06-13-2012, 06:29 PM
I (hopefully) want to take this in a direction other than the standard "drops suck", "drops are too rare", etc etc.
My main frustration with the drop system in D3, is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Blizzard has laid out what the drop rates in 1.03 will be for Inferno, but that doesn't seem to help for the rest of the game.
In D2 (I hate making this comparison), if I was looking for a Buriza, I knew roughly where to farm for my best chances of having one drop. In D3, if I'm looking for a pair of (Mr.) Boj Angles, I haven't the slightest clue what mobs / breakables can drop them. They're an ilvl 41, clvl 39. I've gotten drops in Inferno that require clvl 45. People say they drop in NM. Logically then, I can deduce that they could drop anywhere from A1/NM to possibly A4/Hell.
That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems to be slightly on point. If you make the loot system so broad that you're routinely getting stuff you can't use, or you have no clue where to farm for stuff you do want, then people resort to the lowest common denominator: AH or Chest/Goblins.
Blizzard constantly states that they want people to play the game the "right" way, aka killing monsters for fun and profit. I completely agree. When the players have no direction other than "grind your face off in Inferno", that's where we start to see more problems though.
I know the game's only been out a month. I know the resources for D2 took quite a while to build up. I know that the Arreat Summit didn't come into being overnight, and (iirc) was a post-LOD addition, after most of the game data was readily available on other sites. BUT, it's hard to transition from an almost fully transparent game, to one that has us blindly fumbling around in the dark again. That might be the biggest set-back of D3, and the super-random loot system doesn't do anything at all to help that.
My main frustration with the drop system in D3, is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Blizzard has laid out what the drop rates in 1.03 will be for Inferno, but that doesn't seem to help for the rest of the game.
In D2 (I hate making this comparison), if I was looking for a Buriza, I knew roughly where to farm for my best chances of having one drop. In D3, if I'm looking for a pair of (Mr.) Boj Angles, I haven't the slightest clue what mobs / breakables can drop them. They're an ilvl 41, clvl 39. I've gotten drops in Inferno that require clvl 45. People say they drop in NM. Logically then, I can deduce that they could drop anywhere from A1/NM to possibly A4/Hell.
That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems to be slightly on point. If you make the loot system so broad that you're routinely getting stuff you can't use, or you have no clue where to farm for stuff you do want, then people resort to the lowest common denominator: AH or Chest/Goblins.
Blizzard constantly states that they want people to play the game the "right" way, aka killing monsters for fun and profit. I completely agree. When the players have no direction other than "grind your face off in Inferno", that's where we start to see more problems though.
I know the game's only been out a month. I know the resources for D2 took quite a while to build up. I know that the Arreat Summit didn't come into being overnight, and (iirc) was a post-LOD addition, after most of the game data was readily available on other sites. BUT, it's hard to transition from an almost fully transparent game, to one that has us blindly fumbling around in the dark again. That might be the biggest set-back of D3, and the super-random loot system doesn't do anything at all to help that.