Hit 60 -> spend 20 minutes in the AH -> dominate inferno
Yeah, that sounds awesome! Stupid.
Diablo 2: Meet level requirement for item -> spend a week trying to track down and trade that item via chat and websites -> improve character in a week
Diablo 3: Meet level requirement for item -> spend 5 minutes tracking down an item -> improve character in 5 minutes
Making the tracking down process easier doesn't upset me in a game where killing monsters is the goal.
Well i didnt spend a week trying to track that item down via chat and websites in d2. I had either found the items on my own, or a couple of close friends of mine found them, all on their own too, and we all thought it would be cool if we started a new character based on that character. If not, I dont mind spending a week or even 2 doing runs, being pretty sure that by e end of that e item i want will drop. It wasnt all that difficult to find the items for most builds in d3, esp since most of the required items werent things like windforce or tyrael's might.
How many times in d3 has an item dropped that cause people to say:"hey my friend or myself should start a new character with this! Cool concept!"
So what if the item prices have dropped? It still doesnt change the fact that the drop rates and quality are way below what is usually seen in an ARPG.
I just read a response by runic about economy here:
"Economy – Does TL2 need an economy? In a game about the item “hunt”, where the hunt is where the pride is, what do people earn from “buying/selling” items. What I find confusing here is everyone here goes, “LOOOooOOOOT” , an integral feature of this genre, yet they also want a feature that completely goes against this feature. In my opinion there is no pride in buying an item in these games. Say you’re a hunter, you kill something keep a trophy, there is pride in that. Now say you are a hunter and you bought a trophy from another hunter, where’s the pride in that. People always describe this genre with phrases like “Enjoy hunting for LOOT? Look at this” and that’s exactly what Runic delivered, a game where you can find the item you need or want. An economy will exist, just not one that is controlled. To have an economy is to change the item game to correlate with the Economic system. Apart from that like ladders, an economy is a perk, an extra."
Before others come here to flame and ask me to go play TL 2 instead of wasting time here, yes I will play TL2, but that doesnt mean I wont play d3 anymore. It's the fact I, and many of us here, are all concerned about the game that we hope some changes will happen that will make the D3 a better game. If we didn't care at all, then we wouldn't bother posting here in the first place.
A:"Cool, where is this farming place that's fast and cheap?"
B:"The AHs. Just buy what you need!"
Its frustrating and so against the very loot nature of ARPGs. It seems that all the focus now is how much their item will sell, how the economy will be affected, how much one can resell an item.
You are considering the fact that all the items that dropped in D2 were Isenharts. For every 20 Green Breast Plates I left on the floor, I would have picked up like, 1-2 useful Uniques, mid level or rarer. Those are better odds than rolling rares that have a 1 in 10000 chance of being something good. As for the Frosties parallel, yes they are dead loot, and there's so high a percentage of dead loot in D3 that it's not even funny anymore. As mentioned, the fact that the legendaries already roll with random stats, and they are even more rare than what they were in D2. They're almost like high runes now.
Yes people who traded in d2 were faster than me, but were that MUCH faster? No, as the gear I found on my own was more than sufficient to farm properly and quickly in my own right. And how can I care what the 'other guy' is doing? If Blizzard still sticks to the fact that people can 'buy items off the AHs' and thus never increase the drop rates, then I would never, ever be able to find the items that I want. Not even close. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't mind the AH as it is a centralised system for us to use when we want to find that 1 or 2 items that we need. But currently, people are just too reliant on it. Countless threads and posts of people saying "I sold this and that for 100million gold!". Since when did Diablo become a high-end, expensive version of Drug Lord?
I am a Blizzard fanboi, and played all their games except for WoW, and I have many friends who are the same, whose teenage years were dominated by games like Warcraft and Diablo 1. Most of them have left the game. People who offered me $300 for a beta account have left the game. Diablo 3 certainly is not a bad game, but it could have been so much more. We all waited so long for it, and the only bitterness I might have is not what others have and how they acquired their stuff, but what the game could and should have been.
I dont see how a low posts count makes me wrong in my memory of D2, or my opinion of D3. That's to the point of being insulting. Anyway, to be more objective, I get the point about it being the 30,000th Isenhart's on the floor, but hey guess what? At least it's a set item. Do I even get a 3rd say, Asheara's set item in d3 after 400over hrs? heck i dont even have one.
