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a. The rarer it is, the higher the density, and a density percent mod will appear on the keystone tooltip

b. Legendaries aren't necessarily higher density, they have really cool, predetermined layouts, mobs, and perhaps semi-guaranteed treasure (i.e. Stomach of the Flame Giant Keystone: gives a horadric cache with a bunch of fire items/legendaries)

c. Craft keystone at the jeweler (give him a use, they're kind of gems) where:

i. Legendaries will need whites as a base (just like leg crafting now in ros), and other rare and unique crafting materials per cool map design (à la pony level staff)

ii. You can combine 2 (or 3) whites for a blue, 2-3 blues for a yellow

iii. You can re-roll the density on the keystone for mat costs (gold, blood shards, anything really)

d. Let legendaries (or maybe rares too) give you 1-4 (or however many is a good number) allies (sometimes, kind of rare) that can be things like golems, knights, angels, etc.

a. Each different type of elemental skill damage

b. Thorns

c. Life Regen

d. LoH

e. Projectile Speed/Range

f. Splash Damage

g. increased duration of your cc effects

h. etc. <comment cool stats

Quote from Sagathiest

if you hand Lord Voldemort a shitty wand he's still Lord Voldemort. the ideal wand maximises his power but even with a shitty wand he's still one of the most powerful wizards alive....

Quote from elvy

I think no one has mentioned prefixes and suffixes yet, just affixes like they are now in D3.

D2 had many interesting affixes, yes, but it also included the inability of many of the flat out best affixes to roll together. With enough interesting affixes this wouldn't be an issue with D3, however this is not the case.

Let's take, for example, a weapon in D3. It can roll +flat dmg, +dmg%, +crit dmg, +socket, +attack speed, +mainstat. This is the perfect roll for all builds and all characters dps wise, no exceptions. Lifesteal might be more desirable instead of attack speed or mainstat if you can't get any of it elsewhere, but that's it. Any other affix is, by comparison, bad.
Let's now imagine that these all could not roll at the same time. A rare could still have 6 mods, however 3 would have to be prefixes and 3 affixes. You could have 4+ of these mods as prefixes. Some builds would value +flat dmg and +attack speed more than +mainstat or +dmg%. Even if it's still just boring dps increases we're dealing with, now there's some flavor to it. The perfect weapon isn't predetermined for all situations anymore.

This is obviously just a band-aid for the 'we don't have enough interesting stats to throw at you' problem. But it's a pretty good band-aid and it could be argued that even if there were 10 equally desirable stats, giving the itemization team the ability to disallow a few of them from rolling together would be a powerful tool in their hands. A lot more powerful than just disallowing more brackets from the same category of affix to roll together, like it is currently.

Quote from daisychopper

And +skills were never random rolls - you couldn't roll between 1 and 50 +skill. In D3, all relevant stats have pretty huge ranges, which adds to the perception that the itemization sucks.

Quote from Voix

UI plays a huge part with items too

Quote from Bagstone

If I were to build a game, I'd rather copy D3's itemization (or TL1).

Quote from shaggy

Most of this isn't helpful. The guy wants to know what is good about D2s loot (hell, he'll probably take examples from any ARPG, I'd guess) because he wants to use that knowledge to make his game better. Telling someone "everything was perfect with D2 loot" doesn't help because he's obviously not copying D2s loot 1-for-1. He needs specific feedback, not infographs made by some butthurt Blizztroll that aren't even factually correct.

Some things to think about when it comes to loot:

Player Power vs Monster Power
In D2 you could beat the game naked. This meant that the items were sorta like... icing on the cake. An imperfect item was still viable. This is why so many people say stuff like "lower level items were viable!" These items were viable because the game was less difficult. People clamored for higher difficulty in D3, they got it, and one of the side-effects is that it puts more emphasis on attaining items that are "great" instead of just "ok." Which is better? Can't say. I'm not personally a fan of being able to beat a game that's loot-centric without any loot, though.

Unkillable Players
Life Leech. My favorite topic ever. In D2 you could stack this til the cows came home (err no pun intended) and make a character that, in PvM, was exceptionally difficult to kill. Was this good design? I doubt it because it was one of the first things that the D3 team nixed. It was recognized that having characters that could basically stand in anything, and who basically had infinite life and mana with fairly low gear requirements was a bad idea. I'm not saying that D3 got this right, but I would definitely caution you about not throwing stats like Life Leech (or Mana Leech) around on lots of items or, at the very least, keep careful control on it so as not to dillute the game with that particular stat. Then again, you may want to avoid it completely and go in another direction which would also be interesting.

