The Item system worries me, does it for anyone else?

PC General Discussion
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Firstly, D4 overall I think is pretty good, few quirks here and there and some creative license from the other games (whether good or bad), but overall solid work from the Devs IMO.

I am however a bit concerned about the item system… I felt I never really “cared” about what dropped as I was always looking at that magical green number to see if it was “better”, yet it was only showing damage/armour numbers +/- and nothing else. But this wasn’t the worst of it… the stats just seemed, uh… boring? %this, %that. where are the cool unique stats of old? I hope it gets better as the game progresses, but a game focused around loot, I’m worried it’ll go the way of D3 with %crit chance * %crit damage boringness (please don’t end up doing billions of damage #crossesfingers).

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Last beta I wasn’t really focusing on stats much. This time I paid attention to what would work for my build (close damage, far damage, damage type, resistances etc.). I dunno I feel like it is fairly straightforward. I like that there aren’t as many useless options as say PoE where every time I play a caster I get nothing but Attack gear.
More interesting Legendaries and Uniques will show up later on.

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Yeah I hope you’re right! Maybe I was looking at it to narrow minded and have the rose tinted nostalgia glasses of D2 on, which always “seems” to have interesting stats on items.

Level 20 probably isn’t the best gauge, so my fingers are crossed… I just found up to level 20 I didn’t really seem to care what dropped.

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This. Lvl 20 is so low and insignificant, its not just not the best way, its entirely useless to gauge off.

Stats dont change late game, nothing new comes into play, but if you do this, your build is going to be trash.

Most dont know but theres an advanced tool tip and advanced compare option in the settings that are natively off. Turn that on.

End game, stacking those boring %s based on your builds will be a large part of the difference between a char thats worth while, and a char thats dead weight. Have a melee char? % dmg to close enemies needs to be a focus and stacked. Have a vuln build? % dmg to vuln should be one of your focuses.

Sorry you feel its boring, but, its not… with that said, you also clearly dont understand how important those boring stats will become, which is ok, but do you know why you dont? Because you played to level 20, 25 tops if you played last set, and thats too low for any of it to matter enough to be very noticeable.

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We literally only played the first act (last beta) and to level 20 now and we saw barely anything of the gear itemization and you are starting to panic?

We aren’t even playing the release candidate.

The problem, is we are still trying to use the D3 type of gear itemization in D4 and they are different systems.

You are going to have to experiment with gear to work out what you want to concentrate on because your class builds are going to change as you play.

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Normally I don’t care about items much at all until level cap, but in this game I do actually care about the stats. This is because most of the stats are… dull. Let me explain how this counter intuitively works.

I believe this is perhaps intentional for two reasons. 1) Extra stat padding for more item variety, and 2) the need to put in obviously less good stats so players key on the obviously good stats over time.

This is done in magic the gathering as well, where obviously bad cards are made. The reason is ostensibly to have the players learn to develop their sense of card evaluation. Give an obvious good and bad example for players to put on a spectrum to compare other things to.

For this game, its the dumb stats like the conditional damage ones (near, far, vuln, cc’d, etc). Those are just… so so. But the obviously good stats are pure dmg increase, DR, correct stat boosts, skill ranks, and the like.

As time goes on better things drop with better stats and you begin to get an eye for what is important for your build. At least that’s how it feels to me.

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Never understood the logic of “Boring stats” in an RPG game, as there never is an example of what an “Interesting” stat is.

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Stats are kind of an illusion.

In Diablo 2 LoD we should admit the all stats were to a specific point kind of predetermined:

For example
+All Skills > +Class Skills > + Class/ Elemental % Dmg > minus X% res for your build

  • All Res > +x% of any element res.

So if you look close to the itemization in D2 LoD it was most likely, just a quick example for a sorc some what like this:

Occu BiS for early game, next upgrade would be Hoto or if you go PvP max dmg PvE Eshu with +3 all skills, +20% light/fire + socket for 5/5 light/fire rbf.

So it was always Spirit Sword → Occu → Hoto/ Eshu

No other item in that slot or else you were bad.

Thats how ARPGs work, there will always be a best in slot item and with that always stats that are better.
If it is +Skill or +Crit doesn’t matter, both serve as damage multiplicators.

How it will be in D4 no idea because we have +skills and our damage relies also on weapon damage and +% critdmg with chance.
And then they have all kind of weird stats like vulnerable modifiers, …

I think the most important think will be high weapon dmg because based on that the multipliers add. So high weapon dmg > crit chance > crit damage > +X to rank Y > +% elemental dmg (psn, fire, cold…)

In Diablo 2 we only really had +skills that increased our dmg, hence why Soj was BiS for most classes. Again, most classes. Not all.

Was that deep? Not really… or can someone explain why else we were all running around looking the same
Shako, Hoto, Enigma, Spirit Mon? Once you had the “base endgame” items you would swap Shako for Griffon or 20fcr Circle + 2skill class, maybe your Hoto for Eshutas or DF, maybe you were exot and didn’t wear enigma but chose viper or CoH (why?) as sorc. But even Enigma was the BiS on Sorc because of % DR.

If you look at Shako in D4 it is safe to say it will be BiS as well duo to %DR. Unless they add viable options for specific builds.