I didnt bot in d2, and i didnt trade, and it sure didnt take me 400 hrs to gear up 2-3 characters. Again, ask yourself, where would you be without the AH in D3? would you be on the same "power curve" as what I would have been in d2?
As for Alkaizer, how much did he spend on the AH again? Remind me please.
Lots of people playing hardcore realized something months ago, which softies still doesn't seem to understand.
Please, make a new char, go to 60 and play without the use of AH at all.
You will see a huge difference, a very huge one. It will often drop gear improvements.
The reason you dont find them, is because you have currently reached the point where gear upgrades are so rare, they cost millions on the AH. Obviously, its going to be rare to find them while farming too, if not they would have cost far less.
So, see the real problem and stop blaming blizz for buying good gear on AH and then not finding better drops yourself.
"But I don't find any items that can sell for millions!! /QQ"
Well, if you would find 100 of those every hour then they wouldn't sell for millions, once again you have failed to see the problem...
I may be playing softcore, but I haven't used the AH at all to buy anything.
i found thousands of set n unique items in d2.. did that make me want to stop finding items after I had those items? no, because i knew that with those items i could
Thousands of set and uniques? In Hell? Over how long? LOL is all I can say to that.
I don't find his statement hard to believe at all.
I played D2 for about 7 years, and doing meph/pindle runs nonstop would net you a unique/set item on average every 3 runs, sometimes more, sometimes less. Considering you could do a run in 30 seconds, someone playing for 5+ hours a day could easily farm up 100 uniques, per day.
They dropped FAR more often than they do in D3.
thanks for the backing up.. even if i wasnt doing baal/meph/pindy runs all e time.. even spending 15 mins to clear hell cows on /p8 on my amazon netted me at least 1 unique, if not 3-4 per run..yes most of them were not as good as what i had already found, but at least i knew i had a chance at getting something better..
in d3, i know i hardly have a chance of getting 'something better', and when a 'possible something better" drops, it usually rolls bad.. its like playing roulette where if you bet on a number, say 0, and the wheel stops at 0, the casino then asks you to bet again on another number for the next spin before you win. ridiculous odds if you tell me
Saw this on the official forums that I though was a great summary of the itemisation atm:
If they make the good items more common they are not any more expensive in the AH soon. Soon it will be common gear and finding upgrades will be even more difficult. Soon you would need to roll the desired stats with close to perfect rolls on the stats. Now you need to roll most of the desired stats with quite high values to earn some money or get yourself an upgrade.
meh... e AH again.. i cldnt care less how much things cost on the AH.. I havent bought anything from the AH and finding upgrades is already super difficult.. dont we already need to roll the desired stats already?
i found thousands of set n unique items in d2.. did that make me want to stop finding items after I had those items? no, because i knew that with those items i could
1) farm faster to give me a higher chance of getting better stuff
2) find more items by MYSELF or with friends from DROPS
everyday there're tons are threads on the bnet forums discussing about the lack of loot.. and they arent just whine threads,but constructive threads, some with research and some with solid thoughts put into them.. is it that hard for blizz to see where the problem is?
the recent "identify 1000 rares video" also shows how lousy the idemisation and how stupidly random the rolls were.. a THOUSAND items and barely a handful are good.. gosh..
again, before ppl say:"farm faster, kill faster, be more efficient", its back to the AH again, aint it? how many of us here can "farm effectively" for items w/o anything bought from the AH? my barb can do act 3, but takes slightly over an hour just to clear half of the act.. and no, i have no items that arent self found...
6 yrs of D1, 12 yrs of D2 n LoD, and many more hours in games like borderlands, Titan quest and even dungeon siege 1, 2 n 3... none of them have such a bad loot system/drop rate...
and i am loosing faith after 4 months of d3..
to quote something from the blizz forums: "You are meant to be a hero, I feel in D3 that my character is a homeless bum sifting through trash cans of discarded loot looking for the least worse items to keep or try and flog for two bits."
heck even the bum from Batman begins had wayne give him a nice coat. we dun even have a carrot to eat.
Think assembling the infernal machine may need us to collect some body parts, what with all the reference to 'gory' and 'blood-stained'.. could be the body parts of act bosses, or from random elite mobs..
