Since everybody seems to know how to fix items better than Blizzard, I would like to hear what you guys think would make the itemization/update patch the best entertainment you've had in years.
Personally, I would like to see a complete revamp of the main stats. Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence should be more appealing to all classes.
Strength should be increasing all melee damage, not just Barbarian damage. Along with that it should increase block chance, a bonus to crit damage, and keep the current bonus to armor rating.
Dexterity should be increasing ranged physical damage. And then of course some of the fun DPS stats, like attack speed and crit chance. The defense stat would still be dodge chance.
Intelligence should be increasing elemental damage dealt. This would still increase Wizard and Witch Doctor damage because everything they cast has an elemental property. Along with this should also be an increase to resource regeneration/decreased resource cost and a bonus to damage of resource spenders. Elemental resistance would still stay as well.
Now, Vitality is good as is, but I feel like they could decrease the amount of life it gives. I would also hope that they change monster HP/damage output scaling in line with this. I like to see big numbers, but not so that I can't tell if its 100000 or 1000000.
I could keep going but I'm on my phone so typing sucks.
Lend me your thought, I know you guys have them.
Personally, I would like to see a complete revamp of the main stats. Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence should be more appealing to all classes.
In the earlier stages of the game, when they were still developing it and testing it (I think it was closed beta). They had stats similar to what you suggested. I think they felt that it was to complicated to gear your character and felt it was easier to to gear for dex and vit instead of some str, some dex, some vit and try to balance it out. It might be hard for new players to adapt to this system because it's more complex but all in all I would like something that made items and stats more interesting.
Not that similar. They had actually removed str, dex and int from the game and replaced them by rating stats (like the yellow gems in WoW): to hit rating, crit rating, attack speed rating, power rating and so on.
Nobody really liked that, me included, so they went back to the original stats. But on the other hand, they made them so equal and created items with stats like "one of str/dex/int" that there's hardly any difference between them.
The suggestions in the OP are fine and the thread in general too. It's a monstrous design task to actually "fix" the game, don't know if at all possible to meet the expectations
I completely believe that the game is fixable, after seeing how far the game come already. A big problem is that there is such a broad spectrum of what people want that it might seem hard Blizzard to really nail something down that is going to please the most people.
But that's a different thread...
Elendiro, if they implemented Intelligence how I suggested, they could change the default damage type of most spells to compensate, like for example, Spectral Blades could be Arcane damage instead of physical. Would still make sense and Wizards would still increase its damage.
Now, if you wanted to make a Melee Wizard, like they bragged about so long ago, stacking a bunch of Strength/Dexterity and using a rune that changed Spectral Blade to physical damage would be possible too.
Str / Dex / Int / Vita. Keep these exactly how they are. Once another strength class is introduced, it'l be far more balanced. These unique stats that are only appealing to ~2 classes each is actually a very good design, because it helps differentiate gear.
Defensive stats. Most of these are fine, such as Defense, All resist, radius and +HP/HG.
Thorns. Change this to reflect X% weapon damage back on attacker, instead of a static number. Another option is to have it reflect say for fun, X% of your maximum life. Gear would just stack the X%, so you would have say ~25% gear that would stack. This would obviously be more appealing to defensive setups.
Single resists. These need to be able to roll 150% or so compared to all resis. So you'd have a possible roll up to 80 of all resist on a chest, or a single resist that can roll up to 150 or 175, while also not limited to one resis. Such as a chest rolling 155 poison resistance, with another 170 cold resistance. This will mean that all-resis is still viable, but it might be better for certain set-ups to try and stack 2-3 resistances really high compared to the rest.
Offensive stats. Crit damage, Crit chance, Attack Speed, Main stat and +Dmg are all fine in my opinion. The problem lies with there not being ENOUGH damage increasing stats, and therefore all can be found on a piece of gear. Jewelry / gloves can roll everything, so we need more affixes than there are spaces.
+X% elemental damage. Already a version in the game for some legendaries, but it needs to be more streamlined. These would roll specific spell schools, such as +15% fire damage.
