by adding another layer to the aspects (like attribute requirements or item base tier requirements) and making more use of opportunity cost in the aspect slots, but I do think the aspects + codex are a strong system that they shouldn’t just try to change into POE2’s skill gems.
- Tempering gives you far more control than POE2’s currency-based crafting does, but the currency crafting has way better high-end outcomes for two main reasons: (1) the randomness means that the average outcome is far worse, and (2) item power means a lot more because there are far fewer damage multipliers and defense-solving boosts in the rest of the game. Also, it’s just fun to incrementally improve items and see what you get - tempering isn’t random enough for that to be fun, so adding more ways to get value from more random tempering would be fun. D4 bases are more interesting (because they include 3 random affixes with the possibility of being GA) but you also can’t find any item that isn’t a crafting base. Vaal orbs add a layer of fun you can’t get from tempering, but could be a great direction to expand the tempering system, especially if they want to make the base system more deterministic. Give us a currency that randomly removes a temper and lets you re-tempering it, but then also give a currency that adds a random third temper from a pool of positive and negative traits and seals the item so you can’t craft on it anymore. Could even make the end product tradeable.
- Enchanting vs. Chaos Orbs is another control vs. randomness question. I think Enchanting is probably the better system, but Chaos Orbs have the benefit of a way better high-roll possibility. If you have that one-of-a-kind base and you just need it to have the right stats (like boots with move speed and rarity), you can use chaos orbs to get there. Having both systems could be cool, though, especially if D4 added a chaos orb equivalent that could give you an extra GA in a normal slot and could potentially randomly reroll a temper.
- Runes in POE2 are just way better than D4 gems. D4 could easily up its game here.
- Trigger skills work almost exactly like Runewords, but they give you more ways to invest in their trigger and more options for what gets fired off. D4 should take a hard look at how to iterate on runewords to expand them in both those directions.
- D4 uniques are much more prevalent and are often very cool and build-defining. There’s a tough tradeoff here between choking builds with uniques and therefore cutting off the crafting game vs. having no useful uniques. POE2 uniques are cool and ambitious in ways that only the best-designed D4 uniques are, but a lot of them are undertuned.
- Quality-improving currencies are available earlier than masterworking ones, but they are way less impactful and also less interesting (because of the masterwork crits)
- Chance orbs are interesting because they give you a path to break down regular uniques into the one you need. I’d love to see unique-crafting recipes based on gems and runes in D4, to complement the mythic-crafting ones. Mythics are cool, though, as top-end chase items.
- Jewels are far more interesting than glyphs, even if glyphs provide some end-game progression value. The glyphs are also a source of just insane build scaling. I think that system should be entirely rethought and made into an item system, with bases that dictate which nodes are affected by node-based affix and what the in-range stat threshold is for stat threshold affixes, but then each affix is selected from a pool of options with different tiers possible for each affix (and some affect nearby nodes, some require the nearby stat threshold be met, and some require a specific glyph XP tier). You could still include glyph XP and glyph tiers that expand the range and act like quality to slightly improve all affixes, with some ability to breakdown a glyph and harvest back some of its XP.
- D4 would benefit from something like the charms and flasks in POE2 - it’s a really cool, lightweight system that dramatically improves on the complex on from POE.
