What makes the item system so bad?

[Archon_Wing]

So, what can I do to upgrade on this, if I want more gold find, or just a better shield with similar stats? Bigger numbers is one, but that's why the itemization sucks. The strength is the most useless trait here. So I can swap one trait at most. What if I want +blocking and crit chance? Whoops. Gold find has gotta to go. It can't coexist. And even if the shield has the dream traits, if there's only 10% blocking, it's not going to get bought...

...Ultimately, upgrading just means seeking a duplicate of your item with somewhat bigger numbers.

This confuses the hell out of me. You list out a multitude of options you have when deciding how to upgrade your items. Very real, hard choices you would need to make about how to progress your character. If you want to improve one aspect of your character you may have to make sacrifices in another area.

And the conclusion you come to is that the only option is to not make a choice at all. You have choices. You can sacrifice your gold find and grab 8+ Crit chance. You can look for a shield that has +Life %. Looking at your character page you have serious options, across the board, on upgrade paths for your gearing. But yes, it does require big choices about your whole gear set and it does mean finding a good balance between what you gain and what you sacrifice.

Speaking from personal experience I've been trying to find places to slot in %CC Reduction on my gear. I'm up to 21% right now and if I win a couple possible auctions I can probably get that up to 40%+. At that rate this affix stated at that level will have a huge impact on how many champion fights go for me. I see people every day complain about monsters with Jailer, Frozen, etc. Even going so far as to say that these abilities should be removed from the game, and yet nobody bothers to try to gear for the gear stat that directly counters those abilities.

Problem is that I feel like these sacrifices just lead me on a merry go round. Giving up one for the other, and it just doesn't matter.

Sure, I can dump a few things. But what's the point of a shield with crit that has low Dex? A 200 dps boost? Okay, I can go for all out damage but even up to the 10 million range at least one or more of the following: the block rate, dex, vitaility, and/or resistances are mediocre, excluding gold find as a search item. (an amount I don't feel like devoting the effort to). Might as well dual wield at this point.

I admit it's partially my fault, but any attempted upgrade on my part simply never lead to anything interesting and I end up going back to my shield. I simply dislike the concept of going in without a modicum of gold/magic find. Even if I kill at my best case scenario of 20% faster, it's not worth the time to spend all that gold. If I spent 5 million gold, I'd to earn 25 million extra just to break even! Can I really get my dps up to 24k (and this isn't counting any survivability sacrificed)? Maybe I should dual wield instead. Edit: Well, actually there's a good shield for 1 mil (10% crit, vit, dex, somewhat less dual resist, and a good +500 more armor) that popped up-- 15% block rate does seem kinda annoying though. A while back, I may have jumped on this shield for the sake of clearing act 3/4

Then again, I guess I'm out of the "progression" stage. I can already do act 4 with gold find on; so my goal is to well... naturally want more.

But this isn't about me. My point is that 6 affixes just have a hard time succeeding in a world that demands pretty much every roll be good, and thus most rare items are doomed before they are generated. Int on a barb item? Oops.