Itemization

[mjdoom]

Just saw an awesome post on the Raids and Dungeons forums.  Blizzard has hinted (in their reasoning of the +def nerf) at the ways they come up with items, using mod values to determine how much of what can be added to an item.  Hyzenthlei worked out the numbers, and shows you Blizzard's values for stats, and how much value blues versus greens can have and such.
Snippit:
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Just read through this thread and the most interesting thing to me was the restrictions of the formula on increases in ilvl. If the system stays in place as currently constituted (linear increase in ilvl, exponential increase in value of stats as a component of ilvl) item improvements will grind to a halt as one poster mentioned. Without running any numbers it seems that by tier 3 or 4 the differences in items will be almost entirely insignificant...

This says to me that Bliz has to change their item formula in some way at some point, and probably fairly soon with Silithus on the horizon. If they do this in any logical way it stands to reason that tier 2 may indeed be improved as people are apparently clamoring for (I personally haven't looked too closely at Tier 2 gear yet). These improvements may not come exactly how the player base wants them (with Bliz you'd almost expect it to not be what you want) but any improvements will be welcome. I'm reminded of a voice chat conversation just the other day about Bliz's lack of foresight in previous Diablo games and it seems to have caught them again. The budget system seems to be a good idea but some of the implementation details are seriously flawed as the system scales.

This almost leads me to pity the poor raid dungeon designers. Any of us who have dealt with Blackwing Lair have probably been frustrated in some way (probably an understatement even). Part of this is that the dungeon is designed with some of the harder encounters very early which slow any significant progress. But in light of knowing more about itemization it stands to reason that the guilds that are finally getting some of these encounters down and progressing are actually gaining less power overall with the loot and thus it is not necessarily making those encounters any easier. This is in contrast to earlier dungeons where early attempts required high technical working as a group but as your gear improved you could blow through the encounters easily.

It seems that the current itemization scheme will put a quick halt to this and will also make developers of new dungeons walk a tightrope of giving more challenging encounters while not making them impossible. The current system means that Tier 3 and Tier 4 dungeons would be forced to have similar difficulty to BWL (and not anything more) because gear is simply not improving fast enough to make encounters significantly more difficult without making them impossible. Unless it is Bliz's plan that as each tier progresses you need more and more (and almost to the point of basically ALL) of the loot from the previous tier to even stand a chance at the current tier.

- mjdoom