Will They Ever Address Itemization Issues?

PC General Discussion
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Itemization is the core of ALL ARPGs and I don’t think they will ever address or fix the poor itemization in this game.

The easiest items to find in the game should not be BIS. Most people are finding BIS items before level 75 and the affixes are completely bland.

Item power is silly.

Damage multipliers are bad aka mostly vulnerability.

Affixes are redundant. Example: (close,far)

Ancestral and Sacred are irrelevant.

All rares can roll the same affixes.

An item power 800+ does not give higher rolls or unique affixes compared to an item power 725.

Getting 3/4 affixes you want on a rare is very easy to do.

Legos are a dime a dozen and not interesting when you find one.

No target farming at all for uniques or legos. “Base farming” doesn’t work.

Uniques are purposefully built poorly because they “don’t want you building your char around uniques” aka they don’t want you to use them over rares which makes most uniques worthless.

Uber uniques are the only interesting items in the game and their impossible to get.

I am struggling to see how they will ever fix or address itemization with how much they are are already struggling with simple issues.

Imo, they are prioritizing character balance around a broken system (short term issues), instead of fixing or addressing the core issues of the game (long term issues).

Do you think they will ever fix itemization or even address the massive issues with it?

35 Likes
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No - they won’t. Because to fix items you need to overhaul several systems in the game.

-Aspects need to be completely reworked
-Affixes need to be completely reworked.
-Talent tree/paragon board need be reworked.
-Difficulty tier scaling need to be reworked.
-Item power scaling needs to be reworked.

Too many people think the game can be fixed easily. It’s simply not the case. A lot of the mistakes with the game can’t be over come by small fixes.

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It would take too much work for the current team. Need fresh blood in there. Half of the problems we’ve had since launch could have been fixed by an ambitious dev/programmer eating lunch at his desk.

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This is why the game is bad… terrible loot in a loot grinder = fail

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Thats because the game sold millions and they dont car now… they get paid either way whos gonna discipline them? Cant tell someone off for making the company money

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Many things could simply be deleted. All of those extremely niche stats (+dodge against ranged attacks is one of my favorites) can simply be removed from the game. Other than that i agree that a lot of work is required.

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Could be bad direction from the higher up. Doesn’t seem like they have their priorities straight over there. I think it’s too late now though.

To fix this would mean that all the stuff they are currently working on would need to be paused (season 2+) and fixing itemization would take at least 3-5 months if they went full force on it and did rough QA for it.

I would personally prefer they do this though because the further they go with this existing model the harder it will be to fix it later.

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An expansion that will “save” the game will come sometime next year, or during winter holidays. It will have a price, ofc. A significant one.

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Expansions won’t fix itemization issues.

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That is a very positive thing.

That is not redundant, since you can get both.

Eh, you can find BiS before 75. Just pretty unlikely you do. That seems exactly how it should be in an A-RPG.

Also exactly how uniques should be designed. That said, yeah, some uniques could use a little buff to make them able to compete.

There are plenty of issues with itemization.
Especially in how the dmg buckets are designed, resulting in Vulnerable and crit being too powerful, and stats in the mega bucket being too weak.
Some affixes should be combined (having frozen and stunned as separate affixes seem meaningless, just make it a combined one for ‘hard cc’ effects, and so on. All class specific affixes should be changed into affixes that work across classes too.
On the other hand, a bunch of new normal affixes should be added.
Many of the build defining legendary and unique affixes should be moved to the skill tree and paragon boards. Items should enhance builds, not define them, or feel required.
Rares and legendaries also need to be able to be better than the “crafted” legendaries (imprinted), so the original rarities dont feel meaningless.
Affix ranges should be drastically reduced, and droprates lowered accordingly, so we dont get so much item spam. Getting low rolled, low item power items at high character lvl is meaningless filler.

But the foundation is quite good tbh. There is something to work with here.
Whether Blizzard is capable of that is another matter.

