As more and more people hit level 60, it is becoming apparent that Blizzard may have drastically and unintentionally trivialized end-game weapons and items. Relatively common Magic weapons found on vendors and elite packs are cropping up at very fast rates, and they are better than the best Legendaries in the game.
All that is needed to get the highest DPS weapons in the game is to hit level 60 and kill a few inferno packs and hope a weapon drops with a + damage mod on it (these are relatively common).
There is a thread about this issue on the main forums that has yielded a Bashiok response:
 Blizzard Quote: |
||
| Intended design is for an end-game characters to have a mixture of set/legendary, rare, and crafted items. Legendary items are commonly not going to be the best items. It’s a title that denotes a named item, with set stats, and a unique model. It does not mean they’re the best items. Completely random rares will be the best items in the game if they roll up the right stats. …. The problem is legendary items are complete garbage currently. It was fun to find a great legendary in D2. It is no fun to find rares. It isn’t hard to understand, legendaries should be much, much better then they are, and there should be more of them. Common, Blue weapons having double the damage on them then the “best” legendary weapons is a broken design, if your goal is to make a fun game. I will take that feedback. Thank you. As to the “more of them”, Diablo III at launch has more Legendaries than Diablo II had at launch. I’m sure we’ll add more as time goes on, but I do not agree that we don’t already have a lot. If you’d like to give any specifics I’d be happy to write them down. |
||
I fully agree with the sentiment in that thread.
Here are just two of the MANY examples below:
Considering how much rarer Legendaries are than magical weapons, it looks like someone really dropped the ball on this one. Here is the “best” Legendary sword in the game, Azurewrath:
Even a perfectly rolled Azurewrath has less DPS than a mere magical weapon. While some might say, “But legendaries have other stats!!”, everybody knows that Weapon damage is the most important thing on a weapon, and the bottom line is a common magical item should not have that much DPS, in comparison to insanely rare Legendary items.
This is a big problem that will have permanent implications on the longevity of the game. This needs to be fixed before more of these easy-to-get insanely powerful weapons further contaminate the item pool.
As many will recall, I have previously written and been very vocal about how having all of these balanced and good affixes in the game, and not having crappy affixes to offset the % chances to get good items is potentially game-breaking.
Here is what I have previously written:
To be quite blunt, I am not at all a fan of the homogenization of item stats in Diablo 3. I don’t like that every single affix equally benefits every class and spec. Why? Because it’s uninteresting, boring and simplified to the point of having little to no diversity. It’s trivial and basic, turning a complex and interesting item system into a simple and basic decision that you can’t possibly get wrong. It leads to items being so generic that their value is just a matter of taste, rather than being actually superior for X spec. In short, it’s boring and very MMO-like.In Diablo 2, an item had to have the following to be awesome:
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.
In 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.
Update: A 1027 DPS 1hand Magic sword. So if you had any doubts previously, here you go:
(US, AUD, GBP, EUR) 
