Zero(pS)

The purpose of this multi-part essay is to deeply analyse how some of the core systems and features of Diablo 3 work, and most importantly try to undestand what was the thought process of the developers that have lead them to make the current game-defining decisions.

I’m also going to analyse the problems separately. It’s not uncommon to see someone putting all the issues in the same basket (skill balance, stats system, AHs, drops, randomization), and that makes it even harder to pinpoint a solution to each of them.

Always considering the more common feedback from the playerbase, to better comprehend how most players feel about these choices, and most importantly debunk some of the misconceptions regarding these systems and how they affect the gameplay.

All that to improve the reader’s understanding of the current situation of the game, what can and should be changed to improve the experience. So the players can provide a much clearer and focused feedback to the developers.

A change that could, and should, considerably hasten the modifications needed to make the game a much better experience – which I’m quite sure we all want.

For the character sheet damage, essentially the game takes your Weapon Base Damage (which is random, having a minimum and maximum value), uses its base attackspeed to determine a Damage/Second parameter, and then applies all of the offensive bonuses in a certain order. These bonuses are your Main Class Stat (Str, Dex or Int), flat damage modifiers (present in Rubies, Mojos, Sources and Jewelry), % bonus to elemental damage (scheduled to change), bonus to critical hit chance, critical hit damage and attackspeed.

For the effective HP, which is essentially how much damage you can take considering the raw damage from monsters: the game takes you Vitality stat as the base, multiplies it by 35 (at level 60), then applies all Life% bonuses. The raw damage dealt to that number is then reduced by Armor and Resistances, and it’s not uncommon for this reduction to reach 85% nowadays, meaning that your effective HP (with 35k Health) can quite easily surpass 175-200 thousand HP (and not the 35k it shows on your health globe).

One of the more common complaints from the players is how shallow both the Stats and the Item Affix systems are in Diablo 3. A lot of players say that the way the game is currently set, all of us want a combination of preset stats on our items, essentially removing the choice component of the equation.

It is said that we all want items with a big bonus to our class Main Stat, and then a combination of other offensive and defensive stats (depending on gear slot) – these are our primary stats.

Every other item affix (pickup radius, magic find, specific resistances, life per second, thorns, gold find, bonus to skills) is secondary. It’s hard to value them, to factor them into the equation, because they don’t increase our general offensive power (only specific skills) or our general defensive power (only specific resistances); also many of these are utility stats, like pickup radius or magic find, and some are outright too weak for the current “metagame” (I’ll elaborate on those much later).

In this context, every item that does not have a combination of a few of the more important (henceforth called primary) affixes, either DPS or EHP related depending on the gear slot, is deemed “useless” by the players.

And that’s it not incorrect...

... but it’s not necessarily bad either, and I shall explain. Calm down, don’t kill me!

The reason I say that’s not necessarily bad, from a customization standpoint, is because we have so much power to determine our character stats at any point in time.

Imagine that they gave us this “slider” system, where we are free to slide our stats all the way from the Offense spectrum to the Defense spectrum. This is both our “Stats” system reimagined, as well as our stat respec system.

It’s mostly a Binary System, that’s why it seems so simple and not deep enough. These (henceforth called) Primary stats were designed to either give you offensive or defensive Power.

An example: if for any reason we “feel” (in fighting) that our character is too frail, we can swap a piece of gear (say a Ring with average damage, mainstat and Crit Chance/Crit Dmg) that gives us a ton of offensive stats in favour of defensive ones. Imagine a ring with +75 Resist All, 280 Armor, 170 Vitality, 400 Life on Hit and bonus Fire Resistance.

And there goes the slider slightly (heavily?) in favour of defense. We can keep doing this in other slots, trading stats and fine tuning offense/defense, until we reach an acceptable point for the “difficulty” we’re facing. And suddenly that Fire Chains or Molten affix that was destroying us before would be very manageable.

This stat system (in particular) isn’t a way to customize what you’re going to do in the game, or how you fight the enemies, but instead it’s a way of saying how effective you are at either doing damage or taking it.

The whole Offense vs Defense might seem very 2 dimensional, but then again isn’t everything in an action focused game? Isn’t it all about either attacking or defending yourself?

“But I can’t have a crazy build or specific traits! I FEEL like everyone else, and that sucks!!!”

From my point of view, that’s a task majorly left for Active/Passive skills (which can definitely improve with some much needed skill balance) and “unique” affixes on Legendaries (which can be improved as well).