+Attack Power. This works like you'd think, but it increases only physical / weapon damage attacks. It'l obviously benefit melee more, such as the barbarian, the Druid (muhaha), some monk skills and then some select skills on the WD / Wiz / DH. It can roll with main stat, but offers twice the damage increase than a main stat. The drawback is it's pure damage, and there's no defensiveness associated with it.
+Spell Power. Exact same as above, except it effects all attacks that do elemental damage and doesn't effect physical / weapon damage. Geared more towards ranged classes, it still can benefit certain builds that utilize skills that use spell schools. A fire whirlwind barb comes to mind.
Legendaries - On paper, having rares drop with the ability to be better than legendaries sounds good because it means we'll always be looking for something better, and never really have that 'bis'. In practice however, it's just not fun. The most sought after type of item shouldn't be the easier to find compared to the rarest type.
Having all legendaries roll their stat ranges based on the monster level that drops it is an awesome start. This increases the pool of legendaries dramatically.
Legendary weapons. These need to have their sheet DPS normalized. IE, every 1 handed legendary can roll about the exact same sheet DPS range. Such as every sword dropped from a Mlvl 63 can roll from 900-1200 (or whichever range is decided upon). What sets them apart from each other? Their unique affixes of course! The normalized DPS changes it to where players are choosing their legendary based on what cool ability it does that others don't, instead of just which one gives the highest sheet DPS. If the live version of Azurewrath could roll the same DPS as an echoing fury, then suddenly it's a harder choice if players want that extra +.25 attacks a second, or a huge chance to freeze, ect.
It's easier for Blizzard, and, well everyone who makes a game to make things less powerful and then build up, because players react positively to those changes. If they made everything super OP, they deal with a lot of backlash when they have to tune it down. That's why in loot 2.0 Blizzard has a FAR greater idea / reference in making unique legendary affixes. Patch 1.04 had great ideas, but a lot of them just need to be pumped up, and a LOT of new affixes need to be made.
In a nutshell;
Add new damage increasing affixes. (AP / SP / %ED)
Change some current affixes. (Thorns, Single Resistances)
Change affix ranged to be the best on legendaries.
Make all legendaries able to drop from Mlvl 63 enemies, and roll their stats accordingly.
Normalize sheet DPS on comparable legendaries.
Re-design almost all legendary unique affixes to be at least useful, if not 'game-changing'.
I'm a dev. I need inspiration. I need a sure-hit idea.
I install Diablo 2 and let the beautiful itemization waft over me. I pay attention to the intricacies of Diablo 2 itemization. I submit myself to the end-game power of Rune Words and the way such an idea makes use of even the most innocuous item types. I take a look at how charms are their own item type, and the introduction of a new item type completes the circle.
I begin to understand that millions of my customers expected this and got "that".
I no longer worry about borrowed ideas within the same franchise. I begin to understand how hundreds of thousands (millions?) of core Diablo fans would come rushing back to the game, E-penis at full mast, stumbling over their computer chairs in a mad-dash to relive the romanticism of Diablo 2 itemization.
I understand the potency of addition without subtraction. Do not take away what was desired, I add to it. I admit defeat for my errant ideas and succumb to parity. You want it, you got it, an inescapable logic within this realm.
Wow Bleu, that's some really good starting points.
I love the normalized weapon range for each weapon type. That would pretty much eliminate BiS gear. I like the idea of having my Barbarian using an ilvl 63 Butcher instead of Skorn or maybe even a Boulder Breaker. Like you said, it would come down to what makes each legendary different instead of just most DPS.
Love those extra affixes too. In other games, I'm a +Attack Power glutton. lol
Wow Bleu, that's some really good starting points.
I love the normalized weapon range for each weapon type. That would pretty much eliminate BiS gear. I like the idea of having my Barbarian using an ilvl 63 Butcher instead of Skorn or maybe even a Boulder Breaker. Like you said, it would come down to what makes each legendary different instead of just most DPS.
Love those extra affixes too. In other games, I'm a +Attack Power glutton. lol
Ty sir =D
Oh and it was Ruksak that reminded me I completely left out another portion; Different item drops. We need something else to be on the hunt for besides just gear.
