When Diablo 4 launched it was plagued by a variety of issues in almost every regard to game design. Balance, quality of life, monster density, endgame, loot, D4 suffered from subpar design in each of those categories. Fast forward to Season 2 and a great deal of things have been fixed or improved, but we’re about to discover why Diablo 4’s itemization is still its greatest weakness.
To those who may be new to action RPGs, Diablo 4’s loot may seem compelling enough, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find it’s rather shallow. Because in that simplicity and accessibility lies a recipe for a less interesting loot system. This is thanks in part to the affix limitations Blizzard has integrated into D4’s loot systems. Limitations such as, generic number increases, on-hit effects that are very difficult to sense and feel during combat, and a hard limit on number of affixes any one piece of gear can have.
To elaborate, what makes those affixes less impactful is how few of them appear on the game’s rarest of loot. Both Legendaries and Uniques in Diablo 4 only have four regular affixes and then one Legendary or Unique affix to differentiate the two rarities. Look at another Action RPG like Grim Dawn, where a similar Legendary item can have nine affixes and sometimes more.
On top of that, Grim Dawn’s best gear also comes with built in skills. These skills aren’t just simple +1 or +2 to skills in your skill tree but are complete stand-alone on-hit effects with low cooldowns and powerful effects not tied to your own class skills. For example, in Grim Dawn a Legendary item could grant a 10% chance on-hit to cause an area of effect attack that does two kinds of physical damage, with a bleed and a 30% slow over 3 seconds. It’s clear that in Diablo 4, there aren’t enough surprises for the player to look forward to outside of the min and max rolls for each affix.
In comparison, let’s look at the ARPG Last Epoch’s Unique and Exotic gear rarities. Like Diablo 4, Uniques in LE have more unique and powerful affixes that can’t be found on lower rarity items. Unlike D4 though, LE’s Uniques can have two or more said unique affixes. Even better though are LE’s Exalted items that are the only ones in game to have tier six and seven affixes that are much more potent than tiers one through five on lower rarity items.
Meanwhile, Diablo 4’s crafting systems also falls short compared to its modern contemporaries. Take the ARPG Last Epoch again for example, rare items and below use affix shards to change an item’s affix or upgrade the affix tier up to tier five. Which when combined with crafting Runes and Glyphs gives the players almost complete control as to how a crafted item would turn out—a far cry from Diablo 4’s three random affixes given during crafting, yuck.
But where something like Last Epoch truly shines and Diablo 4 fumbles even more is how crafting endgame gear works. Sure, in Diablo 4 one can switch out the Aspect of a piece of Legendary gear with another. In a vacuum this doesn’t feel terrible, but it’s certainly barebones compared to the following example. Last Epoch handles end-game item crafting by allowing players to take a Unique drop with one to four Legendary Potential and combine it with the tier 6 and 7 affixes of an Exalted item.
The result is a new rarity of item called Legendary that feels as much as that name suggests. This is because a Legendary item has all of the affixes of the Unique with up to four of the Exalted item’s boosted affixes. Much like Grim Dawn’s best items, LE’s Legendaries can have up to 9 affixes and at that point Diablo 4’s stingy, rigid item drops can’t live up to that. It especially doesn’t help when a majority of Diablo 4’s Legendary Aspects feel bland enough that they could have been in the class skill trees to begin with.
If Diablo 4 can overhaul their Legendary and Unique items to include more affixes of greater variety, power, and utility then it has a shot at actually having loot worth getting excited about. Maybe we will see such loot overhauls in Diablo 4’s first expansion.