My own guess is that there are going to add the "/players" command or something similar, while lowering the damage/health on /players 1. At the same time, skill damage will be nerfed to compensate for this drop in difficulty, but overall ppl would still be killing faster than presently. Remember d2 on /players 1? super fast and efficient.
For players with great gear, they can go up to /players X for a bigger challenge depending on how good their gear is. Similar to d2, e more /players, e more loot will drop.
Another buff they might add is to tweak e drop rates. Jay said that: "The new legendaries are a big step in the right direction, as are tweaks to item drop rates. But I'm not convinced that we've gone far enough. If you don't have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner -- and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives -- then we haven't done our jobs right. Out of our concern to make sure that Diablo III would have longevity, we were overly cautious about how we handled item drops and affixes. If 1.0.4 hasn’t fixed that, you can be sure we'll continue to address it" - hopefully they buff e rates to e pt that players are able to find great gear on their own instead of just always turning to the AH for upgrades.
Great to see some civil discussions going on. If I have stepped on anyone's toes, I do apologise but I guess all of us here just want D3 to be the better game than what it is now, and we each have our opinions on it.
Well if orange/green drops were more common, I dont think it will kill the psychological effect or euphoria of seeing one drop. I dont think people are asking for 1 orange/green every elite pack, but surely 1 out of 20 is not that bad a return, given that the orange/set item may not have the best roll after identifying them? Selling 1 item for a few hundred thousand gold on the AH should be A LOT of gold, especially if you were new to the game. Heck, that item wld only sell for a ard 3k gold in-game to the nearest vendor.
Even though the prices for items on the AH has dropped, and it does take maybe 2 million gold only to effectively equip one hero for inferno, giving the players a better chance in finding their own gear helps in:
1) players do not post every other 'good gear' on the AH. There are thousands and thousands of items that are not being sold on the AH. By increasing drops, players should only post up items that are really worth it in response - a rare with nice rolls, or a orange/green item with good rolls n random affixes. It becomes more streamlined due to the curbing of item floods. If there comes a day when I want to go on the AH, it would be like what I said before, where perhaps I am missing that last piece of a set, or I feel I have saved up enough gold to get that orange item with great rolls for an upgrade, however slight it might be. At the moment, the hundreds of millions of gold some of the items cost is just crazy inflation, and if one doesnt 'play the AH' well, they are all impossible to afford. There's an achievement in the game for picking up 100million gold. Yet, we do not have an achievement for selling 100 million worth of items on the AH. I dont think blizz anticipated the crazy gold prices on some of the items that have been posted up on the AH.
2) more good items also allows people to play with their alts more. Most of us here just farm with a single hero, not paying much attention to others. Yes, playing time is a factor as we do not have time to keep playing all the different heroes, but increasing the rate of drops raises the incentive in playing something different. "oh I have 3 pieces of the tal rasha set and the 4th just dropped! time to go back to my wiz and give it a try! oh maybe i should go on the AH n get that amulet that i am missing too to complete the set!"
3) more item/gold sinks in-game are needed to make sure that the increase of items is not wasted. The blacksmith was supposed to do the task, but the scarcity of plans are stopping many from breaking down their items. crafting can easily burn through a few million in a single session just to get a good roll, not to just sell on the AH, but to equip on your hero or alts. I have thousands of crafting materials and tomes just sitting there on alts doing nothing as I have nothing nice to craft. Other mechanics like adding sockets or an affix to 4-5 affix rares would also see many people burn through gold in-game rather than on the AH.
The AH is a great, centralized way of trading, but like some have said, it could and should be better, just like D3 itself. Some quotes about the AH from wyatt and jay that the game was not meant to played so much with the auction house in mind, and this was way back before 1.03 hit.:
Wyatt: "The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House." Jay: "we tuned and balanced the game without the auction house,"
Well I never said anything about not having the AH at all. All I said that I dont want to rely on the AH to get drops that were not meant to be that rare in the first place. I never said that the D2 system is perfect - yes we know have a stable way to trade, less scams and all, but surely a game in 2012 compared to 2000 should have made those improvements? Isn't Diablo, or most ARPG, loot games? carrot and stick to the core? with no new skills to earn past lvl 60 and only the item grind to keep things going for the moment, is the current "carrot" for players is for them to learn to flip or snipe items on the AH? I also never said about finding ALL the gear on my own.
