A few articles ago, I wrote about how item Affixes/stats in Diablo 3 appeared to be too well-balanced against each other, and how that would dramatically reduce the level of awesomeness of those super-rare, freakishly-lucky affix combination items. Is Blizzard purposely lowering the “Spike level” of random items and flattening them out a bit so that they are closer together in quality?

For example, in Diablo 2 there were plenty of Affixes that sucked for X class, and even some that sucked period (Light Radius etc). Not only did this make Affix combinations very important, but it was further intensified by the fact that item-types also had to match the right affix combinations, as they had varying degrees of usefulness for different classes, such as Lighter armors for Sorcs/casters (since they didn’t want to pump loads of points in to strength just to equip them), and more plainly obvious ones such as 2-handed heavy weapons being useful for Barbs/Druids, and useless for casters. 1 Handed swords and shields for Paladins etc. So basically, for an item to be awesome it had to fit a long list of criteria to be awesome, which were so difficult to perfect that these “near-perfect” items were literally one in a million.

The Criteria List for a random item in D2:

A) The right Affix combinations, and little to no wasted affixes (ie caster-friendly stats to match a caster-item, rather than strength, lifesteal etc.)
B) The right item-type to match the affixes. (caster stats for light armor, melee stats for 2h-heavy weaps etc)
C) The top-end affix range for the affixes (ie 290 out of 300% enhanced damage over say, 83 out of 300%)
D) A large number of Affixes.

So if you found a Rare 2-hand axe, you would needed it to have melee friendly stats, and not have wasted affixes like Faster Cast Rate and + Energy etc. That alone had low probability, since there were so many affixes in the pool, and rolling multiple affixes that complemented the class/item was very rare. On top of this, because it is a Weapon-class item, it MUST have the Enhanced damage stat or it is trash. So the requirement of having that Affix roll on the item dramatically reduces the probability further. And finally, you would need it to have high-range stats of its affixes. And the more you had the better. This criteria is so difficult to achieve that it made the item-system in Diablo 2 virtually unconquerable (until the super-powerful Runes came in a later patch). You would always be able to get better items.

Diablo 3 on the other hand, thus far has very generic, balanced and equally useful affixes no matter what your class or spec is. In fact, before the recent changes to Attribute points, every single affix was more or less equally useful for every single class/spec. In addition to this, item-types in Diablo 3 are far more homogenized, meaning that every class can use virtually every item-type (some restrictions). Wizards can use big 2h swords. Armors have no requirements, usable by all. This further moves away from the D2-style model of low-probability awesome items. It means that when you roll up a rare item, all of its stats are useful, and the criteria for an item to be good is drastically lowered to only one thing: High Stat Ranges.

Here is an experiment for you: Rank the following 4 Xbows in order of best to worst:

The previous Attribute system that comprised of Attack, Precision, Precision and Vitality was nothing short of a homogenization disaster. Thankfully, Blizzard picked up on this during testing, in which they no doubt saw how boring and pointless items were when every stat point was comparatively useful for everyone. You could take all the gear off of your Wizard and throw it on a Barbarian and it would be exactly the same in terms of usefulness. That is the definition of terrible.

The attribute changes were a very welcome sight, but I still believe that far more diversification needs to be done on affixes and items. They are all (save for Attributes) still generic and homogenized for every class. They are still equally balanced and useful for not only all classes, but even most specs. I for one don’t want to be traversing the AH and seeing a million comparatively good Rare Armors that all look bland and generic against each other at a cheap and nasty price.

Or is that the intention?

There is speculation from the public that Blizzard may be doing this on purpose to make item trading more frequent by “de-spiking” the random-item market. So instead of having a few, low probability good rares for quite expensive price-tags, they are making many, high probability good rares en-mass for cheap to spur AH sales, particularly now that Blizzard get a static flat fee.

Do I agree with this speculation? Not really. I think at the most it may have played a tiny role, but I truly think Blizzard are only now just seeing how well-balanced affixes are bad. It is seemingly normal to make that mistake, after-all balance is a good thing right? I think Blizzard are now gearing towards diversifying item stats much more, starting with the core attributes that they recently announced. We know that they are smack bang in the middle of a major items pass as we speak, and are fine-tuning affixes. So I take some comfort in that.

I am a big advocate for diverse and deep affix pools (as you probably noticed). I think it is the most important thing for a Diablo-style item system. It is important that the best random items are VERY rare, and that the player always feels like there is something out there to hunt for. Otherwise the depth of the game suffers and you end up with generic, WoW-style items that are about as exciting as hemorrhoids.

At the end of the day though, Players will always be the ones driving the item-economy. So if the item-gap is smaller, than the pricing for those slightly better items will always scale up quite high. We saw this in Diablo 2, when nearly every unique item with variable stat ranges were far more valuable when they had close to the maximum amount of stat points that were available on the stat-range of the item. And “perfect” versions were exceedingly valuable, sometimes worth more than 5x the price of a not-so-perfect unique of the same type. With many Legendary items in Diablo 3 likely to have 1 or more random Affix mods, this is surely going to make the Diablo 3 Economy very interesting.