In an ideal ARPG items would not only grant bonus but also have negative effects.
Enigma for example was OP because of the Tele skill but at the same time it opened 20 different builds for classes to play.
It would have been a fair item if it would not give the huge +DR% and perhaps minus X% all res. Not even mentioning +2 to all skills at this point, but +2 to all skills for random class would have done it as well. The price would have sky rocket for Palas though. Imagine building enigma and it gives +2 to amazon skills… jee…

A huge bonus should give a huge negative somewhere else. If you have 100% mobility you should be squishy but you should also be able to dodge cause of your mobility. If you can’t move fast, you should be tanky because well - you can’t move fast.

People forget that mobility is actually a very important stat in ARPGs which can make an item BiS. Add one item that gives us 200% running speed and I bet you, even without any other stats like dex, str, int,… it is BiS. Because it makes you fast. It’s good. Nobody wants to be slow in arpgs.

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We haven’t seen much tbh. I did get one really cool rare amulet on my rogue this time. I imprinted it with the Flurry aspect to make it legendary and if we were in June, I would have upgraded and socketed it too.

Choker of Encircling Blades
Legendary Amulet
226 Item Power
5.6% Resistance to all elements
+1 Rank of all Agility Skills
+1 Rank of all Imbuement Skills
+4.0% Crowd Control Duration
*Imprinted: Flurry damages enemies
in a circle around you and deals 12%
increased damage. (Rogue only)
Requires level 11

So I got free skills which I hadn’t picked and my poison imbue was 2 instead of 1. It felt like a D2 item and made me happy lol. I’m not worried about itemization at all.

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Kind of like Diablo 2 because I honestly didn’t know what to do with the +1 rank
to ability X if I was already using all slots.

It doesn’t even contribute to the skill tree progress. Meaning, if I have +2 to ranks of lets say whirlwind, I still have to put in 2 points into whirlwind to progress to the next part of the tree or spend the 2points atleast somewhere else to progress.

Its cool to have if I am already using a skill though. But other than that, dunno… maybe sometimes you can save a point or two and put it in something else.

Like my rogue didn’t have to skill dash and shadowstep. I put the 2 points into something else to progress further. It would be cooler if those two ranks made it so I didn’t have to waste 2 skill points on something else in that section of the tree, so I can use it on the next part for poison trap or psn imbuse

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Scenario. You go into a dungeon that you know the poison imbue will be less effective than the shadow imbue. Now you aren’t completely crippled by your chosen spec because you can just change the skill button from poison to shadow without paying to do it.

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What are some stats of old that you would like to see? The only thing notably absent to me was life/resource steal per hit, which I’m happy they are gone.

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This is only because we are limited to only 22 points. Once the game is out we’ll have 58 points and you should be able to skip over tiers if you have more points in one of the lower tiers.

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It mostly sucks. Gotta wait for runes and whatever that’s supposed to mean and see if they can turn it around.

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What unique stats were you looking to return?

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It’ll pass as you get more familiar with your character and build, what stats to look out for. You’ll be fine

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I like the + skills on items and I am neutral about all the damage cc, vuln, etc types not happy about them but neutral.

What I really hate is lucky hit mechanic, its such as waste afix on item. Skill has 20% lucky hit, then item has effect on 5% on lucky hit which literaly means zero chance to ever see the effect. I really hate lucky hit they should just give us raw number like this effect has 1% chance and be done with it.

Also the raw stat like inteligence is pretty useless on low level, 10 int = 1% of damage which so low so at low level its basicaly waste of affix on item and I allways roll it off. Willpower for mana regen its not much better. Maybe we will have thousands of those stats on items at end game as in D3 which will be terrible even more.

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I’m aware of their importance / their potential… I played many years of D2 and D3 with Min/Max builds, BiS gear, etc. so I get how it works. I do agree that level 20/25 is not a good measure of how it will feel later on, so I am probably jumping the gun a bit here. My comments were more from a place of every ring was +%res x2 baseline, every weapon was generally +%close/far dmg, etc. It felt like each item type had a fixed thing they always had. Where as what I liked about D2 mainly, was that you could pickup an item with +1 light radius… was it good? heck no, but everything had Affix(s) + Suffix(s) that all randomized from a giant pool and was rarely the same outside of runewords, uniques, etc… meaning that getting a BiS was near impossible, so every item could be amazing right? Even blues could be great. Maybe rose tinted glasses though as other people have highlighted some good points.

I did not know this! thankyou for that tip!

Most peoples feedback here have highlighted some really good points though that I didn’t consider! I guess the stats I feel are missing are those +%ED, +Direct Dmg, Life/Mana steal per hit, +20-30 Cold/Fire/Light damage, +% magic find… I also don’t think I saw +%attack speed? although it probably exists. Maybe all of those exist! I think it’s more what I just said above… every item felt somewhat fixed in some way, rather than almost completely random, making it exciting to pick things up and see what it rolled.

I also feel like the +Intel/Str/Dex, etc. didn’t really feel like it did much… D2 you would love +20Str on an item, because then you could finally equip something you couldn’t before… but in D4, everything is wearable within your class if you’re the level req. I dono, maybe I’m to nostalgic for older systems like that and it’s all just superfluous bloat that isn’t needed.

Thanks for all the responses though guys, definitely given me some things to think about further!

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You ought to be looking at stats when the real game drops.

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I love the way items work… I mean lets be real no matter the item system you’re constantly comparing for which has better stats, that’s what an item game is lol…

But nah at level 20 I was purposefully looking for aspects which boosted my build (earth druid), and then transferring it to the item with the best stats, adding some sockets, gems, oh something else better, lets transfer these over, do this, build this.

I LOVE the item system in this game and having played all the diablo games I think it’s the best of all of them… it’s so accessible and customisable. I love it.