How does loot roll its stats? And what can Blizzard do to make it more fun?
Kripparian just released a video explaining how the loot is rolled in the game and how that affects your loot. All too often your loot ends up being vendored or just not picked up, and that takes away from the whole game-experience. When you have a game, where the endgame is entirely based on getting better and better loot, until you have best-in-slot-gear in every slot, you really need a well-functioning loot-system. Not a system where 99% of the drops are useless and the 1% is godly.
There are a few ways to make this work, and there are ways to not make it work. The interesting thing is what is Blizzard going to go for?
Kripparian explains the mess that is the loot system in Diablo 3
Diablo 3 is based on RNG – random number generation. This comes out in the dungeon layouts, where most of them are random, the elite packs you meet, which roll different suffixes every time you meet one, and the RNG most certainly rears its ugly head when loot drops. All of this RNG is also why your loot sucks most of the time, as Kripparian explains:
Take the lowly treasure goblin:
Everybody loves Treasure Goblins and their differently colored cousins!
Everybody loves finding them! He can drop anything from 2-5 items and then everything goes all RNG from there: the 2-5 items each have a chance to be a rare, legendary or set item. This is affected by MF, so the more MF you have, the more rare and above loot you will get. The 2-5 items also have a chance to roll different iLvls, and then we finally get to the juicy parts. When the iLvl and rarity has been determined, you get anything from 2-6 affixes on the gear itself.
Affixes are what determines how good the item is. apart from how well the base DPS of the weapon rolled. If we take weapons, affixes include +damage, %attackspeed, crit chance and crit damage, sockets, stats, life on hit, life on death. Just %attackspeed ranges from 1-11% on non-white items. Interestingly enough white items can still roll high %attackspeed stats:
White items weren’t nerfed in the recent IAS patch. Interesting, but useless fact.
I just searched the AH to find that item. It’s useless, but still a fun thing to find. But you need a few things to get a great weapon, and all of those things are range-bound from bad to godly and anything in between. And you need all of them on your item, and you need all of them to be good to godly in order to break the 1500 DPS glass ceiling.
Everything needs to come together to go above and beyond 1500 DPS
All of those good stats maybe have a 1 in 1000 each to roll well. But before they get a chance to get rolled, you need get iLvl 63, a high base DPS and then you need 3-4 of them to roll that well at the same time to get a godly weapon. So a 1500 DPS weapon is maybe 1 in a million drop…..of iLvl 63 weapons. That is a lot of farming and that is also why your loot sucks.
But what is Blizzard going to do about it?
This is the tricky part. I don’t mind it being so difficult getting the 1% gear in this game. The best gear is supposed to be hard to get and not everyone should run around with best-in-slot gear in every slot. That would seriously diminish the appeal of the game. So Blizzard should stay the fuck away from the 1% and focus on getting the 99% to not suck.
As it is now, the 1% is not enough to make up for the mess that is the 99%. I say mess, because it isn’t fun getting vendor-thrash all the time. You just end up not picking up loot unless it is yellow. That is a serious flaw in the game and needs to be addressed. Blizzard can either do this by fiddling with the 1% and make it bigger, as in higher drop rates for better chances at getting the best-in-slot gear. As I said before, that would be a mistake and would diminish the gaming experience.
Instead Blizzard needs to work on the 99% and make it not crap. Make it usable, by using it for crafting. This is a lot of work, since they would need to revamp the entire crafting system and somehow make lower level crafted items desirable. With such a short leveling curve as there is in Diablo 3, people won’t be using crafted gear for their alts. Cheap drops from the AH or in-game will suffice, since you will outlevel your gear swiftly.
So we need a way to make it appealing to stay in a level range or we need gear that levels up with you. WoW has this in its Heirloom gear and its twink PVP:
- Make Heirloom gear available in Diablo 3, make it character-, or at least account-bound to keep the turnover down and make it require massive amounts of crafting materials from all levels of crafting materials.
- Introduce low-level PVP brackets in Diablo 3, like in WoW, and introduce crafted PVP gear for these ranges. We don’t know if Blizzard will introduce specific PVP stats, but if they do they could be added to Heirloom gear, so there would a PVE edition and a PVP edition of Heirloom gear.
I am sure there are many other ways to make the loot system better, so what do you think? In your opinion, what is wrong with it and what can be done?
Swing by Facebook and join the discussion in the Diablo 3 Farming FB group and get farming, ya lazy bum!
I agree completely. Useful drops being few and far between would be one thing; lottery odds is another thing entirely. For a game based so heavily on the gear you have, this oversight is very disappointing. I’ve gotten a couple legendary items since 1.0.3b….I have several potential buyers; they all just happen to be the in game vendors.
You’re lucky. 100 hours in and I haven’t seen a single legendary drop.
I agree that the loot needs to change and that there needs to be less trash.
However, the ideas to make the gear like the wow gear is awful. Low lvl pvp is only fun for the kids decked out in heirloom gear that easily outmatch the average upcoming player. Terrible idea, as it was for wow. Making things account bound will ruin the economy more so than it already is (if that’s possible) as people will just stop trading gear all together. This isn’t wow where the economy can be based almost entirely on commodities.
They need to give blues a chance at actually being usable. Less of a chance than rares, but still a chance. Idk why they feel the need to tie them down to the 2 affixes. Why not 3 or 4? Especially for high item levels. Also they can adjust the ranges on the rolls. Why 1-11% ias? Why not 5-11%? Again, maybe even just for item lvl 62 and 63. maybe totally random isn’t the way to go. Because right now it is as u say, 99% shit and 1% godly. Why not 60% shit, 29% usable and 1% godly?