Runes - Exactly how they were in D2. Gave a slightly odd, if not really not-that-useful affix when socketed by themselves. BUT, when combined in a super secret order, they create runewords!
White items - Only white items are allowed to roll addition sockets. 1-3 on helms, shields and 1 handed weapons. 2-6 on chests and 2 handed weapons. This alleviates the problem of having to re-design current items to accommodate additional sockets while still having enough sockets to have fun with. Now all of the sudden, white items might be useful =D
Jewels - I made a thread awhile back detailing how I envisioned all these other dropped items would work, but I'll try sum each one up. Jewels drop in magic, rare and legendary quality. Each quality guarantees an additional affix, up to 3. So 1 for magic, and so on. Jewels, however, can only be socketed into jewelry. This lets jewels actually be powerful, without them over-riding gems / runes or creating too much OP'ness. Jewelry will still only be able to have 1 socket. The mystic will actually be able to add sockets to jewelry if there aren't any already on them, at the cost of one affix of the players choice.
Charms - Charms will fit into the Talisman, and instead of having normal item-like affixes, they will effect skills / categories of skills. The Talisman will have 6 slots, 3 for direct skill manipulation, and 3 for class specific manipulation. Charms will drop class-specific, and have an extremely low drop rate which of course will make them of legendary quality.
A direct skill charm example could be a Barbarian charm that removes the cool-down of battle cry. Why remove that cooldown? Because then you could use the category-type charm that creates a 100% weapon damage AOE when using one of your shouts. Add in another category charm that increases the fury gained from your generating shouts by 100%, and TA-DAA! A ghetto shout barb!
Anyway, I just wanted to add in more dropped-items to be on the hunt for along with my idea (some stolen) for itemization.
I'm a dev. I need inspiration. I need a sure-hit idea.
I install Diablo 2 and let the beautiful itemization waft over me. I pay attention to the intricacies of Diablo 2 itemization. I submit myself to the end-game power of Rune Words and the way such an idea makes use of even the most innocuous item types. I take a look at how charms are their own item type, and the introduction of a new item type completes the circle.
I begin to understand that millions of my customers expected this and got "that".
I no longer worry about borrowed ideas within the same franchise. I begin to understand how hundreds of thousands (millions?) of core Diablo fans would come rushing back to the game, E-penis at full mast, stumbling over their computer chairs in a mad-dash to relive the romanticism of Diablo 2 itemization.
I understand the potency of addition without subtraction. Do not take away what was desired, I add to it. I admit defeat for my errant ideas and succumb to parity. You want it, you got it, an inescapable logic within this realm.
You got me all tingly inside, you big tease.
Just sayin.......I'd jump through the fuckin roof, tears in my eyes happy, if I heard of such inclusions.
Principally I say this because my confidence is highly shaken toward whether or not their ideas will be able to live up to the wait, as well as the expectations.
The game definitely needs more items to hunt for besides gear. I used to love all the ideas they had before beta actually kicked off. Really want them to go back and revisit those, like charms and the talisman, seven levels to runes, diamonds and sapphires. Those would all be welcome additions and probably something that might make its way to the expansion.
I'm sure people would complain about not being able to play the way they want without finding the runes that drop, but right now I read complaints about how the game is too streamlined and easy. Its time for something fresh.
Many people just think that adding more stuff will fix the game.
Add Talisman!
Add charms!
Add new affixes!
Add moah legendaries!
I actually disagree completely with that. We already have 13 slots to gear up, lots of items for those, and only a handful of these are useful for the top players. It's just really really really really difficult to balance items such that all of them seem to be equally desirable. And adding more stuff makes balancing even harder. Sure, new affixes or more legendaries might help if the affixes are "as rewarding as the old ones" or "offer really nice new game mechanics" or whatever. However, in the end no one cares; after a couple of months everyone is back to min/maxing.
