The satisfaction of Diablo is the excitement of finding a new drop that makes your character tangibly stronger than they were before. The core problems with this system were as such:
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Diablo 4’s affixes are not good. The hyper-specific nature of conditional effects like “+0.2% crit damage against enemies that haven’t called their mother in more than a week” is not a tangible power-up.
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Diablo 3 and 4 rely heavily on the impact of the pre-defined unique effects of a small handful of legendary and unique items to the point where buildcrafting now focuses on having a specific weapon or armor piece, and no longer on the distribution of the stats you got from random rolls, making ALL AFFIXES ON ALL ITEMS significantly less meaningful than they should be. This is a problem that is deeply endemic to the way D3 and D4 are designed though, and would require a fundamental rework of pretty much every progression system in both games to fix.
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Having a lot of such affixes on an item makes drops feel like a bait & switch. The initial excitement of getting an item with 10 effects, only to notice that most of them are such conditionals, and that the item doesn’t really do anything most of the time, makes getting “good” items feel sour.
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Blues and Yellows are automatic garbage and not worth looking at, due to the low power of these items and the hyper-inflated drop-rate of so-called “legendary” equipment.
The loot rework fixed point 1, did nothing about point 2, and made points 3 & 4 worse, while introducing new problems.
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Because of the strict hierarchy in the now lowered quantity of affixes per item, unless the item level is vastly higher than the legendary it replaces, a “rare” item can never be better than a legendary due to a lucky combination of effects.
Diablo is slowly making more and more low-end item qualities effectively worthless, and this is the opposite of what’s needed to make getting the now famous “loot fountain” exciting. It’s hard to get hyped for one when you can tell at a glance that a boss that only dropped blues and yellows might as well only have left behind a bunch of crafting resources. -
Loot is no longer immediately exciting. The fact that any drop you acquire needs to be churned through a, no-longer-optional, crafting system before it reaches its full power feels like a more protracted variant of identification, that also has less impact, because you already know the majority of what the item does. It also leads to another case of two-step disappointment, where you can get shafted on an otherwise stellar item because tempering didn’t give you the affix you needed.
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The “fundamental” affixes are boring. Comparing a yellow item in D4 that just gives you extra damage and health to something like a magic item, “Cold Shortbow of the Bear”, a ranged weapon that knocks back enemies and slows them down so they take longer to get close to you, this should be easy to understand. Even if the yellow is statistically more powerful than the blue, the former is a stat stick that makes your damage spell deal a few points more damage, while the latter actually gives the impression of a weapon that feels like there is a point to its existence.
Diablo 1 - 3 had a lot of “low impact” affixes as well, like single-digit attribute bonuses, or
miniscule class resource generation on critical hits. But these effects were still immediately noticeable, and/or it was easy to understand how these affected the performance of the item, and of your character when wearing it.
The key to fixing the loot system in Diablo 4 would have been to make all types of items more powerful by changing the affixes to be simpler but more universal, to give items more affixes per type, and to add variance to the amount of affixes an item can have. This way, a god-roll on a yellow can feel like hitting the jackpot in a lottery, and not an auto-scrap. This would also allow for the drop rate of yellows to be raised and oranges to be decreased, making them and their unique effects suitably “legendary” while reducing every character’s dependency on being fully kitted out with them.
Also legendaries should have names again. I have no idea why their naming scheme is just the same thing as blues now when rare items still have the random words. It’s another symptom of making them feel more like “rare+1” items than anything else.