Also, that’s where those secondary stats come in too.

Imagine two Wizards with the same Skill build (and overall similar offense/defense). The 1st Wizard has 5 gear pieces with Arcane Resistance rolls. The 2nd Wizard has 5 gear pieces with Pickup Radius. The 1st will have a much easier time going through scissoring Arcane Beams. But in a desperate situation against a Reflect Damage Elite, where you’ve just killed an enemy and you need that health globe asap, the second Wizard is going to have a much easier time.

That right there is a meaningful gameplay difference. It actually plays differently during the battle (and I can’t emphasize those words enough). The fight, which is the absolute core of Diablo 3, because it’s the one activity we do all the time.

One of the things that kinda hurt this Secondary Affix system is how you have to stack those Secondary stats in order to feel their effects. That is a necessary evil, though. If we could have +20 pickup radius or +3k Life/Second as a roll on EACH gear piece, we could easily “break” the game’s systems. No amount of development time would be able to create a challenge for someone with 15k+ Life/Second (as an example).

I don't think you could have that “crazy build” just by spreading stats out on D2, you needed the item/skillbuild support for it. And as far as “item affixes” go, a lot of them were actually useless in that game.

Now, my personal opinion is that this stats system is a huge improvement from D1/2’s systems!!! You’re absolutely free to disagree, but at least try to understand my perspective.

“You’re crazy dawg....”
I’m not In Diablo 2 the Stats System was a very deceptive way to “customize” your character. Spreading points out between the stats was allowed, but zero builds that worked past Nightmare/Hell didn’t have very predetermined stat distribution.

A new player would be left thinking that putting points in Strenght could make his melee damage awesome, because that’s what the game told him. He would put 70+ points in Strenght, thinking that his Barbarian would be crushing things in higher difficulties, and another few points in Energy, thinking how awesome it would be if he could spam that awesome skill he just got.

Upon reaching Hell, if he didn’t have the “right” active skill, he would face physical immune enemies, not be able to kill them at all and probably be dying in a couple hits. By then, if he wasn’t frustrated and checked the internet for info, with he would realize that it’s better to rely on damage from a good weapon (or a specific skill) and dump all your points into Vitality.

That’s considered nowadays to be a very bad game design, and for a reason.

The main point here is how insanely easy it was to break your character in Diablo 2. It wouldn’t be “slightly less effective” in Hell, it would be literally (and now you can actually use the word) useless!
This may sound awesome for the dedicated player. Hell, being able to find information and being the type of gamer I am (who reads forums/guides and watches videos to get better), I should be mad that they moved away from such system, as I can’t use this “underground” knowledge to show off to other people.

Instead I’m very happy they moved away from this philosophy. It’s a very archaic gaming mechanism. The D2 stats system was a jurassic system, with a masked complexity. There’s no complexity when 99% of the stat distribution choices are wrong, and just a few actually work.
I can point at hundreds of profiles all with different stat distribution in D3, and they’re not broken. Some of them deal slightly more damage, some of them survive a bit better, some are better at fighting elites (with massive Bonus to Elite bonuses) by sacrificing some “white mob” slaying power.
And the whole “noobs should get what they deserve” attitude that we see every now and then. That’s outright disgusting. They already get what they “deserve”: they play a lot less, they’re way behind the item knowledge curve, they don’t know how affix roll systems work, they don’t know what’s the best place to farm, they barely know how to use the AH, they can barely do MP 0-1, most of them haven’t even reached Inferno, or they stopped playing and they’ve now fallen way behind the item-power curve. I can point to 15+ people on my friends list who are that kind of player.

“Diablo 3 has a much more simple system!!! That’s too much casual appeal!!!”
Yes, D3’s system is a lot more accessible. It’s easy to determine how powerful you are, AND you can never “break” your character.  As long as you improve, and get to know the game better, you can always make sure you haven’t wasted your time. That doesn’t mean it’s not deep, or that there’s no choice to it, as some absolutists (Siths?) will have you believe in every comment they make.

“But we always want a minimum amount of defense and always higher DPS! And thus everyone has the same stats!”

That’s both true and false at the same time.