Why not take the opposite route and remove stuff. Some people have actually touched upon this idea earlier: make stats exclusive. For example, don't allow for trifecta items. An item should EITHER have crit chance OR crit hit damage, but not both. You'd have to mix a couple of items of both types, you couldn't just go straight one way or the other. Same with main stat and APS, and also for the defensive stats - vitality, allres, armor, life%, physical res shoulders. What the hell? Make some of these exclusive.
Sadly, we won't see this since Blizzard already said they don't want to invalidate gear again (as they only did once with the APS nerf), and especially the outrage would be crazy after all the trifecta amulets would disappear. But this is just my $0.02 on how I would fix items.
Many people just think that adding more stuff will fix the game.
Add Talisman!
Add charms!
Add new affixes!
Add moah legendaries!
I actually disagree completely with that. We already have 13 slots to gear up, lots of items for those, and only a handful of these are useful for the top players. It's just really really really really difficult to balance items such that all of them seem to be equally desirable. And adding more stuff makes balancing even harder. Sure, new affixes or more legendaries might help if the affixes are "as rewarding as the old ones" or "offer really nice new game mechanics" or whatever. However, in the end no one cares; after a couple of months everyone is back to min/maxing.
Why not take the opposite route and remove stuff. Some people have actually touched upon this idea earlier: make stats exclusive. For example, don't allow for trifecta items. An item should EITHER have crit chance OR crit hit damage, but not both. You'd have to mix a couple of items of both types, you couldn't just go straight one way or the other. Same with main stat and APS, and also for the defensive stats - vitality, allres, armor, life%, physical res shoulders. What the hell? Make some of these exclusive.
Sadly, we won't see this since Blizzard already said they don't want to invalidate gear again (as they only did once with the APS nerf), and especially the outrage would be crazy after all the trifecta amulets would disappear. But this is just my $0.02 on how I would fix items.
It's a genie-back-in-the-bottle problem. Yeah, affixes being exclusive and making you choose one or the other would have been a great design, but they didn't go there, and now they're kind of stuck with what they've done. There's no way Blizz is going to mass-delete items, so any changes have to accept that legacy items will exist. And the only real way out is to try to make competitive alternatives to trifecta gloves/jewelry, mempo and skorn (to pick out three of the most egregious "best at what they do for everyone" items). Some of that is through expanding the pool of options - for example, look at some of the low-level legendaries - Moonlight Ward would be a great Monk neck, if it rolled well at 63, while The Tormentor would be a solid two-hander for Int classes with level 63 stats (Roll LS/OS? GG). Some of the others might need a little reworking - why does the Sledge of Athskeleng give LoH when it's the slowest level 60 weapon in the game? If it was LoH or LS, you could get some very nice ones indeed, and have movespeed on your weapon. So stuff needs to be added. But some of that can be done with relatively little pain, using the pool of legendary items already made.
Some of that is through expanding the pool of options - for example, look at some of the low-level legendaries - Moonlight Ward would be a great Monk neck, if it rolled well at 63, while The Tormentor would be a solid two-hander for Int classes with level 63 stats (Roll LS/OS? GG).
Actually, that's another good point. For some reason Blizzard decided to have this ridiculous stats progress like in WoW, where level 1-60 gear kinda scales and then everything above 60 just goes crazy off the chart, making all pre-60 gear invalid. That was a deliberate design decision that made all pre-60 gear useless. But why would they still let level 58 items drop on Inferno? Why now trying to make pre-60 gear more interesting even though it was designed exactly like WoW vanilla gear and they must have seen it coming? This is maybe the biggest caveat of the new system as it's absolutely impossible to turn around. The way how they addressed this in WoW was just by introducing an entire new level and making the old one useless... which lead to inflationary numbers of HP/damage and make vanilla characters look like dummies. I hope they find another way for D3 and the x-pac.
Not sure why d2 gets so much praise, some things were good but there was also plenty of bad.
D3 actually beats out D2 in many respects, all gameplay related IMO.
Diablo 2 had the best itemization of any ARPG ever made....that's why the game was so great and had such unreal staying power. If D3 could accomplish the same lofty level of itemization, it would be even better than D2.
