Brother Laz Explains What’s Wrong with Diablo III’s Legendaries
Posted 5 June 2012 by FluxWith most fans expressing dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of legendary and set items in Diablo III, I thought it would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who, unlike any current Blizzard employees, has actually designed full suites of Set and Unique items for Diablo II. No, not Erich Schaefer, but a mod maker and author of our one-time column, Dead Fish.
Brother Laz created the Median XL mod, and while updating it over the years he created thousands of unique and set items, and was always in direct contact with the players, learning exactly what they liked and didn’t like, and used and didn’t use. Laz is also an analytical and clever guy, and writes entertaining columns, so long as you like sarcasm and aren’t the one he’s pointing his barbs at.
True to my hopes, Laz had plenty of observations on where the Diablo III legendaries went wrong, and he’s got a whole three-category ranking system for types of unique items and the players that they appeal to. By his measurement, Diablo III’s only hit one of those types. I’m overcomplicating things in this summary, so check out the following quote and then click through to read the whole article. I guarantee it will give you a new way to think about unique items and will make very clear why they are so lackluster, as currently presented in Diablo III.
The Spike – Plays to win, no matter what it takes or how boring the path to victory may be. This is the guy who is perfectly fine with the fact that his D3 wizard wields an axe and his D2 sorc wears a green potato bag on her head. This is the dickwad who picks Tryndamere in 3v3 blind pick and after banging your *** for 20 minutes goes GG EASY NOOOBS in all chat.
The Johnny - Sees games as a means of self-expression. This is the guy who builds a Molten Boulder druid, intentionally wears tier 2 paladin gear in WoW when not actively fighting and picks Orianna. Usually he gets trampled by Spike but sometimes it works and then he feels great.
The Timmy - Likes big stuff. Uses the rocket launcher because it makes big explosions. Goes all offense in every build because it makes big damage numbers. Picks Garen and screams DEMACIAAA every time he spins2win from the bush. Plays for fun where fun is defined as smashing stuff but is not willing to get bored out of his skull to maximise his success rate.
Diablo 2′s uniques appeal to each of these groups, whereas Diablo 3′s legendaries (aside from being the victim of a typical Blizzard overnerf) are boring and therefore only appeal to Spikes. In fact, between legendaries being the equivalent of a Mercedes SL350 Blue Efficiency in terms of passion stirred up and the lack of fun and viable wizard spells not named after the company or a Starcraft unit and similar problems for other classes, Diablo 3 seems to appeal only to Spike players.
Click through for the full guest article, which includes illustrative items of all three types, plus fix-it proscriptions for Diablo III going forward.
Uniques, monkeys and typewriters
Uniques. Or legendaries for you whippersnappers. The whole reason anyone played Diablo II, other than the potential to make imbalanced overpowered builds, was the potential to find imbalanced overpowered uniques.
So naturally the community complained that uniques were too powerful and everything was better during those golden days before LoD when rares were the best items, by which they meant rares were the best items if you played the best class (barb) and sorcs were restricted to very specific uniques and sets with +skills and FCR on them, and by community I mean the few people above 10 years of age who actually cared about balance instead of jerking off at their EZ BOT’D EBOTDZ.
Anyway, from a game design point of view making rares the best makes total sense. They are Random and this is a game built on Randomness so if we put more Randomness into your Random then you can farm while you farm and enjoy the gift of Randomness. Plus, Enigma was overpowered.
……
Time to confess: I was one of those hippies too. My Diablo 2 mod Median XL (you may have heard of it, perhaps when it became #3 Overall Mod of the Year at ModDB or from that interview with the Blizzard employee who admitted to playing MXL instead of working on inferno class balance [based on a true story]) started out highly idealistic and with no uniques at all because rares were meant to be the best.
The overwhelming community response was that there was no community because shockingly noone wanted to play the mod. In a strange coincidence, the popularity of the mod increased linearly with the power of the characters, compensated by an arms race on the part of the monsters. Enter a bunch of uniques. Enter sacred items, basically Diablo 2 elite items but only in uberlevels and with their own uniques. Enter a second set of sacred uniques. Today there is a broken OP unique for everyone and rares are useless. The community likes it that way and claims the item system is amazing.
Take that, yellowbugs.
Player Classifications
Why? If you ask a professional game designer (a guy who can use the word “conveyance” to describe progression) he will claim there are three types of players.
