Hardcore Item Survival Options
Posted 26 April 2012 by FluxIn Diablo II, 
Hardcore players could allow friends to loot their corpse, enabling them to save your gear in case of disaster. That only worked when playing with friends (while most deaths occurred in solo item harvesting games), of course, and anything in your stash, cube, or inventory was gone forever, looting or not. That scenario is exactly reversed in Diablo III, since all HC chars on an account have access to the same stash. On the other hand, the loot option is gone.
This creates a perverse incentive to sometimes *not* wear your best gear, since if you die with it on, it’s gone forever. As all experienced D2 players learned, it was FAR tougher to obtain really high quality items than to level up a character who could use them, and this situation will almost certainly repeat in D3. This means that the top items on your HC character will be worth much more than the character wearing them, thus if you’re going into a really dangerous situation, you’d be wise to stash your best items and put on gear that’s almost as good, but not so irreplaceable.
At least that’s the theory, one I brought up during our two-part Hardcore podcast last year, and repeated in a couple of news items afterwards. Most players seem to think it’s not a great idea; that switching out the gear would just make you more likely to die, but it’s still a hypothetical, as we don’t know anything about the spikes in difficulty we’ll see during the end game.
That issue came up in the B.net forums today, and Bashiok replied with an eye on the long term economic effects of item loss upon death.
Our approach at this point is to see how this works out, because we think being a bit harsher on Hardcore is ok. Absolutely people may be scared to keep items on them, but maybe that becomes part of the fun and the strategy of it. We’re taking a wait and see, but definitely after release we’ll be interested to hear thoughts from Hardcore players and see how it’s working out.
As a once and future HC player, I have to vote against dropping all your loot on death. While it would provide the first *real* incentive we’ve seen in D3 to play in a friendly party instead of going alone, this, along with the shared stash, would take virtually all the sting out of death. HC players are accustomed to rerolling; so having to recreate your character isn’t a big deal. If you only lose what you’re carrying in your inventory upon death — not gold, not stashed gear, not runestones in skills, not Artisan training levels, etc — that’s putting too many training wheels on the Diablo Hardcore experience.
Update: Many players in comments point out something I didn’t mention here; that any sort of “drop gear upon death” would be a huge incentive for griefing. Trapping waypoints or town portals, suddenly vanishing from a boss battle just when one player is low on health and needs assistance, etc, all become more than a mere prank when the possibility of making a corpse pop is added to the equation.
I hope it will stay so. I dont like the idea, that whe can loot the corpse or the stash remain when death. Death = beginn new, naked and with new motivation
Yeah.
I’m not a HC player because I want to keep my items when I die. If they’d not punish HC players by taking their items away, HC wouldn’t be HC but just a “Grind to lvl60 when you die”-mode.
Totally agree with you! I’m a HC player. I dont see difference in HC or soft if we can take our itens back. When a HC die, is generally his own fault. So, start again and be a better player!
If you can’t stand the heat, don’t stay in the kitchen. Hardcore is not for pussies. Stop complaining, pussies.
Agree with Ehhwut-
If they would allow corpse looting Id be VERY dissappointed – might as well play softcore and to be honest I wouldnt play softcore so ya.
For all the peeps wanting this you dont even know what hardcore is – stick to your softcore and let us real players enjoy our deaths in peace.
I played HC a LOT in D2, pretty much exclusively after passing single player in SC, had several characters and died multiple times and I support looting. IIRC you still lost your backpack so all charms etc (which I realise does not really matter in D3 due to no charms).
Maybe a good solution would be to limit the items you can recover? Like just weapons, or for example you can only recover X items.
It seems that originally HC was meant that you only get 1 life, not that your body and weapons vapourise and nothing can be recovered. Heck, the body even stayed on the ground.
Maybe the items could also lose all durability if it’s expensive to repair them.
Nothing is more expensive than starting over. It’s not truly Hardcore if you’d actually get to retain your l33t gear. It’s easy to restore the character via grinding (or rushing), and gold is just a time=money thing too. But gear is everything – you gotta find or trade for your wares. If you want it all back for dying, why are you even playing Hardcore?
LOL this made my day.
Bash makes a good point about the future economy – there has to be a way for items to be lost, too. And, yeah, it’s not particularly hardcore if the most difficult-to-achieve aspect of your character – the items – isn’t lost.
As for not using your best gear in dangerous situations? Some people may very well do that. But then you’d have to ask them – why on earth have you even got the gear if you’re not going to use it? Bragging rights, I suppose, and that’s up to them. If the item’s good enough to give me a bit more of a chance, may as well use it!
Think about this situation when it comes to HC characters and parties. Say you are with a group of three and fighting a battle with some monsters. What if you and your friend you are playing with on TS/Vent/Mumble are range attack and the poor soul by himself is a monk or barb. What if you both decided, hey lets get some free gear and then they both run off away from the guy in the pub all by his lonesome. He is dead now and the two fight their way to the body to score loot of a guy they F’d over? For that reason alone it should be all items on that character vanish. It would be worse if it was 3 friends and one loner….poor loner
Did you play D2 HC at all?
1st. You dont play with strangers
2nd. You need to give consent to loot your body
3rd. You dont play with strangers XD
Since there is no party menu in D3, the consent to loot your loot (while you loot) would be automatic, so he has a point.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that consent to loot would be automatic.
Well, given that Bashiok said “drop all your items” not “permission to loot” that’s one reason to believe it. You could also note the lack of consent for party joining, banner using, quest reward sharing, etc, and say those are all other reasons as well.
So now they want Hardcore mode to be for real hardcore players that got time, skill and dedication that lose almost everything when character dies. Month ago when there was discussion about RMAH in Hardcore, they was ready to give us pay-to-win oppurtunity that is totaly diffrent from todays point of view on “how Hardcore Hardcore will be?”
Interesting point to pile on. Though this form of grieving of a non issue with a simple consent loot window. But totally I agree with dropping ur **** would not incentivise but more so make co-op mandatory unless you like pain, and it goes against core design philosophy of solo play not being punished in an impactful way that JW has kept reiterating.
Give me loot dueling and I’ll be happy.
This doesnt encourage friendly play, since dickheads may try to get you killed in public games ( most people won’t play public in HC though, at least in my opinion ) to get your phat lewt. IMHO, lose all gear on death is the best aproach, D2 had ladder resets, so there was a gear reset every 6ish months, in D3 this may be a really bad idea a few years down the line.
It should stay as it is now. Share stash is more then enough, friendly corps looting would be too much.
How does the shared stash make things SO much better? It’s not like in D2 you couldn’t transfer items between your HC characters. The only difference is that you keep you dead HC’s stash, which wouldn’t contain the BEST items anyway cause you’re wearing them and the other beenfit is sharing with SC characters, so you can use SC for item hunting and transfer to HC – I guess that might be a big benefit, but still…
Your SC characters do not share the same shared stash as your HC characters.
oh, ok. So that makes the stash argument even weaker as the only benefit is that now you don’t have to worry about items in your stash if you lose HC.
Unless you were multi-boxing, muling was inconvenient and time consuming in D2. Imagine a system where you could have never lost the runes you were carrying around to upgrade, never lost anything betore you could twink it, carried a ton of equipment around for instant switching for different situations, etc.
That’s what you get in D3, with a shared stash. You’ll never lose gems, crafting materials, gold, etc.