[Triple randomness]: The real reason why loot in D4 is not exciting

PC General Discussion
1

I see a lot of people complain that they barely upgrade their gear pass level 75 because drop rate sucks, or there are too many useless affixes. But I argue that drop rate is not the main issue that caused the gear switching so hard. That said, I think even if Blizzard increased the drop rate or removed those useless resistance affixes, it won’t make people change their gear more frequently.

As a level 80 Druid, I can see about 1~2 gear that have potential to improve my current equipment every hour or so. Which is a frequency I think makes sense.

However, I haven’t actually swaped those gears. Instead, I stored them. In fact I haven’t changed my gear since last week, so the quality of my equipment didn’t change at all, but the quality of my stored gears improved, like 40% of the gears I stored got an upgrade.

Why? Because swapping hoarded gear is free. But swapping an equipped gear require you to have following three things:

  1. Having the yellow gear in the first place (which require luck)
  2. Find a good aspect (which require luck)
  3. Re-roll one of the affixes (which require luck, or billions of gold which doesn’t make sense, so still require luck).

This makes gear switching punishing. Because even if you get a new gear that could improve your current equipment, you need to consider if the improvement is worth the cost. If the improvement is small. Then it won’t be worth it to spend tons of gold and another hardly earned max roll aspect. Since we don’t have a reliable way to get max roll aspect and we don’t have a reliable way to farm gold to compensate for how expensive the reroll is. We would only switch gear when the new gear is significantly better than the old one.

But EVEN THEN, even if you do find a new gear that is significantly better. You still don’t want to equip it immediately because the new gear might be just better suited for another build, which would require you to reroll for another affix and imprint another aspect. So you STILL want to store it first.

What’s the root cause of this problem? Because there is triple randomness in the pipeline, to make a equipment upgrade, all three things needs to happen together and they all depend on luck, pardon me for repeating again:

  1. Get a good yellow gear.
  2. Get a good aspect, (ideally two good aspects because you want to save one for later upgrade).
  3. Get a good affix reroll.

This triple randomness makes a lucky hit on one thing feel rewardless because you will need all three to improve your current gear. It punishes incremental upgrades because you always want to wait for better gear to imprint a good aspect or you want to wait for a better gear to spend money on reroll. So whenever I see a good yellow drop that is slightly better than my current equipment, I don’t feel it’s exciting, I feel it’s a burden and put it in my alt’s storage (because of course my storage is full).

So how can we fix this? We would need to decouple the triple randomness. Making it so that lucky hits on each of those things feel more exciting independently, not depending on other things. This can be achieved with following changes:

  1. Extract aspect to upgrade codex. So that whenever you get a better roll on an aspect, you gain a permanent upgrade and you can feel more comfortable to apply them to gears with predictable cost on gold and material. (it also alleviates the storage problem.)
  2. Set a cap on reroll cost. It can be expensive, but it shouldn’t be astronomical. We should cap the cost to at least always allow one reroll with the gain from one high end NM clear.
  3. Allow reverting gear reroll to their initial state, so that you can choose to reroll another affix. Then you won’t need to worry about using a good gear now close the door to use it on another build.

With those changes, it still costs to switch and upgrade gears, but those costs are predictable now, and that’s what’s important. Because people will feel more comfortable making decisions when the cost is predictable. If upgrading a gear costs you 1 hour of farm time. I would bet a lot of people will be willing to do that. But if it costs you unpredictable time, even if on average it is shorter than 1 hour. People may still refuse to do that because most humans are instinctively allergic to uncertainty.

8 Likes
2

TBH those 2 things are super easy to fix in 3 simple steps (writing this like 30th time already)

1 - Inherent rolls should have alterations, not be always strict. That alone will fix the problem of “gambling addiction” in a large way

2 - Get rid of bad affixes and add some more interesting ones in 2 ways… If a buff happens to rarely then change the conditional to something more frequent (on elite kill => on Overpower, or on CD use), If a regular affix but doesn’t have impact change to be an ON-OFF “switch” (Control impairment and slow reduction => remove slow on Evade, remove slow on usage of CD, remove Slow on Overpower)

3 - Rework the “damage and mechanics pie” a bit more - this is a direct consequence from point #1 but still - why not have a Staff that has lesser (if rebalance required) baseline damage but has like 60-70-80% bonus damage vs CC (instead of 25% or whatever baseline is)

TLDR - less bad affixes rolled = less gambling, also inherent roll = something I like rather than something that is rolled baseline equals less gambling (for ex. why roll for Movement speed on Amulet that has inherent MS roll instead of AllRes already ? :slight_smile: )

Now sure, if wanna min-max everything then GL with it

1 Like
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This would help with the re-roll experience for sure, I would be happy to see those changes even if they don’t set a cap on the re-roll cost.

