What makes the item system so bad?

[Archon_Wing]

I'm sorry that my analogy is too abstract. I am pointing out that the item changing is moving as a circle, aka no progression.

For example, a 30% increase in offense, and a 15% decrease in defense power is progress. It is very likely that you may use your skills to get further. You made a sacrifice, but the cost to benefit ratio is clearly to that of the benefit side. Some may even argue that a 40% decrease in defense is fine too, depending on what you are dealing with.

However, increasing combat abilities by a marginal amount and reducing your treasure hunting ability (Gf/MF) by a marginal amount effectively leads to no real gain. It's just like rearranging the same thing and realizing you just spent your gold on nothing, really.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to pick on you, but the economist in my head is having fits. You only trade one piece of gear for another if you prefer it. (otherwise, why trade?) And you presumably only buy new gear when it's better than your old gear. Perhaps you have to do multiple swaps, in order to keep your offense and defense in balance, but slowly, better gear edges out worse.

I'll repeat again. 6 affixes makes the situation difficult when many affixes are basically mandatory. It just doesn't allow people enough leeway to suit their playing style. I'll use a less controversial example this time. Single resists in general do not provide as much resists as all resist. This doesn't allow stuff like say, someone who specifically is built for a certain section to withstand arcane attacks in a party. Sure you can stack both all resist and arcane resist, but then it still becomes someone wearing all resist items that happen to have arcane resists. All resists is just a better trait even when defending against a particular element. In addition, you can't have more than one of a single elemental resist on an item, furthering the superiority of all resist.

More affixes would not fix that problem. (Fewer affixes might help, by making you balance your stats between pieces more). What would solve it, is more balanced affixes. If you buffed the single resist affixes massively, the resist all/resist one gap would not be so big.

-Jester

Point one. True. But if we're going by that route, then I feel that the best use of resources is to not improve my gear for an extremely indefinite period of time. Also, regardless of the quality of the itemization, this would hold true regardless.

This is not the same as a frequent complaint of people that prices are too expensive or something. For the most part, the rarity of the items reflects the price. But also given the fact that there have been tons of non-legit items have been dumped kinda shows that the incredible difficulty of getting items that are considered "upgrades". It goes beyond drop rates or anything. Not only do you want affixes of a high magnitude to be dropped, but they must also drop in a particular order on the right item. Even if inferno dropped only 61-63 items, the problem would be masked but still remain. The game doesn't know what a "good" item is. It's just that the box that defines "very good" items is very small.

I'm still going to hold onto the belief that having more affixes on higher level items would allow them to be more distinguishable than the gradual upgrade of the same item with different names.

Point two. Yes, it's more of an issue of balancing. That was another issue to speak of. Ultimately, I should have just stuck with my Diablo 2 description of rares.

On a side note, this is why the legendary buff is a good one. It allows more consistency in a itemization pool that is already heavily reliant on chance.