What if the drop rates are increased? are you afraid that no one will use the AH anymore? Nope, people would still want to use the AH to find the items that RNG fails to give them.. as I said that near-perfect roll or missing set item. Everyone benefits, prices get more stable as ppl start to post more gear that is found on the AH. The perfect gears are still pricey, and the odds of getting them in-game are still ridiculously low due to random stats. So, what harm will raising the drop rates do?
Before people say that I am raging and ask me to stop being emo or taking things out of my arse, I am still playing the game with a passion. Its just that the game could be so much more.
Well I didnt trade at all on d2 ladder.. n i still found my titans, full IK set with a super lucky sacred armor drop in maggot liar, my friend was lucky with a rune drop that allowed me to make a smiter.. I also didnt say that I can 'fully upgrade' myself with self found items.. if i really want a perfect character with near perfect rolls on the perfect items for each slot, then yes, the AH will be needed just like how i would use e trading forums in d2.. atm most ppl are nowhere close to getting great items for each slot after hundreds of hrs of gamplay on just a singe hero with self found drops..
As for blue post: I remember one saying that players should not feel that using the AH as a necessary part of completing the game or something to that extent.. and i still feel that items are supposed to be self found. one farms items for their own hero, or for alts if e item is not for e current hero. How many times in d2 have u played where u were a paladin n a titans drops n u go :"hey i should play a javazon next"? and how many times in d3 has an item dropped and makes u go "hey i should try this character next?"
I also dont find upgrades every 2-3 hrs, and i havent bought anything from the AHs at all.. yes in d2 we could see a lowel lvl set drop from hell baal/meph.. but how long do we take do just one run? n the range of affixes and no-random affix property of uniques mean that when something drop, we knew what we were going to get.. no silly str rolls on wands, or intel rolls on mighty weapons.. and looking at just what bosses drop during runs in d2 to compare to d3 is not right as well.. some drops were found off normal monsters or unique packs along e way too..
IK set useless and common? well, in d3, taking an average IK set item on its own, a good rare would most likely trump it as well.. and we still have to factor in that the IK set item, say gloves, have a bad roll,.. n then what? you also mentioned that they were "common".. are the IK set items common in d3?
0
Well i didnt spend a week trying to track that item down via chat and websites in d2. I had either found the items on my own, or a couple of close friends of mine found them, all on their own too, and we all thought it would be cool if we started a new character based on that character. If not, I dont mind spending a week or even 2 doing runs, being pretty sure that by e end of that e item i want will drop. It wasnt all that difficult to find the items for most builds in d3, esp since most of the required items werent things like windforce or tyrael's might.
How many times in d3 has an item dropped that cause people to say:"hey my friend or myself should start a new character with this! Cool concept!"
So what if the item prices have dropped? It still doesnt change the fact that the drop rates and quality are way below what is usually seen in an ARPG.
I just read a response by runic about economy here:
"Economy – Does TL2 need an economy? In a game about the item “hunt”, where the hunt is where the pride is, what do people earn from “buying/selling” items. What I find confusing here is everyone here goes, “LOOOooOOOOT” , an integral feature of this genre, yet they also want a feature that completely goes against this feature. In my opinion there is no pride in buying an item in these games. Say you’re a hunter, you kill something keep a trophy, there is pride in that. Now say you are a hunter and you bought a trophy from another hunter, where’s the pride in that.
People always describe this genre with phrases like “Enjoy hunting for LOOT? Look at this” and that’s exactly what Runic delivered, a game where you can find the item you need or want.
An economy will exist, just not one that is controlled. To have an economy is to change the item game to correlate with the Economic system.
Apart from that like ladders, an economy is a perk, an extra."
Before others come here to flame and ask me to go play TL 2 instead of wasting time here, yes I will play TL2, but that doesnt mean I wont play d3 anymore. It's the fact I, and many of us here, are all concerned about the game that we hope some changes will happen that will make the D3 a better game. If we didn't care at all, then we wouldn't bother posting here in the first place.
0
A:"I cannot find anything!"
B:"Just gear up! Its fast and cheap!"
A:"Cool, where is this farming place that's fast and cheap?"
B:"The AHs. Just buy what you need!"
Its frustrating and so against the very loot nature of ARPGs. It seems that all the focus now is how much their item will sell, how the economy will be affected, how much one can resell an item.
Hopefully as time goes by things get better.