It's just a shame they didn't stick to the same itemization template, only, adding more. Instead, they shit-canned most of D2's great itemization ideas and the result was an epic, smoldering failure.
Not sure why d2 gets so much praise, some things were good but there was also plenty of bad.
D3 actually beats out D2 in many respects, all gameplay related IMO.
Diablo 2 had the best itemization of any ARPG ever made....that's why the game was so great and had such unreal staying power. If D3 could accomplish the same lofty level of itemization, it would be even better than D2.
It's just a shame they didn't stick to the same itemization template, only, adding more. Instead, they shit-canned most of D2's great itemization ideas and the result was an epic, smoldering failure.
I don't want to argue with you, but I wouldn't call having complete and obvious BiS gear in D2 'better itemization' than D3. The only reason people think D2 had better itemization is because once you were level 85 + you out-leveled everything so much that you could wear pretty much what you wanted and still beat hell.
If D3's harder difficulty was equal to monster power 2, then we wouldn't hear NEAR as many complaints about gear, because you can pretty much faceroll everything on MP2 wearing, again, whatever you want.
But instead D3 actually has difficulty in that the high MP's demand either a complete defensive skill setup, and / or a lot of defensive stats, PLUS the need for super high damage to actually kill things in a timely manner. This is great in my opinion, but it does have one huge drawback; Any item that's less than near-perfect becomes useless because you NEED all the BiS you can get just to clear MP 10.
TLDR; D2 didn't have better itemization, the difficulty was just so much lower than D3 that you could wear what you wanted, giving the illusion that every item was awesome.
TLDR; D2 didn't have better itemization, the difficulty was just so much lower than D3 that you could wear what you wanted, giving the illusion that every item was awesome.
Except you missed the part where D2 did have better itemization. Did everyone stack crit? No. And really, its because D2 was 50% skill tree build and 50% items. In D3 we have no skill trees and the game is 100% item dependant.
In D2 I could literally beat Diablo with a naked Sorc or Necro if the skill trees where used right.
I don't understand why people keep saying D2 had some sort of magical illusion going on. But I sure as hell would love someone to cast some sort of magical illusion on D3 that would give it the same depth as D2.
TLDR; D2 didn't have better itemization, the difficulty was just so much lower than D3 that you could wear what you wanted, giving the illusion that every item was awesome.
I'm using D2's itemization via PvP to truly judge it's merit.
PvP was the ultimate challenge (in terms of difficulty) offered in D2.
Of course D2 had better itemization. How you could say different beguiles me. Just based on the number of item types alone I could make this claim with confidence. Jewels, Charms, socketed greys/white, Etheral, runes.... that's 5 item types that D3 doesn't even have, and D3 offers nothing to replace these omitted item types.
2-hand weapons are almost useless altogether.
D3's itemization is so bad it ruins the greatness that is it's gameplay.
Personally, I would like to see a complete revamp of the main stats. Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence should be more appealing to all classes.
Strength should be increasing all melee damage, not just Barbarian damage. Along with that it should increase block chance, a bonus to crit damage, and keep the current bonus to armor rating.
Dexterity should be increasing ranged physical damage. And then of course some of the fun DPS stats, like attack speed and crit chance. The defense stat would still be dodge chance.
Intelligence should be increasing elemental damage dealt. This would still increase Wizard and Witch Doctor damage because everything they cast has an elemental property. Along with this should also be an increase to resource regeneration/decreased resource cost and a bonus to damage of resource spenders. Elemental resistance would still stay as well.
Now, Vitality is good as is, but I feel like they could decrease the amount of life it gives. I would also hope that they change monster HP/damage output scaling in line with this. I like to see big numbers, but not so that I can't tell if its 100000 or 1000000.
I could keep going but I'm on my phone so typing sucks.
Lend me your thought, I know you guys have them.
Not that similar. They had actually removed str, dex and int from the game and replaced them by rating stats (like the yellow gems in WoW): to hit rating, crit rating, attack speed rating, power rating and so on.
Nobody really liked that, me included, so they went back to the original stats. But on the other hand, they made them so equal and created items with stats like "one of str/dex/int" that there's hardly any difference between them.
