D4 - Itemization

General Discussion
1

D2 was a good game, D3 was a good game too.
But both were quite different and not addressing the same audience.

It’s hard to get everyone satisfied, but they tried. And they’ll try again, and it’s fine.

Now here’s what I think grew old too fast in D3 for me, and what I’d like to see in this new opus.

D3 's gameplay could be summarized as this :

1 Level up fast
2 Put an item once in a while when the light is green
3 Equip any legs before max lvl because stats.
4 Then rinse and repeat the farm until you have the set you need, the legendaries that fits your set, and eventually get ancient version of them.

What was lacking for me was the creativity left to players in how they wanted to play.

Set items were too powerful, eventually making the skill choice look like it didn’t really matter.
What I mean is that we were given an opportunity to build our unique character by picking the skills we wanted, but it was an illusion.
In fact in D3 we were forced to play a given set of skills because Set items were so game changing and powerful that it was foolish not to use them.

BUT, there was in fact one good idea behind that.

Why limit the different builds to a given number of skill-combinations, when you could have one build per set, or even per legendary items, giving the developers the possibility to add more of them over time.

That is a good point and that should keep going on. But don’t try too much to enforce some ways to play and let the players discover, find and share the combinations that works.

There should be as many builds as there are different unique Items, because Legendaries offers more combinations and thus, more diversity in builds that set items.
They should, in fact, be more powerful than set items if you think about it.
This should go in a way that Set items would be the ticket entry into higher difficulties, offering a easy to understand build for people that don’t want to think excessively and just have fun to smash monsters with a character that that is a bit solid.

But they should definitely not be the way to the top of the mountain.

What I’ve seen so far with the talent and skill system is a very small base of choices that I hope will really have an impact over the gameplay. I would be disappointed if all this was powder in the eyes and we happen to all play the same builds like it feel liked in D3.

The more layers of choices you have, the more diversity you gets.
The rune system could be one of them, cause you could create new Runes later on and that could make all the players have to think again on how they built their character.

But the Itemization is what should be the real factor here, because New Items are so cool.

Something was a bit disappointing with legendaries in D3, it was that they were a shitloads of them not being useful at all in any build, and you would only equip them while leveling because of their good stats.
This was leading to a situation where you would be frustrated by these kind of items because they were polluting the pool of legendary drops.
Too bad that some of them looked really nice, and you’d have like to have them really matters and have their impact on gameplay.

And … Why have common, magic, rare, legendaries, sets, ancient etc… If in the end only the last ones really matters?
Never understood that. We don’t need many layers of rarity. Go to essential.
I don’t take any pleasure to take loot and have to manage my inventory just to get small pieces of crafting items that in fact doesn’t help you at all get the items you really want…

But now to the suggestion…
For there’s something I’d really love to see happening in D4.

It’s to have powerful unique items (legendaries or whatever you wanna call it)
that really impact the gameplay, and that are hard to find.

But more than that.
I want them to have a true story, I want them to be truly unique and legendary, I want them to be wield by mighty foes and not by the regular fallen or cultists you happen to fry at the corner of a randomized dungeon.

Regular mobs shouldn’t drop such unique items.

I want to have go deep into hidden places, through optional quests and into scripted dungeons and labyrinths both to unravel parts of Diablo IV 's lore and in the end to find items that have their own unique dungeon/boss/style/way-to-play/story.

When I find a legendary item, I want the experience to be rather unique and I want to be truly amazed. Not just look at it as if it was just another random loot.

This kind of items could be a little bit more rare, due to the fact that they could only drop in a specific place, from that typical mighty foe with a quite low rate (you should have other jewelries or runes or so to loot for, so It would not feel like too much of a grind).

D4 is supposed to be a open world game.
I want to be able to go on a journey to find such epic items if I want.

Imagine this :

You enter a tavern and talk to the drunk old man sitting in front the bar.
He’s talking about some old legends and epic stories while the innkeeper tells you he’s drank too much again…
But you decide to pay attention to the old man’s tales and have him get another strong ale…

Once upon a time there was a powerful dark knight whose mighty sword would drink it’s foes blood and kinda feed on it.
He was ruthless and known as a mighty demon slayer, even if a lot of people were afraid about him. People said he made some kind of dark pact with a devilish entity to gain such power.
Eventually the man disappeared and his intriguing sword with him.

After another ale, the drunk old man manage to give you a hint toward the place where the last battle he was seen in happened.
A little exploration and evidence gathering and you happen to find an entrance to a lost temple hidden in a dark cave.

After exploring this lost temple and fighting through the ghosts that haunts it, you find a defiled chapel with a tomb, only to discover you were the very foe the mighty dark knight Lich waited to nourish upon and finally end it’s everlasting torpor.

