I’ve played quite a lot D2 and the most fun part about it was finding a gear. Each unique or set drop and even some rare drops were exciting, because they had potential to improve your character a lot. You were leveling very slowly and ocassionally finding better gear, therefore you needed a lots of time to gear up properly.
In D4 is quite opposite - you level up very fast and you gear up very fast. There are some moments of the game where there is some kind of excitement about drops. For example, somewhere between 30-40 level when legendary items starts to dropping out, and for few levels after switching to higher difficulty tier when sacred and ancestral items comes into play. And that’s about it. All item drops (rare and legendary) are so common that sometimes you don’t even bother to pick them up.
There are also unique items which are very rare. They very rarely drops and some of them are almost impossible to find. Unfortunately the most common one are no better than legendary aspects and you can get them easily in 5 minutes by target farming. All better ones just don’t drop. You have to target farm them. But even when target farming those, probability to get the most powerful ones is still very, very low. So how to feel excited about item drops?
The game needs some build defining items which are not too rare and not too common, somewhere in between. So players can feel some excitement when they pick them up. So you can decide to go specific build just because you have found specific peace of gear, not because you choose to at the very begining when you were still level 1. Game allows to respect entire character anyway.
First of all we need much bigger pool of build defining items which drops rarely, but consistently. Much more often then current uniques. Target farm shouldn’t guarantee to drop unique item from very limited pool. It should just increase the chance to get specific one. But drop rate of unique items still should remain very similar across all game activities, so each drop, no matter during which activity, can bring some excitement.
Another thing are legendary aspects which drops like mad late game. If you can have full backpack of those in like 30 minutes of playing - there is something wrong. Drop rate of those should be much, much lower. However because some of them are obtainable from the dungeons, I would split them into 2 categories:
- common ones - dropping more often, obtainable from nightmare dungeons, giving some power level to your character in mid game and later used a source of materials
- rare ones - not obtainable from nightmare dungeons, more powerful, gives an option to create specific builds around them, dropping rarely but still more often then uniques, you would think twice before inprinting it on any item
Last thing are rare item which also drops way to often. I guess it is because affix pool is quite high on every item and finding the one which perfect affixes and rolls on them isn’t very likely. So you have to go through many of those to find a good one. But that is boring without a loot filters. So much better would be to have much less rare item drops to go through, but with a smaller pool of affixes instead and therefore having higher probability of getting right ones. Then each item drop would actually matter and getting all of them to max out your character would require much more time.
2 Likes
Apart from uniques there’s zero loot excitement. The legendaries are not legendary, they are just aspect carriers.
In D3 there are many non-set legendaries that can really boost you and change your play style. You can really mix and match items and skills. In D4 it’s just a slog. Which aspects do I want to keep… are any of these yellows non-useless.
3 Likes
Yes, but that is the case only for Duriel drops. Any other unique drop will be just a common one which can be easily found in a few others target farm areas. Awful design. I know Blizzard is planing to address itemization issues in S4, but not sure which ones exactly. I hope they will do something about that as well
1 Like
diablo 2 made you jinz your pantz when you drop grey item
(giant tresher, mage plate, archon plate, mancatcher)
some gg bases for runewords
diablo 4 makes me 
everytime anything drop
That awesome moment you find… erm found your first lance with life and mana leech stats 
I talked about exactly this. Its oversighted but I think dopamine hits from loot is why aRPGs are popular.
And Diablo 4 doesn´t have this… I don´t have this feel even with uniques.
I guess ubers can deliver, but they are locked behind such a big chore its not worthy for me.
No dopamine from loot = no playing for me.
3 Likes
Yesterday i found my first uber item. A Harlequin. I “worked hard” for the mats, hard because it was boring and i fell asleep often while doing whispers/helltides and i only do solo runs.
I saw the drop and… i really felt nothing. So i can use it for a couple of weeks and then. Reset, gogogogo mats collecting fun again.
Theres not even a unique x-bow in the game. Itemization cant get any worse.
2 Likes
I wish we could see stats on how many pieces we have sold or broken down for mats. If you could see those than you would know why there is zero excitement while hunting loot in a genre thats all about that chase.
The worst part is filling your inventory 2-3x in a single NMD run and spending the time sorting through all of that loot, reading the affixes to get +.1% to a conditional roll. Or finally getting that i925 weapon to replace your i910 weapon except 3 of the rolls are minimum value and the weapon is actually a DPS loss.
And then my favourite part, sorting through chest armor looking for defensive rolls and getting a dozen pieces that have only offensive rolls instead. Also don’t get me started on tri resist boots with movement speed and extra evade charges. It’s tough enough to get 3 out of the 4 and when you do hopefully you are sitting on a pile of gold when it happens.
Loot piñatas and affix bloat are both to blame here. Maybe loot should drop less often so we don’t spend half our time reading instead of playing. We need a less is more philosophy to make the game feel good. Reduce the drops, increase the quality and remove the bloat.
FWIW I got a starless skies and a doombringer in under 20 Duriel runs this season and neither drop really excited me because it was already burnt out from the loot grind.
1 Like
imagine i got grandfather + shaco in 7 duriel runs and i noticed it when going to stash pathetic items to pathetic stash/vendor
wow what an excitement.
now i can do fkall with that still
1 Like
I agree with this assessment. The duriel runs were fine for s2 because they were new and gave players targets to farm uniques. But they really need to change things up if they want players to keep coming back every three months. We need new things to farm and different places to farm them. And I think we can all agree that the itemization change is needed sooner rather than later.
This is what happens when nothing is rare
2 Likes
Diablo 4 just rains loot and everything feels trash. Loot is way too predictable and no fun power spikes until you change world tier, otherwise its all barely upgrades and so many boring stats on gear. Diablo 2 loot had a more sense of discovery when getting loot. But diablo 4 it all feels the same and predictable as hell.