The suggestions in the OP are fine and the thread in general too. It's a monstrous design task to actually "fix" the game, don't know if at all possible to meet the expectations
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Sol77-2972/hero/66110450
But that's a different thread...
Elendiro, if they implemented Intelligence how I suggested, they could change the default damage type of most spells to compensate, like for example, Spectral Blades could be Arcane damage instead of physical. Would still make sense and Wizards would still increase its damage.
Now, if you wanted to make a Melee Wizard, like they bragged about so long ago, stacking a bunch of Strength/Dexterity and using a rune that changed Spectral Blade to physical damage would be possible too.
Quickly.
I would fix them quickly.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
Str / Dex / Int / Vita. Keep these exactly how they are. Once another strength class is introduced, it'l be far more balanced. These unique stats that are only appealing to ~2 classes each is actually a very good design, because it helps differentiate gear.
Defensive stats. Most of these are fine, such as Defense, All resist, radius and +HP/HG.
Thorns. Change this to reflect X% weapon damage back on attacker, instead of a static number. Another option is to have it reflect say for fun, X% of your maximum life. Gear would just stack the X%, so you would have say ~25% gear that would stack. This would obviously be more appealing to defensive setups.
Single resists. These need to be able to roll 150% or so compared to all resis. So you'd have a possible roll up to 80 of all resist on a chest, or a single resist that can roll up to 150 or 175, while also not limited to one resis. Such as a chest rolling 155 poison resistance, with another 170 cold resistance. This will mean that all-resis is still viable, but it might be better for certain set-ups to try and stack 2-3 resistances really high compared to the rest.
Offensive stats. Crit damage, Crit chance, Attack Speed, Main stat and +Dmg are all fine in my opinion. The problem lies with there not being ENOUGH damage increasing stats, and therefore all can be found on a piece of gear. Jewelry / gloves can roll everything, so we need more affixes than there are spaces.
+X% elemental damage. Already a version in the game for some legendaries, but it needs to be more streamlined. These would roll specific spell schools, such as +15% fire damage.
+Attack Power. This works like you'd think, but it increases only physical / weapon damage attacks. It'l obviously benefit melee more, such as the barbarian, the Druid (muhaha), some monk skills and then some select skills on the WD / Wiz / DH. It can roll with main stat, but offers twice the damage increase than a main stat. The drawback is it's pure damage, and there's no defensiveness associated with it.
+Spell Power. Exact same as above, except it effects all attacks that do elemental damage and doesn't effect physical / weapon damage. Geared more towards ranged classes, it still can benefit certain builds that utilize skills that use spell schools. A fire whirlwind barb comes to mind.
Legendaries - On paper, having rares drop with the ability to be better than legendaries sounds good because it means we'll always be looking for something better, and never really have that 'bis'. In practice however, it's just not fun. The most sought after type of item shouldn't be the easier to find compared to the rarest type.
Having all legendaries roll their stat ranges based on the monster level that drops it is an awesome start. This increases the pool of legendaries dramatically.
Legendary weapons. These need to have their sheet DPS normalized. IE, every 1 handed legendary can roll about the exact same sheet DPS range. Such as every sword dropped from a Mlvl 63 can roll from 900-1200 (or whichever range is decided upon). What sets them apart from each other? Their unique affixes of course! The normalized DPS changes it to where players are choosing their legendary based on what cool ability it does that others don't, instead of just which one gives the highest sheet DPS. If the live version of Azurewrath could roll the same DPS as an echoing fury, then suddenly it's a harder choice if players want that extra +.25 attacks a second, or a huge chance to freeze, ect.
It's easier for Blizzard, and, well everyone who makes a game to make things less powerful and then build up, because players react positively to those changes. If they made everything super OP, they deal with a lot of backlash when they have to tune it down. That's why in loot 2.0 Blizzard has a FAR greater idea / reference in making unique legendary affixes. Patch 1.04 had great ideas, but a lot of them just need to be pumped up, and a LOT of new affixes need to be made.