Epic fight… Big win, and a chance to drop it’s unique weapon.
A nicely designed scimitar that leech life and gain temporarily strength for each foe you slay.
The thing is horribly great :slight_smile: and you’re happy.

You’re happy because you’ve come a long way to be able to have a chance at that specific weapon. It has a story that merges with the lore of the game making it an epic adventure over a randomized dungeon.

One quest but two rewards : You delved deeper into the world of Diablo and it was already rewarding in that way, and you brought an special item back, with unique properties with it.

If each new way-to-play is brought with/by new items, new quests, new lore, new places, new bosses. What could you ask more than to play more and more and more… ?

1 Like
2

I think that in D4 items (mostly Uniques) and sets should not buff a specific skill but rather have global buffs to skills and maybe even elements, spell damage and so on.

The problem is that if every item is gonna be made in same fashion as D3 items are, we are gonna be forced by items in general to use that one skill which they buff.

Look back at D2, a lot of people say that +to all skills was bland and boring, yet it never forced to use some precise skill, you could pick. Same stuff was with sets, it had global modifiers that didn’t focus on some specific skill (again + to all skills). To add more there were items that gave plain +fire dmg, -%mob fire res, there were also penetrations and so on…

I think D4 should focus on this idea and have global modifiers on Uniques and sets, more area, more spell damage, fire pen, spell leech, fire or light or whatever elements apply a -res curse, lightning projectile spells now pierce monsters or splash or explode, such stuff instead of making an item that makes one precise spell deal 5x damage, OF COURSE you gonna use that until you find another item that makes a skill deal 10x damage, endless hamsterwheel. But if you made global element dmg or something you would have a choice between the variety of spells of that element.

I really hope D4 devs are gonna go a smarter and a more creative way in the itemization, otherwise we gonna get another D3 mimick which will of course improve some things but in the end up being D3.5.

To sum it all up my ideas might be very hard to balance and implement, it would definitely be much harder to create such items/mechanics rather than frostbolt deals 3x dmg, but the question here is how much work do current D4 devs are prepared to invest to make a VERY VERY deep and customizable game.

3

I hope they truly expand the talent tree, make a lot of interesting choices maybe even a variety of talents that augments skills in interesting ways like maybe converting one dmg type to another or adding a projectile, or chance to launch some spell a second time etc…

Same goes for skills, they should make a huge variety for us to use. What I’ve seen in the demo ( I understand this is only alpha and since they told the game won’t release anytime soon there is a lot of work) it isn’t anywhere being enough. Maybe even the brackets/specializations should make return similar to D2. There is a lot of possibilities I think.

4

Well, if most of the “powerful” Uniques and I reckon this should be a majority because getting a meh Unique is frustrating then the rare items must surely make a return, in fact I’m not against your idea at all.

Getting a good Unique somewhere deep which is truly UNIQUE would be awesome instead of having tons of garbage.

But as I’ve mentioned, rares should be very good items and possibly even BiS at some cases too. This would truly make the itemization much deeper. It’s sad to see that rares have no love in D3 and are just insta salvage. D4 should focus on all items kind of and make rares viable for the endgame too.

5

There needs to be an item sink

You could permanently lose an item if you die while wearing it. Or its durability could get reduced by 1 each time you die. An item with down to 1 durability would be practically useless because it would break so often that wouldnt worth the time loss to stop your grinding and go to blacksmith and repair it.

We had Kanai’s cube in d3 and we could have something similar in d4 but with an added risk of permanently losing the item you are trying to augment.

I personally believe Diablo is all about the drops those few seconds where the dopamine kicks in until you id the item is what keeps me coming back.But once you gear your character it kind of feels like you have ended the game.

Some people just want to have a complete set. Others want to have full ancient items or full augmented and a few want to push to the absolute min max limits and contest the leaderboards. Whatever the kind of player you are you will hit your limit at some point. But if your items are destructable you will always have to grind a bit more to replace that one item that broke.

On a side note. With the addition of dungeons i strongly believe that blizzard should take the risk of moving towards a more mmo style by adding a tankier class and a healer class.

Especially if they add leaderboards for dungeon time clears.Obviously this is diablo people will still be able to clear the dungeon by themselves or with any combination of classes. But having a “tank” and a “healer” should make the dungeon clear faster. I mean we already have that with zdps builds but actually having dedicated classes with less dps potential and more buffs would make the franchise move towards a more mmo style game adding new audience.

Lose items trying to upgrade them, lose gold when you die, lose gems trying to upgrade them add sinks everywhere and people will grind the game people will want to trade.