Diablo 3: Itemization Design Ideas


There was some talks on the Itemization patch (aka Loot 2.0) with a nice summary on the Diablo Fans page. The three big ideas are 1) making legendaries have unique properties; 2) making items upgradable (and thereby non-tradeable); and 3) more attention to less used class talents/skills. While the last part is yet to be seen, the other two items are more relevant since the current legendary and set items are pretty specific with regards to which are heavily sought after.

That said, for the relevance of this blog posting, I want to delve into some design ideas when it comes to itemization. First, I want to discuss the upgrade idea. Right now, the reference to upgrade is pretty obscure outside of the fact that it will happen. The question becomes the implementation. In World of Warcraft, there are two methods for upgrading and changing items: 1) using Justice or Valor Points for 8 ilvl upgrades; 2) reforging stats. In the current format, only certain stats are currently worth anything, namely all resistances, critical hit, critical damage, attack speed, physical resistance and armor. These stats are outside of the four main stats. A few other stats like gold pick up radius can be useful but at times is relegated to being class specific (like in the case of certain witch doctor builds) or specific elemental resistance, which mostly is for One With Everything passive monks. The remaining stats for the most part are useless unless it involves a resource reduction or additive bonus for a class skill.

Currently, the issue about items is that the vast majority of items dropped are useless, having so many random stats that most people end up selling them off, converting them to materials or not even bothering to pick them up. While the crafted gear did help provide a way for people to obtain better gear, you still had to farm the materials and spend quite a bit of gold before you could craft a decent piece with ideal stats. The only thing guaranteed though was just one main stat. The rest was simply a gamble.

My idea for upgradeable item is to reduce the gambling factor and make items more reliable in terms of what ideal stats you can place on something. Part of the idea comes from the notion of reforging from World of Warcraft, where you can move certain stats to another stat. In the case of reforging from World of Warcraft, reforging involves partially moving a stat over rather than completely removing the other stat. The thing with Diablo though is that I suspect there is a limitation on the number of stats that you can have on an item. So the problem about using the World of Warcraft method is that you would end up not having enough room to convert over useful stats.

One idea to handle this is to make a full conversion of a stat more costly somehow. The cost could be gold, materials or even finding a rare recipe. Either way, it would penalize someone for doing a full conversion of a single stat. Perhaps the sacrifice could be a brimstone or several brimstones for instance as obtaining them can be difficult (you can buy them on the AH or purchase legendaries on the AH but it still will cost a great deal of gold and doing this might pump up the cost of brimstones on the AH). Either way, doing a partial conversion might cost a lot less comparatively, requiring less materials or maybe no special book to learn.

The other idea I have for making items more useful is doing a stat upgrade using materials from a similar item with the stat you want. Say for instance you have bracers with all resistance of 50 on them. You want to pump up that value so what you need to do is find other bracers with all resistance. If you manage to find another all resistance bracers, you can then perhaps swap the stats (say the new bracers had 80) or take a percentage of those stats and convert them over. So maybe every 5 or 10 levels provides 1 point in the conversion process. If you want to increase the challenge aspect of this, you can make it so that you are required to find recipes for the specific stat and item type in order to make the conversion work.

Still the problem about item upgrades is that you still have certain ideal stats, potentially making a lot of rares useless. And since only a few builds are feasible or worth anything, you’re relegated to just focusing on damage, survivability and critical hits to make your abilities work. This is where the talent/skill redesign is imperative but at the same time it must work hand-in-hand with a re-thought out item stat system. While the example of “Call of the Ancients” lasting forever sounds appealing as an ability exclusive to a legendary, it does little to address useless stats like item invulnerability, the various resistances, thorns, etc.

To me you can still have those types of stats on items but they must work closer with a class’ abilities. For instance, let’s say you’re a tank and your function is to absorb damage. My inclination is to make thorns more appealing to a tank by creating a massive AoE effect that increases dramatically in damage. Perhaps, thorns amplifies certain auras like Storm Armor. Or other stuff can do more to reduce cooldowns like Rain of Vengeance or resource generation.

My main emphasis is in defining playstyles and specific build types rather than attempting to focus on single skills/talents and stats. Like having a bowling ball Demon Hunter, Hulk-like Perma-smashing Barbarian, auto army creating Witch Doctors, etc.

 

 

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