The Spike – Plays to win, no matter what it takes or how boring the path to victory may be. This is the guy who is perfectly fine with the fact that his D3 wizard wields an axe and his D2 sorc wears a green potato bag on her head. This is the dickwad who picks Tryndamere in 3v3 blind pick and after banging your *** for 20 minutes goes GG EASY NOOOBS in all chat.
The Johnny – Sees games as a means of self-expression. This is the guy who builds a Molten Boulder druid, intentionally wears tier 2 paladin gear in WoW when not actively fighting and picks Orianna. Usually he gets trampled by Spike but sometimes it works and then he feels great.
The Timmy – Likes big stuff. Uses the rocket launcher because it makes big explosions. Goes all offense in every build because it makes big damage numbers. Picks Garen and screams DEMACIAAA every time he spins2win from the bush. Plays for fun where fun is defined as smashing stuff but is not willing to get bored out of his skull to maximise his success rate.
……
Diablo 2′s uniques appeal to each of these groups, whereas Diablo 3′s legendaries (aside from being the victim of a typical Blizzard overnerf) are boring and therefore only appeal to Spikes. In fact, between legendaries being the equivalent of a Mercedes SL350 Blue Efficiency in terms of passion stirred up and the lack of fun and viable wizard spells not named after the company or a Starcraft unit and similar problems for other classes, Diablo 3 seems to appeal only to Spike players.
These are the people who first cleared inferno difficulty by skipping inferno difficulty because winning is what matters and not taking part in the actual game. Because there are no builds and therefore no real way to lose the game they get no satisfaction from making a good build in Diablo 3, so they are now playing the auction house. And they don’t actually give a damn about legendaries because they found some blue in a garbage bin behind whatever-is-his-name’s stand (how did I forget the name of this amazingly indepth NPC who contributes to the incredible storyline of Diablo 3) and it deals 6 more dps. Oops.
Johnny Items
Diablo 2:
Witchwild String — Short Siege Bow
Two-Hand Damage: (32) to (75-81) Required Level: 39 Required Strength: 65 Required Dexterity: 80 Bow Class – Normal Attack Speed +150-170% Enhanced Damage Fires Magic Arrows [Level 20] 2% Chance To Cast Level 5 Amplify Damage On Striking +1-99 % Deadly Strike (+1 Per Character Level) All Resistances +40 Socketed (2) Cool name, neat Amplify Damage proc and magic arrows and an alternate way to inflict damage and a big resist bonus. It is sort of viable, if you assume spending more than 2 seconds to kill a cow pack is viable in this game. This is one of the best designed uniques in D2 because it has a consistent theme without giving up usability and is good enough to spawn its own build. <3
Median XL:
Freakshow — Scythe (Sacred)
Two-Hand Damage: (675-727) to (1335-1407) Durability: 74 Required Strength: 466 Required Dexterity: 466 Required Level: 100 +(10 to 12) to Necromancer Skill Levels +(301 to 350)% Enhanced damage Adds 250-750 damage +(3 to 5)% to Spell Damage +4 to Maximum Necromancer Minions Random Resistance Bonus (-25 to +75, changes every 2 seconds) 10% Reanimate as: Ratfink 15% Reanimate as: Slain Soul 15% Reanimate as: Slain Soul Socketed: 6 I discovered pretty quickly that the only way to make “not the best” uniques popular was to make them crazy in some way. Usually it took the form of a chance to cast a weird skill or reanimate a cool monster. This proved so popular than 90% of the sacred unique weapons has a CtC of some kind, giving the player the satisfaction of flashy visuals that explode the screen and may even change gameplay in interesting ways.
Diablo 3:
None, unless their idea of a Johnny item is a legendary with a smattering of random stats and 2.1% chance to knock back.
Timmy items
Diablo 2:
Two-Hand Damage: 35 to (241-547) Required Level: 73 Required Strength: 135 Required Dexterity: 167 Bow Class – Slow Attack Speed +250% Enhanced Damage +3-309 To Maximum Damage (+3.125 Per Character Level) 20% Increased Attack Speed 6-8% Mana Stolen Per Hit Heal Stamina Plus 30% +10 To Strength +5 To Dexterity Knockback Big bow, big damage, knockback for extra trololol power. Gets beaten by a few other items, notably every runeword melee weapon in the game but back in its day this was the brute power item. Diablo 2 has a number of these: generally every item you remember because it is LOL OP was a Timmy item.