Skills
This is the one area that I think D2 completely outstripped D3, although we will see how Loot 2.0 addresses it. Most of the skill-specific affixes in D3 are completely inadequate and insufferable. They're almost always inferior to other offensive stats and for most builds it's not worth having them. STONE OF JORDAN (D3) is the one major example against this because of how the item is designed. However, the +all skills and +trees were pretty slick because of how they interacted with your other choices. I took exception with +individual skills that granted the ability to gain skills from other classes (Enigma), but in general there was a better interaction. A druid helm that had +Lycanthropy, for example, was great. Allowing everyone to Teleport was a dire mistake. The only downside of this was that +all skills became a pretty ubiquitous stat and was one of the main ways to increase your damage.

Weapons
This is a hot topic since the D3 team decided that weapon damage determines the damage of all your abilities whereas D2 weapons had no bearing on your damage. It is my feeling that it makes no sense for an all-powerful wizard to be running around using a weapon he found at level 4 because it's got better stats. No one complains that armor = defense and that higher level items have more armor. Yet somehow people complain about what amounts to a mechanic that ensures that some dinky level 4 newbie wand isn't the best item in the game. I don't get it, I never will. Is it a bit strange that a fireball from the sky takes your weapon damage into account? Sure. Does it provide better gameplay? Absolutely. As an adventurer why wouldn't your weapon be one of your most important items?

Charms
Never ask people to trade inventory space for power. It was a great idea in theory. In practice it was a massive annoyance. Items should be equipped. If they are to be carried around on your person then put them in some "bag" or "pouch" that is separate from the actual inventory. Do not use inventory space for this. It's infuriating.

That's all I have in terms of actual feedback on the subject, OP. I hope it helps give insight for your items in your game!

Quote from Voix

Stat requirements - do you want a characters stats to affect the items they are able to equip?
Level requirement - do you want a characters level to affect when they can equip the item
Item Quality- do you want all items to be able to roll a specific quality and will you have a unique version of the item?
Attributes given - what kind attributes can the items have in your game? Can a helms defense be enhanced by a modifier?
Attribute rolls - Will the helms defense roll be able to high or low?
Aesthetics - Will an item catch the players eye when on the floor or equipped by another player?

The above are a few very basic things to consider about items inside of D2. To drill down into the nitty gritty parts of items a good way is to compare D2 and D3.

D2 and D3 differ drastically on how they handle items and that is because of the top point, stat requirements.

Due to the removal of the mechanic stat allocation, items could no longer have stat requirements, which means that items in D3 carry purely numerical advantages over one another and the only boundary to equip said item is a level requirement which becomes defunct at level cap.

Level cap is something also different about D2 and D3, whilst there was a hard cap for D2, many items were scattered among different character levels and people very rarely reached the hard cap, a question the developers must of asked themselves is does this add more flavor or does it provide just another annoying roadblock?

We see that there is no boundaries to equip an item outside of character class in D3 and we are left with the question: are boundaries fun?

When we consider stat allocation in conjunction with stat requirements on items, you start to see how customization of your characters stats start to weave themselves into not only a numerical advantage such as having more strength to do more damage but allowing you to equip heavier swords/armors.

This translates into aesthetics, if i can assign points on my character, I can equip a different sword type and therefore have a different look, meaning your investment into a stat has changed the way your character looks in the world, and adds more weight to your decision.

We then consider the inability for the majority of Diablo 2s lifespan to reset stats, thus meaning when you place points into strength to put that sword or armor on you're stuck with it, adding more weight to your decision.

It is shown that items become an embodiment of your decisions and ultimately your character reflects all your cumulative decisions. I can't honestly say Diablo 2 did a tremendous job of this but the concept was there and it added a bit of "heart" to items.

Other games have also used this concept of weaving stats and items together to create a very deep sense of game play, a few examples would be: Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege 1, the best to show this concept in my opinion however is Dark Souls.

I'm not going to say which is better or worse, because sometimes boundaries piss people off, having the freedom of item choice in D3 is nice, stats became less of a choice and more of "dump loads into str and X and the rest in vit" in D2 which means that sometimes a player could become disenchanted with the system and just outright annoyed by it.

The cruel reality is of all this is you just can't please everyone and as a developer it winds me up so much and is something I eventually had to accept, there will always be people who dislike the games i craft and people who want to man hug IRL.

I wish you luck in development of your game

Quote from RaidenFreeman

You made this with Game Maker!?

Is it 2d or 3d? Where did you find the sprites/models? (haven't tried it yet)

Quote from Bagstone

One feature request: could we get a map/minimap?

I also found a little "bug/exploit": monsters stop chasing you too soon, so you can just "outrun" them, they'll stand at the edge of the screen and you can kill them from there without them taking note of you (only played 3 level as of now).

Also, a question: what programming languages/toolkits are you using, and how do you render the graphics? Looks a bit like sprites? Not sure if it's because of my resolution, but lots of text is almost unreadable (my resolution is 1920x1200). I don't care about graphics at all, I actually liked the simplistic layout - it kinda felt like walking through the Diablo 1 dungeons! (Although it never rained in there ;-)).

Quote from Jamoose

Cool stuff. I will try this out when i get home from work