I really don't understand the rationale of this design-by-committee style development. Are they really so unsure of what they want to make that they're taking fan feedback at this early of a stage?
I mean, I guess it's better than shipping a badly designed game like vanilla Diablo 3, but it's still very weird to me.
The only thing that sends up red flags here is that:
- Stat bonuses on skills sound nice in theory but the skills they showed are prioritizing stats you're going for anyway - STR and some DEX on a whirlwind barb, and willpower on a mage... it'd be far more interesting if STR somehow boosted your frost blades, encouraging unorthodox stat builds.
- Uniques in D2 had the capability of being forged into stronger tiers with the Horadric Cube, which was lost in D3 in favor of just scaling items automatically based on your level (boring). I would love to see these "static modifiers" remain static (and useful) with the possibility of holding onto early uniques and boosting their stats to be competitive with later loot, rather than just tossing old uniques for new ones you find with higher scaled stats.
It's not intuitive to have your Frost Blades be boosted by STR and if that were the case then everyone would do that because they would just be able to stack STR for the life/life regen/armor stats and be a tanky mage.
Also the way to "fix" this is to simply have Uniques that allow for STR scaling on your spell skills. This will allow for the possibility of unorthodox stat builds.
Might have missed an earlier post but I do believe they said that uniques will scale will level like D3.
I do agree that this design-by committee thing is a bit weird. It feels like the game is being focus tested during development.
The item stuff sounds good. Makes all 3 types of items (Magic, Rare, and Legendary) possible to use.
Magic - Less affixes, but a higher maximum
Rare - More affixes, Lower maximum
Legendary - Less affixes, lower maximum, but contains random Legendary affix
There is a 4th type as well, Uniques where are all the affixes are fixed on them. So it's possible that a unique might have ALL unique affixes or legendary affixes. There are also set items. I believe their plan is to have uniques, legendaries and set items to be on the same power level with Rares just behind them.
- Item quality philosophy changes, resulting in things like a greater range of strength/possibilities on blue/magics, increased number of affixes on yellow/rares, random affixes on orange/legendaries (this is a big deal, right?), no more Mythics, and increased prominence for Uniques, which will have fixed effects/affixes that you build around.
I missed the questions here.
Yea these are a major step over Diablo 3, assuming the Set items are on a similar power level of Legendaries. In D3, Class sets far out classed Legendaries and were generally pretty mandatory. It also really homogenized builds since you just picked a skill that you liked and use its associated Set piece. Here there are far more options. Uniques are potentially build changing/enabling and you can then use items around that. I feel that in 90% of cases Legendaries will be more powerful than Rares but builds will be more some combination of Legendaries + Uniques and maybe a 2 piece set thrown in. It's actually possible that Magic items might make a comeback since weapon DPS is so big in these games and a good magic weapon may outclass most Legendaries even (if the two stats you get on it are relevant to your build). At least early on, I am sure after min/maxing it will be Legendaries with the affixes you want.
The only thing we have to be wary about are Legendaries or uniques that buff a certain skill to some absurd level where they are mandatory. Stuff like your Frozen Orb fires off two additional orbs would be so silly and would invalidate any Rare/Magic weapon and most other Legendaries/uniques in that slot. That's basically what Diablo 3 was... use this Legendary to triple your damage with X skill then use this set piece to buff the damage of X skill by an additional *checks notes* 10000%.
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