Currently we have in Diablo 4 an itemization that was inherited mainly from Immortal and Diablo 3 and honestly I don’t think the Diablo Immortal itemization is ideal for Diablo 4.
Personally, I think that the itemization model we have today, with aspects and using legendary items in all slots, is not ideal. Legendary aspects should be included in the character’s skill trees or Paragon Board, but I think it is very difficult for this model to be changed at this point, so I would like to bring some suggestions to discuss.
Contextualizing
The changes that were brought in season 4 were great when we talk about tempering, maximizing and GAs, but for this reason the rare items (not to mention the magical ones) became useless for the character and were only used as “scrap” for sale.
Suggestions
Let’s start from the bottom up
- Magic Items
The idea for magical items is that they start to drop with a variable number of affixes, potentially containing 1 to 2 affixes.
- Rare Items
Rare items will also have a variable number of affixes, and may contain 2 or 3 affixes.
- Item Journey
Before we move on to legendary items, let’s talk about the journey of magical and rare items until they become the ideal items for our build.
Starting with the Rare items:
In order to make use of rare items that only have 2 affixes, we will have the opportunity to enchant the item in a different way.
Therefore, when we go to the occultist with an item with 2 affixes, we will have the option of adding a random affix to the item with the same costs and materials that we would have if we were just making the exchange. The item that had an affix added can only have this new affix modified in the occultist, the others cannot be exchanged.
Now talking about the Magic items:
The idea here is to expand the game’s crafting system by giving the possibility of moving items up from their “hierarchies” to the next possible one and this can be done from magical items to rare ones.
With this we now have the possibility of transforming a magical item into a rare item and in this way, after being transformed into a rare item it can be transformed into a legendary item.
“but why would I want to transform a magical item into a legendary one?”
Let’s use the following example, I’m playing and I got a magic glove with 2 affixes: +7% attack speed / +7.5% critical hit chance.
At this point I judged that it is interesting for the build I want to do and I decide to try to take this item forward, I take it to the optician to transform it into a rare item, after transforming it into a rare item I continue to add the affix that missing and after a few tries I manage to get the affix I want on the item. Now the final step to transform this item into legendary is to add the aspect I want and after that I can move on to trying the other affixes in tempering and, if relevant, maximizing this item.
- Legendary Items
Now speaking of legendary items, other than those that we transform via aspect.
In my opinion the biggest challenge is to transform these items into truly legendary items, right at the beginning the legendary items were magical items but with aspects inserted into them, now the legendary items are just legendary items because the magical items were “downgraded” and not because they received better attention. Today, the legendary items are the standard items, the drop rate is high and we only want to get them, reaching a point where we will only get a legendary item if it drops with a GA because there might be one we want.
My idea for legendary items is to reduce their drop rate, making it similar to the drop rate of legendary items with GA, with this “native” legendary items becoming only items with GAs.
What would differentiate legendary items from rare items now is that they drop with 3 affixes and will always come with GAs and this is what makes them legendary
Magical and rare items are our option to transform into “common legendary” items (like the ones we have today), to extract the aspects so that they can be inserted into the rare items, we would then obtain the “physical” aspects again. but they would not occupy the same item slot, we would have a slot just for them and we would take the aspects to the occultist to update the codex and the repeated aspects we would sell for gold.
Other suggestions for changes
I understand that what was said above can make the game a little “slower”, leaving room for the phrase “this way we’ll go back to spending more time looking at items than playing”.
We must understand that playing a game that derives in some way from an RPG implies that at some point we will look at items, skills and powers, but we can make this easier and faster with some changes:
- Affix Indicators
The idea here is simple, next to the item name we have an indicator of how many affixes we have in the item.
(The Diablo franchise has inspired many games, it doesn’t hurt to take some inspirations back to it)
- Loot Filter
Filter items with key words selected by players, items with affixes that contain these words (example: critical rate, basic, bleeding, +X for skill X, armor, etc.) will be marked with a different color or will have a beam of light according to its rarity (blue for magical, yellow for rare and legendary ones a stronger glow).
Conclusion
In general, we will reach the point where we only go after items with GA (which will become legendary items) as we do today in the end-game stage, magic items will no longer be interesting to us, as will items rare at the moment, but this way we will have more options when leveling the character to build our items, making the itemization a little more comprehensive and giving use to the lower items so that they are not just scrap for sale.