Median XL:
Danmaku — Athulua’s Hand (Sacred)
Defense: (2666-3339) Durability: 29 (Amazon Only) Required Dexterity: 349 Required Level: 100 10% Chance to cast level 15 Javelin Nova when you Kill an Enemy 1% Chance to cast level 45 Fire Bolt Nova on Striking 25% Chance to cast level 5 Javelin on Striking +(2 to 3) to Amazon Skill Levels 35% Increased Attack Speed 25% Faster Block Rate 1% Increased Chance of Blocking Adds 50-100 damage +(41 to 50)% to Fire Spell Damage +(201 to 250)% Enhanced Defense Socketed: 4 It’s a javazon shield with 25% chance to trigger a javelin that deals weapon-based damage and therefore has 25% chance to trigger another javelin which triggers a javelin and so on until the universe collapses. Also has 10% chance to shoot a lot of javelins on kill which trigger more javelins on hit. Javelins? Javelins. Javelins! Javelins javelins javelins. Javelins? Javelins!
Diablo 3:
Timmy appeal is greatly reduced by the lack of big numbers and spectacle. No one likes 1.9% chance to stun one target or +30% enhanced damage. That’s, like, totally, like, lame.
Spike items
Diablo 2
Defense: 302-363 Required Level: 42 Required Strength: 118 Durability: 55 (Barbarian Only) +150-200% Enhanced Defense 30% Faster Hit Recovery 20% Bonus To Attack Rating +2 To Barbarian Skill Levels 3-6% Life Stolen Per Hit All Resistances +30 +20 To Strength +20 To Dexterity +2 To Combat Skills (Barbarian Only) I hope you noticed all of the pre-1.10 exceptional class uniques have essentially the same stats and shared the same property of being the best items in their slot until 1.10. Lovelessly designed through copy/paste and intentionally overpowered – the ultimate Spike item.
Median XL:
Scales of the Serpent — Gothic Plate (Sacred)
Defense: (7012-9696) Durability: 99 Required Strength: 614 Required Level: 100 15% Chance to cast level 40 Carpet of Spiders on Attack 8% Chance to cast level 12 Time Strike on Striking +150% Damage to Undead Adds 400-600 poison damage over 2 seconds -50% to Enemy Poison Resistance 10% Chance of Crushing Blow Enhanced Weapon Damage +(41 to 50)% +(251 to 300)% Enhanced Defense +100 to Strength +50 Life on Striking in Melee (31 to 40)% Chance of Uninterruptable Attack Socketed: 6 The ‘SotS’, repeatedly nerfed to no avail and es still #1 in Brazil. Read a build guide (especially one that lists every uberquest as Easy, Easy, Easy, Easy, Easy and Astrogha as Easy-Medium) and among the incomprehensible acronyms you’ll probably find ‘SotS’ somewhere. This is intentional, because the bright lights at Blizzard cracked down on ‘overpowered items’ and the result is:
Diablo 3:
Remember when I said every uni– sorry, lamedreary in Diablo 3 was aimed at Spikes? Unfortunately the Spikes don’t want them because they do less damage than the above mentioned dumpster blue. A big fat zero again.
Verdict
Diablo 3 lamedrearies are aimed at Spike players at the intentional expense of Johnny and Timmy (and still manage to fail because they are too weak). Therefore buffing them won’t achieve anything unless they become the best items in the game or Spike will still ignore them, and won’t make them any more tactically interesting or bigger so the Johnny and Spike aren’t satisfied either.
This may explain why people NOW claim uniques should be the best, despite advocating the opposite in the past 11.5 years. Only the Spikes want them to be literally the best – the Johnnies and Timmies simply don’t care anymore and have given up on the game after the Great Death Blossom Disillusion and the Why Is My Hero So Weak Disillusion respectively. Their dreams crushed, all that is left is normal difficulty and the rose coloured binoculars pointed at Guild Wars 2. And of course Teemo in your ranked game. Thanks, Blizzard.
So there’s Laz’s semi-professional opinion. Hard to argue with his conclusions, as far as I can see. What do you guys think? Is he right? Can Blizzard resuscitate the legendary and set items in their game, and what could they have been thinking, launching with an array of green and orange items that so many fans realized at a glance were underpowered and uninteresting?
I am a definitely a Johnny.
Diablo 3 needs more crazy quirky ‘unique’ legendary item.
I’m more of a collector/hoarder, but since he’s talking about actual use of the items I definitely fit the Johnny bill. Alas, with the new skill system (which is fun, I have to say) itemization has all but been removed as a component of creating an oddball build. o-skills and procs were absolute necessities for that in D2.