In a nutshell;
Add new damage increasing affixes. (AP / SP / %ED)
Change some current affixes. (Thorns, Single Resistances)
Change affix ranged to be the best on legendaries.
Make all legendaries able to drop from Mlvl 63 enemies, and roll their stats accordingly.
Normalize sheet DPS on comparable legendaries.
Re-design almost all legendary unique affixes to be at least useful, if not 'game-changing'.
lol.....serious answer time for me I suppose.
I'm a dev. I need inspiration. I need a sure-hit idea.
I install Diablo 2 and let the beautiful itemization waft over me. I pay attention to the intricacies of Diablo 2 itemization. I submit myself to the end-game power of Rune Words and the way such an idea makes use of even the most innocuous item types. I take a look at how charms are their own item type, and the introduction of a new item type completes the circle.
I begin to understand that millions of my customers expected this and got "that".
I no longer worry about borrowed ideas within the same franchise. I begin to understand how hundreds of thousands (millions?) of core Diablo fans would come rushing back to the game, E-penis at full mast, stumbling over their computer chairs in a mad-dash to relive the romanticism of Diablo 2 itemization.
I understand the potency of addition without subtraction. Do not take away what was desired, I add to it. I admit defeat for my errant ideas and succumb to parity. You want it, you got it, an inescapable logic within this realm.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
I love the normalized weapon range for each weapon type. That would pretty much eliminate BiS gear. I like the idea of having my Barbarian using an ilvl 63 Butcher instead of Skorn or maybe even a Boulder Breaker. Like you said, it would come down to what makes each legendary different instead of just most DPS.
Love those extra affixes too. In other games, I'm a +Attack Power glutton. lol
Ty sir =D
Oh and it was Ruksak that reminded me I completely left out another portion; Different item drops. We need something else to be on the hunt for besides just gear.
Runes - Exactly how they were in D2. Gave a slightly odd, if not really not-that-useful affix when socketed by themselves. BUT, when combined in a super secret order, they create runewords!
White items - Only white items are allowed to roll addition sockets. 1-3 on helms, shields and 1 handed weapons. 2-6 on chests and 2 handed weapons. This alleviates the problem of having to re-design current items to accommodate additional sockets while still having enough sockets to have fun with. Now all of the sudden, white items might be useful =D
Jewels - I made a thread awhile back detailing how I envisioned all these other dropped items would work, but I'll try sum each one up. Jewels drop in magic, rare and legendary quality. Each quality guarantees an additional affix, up to 3. So 1 for magic, and so on. Jewels, however, can only be socketed into jewelry. This lets jewels actually be powerful, without them over-riding gems / runes or creating too much OP'ness. Jewelry will still only be able to have 1 socket. The mystic will actually be able to add sockets to jewelry if there aren't any already on them, at the cost of one affix of the players choice.
Charms - Charms will fit into the Talisman, and instead of having normal item-like affixes, they will effect skills / categories of skills. The Talisman will have 6 slots, 3 for direct skill manipulation, and 3 for class specific manipulation. Charms will drop class-specific, and have an extremely low drop rate which of course will make them of legendary quality.
A direct skill charm example could be a Barbarian charm that removes the cool-down of battle cry. Why remove that cooldown? Because then you could use the category-type charm that creates a 100% weapon damage AOE when using one of your shouts. Add in another category charm that increases the fury gained from your generating shouts by 100%, and TA-DAA! A ghetto shout barb!
Anyway, I just wanted to add in more dropped-items to be on the hunt for along with my idea (some stolen) for itemization.
Just sayin.......I'd jump through the fuckin roof, tears in my eyes happy, if I heard of such inclusions.
Principally I say this because my confidence is highly shaken toward whether or not their ideas will be able to live up to the wait, as well as the expectations.
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I'm sure people would complain about not being able to play the way they want without finding the runes that drop, but right now I read complaints about how the game is too streamlined and easy. Its time for something fresh.
Add Talisman!
Add charms!
Add new affixes!
Add moah legendaries!