There are still things need to be done on the aspect, right now when you get a good gear you want to wait for a max roll aspect, and when you get a max roll aspect you want to wait for a max roll gear. So you need both random things to happen to get a better gear (actually three if you count re-roll in). This would make getting a lucky shot on one thing feel much less exciting.

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The Codex suggestion will help a lot.

5

I agree there are to many affixes and the stat ranges are to wide. I also expected more useful uniques. I thought they would play a bigger roll.

2 Likes
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Uniques are in fact easier to upgrade, because you can’t imprint, can’t re-roll, and can’t trade them. So as long as you see a better rolled uniques, you can immediately put them to use with minimum cost. And that I think is the experience that should happen on all gear drop: A good drop should make you happy immediately, not depending on another random things.

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I’m complete opposite. Stat ranges are far to narrow.
Items should have affix tiers. Lets say there are 6 affix tiers available. Then they could use the item power brackets to dictate what affix tier is possible to roll, but not guaranteed.
So an item power 800 item should have the possibility to roll +3 to life (lowest tier). But it can also roll +1000 life (highest tier). But an item power 500 item can roll +3 life but only goes up to +600 life as that is the highest tier it can roll.

I also think there are too few possible stats on items. But the stats currently is just bad. They should honestly just merge all the +damage to X into +damage. And come up with more affixes. Armor should be physical ONLY and resistances to elemental damage. then they can come up with other interesting damage reduction stats other than plain damage reduction to X.
Theres no proper dodge/evasion stat other than random rolls here or there. theres no block to speak of in an ARPG.

There is just nothing to theorycraft or really any interesting decisions to make. In regards to either offensive or defensive build creating. Just pile on generic % increased damage mods which all do the same, or pile on generic armor and damage reduction.

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If you would use search in the forum you would have seen I posted this idea two months sgo.

/close cause it was my idea

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I hope Blizzard will think the same way lol. They probably concerned that this will hurt their engagement metric. But I think this change would actually promote more meaningful playtime and encourage playing alts.

I have a Druid and I don’t want to shop skin because they are no better than free skins. If I can play an Sorc alt that might change, but I can’t play because I don’t have space to hold all my aspects.

10

Great minds think alike. They also plagiarize.

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Good for you! Cause smart people see things the similar way my friend. And of course I didn’t search before posting, who does lol.

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good ideas bud, im not too sure if the codex should be “uprgraded” but at least i could see non codex aspects being unlocked once you found them.

good post tho really, hopefully something that gets to the devs

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I wouldn’t be surprised to see other people to have those idea. They are not hard to come up with. And I’m sure some of them has been discussed within Blizzard. But they choose to not implement those probably in favor of their engagement metric. But my point is I think they should be implemented.

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We have already pointed out that there are far too many modifiers. This isn’t something new.

We don’t need more interesting modifiers, we need fewer. It is very hard to get (n|4) when n is very large.

Getting a low crit roll is just as useless as getting no crit roll. So those are both counted as unwanted stat rolls increasing the size of n.

1 Like
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Even as a level 20 rogue, I felt, imprinting is too expensive, and we should be able to upgrade affixes permanently.

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The obvious fix would be to make other affixes better (not dispose them), I mean there are some but nowhere near as people wanna make them to be

The bottomline still is the same - other affixes should feel like offering something useful so not always the need to look for a crit

17

Word. Most of the item, like as much as I can avoid it, I don’t change gear because of the hassle involved. Reroll, upgrade, high roll aspect that I don’t have, and now the damn heart sockets for jewelry.

18

The only thing they can do to make crit lower priority is remove it altogether. The only time I might sacrifice crit is if it gives me raw damage for the crit that adds up to more than the 26% or whatever. Of course I’d already need a lot of crit % modifier and chance to crit.

19

I agree 100%. It takes at least 20 minutes to change one piece of gear if you have all the stuff to do it. Not fun at all and I haven’t changed much gear since I was in the 60’s (lvl 75 now).
Really the only thing I’ve changed out since then is I found a decent Lidless Wall and Black River for my Necro.

20

I put that suggestion in another post. I’d go even further and make it where non-dungeon drop aspects are added to the codex as well.