Remember how set items in D2 were usually only good with 3-4 pieces and sometimes was worth it to wear the hole set before runewords became so op… well D3′ set bonuses are a joke
we need runewords..crafted items (rare-> crafted) so 90% of them are not useless anymore…greys can have sockets and stats….we need wp that are useable between acts. i don’t need pony levels but cow levels
we need Laz @ blizzard (loved mxl).
IMO rares should be the best items in game but Legendarys should be good and while not best useful endgame.
And more importantly they should have unique affixes, preferably strange, fun and synergetic to wierd builds making it possible to use builds that would not be viable with out the specific legendary/s used for it.
I agree, but would add that PERFECT Rares should be the best in the game, with Legendarys being comprable to at least the top 20% of Rares.
Wonderfully written article.
HOWEVER, it only talks about and lists WEAPONS.
Possibly the weapons itself are not broken but the combat mechanics by which all classes’ output is based on weapon damage.
My real point though is that when people talk about legendaries and whatnot, they only do comparisons with rare weapons, since the difference in DPS is so flagrant and it be the most important stat on a weapon.
How about truly talking about all types of gearslots and actually talking about set-items?3
The introduction of this article leads to believe that we will get more info on that but we don’t.
“”With most fans expressing dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of legendary and set items in Diablo III, I thought it would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who, unlike any current Blizzard employees, has actually designed full suites of Set and Unique items for Diablo II. “”
So in the end it is again nothing but a Legendary WEP vs Rare WEP.
meh….
what D3 needs is for legendary items to actually drop. i am starting to think they were disabled in my copy or something. its crazy
You will think this way until you find a pair of them. Probably you’ll get excited and will want to identify it right away. First “doh” will be when you realize your mediocre rare is much better than the legendary you just found. After that you may head to the auction house to sell it and make a fortune, but upon checking the items avaible you’ll realize there are a lot of crappy blues that are quite better than your new unique (second “doh”). By the end chances are you’ll try to sell it for a starting bid of, say, 5k gold, and see if someone raises the price because hey, it’s a unique item and is cheap!
I think Brother Laz is spot on the boringness of those items. Most people would accept them not being the most powerful in the game if they had some cool extra trait or made some weak build viable.
I know one person with 120 hours with one character and he hasn’t found one legendary or set item yet!
More than 150 hours of playing time and I found 1 (one) very bad legendary item (no set item of course), that’s a big problem imo.
Where is the fun?
I found 3 legendary items. 1 in normal act 3, while I was leveling a friend on the bridge right before the siegebreaker. It was crap.
The second was in inferno. It was a weapon with like 100 dps. Good stats, but the DPS was WAY to low.
I found the third one in inferno, too. Some part of the armor with around 200 armor. No resistances. Again: crap.
Believe me, you didnt miss anything
BTW: I think laz is right in most cases. The items just don’t attract many people, although it’s the best way blizzard could have chosen.
The problem is that unique items should have unique mechanics. And they lack that funny thing.
–> Every legendary should get a rework, or should get added some funny stats, that make you think: Oh well, there is this funny Item I can use, to smash enemies on a funny way. That makes me happy! Yay!!!
I still remember that one runeword or unique (?) for a amazon bow, with which you casted so many different cold spells on hit and on kill. It was awesome, that the enemies were frozen all the time. It may took long to kill, but it was safe. And Funny.
All the funny character customization takes place in the skill build, not in the item build. Items only add damage, health, armor etc., but they dont add any fun.
That bow would be Hand of Karcheus.
It would be nice if this “funny character customisation” was based on items or even random skills (ever failed to find a fireball book in D1 and got stuck with flame wave for 10 levels?) but you unlock skills at fixed times.
1. Great article
2. I think they can fix the items (and possibly should hire Laz to do it for them!)
3. I wouldn’t mind if legendaries sucked but there were more of them – in DII I never got any awesome end-game uniques but I got a variety of so-so mid-game uniques that I could use for a few levels, and they were fun.
I consider myself a mix between Spike and Johnny, and think games should be designed so Timmy is never viable past the easiest difficulty.
I think that that description really doesn’t do justice to poor Timmy, and hence your reaction is a bit unfair.
The original definition indicated that Timmy wants to experience/feel something, Johnny wants to express something, and Spike wants to prove something (essentially how good he/she is).
Wanting to experience something does not mean a perennial nooblord who sucks at everything and runs around going PEW PEW PEW with no rhyme or reason. It just means someone who cares more about the visceral, immediate reactions. There’s at least a little sliver of Timmy in everyone.
On topic: as a Johnny player, I wholeheartedly agree with Brother Laz.