3 Likes
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I don’t think the rework is as big as it seems.

  • rare items need to drop MUCH less frequently; in turn though, make more gold drop
  • get rid of 50-60% of the stats that can roll on items
  • add more unique items to the game that change builds in unique ways

I fail to see how it’s a positive thing that an item with a higher power level does not have rolls that scale up appropriately. These two attributes should move in harmony together.

The problem is that it dilutes the item pool too much. These potential stats could stay, but then rerolling items should cost significantly less than they currently do; and players should be able to roll at least 2 stats.

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Weird, because that’s exactly what RoS did for D3

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I think 99% of their current conditional affixes should move to the paragon board. That would help with just comparing items right off the hop.

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They launched a game with a very shallow item pool that includes items that are simply not attainable. There are some really nice things this game does, but having so few items and mixing in absurdly rare items is indefensibly incompetent. That they haven’t addressed this in a meaningful way 2 months in is pretty crazy.

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it’ll take years for them to fix itemization because it basically needs scrapping and rebuilding from the ground up.

1 Like
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Is it easy? No. Is it necessary? Yes.

Similar to how they coded stash space. They thought they could take the easy road, slap some RNG onto the game and let it do the work for them. But by doing so they introduced fundamental flaws and problems into the game that run contrary to what people want out of an ARPG. The Devs thought they were way more clever than they were and it messed with the game.

They cut corners left and right and constantly chose the easy route. From level scaling so they don’t have to bother with it, RNG loot rather than manually balanced, to treating this like a pseudo MMORPG where leveling is somehow the “content” and they can just nerf XP gain to “stretch it out”. All while missing that leveling isn’t fun, that the loot system doesn’t fit what many players want, and so on and on.

They made a game that seems to be build solely around “hitting metrics” while missing that those metrics forget one of the most important points. The game being enjoyable.

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It’s item level, and all ARPGs have item level, it’s usually just hidden.

This means that lightning builds can deal more damage with critical strikes by stacking this extra affix. It’s not redundant.

I do think there should be more inherent value to the item tier (e.g. having damage / armor / inherent affix strength come from tier instead of item level).

No they can’t? I have no idea what you mean, but affixes are different by item type.

Again, it’s item level. All the top affix levels unlock at 725. This was true for almost all affixes in D2 also. I can see an argument for adding some affix rolls that get better at a higher item level, since the armor/damage does, but hope when they add something like this that it is more like giving you 70% of the value of two good affixes but combined into one slot. Like a single affix that does resource cost reduction and cdr, but at 70% the max that the single affixes would deliver.

Not clear why this is bad, other than maybe that rare drops are too common.

They don’t want uniques to be so strong that everyone has to play the builds that use uniques, because then you get the D3 sets problem again.

They aren’t interesting, just massively overpowered. Oculus and Tempest Roar and Staff of the Crone are far better.

The long term, high end itemization issues will be fixed by a steady drip of new chase items and mechanics making it far more complex to fully gear out, the same way they improved the longevity of D2 with new additions.

The immediate itemization issues are fixed by fixing vuln vs crit vs overpower vs dots vs flat damage so that all different build types are viable, by buffing underused class skills so that making and gearing up alts is more interesting, and by buffing underused items already in the game to make more chase items available.

I think they could also improve things by adding another inherent affix to sacred items (based on item type) and another one to ancestrals, and making the base damage or armor a random roll based on item tier and type (not slot and item level).

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Ancestral and scared are irrelevant because it is too easy to level up. Why care about scared or stats rolls when you will be replacing in a few of hours with ancestral?

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In every A-rpg??

3000 Post and your knowledge about this is !$%!.

Tell me one ??

Torchlight Series > The higher the lvl the better the items . Item Set at 100 lvl for 100 lvl characters…

Grim Dawn best Game currently . 100 lvl for 100 lvl item characters …

Titan quest the same … I mean i can write many games even Diablo 3 that i played…

So delight me with the knowledge of this is how should be in an A-rpg…??Well tell me one …

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I remembered back in the days when they announced angelic/demonic items and how you had to make a choice and balance out the powers. they specifically said there wont be legendaries and an “ancient” verion of the same item like in d3…and then they go and give us sacred and ancestral which is exactly the thing they said they wouldnt do.

2 Likes