What if item gap was handled differently?

[sifuedition]

Trying to see if anyone can see a problem with this idea. Maybe it's good or maybe it's not well thought out and I'm just not seeing my own flaws.

I would love to see the itemization gaps handled with more iLvls instead of such a large gap between high and low rolls on an iLvl. Instead of:

61 |-------------------------------------------|
62 |--------------------------------------------------------|
63 |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I would much rather see:

61 |-------------|
62 |-----------------|
63 |--------------------|
64 |---------------------------|
65 |---------------------------------|
etc

I wish the stat ranges on each item level were smaller with more item levels available. This would allow several things I think would be improvements.

1. More granularity in what drops from each act
2. More likelihood that higher iLvl means a better piece
3. Smaller stat ranges takes some of the rng out
4. Affix rng could be more granularly controlled by iLvl as well.
5. Allows for more incremental upgrades as you farm

There may be other potential improvements enabled by this as well, depending on where they plan on taking patches/xpacs. e.g. crafting mats and general depth to vendors (max affixes/sockets you can add via new vendors in patches, etc)

I'm sure there are draw-backs, but I'm not thinking of them at the moment.

Thoughts? Criticisms?

Edit:
Grrr, formatting, lol. The lines are supposed to start at staggered intervals too but can't see how to force the spaces.

[pulli]

More likelihood that higher iLvl means a better piece

NO they should just go the diablo 2 system: where each mod (say +0-100 elemtal dmg, +100-150 elemental dmg, lifeleach, loh, knockback etc) are just given from a certain item level.

This would mean if you're looking for a specific mod you can actually find it often in lower difficulties, and wouldn't mean the top items only drop in the last locations in the game.


You system would just mean that ilvl 65 is the only thing worth something, maybe 64 - but in the long term it means once again that only the last place is worth farming. All other are just meant for levelling then. There should be something unique about earlier maps that makes it worth farming there. (Apart from being easier - something unique monetary wise).

[sifuedition]

While I agree that I think reason to farm more content is the better choice, that would require changing item affixes to allow more affixes to be desireable. At the moment, we all generally want exactly the same things, e.g. main/vit/resall. The only thing that tends to vary is do we want crit/loh/liferegen.

Change item affixes to be more interesting and I'm on board with you.

I was trying to find a way to work within the current scheme. This is more in the interest of making it more easily fixed in a patch, less disruptive to people's existing gear, more acceptable to Blizz, etc.

The idea would also be that you can complete Act 1 in say iLvl 59-61, gear, Act 2 in iLvl 60-62 gear, Act 3 and 4 in iLvl 61-63 gear. Then you still have two or three iLvl's that can RARELY (like current set pieces or less) drop that would push you into god mode.

[Chaosmage]

It is already this way:

----61----
_____----62----
__________----63----

The worst level 63 item is as good as the best level 61 item. I don't see a particular problem with item levels per se but that every affix which is good is tied to high levels. In DII that wasn't that way, at least for weapons so you could find a endgame weapon early but without other desirable mods like +2 skills, not that it matters much.

They should make some affixes require lower item levels to spawn. It makes absolutely no sense for example to let the max +50% damage affix only spawn on high level stuff. Furthermore the high +damage affixes should be able to spawn on everything after act4 hell.
This way if somebody desperately needs a high damage weapon they can farm it easily, with high level weapons remaining only the possibility of good stat boni and high life on hit.

[acken]

They should just nerf every stat and buff base stats (of course nerf monsters along the way).

Currently items have too much impact on the strength of a character. Items are supposed to matter but the difference between 60, 61, 62, 63 should never be this big and is imo the cause of many issues in this game.
Item affixes/stats should be more like gem. Where a level 14 gem is definetly the best but a level 10 is not crap in comparison.

[sifuedition]

@ chaosmage
Both my inferno toons are still stuck in Act 1. They are wearing a range of 48-62 iLvl gear. Despite having primarily 58 or less level gear, when I come back to town and id my drops, I still vendor basically every piece I find even though it is about half iLvl60 with about 3-4 iLvl 61-63 in a full bag's worth of drops.I routinely see iLvl 63 pieces with 50 or less of a stat. I can't accept that the worst 63 is better than a good 60.