This game may already be in the shitter as the economy has absolutely spiraled out of control. But I’ve been in act 1 inferno for about a month and won’t be handling act2 until about a 300million gold makes its way to my stash. Items are too expensive and gold is inflating day by day. Please blizzard, figure something out. Or hire me and I’ll fucking do it. Christ on a cross.
Give us a chance at finding some usable gear!
It’s so disappointing to finally see an iLvl 62 or 63 item drop after killing many mobs in d3 to only find out that the iLvl 63 weapon with a base dps of 300 or so has only 400 dps when ID’d. just visited the diablo 3 official site and it looks like they’re losing employees. they’re hiring! apply and fix the loot!
You don’t need 300 millions of gold to do act 2, at least on a barb, cause I recently killed Diablo and I can assure you that ilvl 63 gear in all slots is not needed.
The main flaw of this game is that just to progress into an Inferno act, you need that act gear.
Even act 1 is not doable if you are in full Hell gear!
And worse than that, you need A LOT more than an act gear to effectively farm that act, I mean, I killed Diablo and I still die pretty easily on some act 3 rare packs.
And even if people says “Oh well, I will farm Act 1 now that it has higher drop rates for ilvl 63 items” chances are that you’ll be in the endless lottery thing even more.
I agree that items should be made less random, because, as others said, that’s not wow, and imho there’s too much RNG in random affixes + totally random stat ranges.
One thing you didn’t touch on is that this is actually working as designed…
The Real Money auction house thrives when users aren’t getting the drops they need.
This is part of why it costs 35000+ gold to repair in Inferno… it keeps people new to inferno broke.. while they farm for gear they will never get… they might walk over to the real money auction house… bilzzard gets a cut.
I’m about done with the game because of this.
I think this is stupid, i’ve played for over 200 hours and haven’t seen a good legendary… Rerolling to GF lol xd
I agree with the article and the sentiments in the comments. Something needs to be done but I’ll be damned if I know what. I played hundreds of hours already but I barely had over 3 million at one time. I spent a few millions to painfully gear up to the point where Act 1 Inferno is trivial but that’s still not good enough for Act 2. Yeah, I’m poor because I don’t play the AH. So just by farming early Inferno I’m looking at hundreds more hours before I can progress to Act 3 and beyond. That is, unless I decide to spend some real money on gear because, let’s face it, there’s no way in hell I can come up with tens and hundreds of millions of gold, short of botting.
What GTeye said. On the nose.
I agree with everything in the article, yet I expect that nobody at Blizzard feels that anything needs fixing. The game is designed to draw people in and bring them to the RMAH. Blizzard has absolutely zero incentive to make blue drops more useful when there are dozens of powerful weapons and scads of killer armor just waiting to be purchased.
I’d be thrilled with 90% crap, 9% usable, 1% godly. Sadly, that ain’t gonna happen.
I agree with Darth and the rest of you (mostly). However, I’ve played for a few hundred hours and managed to get at least 6 legendary drops, one Tal Rasha piece and one Immortal King sword (none of which I use on my wiz). Most of these dropped in A1 Inferno, which I can farm endlessly with my wiz after a few AH gold equipment purchases, high in Int, Vit, AR and MF (and a couple with high armor values). I did manage to sell one piece for just over 4 mil gold, and another for about 600k, which let me buy one nice Oculus Ring and a decent weapon.
What sucks is that even with the decent gear I have, I still can’t solo Act 2, and forget about A3. I managed to get halfway through A3 in multiplayer, after dying about 100 times and dropping about 500k gold on repairs. Why should I even bother if the endgame loot is as crappy as it sounds?
I guess I’ll stick with A1 and slowly buy up all the good MF gear I need, at ridiculous gold prices (never real money….so there Blizz!), and then sooner or later (hopefully) Blizz will fix this issue and I’ll be good to go.
It would be amazing if D3 actually had a 1% chance for godly drops! It’s more like 0.0001% or even less for godly stuff, 0.99% somewhat sellable for a few 100k and 99% vendor trash.
Hi
Bounding gears limits us and I dislike it, Because as we gain new items we, want to sell old ones to people who demand for them.
Instead the best way is to pun an life time for items (that can’t be repaired) with low life amounts to very long for legendary (months). All items after reaching to the end of their life will broke forever and must replaced by new ones. This way has several advantage :
1- There will be input and output in the system to prevent from overflowing medium gears and downing their price.
2- Unlike bounding, you can resell you gears.
3- Players with high end gears always have motivation to get new gears because they can’t stand on top forever.
4- Top quality items can drop more and satisfy players with better rewarding, without spoiling game. Rate (Balance) of income and outgo can be determined.
i think that 1% of all drops is waaay more than anyone can imagine in game, the more items get tweaked, by drops or stats, the more prices will go drastically up and trading will get diminished, everything is pretty well balanced in that everyone gets the SAME ODDS, thats the beautiful part, u cant just play the game and not learn how to use the AH, ur gunna lose ur money real quick, so it encourages economic play and flipping items just as much as “farming” which i think is kinda fun… especially when the patches will do MUCH MUCH MORE!
I think they should dump blue and perhaps even white drops from Inferno – perhaps at MP1 and above. Everything you pickup – should be able to be vendored and reused in that particular difficulty – this means when you vendor something in inferno, it gives inferno level materials only. I think this would return some power to the blacksmith (who I believe is almost useless now), and people would farm more items, as well as money while they are leveling or even just plain old farming. Long story short – anything less than rare drops in inferno is a waste of unused space.