I actually disagree completely with that. We already have 13 slots to gear up, lots of items for those, and only a handful of these are useful for the top players. It's just really really really really difficult to balance items such that all of them seem to be equally desirable. And adding more stuff makes balancing even harder. Sure, new affixes or more legendaries might help if the affixes are "as rewarding as the old ones" or "offer really nice new game mechanics" or whatever. However, in the end no one cares; after a couple of months everyone is back to min/maxing.
Why not take the opposite route and remove stuff. Some people have actually touched upon this idea earlier: make stats exclusive. For example, don't allow for trifecta items. An item should EITHER have crit chance OR crit hit damage, but not both. You'd have to mix a couple of items of both types, you couldn't just go straight one way or the other. Same with main stat and APS, and also for the defensive stats - vitality, allres, armor, life%, physical res shoulders. What the hell? Make some of these exclusive.
Sadly, we won't see this since Blizzard already said they don't want to invalidate gear again (as they only did once with the APS nerf), and especially the outrage would be crazy after all the trifecta amulets would disappear. But this is just my $0.02 on how I would fix items.
Actually, that's another good point. For some reason Blizzard decided to have this ridiculous stats progress like in WoW, where level 1-60 gear kinda scales and then everything above 60 just goes crazy off the chart, making all pre-60 gear invalid. That was a deliberate design decision that made all pre-60 gear useless. But why would they still let level 58 items drop on Inferno? Why now trying to make pre-60 gear more interesting even though it was designed exactly like WoW vanilla gear and they must have seen it coming? This is maybe the biggest caveat of the new system as it's absolutely impossible to turn around. The way how they addressed this in WoW was just by introducing an entire new level and making the old one useless... which lead to inflationary numbers of HP/damage and make vanilla characters look like dummies. I hope they find another way for D3 and the x-pac.
Its because there was more good then bad. And id like to stress the word more. D2 just had more of everything.
D3 actually beats out D2 in many respects, all gameplay related IMO.
Diablo 2 had the best itemization of any ARPG ever made....that's why the game was so great and had such unreal staying power. If D3 could accomplish the same lofty level of itemization, it would be even better than D2.
It's just a shame they didn't stick to the same itemization template, only, adding more. Instead, they shit-canned most of D2's great itemization ideas and the result was an epic, smoldering failure.
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I don't want to argue with you, but I wouldn't call having complete and obvious BiS gear in D2 'better itemization' than D3. The only reason people think D2 had better itemization is because once you were level 85 + you out-leveled everything so much that you could wear pretty much what you wanted and still beat hell.
If D3's harder difficulty was equal to monster power 2, then we wouldn't hear NEAR as many complaints about gear, because you can pretty much faceroll everything on MP2 wearing, again, whatever you want.
But instead D3 actually has difficulty in that the high MP's demand either a complete defensive skill setup, and / or a lot of defensive stats, PLUS the need for super high damage to actually kill things in a timely manner. This is great in my opinion, but it does have one huge drawback; Any item that's less than near-perfect becomes useless because you NEED all the BiS you can get just to clear MP 10.
TLDR; D2 didn't have better itemization, the difficulty was just so much lower than D3 that you could wear what you wanted, giving the illusion that every item was awesome.
Except you missed the part where D2 did have better itemization. Did everyone stack crit? No. And really, its because D2 was 50% skill tree build and 50% items. In D3 we have no skill trees and the game is 100% item dependant.
In D2 I could literally beat Diablo with a naked Sorc or Necro if the skill trees where used right.
I don't understand why people keep saying D2 had some sort of magical illusion going on. But I sure as hell would love someone to cast some sort of magical illusion on D3 that would give it the same depth as D2.
.
I'm using D2's itemization via PvP to truly judge it's merit.
PvP was the ultimate challenge (in terms of difficulty) offered in D2.
Of course D2 had better itemization. How you could say different beguiles me. Just based on the number of item types alone I could make this claim with confidence. Jewels, Charms, socketed greys/white, Etheral, runes.... that's 5 item types that D3 doesn't even have, and D3 offers nothing to replace these omitted item types.
2-hand weapons are almost useless altogether.
D3's itemization is so bad it ruins the greatness that is it's gameplay.
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