I guess what I'm saying is it sucks to see plenty of 61-63 gear and it not be equipable despite my 48-59 gear in many slots. I'm not expecting the best gear in the game. I would like to see that if I played 12 hours on a Saturday, at least one of those 63s was actually likely to be better than something I'm wearing because my gear is not that good. If 63 is the "best" gear in the game, I should be happy to see it. I'm not. The only reason I even care about iLvl with the current system is 61+ gets d/e'd instead of vendored. I can't even sell the stuff I see drop on the AH.

If 63 was not the best in the game, they could reduce the range of the random stat roll so that I am more likely to see 90-100 main/50-80 vit/35-50 res all. Not asking for max rolls, just something I can put on to get me into Act 2 and beyond (or finish Act 1 for that matter). That doesn't even have to be iLvl 63 gear, imo, but then somehow iLvl 60, or 61 or w/e has to be good enough for me to make some kind of progress.

Edit:
What I'm proposing is for instance, if 200 is a max roll, then divide that into 5 or 6 or even 8, w/e instead of 3. That way if it's say 5, then the range is about 40, on the average roll. This allows for more incremental upgrades so I feel like that 12 hours was worth SOMETHING even if I don't ever see some kind of godly drop. The current system has two few item levels imo and too much overlap so that the roll quality/affix quality has waaaay too much rng and small upgrades are too unlikely.

[Chaosmage]

From a blue post they mentioned something like every item has a "budget" of stat boni.

What is graphed above is said to be that budget. How it works exactly IDK I think it is something like this:
The reason you find many particularly crappy items is that if a item already has lets say +1500 enemy takes damage on hit it already has exausted a considerable amount of that budget even when the stat is useless, if it is high it reduces the budget.

Somehow I suspect that budget analogy is something they came up with to explain that to us "illiterates" and it is really completely randomized, who knows.

[sifuedition]

Not sure if you get into WoW and it's mechanics. The item level budget is well theorycrafted there to the point Blizz is mostly transparent about it now.

iLvl 346 = x stat points and those are distributed over all the stats on the item. Different stats have different weights in consuming those points.

However, Diablo seems to use a slightly modified version of that, as I understand it, which may be wrong and if anyone knows, please correct me.

iLvl determines the range that is possible and is handled on a stat-by-stat basis instead of a total budget for the item. After that, affixes are randomly rolled. Then the stat value is randomly rolled in that range.
So if iLvl 63 has a max of 200 main stat and 80 secondary stat and then a minimum of say 30 main stat and 15 secondary, then iLvl only guarantees that it will be somewhere between those boundaries. There is a large overlap so that a perfect 60 or maybe even as low as 58 could have better stats than a 63. I haven't pursued the datamined tables for the ranges if they even exist, but that was largely the way D2 worked also if I remember correctly, except with less overlap, maybe. Given the number of 50-70 main stat 63s I've seen, I suspect the rolls are weighted away from the higher values as well so that "godly" gear is much more rare.

[pulli]

I'd really hate those item level things from wow - it makes the last part of the game so much better than earlier parts it defeats the PROGRESS and only the GOAL becomes important.

This is also what I hate in you idea: the fact that an item of iLVL 48 can be better than 1 from 63 actually makes farming earlier acts better. If iLVL(MAX) would always be better than what you get in nightmare/hell it means when you start a new character (and face it diablo is not an MMO, so starting new characters is part of the game - it's not about 1 or 5 or even 10 characters which you wish to get as high as possible) you're just bored until you get to inferno, as up to that point the character was useless.

[sifuedition]

Two things I found. One is a quote that I thought was good as an analogy. The other is a link. The link is to a site that I have not checked out the accuracy yet but should give an idea of the ranges for items and affixes.

Quote:
ilvl is just the dice you were rolling with.

A 20 sided die can still roll a 1, a 6 sided die can still roll a 6.

Source: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...8855?page=2#34


http://www.d3inferno.com/affixes/ItemAffixes.html