0
Yes people who traded in d2 were faster than me, but were that MUCH faster? No, as the gear I found on my own was more than sufficient to farm properly and quickly in my own right. And how can I care what the 'other guy' is doing? If Blizzard still sticks to the fact that people can 'buy items off the AHs' and thus never increase the drop rates, then I would never, ever be able to find the items that I want. Not even close. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't mind the AH as it is a centralised system for us to use when we want to find that 1 or 2 items that we need. But currently, people are just too reliant on it. Countless threads and posts of people saying "I sold this and that for 100million gold!". Since when did Diablo become a high-end, expensive version of Drug Lord?
I am a Blizzard fanboi, and played all their games except for WoW, and I have many friends who are the same, whose teenage years were dominated by games like Warcraft and Diablo 1. Most of them have left the game. People who offered me $300 for a beta account have left the game. Diablo 3 certainly is not a bad game, but it could have been so much more. We all waited so long for it, and the only bitterness I might have is not what others have and how they acquired their stuff, but what the game could and should have been.
0
I didnt bot in d2, and i didnt trade, and it sure didnt take me 400 hrs to gear up 2-3 characters. Again, ask yourself, where would you be without the AH in D3? would you be on the same "power curve" as what I would have been in d2?
As for Alkaizer, how much did he spend on the AH again? Remind me please.
0
I may be playing softcore, but I haven't used the AH at all to buy anything.
1
thanks for the backing up.. even if i wasnt doing baal/meph/pindy runs all e time.. even spending 15 mins to clear hell cows on /p8 on my amazon netted me at least 1 unique, if not 3-4 per run..yes most of them were not as good as what i had already found, but at least i knew i had a chance at getting something better..
in d3, i know i hardly have a chance of getting 'something better', and when a 'possible something better" drops, it usually rolls bad.. its like playing roulette where if you bet on a number, say 0, and the wheel stops at 0, the casino then asks you to bet again on another number for the next spin before you win. ridiculous odds if you tell me
Saw this on the official forums that I though was a great summary of the itemisation atm:
http://imageshack.us/a/img689/8853/infographic.jpg
2
meh... e AH again.. i cldnt care less how much things cost on the AH.. I havent bought anything from the AH and finding upgrades is already super difficult.. dont we already need to roll the desired stats already?
i found thousands of set n unique items in d2.. did that make me want to stop finding items after I had those items? no, because i knew that with those items i could
1) farm faster to give me a higher chance of getting better stuff
2) find more items by MYSELF or with friends from DROPS
1
3
again, before ppl say:"farm faster, kill faster, be more efficient", its back to the AH again, aint it? how many of us here can "farm effectively" for items w/o anything bought from the AH? my barb can do act 3, but takes slightly over an hour just to clear half of the act.. and no, i have no items that arent self found...
6 yrs of D1, 12 yrs of D2 n LoD, and many more hours in games like borderlands, Titan quest and even dungeon siege 1, 2 n 3... none of them have such a bad loot system/drop rate...
and i am loosing faith after 4 months of d3..
to quote something from the blizz forums: "You are meant to be a hero, I feel in D3 that my character is a homeless bum sifting through trash cans of discarded loot looking for the least worse items to keep or try and flog for two bits."
heck even the bum from Batman begins had wayne give him a nice coat. we dun even have a carrot to eat.
where's my carrot?
1
in d2 at least if there issnt a unique sacred plate dropping, it could be a unique lvl 42 barb helm that is super useful
in d3, anything not ilvl 62 or 63 is practically useless.. not to mention anything orange is super rare, let alone green.
0
the Black rock pages could play a part as well
0
For players with great gear, they can go up to /players X for a bigger challenge depending on how good their gear is. Similar to d2, e more /players, e more loot will drop.
Another buff they might add is to tweak e drop rates. Jay said that: "The new legendaries are a big step in the right direction, as are tweaks to item drop rates. But I'm not convinced that we've gone far enough. If you don't have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner -- and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives -- then we haven't done our jobs right. Out of our concern to make sure that Diablo III would have longevity, we were overly cautious about how we handled item drops and affixes. If 1.0.4 hasn’t fixed that, you can be sure we'll continue to address it" - hopefully they buff e rates to e pt that players are able to find great gear on their own instead of just always turning to the AH for upgrades.
