TL/DR Skip to bullet points below.
I previously posted a constructive post on itemization that gained a lot of traction and seemed to have a lot of support on both here and Reddit. Unfortunately Blizzard hasn’t stated anything about fixing even a single area mentioned so I’m posting it again in hopes that at least some of the criticisms will get either addressed or at least dismissed.
Blizzard says they read the forums but since they don’t say which feedback they do and don’t take in, I’ll keep posting this one every once in a while, while adding to it any other itemization concerns listed by other forum posters.
The Forums link:
The Reddit link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/14seg8v/itemization_needs_fixed_im_never_been_less/
And the original post itself:
I asked myself why I could farm Pindleskin and Mephisto in D2 or rifts in D3 over and over even though they are objectively worse activities than the variety available in D4.
It didn’t make sense to me so I thought about it for a bit and the answer was simply loot. When loot drops in D4 its not fun or exciting at all. When loot dropped in D2 (and even D3 albeit for a shorter window of time towards the end due to drop rates) I was excited to see what I got.
My feedback is all either loot related or at least loot adjacent.
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There are nowhere near enough uniques.
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Legendary powers are far too numerous and the game is balanced around this. They were a bad idea in general and only uniques should exist.
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There exists uniques that literally just make your character weaker. (Sorc fireball unique is 100% useless as it lowers your damage far too much, and its small benefit of more clear power doesn’t matter as there is no density in this game.
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Item tiers are a garbage loot system and anything below the top tier is useless.
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You gain the first 80-85% of your power really early into the game and have to grind out 25 levels of nothingness and minor upgrades and tweaks.
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The 2 chase uniques are FAR too chase.
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Mob scaling makes you have periods where you simply feel weaker
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Legendary nodes on the paragon board (mostly) are too weak.
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Too many Aspects are specific to a SINGLE skill making them nearly almost required or useless with no in between.
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Resists don’t matter and if they did there’s no room to stack them on gear anyway.
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Vulnerable is on a different level and is way too powerful compared to the others. (Why are there powers that require BOTH vulnerable AND something else like barrier? why not just barrier to add more diversity?
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There are not enough sources of vulnerable, including exploit being useless for sorc etc. (solvable if vuln isn’t as broken comparatively and is merely an option)
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Blue and white items are 100% useless. It was said Blue would be able to have higher rolls of things in early development and this isnt the case. Blues should have a 50% higher ceiling and floor for stats to allow sacrificing certain stats for others in niche scenarios. White items were always going to be useless however this could be fixed by having more bases for each slot and having a way to turn white items into yellows.
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Items drop smart loot and only drop for your current class (95% of the time, 100% of the time for uniques) making the desire to farm for alts non-existant.
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Items requirements scale to the level they were received at and not their stats. This makes what little trading there was mostly obsolete. Items level requirements should scale with the stats on the item, not arbitrarily the level it was received. (this also hurts gathering items for alts.
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Weapons/offhands are class restricted. This lowers diversity further. These should instead have attribute requirements to disincentivize ‘off-class’ usage but not limit it completely. Could open up new build styles.
Itemization needs fixed. The content and and combat are fun. Density could be upped a little but the main problem of this game is itemization. Itemization is THE core of Arpgs, ironically a standard set by Blizzard themselves.
Edit: Adding great points made below by other commenters.
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Weapon ilvl scales damage purely on its own, making that king and removing a lot of build options.
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Yellows and legendaries have 4 affixes instead of 6 from previous and other arpgs making it harder to stack proper stats, and locks in GG items far earlier giving even less of a carrot on a stick.
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Some conditionals are just absurd, Have barrier enemy is vulnerable while you play with one hand and eat cheerios and deal cold damage there is a 5% lucky hit chance to have a 20% chance to Do a thing. I’m exaggerating a bit but there really are some deep conditionals that are either 100% uptime because the build just happens to always fill all the conditions, or they are worthless. They lean far more towards the worthless side.