Hotfix 6/28 -- Item drop rate changes

[Lissa]

Lissa, there are a heck of a lot less affixes now than before, not more. The main issue is game balance. Inferno requires EXTREMELY high gear stats that require all players to have absurdly high DPS, absurdly high armour and absurdly high resistances. No exceptions. As such, only very particular affix combinations (eg +xxx-xxx damage and +dmg% and +crit dmg% and +primary stat) allow you to reach these minimums. As a result, anything that is not perfect will just not let you progress. In Diablo/Diablo II, equipment was far less important (build dependent, of cause). As such, it did not overly matter if you had light radius affixes, or other such largely meaningless ones that were removed in Diablo III.

As for this hotfix, I am not impressed. As others have said, it completely fails to address any of the core issues and shows a complete lack of comprehension to what they are. Perhaps the signal to noise ratio is so bad that Blizzard are having trouble filtering out what the actual issues are.

There are a lot more now, not less. Take a look at the AH some time and search on just magic so you can see some of the affixes. There are a lot more than there were in D1, probably more than D2 as well. Just to give an example of this, let's look at +attribute Affixes:

You have a Prefix for:
Str
Dex
Int
Vit
Str + Vit
Dex + Vit
Int + Vit
Str + Dex
Str + Int
Dex + Int

You have a Suffix for:
Str
Dex
Int
Vit

In D1 you had a Suffix for
+Str
+Dex
+Int
+Vit
+all stats

you have thrice as many Affixes in D3 than you ever did in D1 for stats alone, and this is just a small subset of what you have now.

This is why getting that optimal item is much more difficult now, because you need so many specific affixes to show up and you get a maximum of 6 affixes on an item.