0
Well if orange/green drops were more common, I dont think it will kill the psychological effect or euphoria of seeing one drop. I dont think people are asking for 1 orange/green every elite pack, but surely 1 out of 20 is not that bad a return, given that the orange/set item may not have the best roll after identifying them? Selling 1 item for a few hundred thousand gold on the AH should be A LOT of gold, especially if you were new to the game. Heck, that item wld only sell for a ard 3k gold in-game to the nearest vendor.
Even though the prices for items on the AH has dropped, and it does take maybe 2 million gold only to effectively equip one hero for inferno, giving the players a better chance in finding their own gear helps in:
1) players do not post every other 'good gear' on the AH. There are thousands and thousands of items that are not being sold on the AH. By increasing drops, players should only post up items that are really worth it in response - a rare with nice rolls, or a orange/green item with good rolls n random affixes. It becomes more streamlined due to the curbing of item floods. If there comes a day when I want to go on the AH, it would be like what I said before, where perhaps I am missing that last piece of a set, or I feel I have saved up enough gold to get that orange item with great rolls for an upgrade, however slight it might be. At the moment, the hundreds of millions of gold some of the items cost is just crazy inflation, and if one doesnt 'play the AH' well, they are all impossible to afford. There's an achievement in the game for picking up 100million gold. Yet, we do not have an achievement for selling 100 million worth of items on the AH. I dont think blizz anticipated the crazy gold prices on some of the items that have been posted up on the AH.
2) more good items also allows people to play with their alts more. Most of us here just farm with a single hero, not paying much attention to others. Yes, playing time is a factor as we do not have time to keep playing all the different heroes, but increasing the rate of drops raises the incentive in playing something different. "oh I have 3 pieces of the tal rasha set and the 4th just dropped! time to go back to my wiz and give it a try! oh maybe i should go on the AH n get that amulet that i am missing too to complete the set!"
3) more item/gold sinks in-game are needed to make sure that the increase of items is not wasted. The blacksmith was supposed to do the task, but the scarcity of plans are stopping many from breaking down their items. crafting can easily burn through a few million in a single session just to get a good roll, not to just sell on the AH, but to equip on your hero or alts. I have thousands of crafting materials and tomes just sitting there on alts doing nothing as I have nothing nice to craft. Other mechanics like adding sockets or an affix to 4-5 affix rares would also see many people burn through gold in-game rather than on the AH.
The AH is a great, centralized way of trading, but like some have said, it could and should be better, just like D3 itself. Some quotes about the AH from wyatt and jay that the game was not meant to played so much with the auction house in mind, and this was way back before 1.03 hit.:
Wyatt: "The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House."
Jay: "we tuned and balanced the game without the auction house,"
1
What if the drop rates are increased? are you afraid that no one will use the AH anymore? Nope, people would still want to use the AH to find the items that RNG fails to give them.. as I said that near-perfect roll or missing set item. Everyone benefits, prices get more stable as ppl start to post more gear that is found on the AH. The perfect gears are still pricey, and the odds of getting them in-game are still ridiculously low due to random stats. So, what harm will raising the drop rates do?
Before people say that I am raging and ask me to stop being emo or taking things out of my arse, I am still playing the game with a passion. Its just that the game could be so much more.
0
As for blue post: I remember one saying that players should not feel that using the AH as a necessary part of completing the game or something to that extent.. and i still feel that items are supposed to be self found. one farms items for their own hero, or for alts if e item is not for e current hero. How many times in d2 have u played where u were a paladin n a titans drops n u go :"hey i should play a javazon next"? and how many times in d3 has an item dropped and makes u go "hey i should try this character next?"
I also dont find upgrades every 2-3 hrs, and i havent bought anything from the AHs at all.. yes in d2 we could see a lowel lvl set drop from hell baal/meph.. but how long do we take do just one run? n the range of affixes and no-random affix property of uniques mean that when something drop, we knew what we were going to get.. no silly str rolls on wands, or intel rolls on mighty weapons.. and looking at just what bosses drop during runs in d2 to compare to d3 is not right as well.. some drops were found off normal monsters or unique packs along e way too..
IK set useless and common? well, in d3, taking an average IK set item on its own, a good rare would most likely trump it as well.. and we still have to factor in that the IK set item, say gloves, have a bad roll,.. n then what? you also mentioned that they were "common".. are the IK set items common in d3?