I went and read the original descriptions created for MtG and I agree. This article’s definition of Timmy doesn’t do him justice.
Under the Laz definition (Noob Timmy… Nooby), I stand by my statement.
The state of Diablo 2 right now is perfect. The issues with legendaries in d3 are:
1. 95% of rares/blues are better than a level 60 legendary. This was not the case in d2. You had to find that 5% rare or magic item that could outclass a unique/runeword. Having rares that were better were good, but not every single rare to the point where uniques sucked.
2. Uniques were useful for more than 1-2 levels in D2. Frostburn, magefists, shako, vipermagi, dungoes. These things were low level requirement but their stats made them amazingly viable even at level 80+. So many good strong builds required a few under level 60 items. Nothing in D3 is the same. There are about 20 useful legendary items out of the whole 200 they made. Pointless.
3. They need to bring back guaranteed Rares from first boss kill in NM and Hell. This was a stupid removal and made players feel flat when they are dying like crazy or struggling to kill a boss to be rewarded with 2 blues. Most players have not found more than 1-2 legendaries. In Diablo 2 you would find a lot, the low level ones are still viable and while you didn’t replace your best weapon with it usually, it often gave you energy to find a better one.
4. You could find useful legendaries in NM or areas of lower difficulty. Problem with inferno is you need Act 3 and 4 inferno items from the AH to actually pass Act 2. Maybe DH and Wiz can, but a Barb (My class) is frankly impossible unless you have rediculous hand me downs. In D2 you could farm Nightmare to find uniques to strengthen yourself that were actually useful. Act 4 hell items will not get you through Act 2 inferno. Nor will Act 1 items.
I had to use the AH since Act I, Hell on my barbarian. Of course this is without going back to farm at all considering the prospect of a good legendary drop is nil, which was the whole driving force in Diablo 2.
I agree with this assessment. I have 100 hours in on only 1 character and I have not found a single legendary, and even if I did it would be worthless. Also, one of the biggest issues is #3, if you’re not running inferno mode you’re not going to get anything worth using or that will sell.
please send a copy of this article to jay, thanks.
The solution is pretty easy, but this is an enjoyable way to put it. Kudo’s!
Blizz should (as everybody knows):
- Buff
- Make ‘em special
I like the artwork though.
I cant believe they shipped this game as it is. The set and unique items are just 1 small part of the problem. They need to bring back the diablo2 feeling and they need to do it quickly. But it being Blizzard, nothing gets done quickly. Set items and unique items need to get buffed. And they need to get their special abilities. Not just some random stuff you also find on rare items. Get rid of the 1.7% chance on knockback. What is that crap, who thought that was interesting?! The frequency needs to be upped as well. We want to find our own items in the actual game. Not while browsing some database outside the actual game.
Lose the quest xp bonus for repeating a quest we already completed so we dont repeat silly quests to level up.
Lose all the treasure goblins, or hide them deep inside caves and things far away from waypoints.
Fix inferno difficulty. Make it actually difficult in a way that requires skill instead of a gear check.
And I would even go as far to lose the GAH completely or make some drastic changes to it. Idea: Hide AH npc’s in the game, a different NPC for each item type. It’s to damn easy right now to get upgrades, and I dont like that it’s outside of the game.
example: Change the merchant npc’s that show up after certain events into AH npc’s for a specific item type.
Speaking of quests, I don’t really like how they’ve changed all the quest rewards to some arbitrary amount of gold and exp. The quests flow nicely with the story, so there’s less of the whole “run all the way back to Jehryn because you forgot to talk to him” stuff, but they almost fade into the background irrelevantly. Even the few quests that require you to obtain some item, it doesn’t show up in your stash so it barely feels like you’ve done anything. I dunno, because I hated making that damn flail all the time, but I wish the quests were more engaging and had better rewards, even if it’s just an item or a gem or something.
There is in effect only one D3 quest. One long quest with short term objectives.
You never have more than one quest at a time and I never even bother checking my quest log (it is not even a log as it doesnt allow you to view previously completed objectives).
It is impossible not to complete these ‘quests’ (objectives) as they are spoonfed to the player throughout the game. Having played through the game a few times i struggle to remember any of them.
No real side quests (events dont count), REALLY booooring items and instant build respec mean that i am already getting bored of D3.
Good PvP will improve longevity. please get it right blizzard.
Absolutely agreed. I love the game to death and will be playing it for years regardless, but this is #1 issue on blizzard’s plate right now. Fix it, and they will get a ton of fans back AND a ton of new fans.