It’s false that everyone (even at the higher gear levels) has the same stats, or even want the same amount of said stats. Some top-lvl players will have 300-500 more Vitality than others (hi Jaetch, hi those on a PvP league) and maybe even a much higher focus on Armor/Life%/Perfect-Resists/LifePerSec. Others will simply try to get as many offensive stats on all possible gear, their Rings and Amulets being a testament to that. Pure trifectas, almost no defensive stats. No vitality if that means they can get 100 more base DPS on their weapon. It’s so easy to see all these players and realize that they have made tons (!) of choices when gearing up.  The lack of choice is even further from the truth at any gear level below the highest.

It’s the “slider” control I mentioned about. People will generally be in the same area, but hardly at the exact same place.

It’s true, though, that we only need a minimum amount of defensive stats. That’s why most budget guides aim for minimum defensive stats parameter, then all-out DPS (also a philosophy most top-notch players follow).

But that’s within the nature of the game itself. D3 is mostly a PvE (!!!) Action RPG.
The developers can only make the Enemies deal so much damage before they start decimating most of the playerbase. That’s very likely the reason why they decided to set a “bar”. A certain level of minimum prerequisites to be able to face a certain difficulty.

Also, this balance of Offense and Defense (70x30) is probably a conscient decision. The idea behind it being that attacking is almost always more fun (and preferred by most) than defending. Most modern games are moving towards a more aggressive gameplay style instead of passive ones.

When you're doing something, it's better than just watching and not doing anything.

And I think they made the correct decision here, because of the role (or lack thereof) Diablo chracters generally play...

You see, Diablo 3 is an action “roleplaying” game. But for the most part of it (and the developers stated this way back in development) there are no traditional RPG roles. You don’t have a dedicated healer, you don’t have a dedicated Tank, you don’t have a dedicated DPS.

This is the “everyone is a DPS dealer” philosophy that you see some people preach. And for the most of it this is a homage to the Diablo franchise. They could have WoWified (or D&Dified) this (non derogatory, I swear), made specific classes/skills and a lot of people would feel a lot more confortable playing public games. They’d feel ok getting items with pure Vitality/Armor/AllRes.

But since everyone is a DPS dealer, everyone kinda wants to be on the same “Slider Level” – roughly a (70% Offense) vs (30% Defense) balance.

That annoys a lot of people (mostly those who only played RPGs with traditional roles, including WoW). From their PoV, just because the choice isn’t a clear Tank or Healer or DPS, there’s almost no choice at all.

Again, I think this is where Active and Passive skills come in. There’s nothing preventing you from going all out defensive on your gear, picking up only group-buffs and crowd control and playing like a Tank. The same way there’s nothing preventing someone from getting absolutely zero defensive stats, and going allout DPS.

But since it’s not efficient singleplayer-wise, nobody does it. This is a whole different problem that is also being addressed in Patch 1.0.8 – the ineffectiveness of playing in a group.

They made a conscient decision of making group-play feel “not mandatory”. The Diablo franchise is not an MMORPG (where coop is usually mandatory). You’re not forced to play with others to be effective. But they messed up their own “Developer Slider”. They pushed it too much to the “non coop” side of things, making enemies resistant to Crowd Control and having much more health against a group.

They thought people would group up and destroy content too easily if they allowed for easier group play. It’s kinda what happened with Athene’s 4 Monk Strategy, that had to be hotfixed otherwise they’d beat the whole game with 0 “farming effort” and just flawless combat, basically bulldozing through content.

What happened, though, was that the playerbase was just too different! You would join a public game and have a guy with 5k DPS and almost no survivability dragging down 2 top-notch players.

And without the ability to create “named” public games to give people an idea of the power you wanted to have in your party (or the party you wanted to join), the natural reaction is to leave and go play on your own, where there were zero disadvantages.

That paired with the fact that is quite normal nowadays to just finish a game and stop playing it (at least 15+ of my friends stopped because of that, they didn’t even get to Inferno or finished it), and we were left alone playing mostly single player.

It is debatable whether the traditional Stats System is better than this one. I honestly think it’s a matter of preference, you’ll definitely see both sides have its own adepts.

From my perspective, though, there’s a very interesting consequence of D3 being the way it currently is: item progression is, from a system standpoint, very meaningful (yes, the AH has hurt this, but that’s another topic/problem).  Tieing your character powerto the stats on items makes you value them very much.

Another great advantage of such approach is that each system has a very clear role in the game (and this is my most compelling argument in defense of the current Stat/Item systems). If they were to mix up the roles of Stats, Items and Skills they would all have overlapping (and repetitive) roles. Much more difficult to balance and tweak, and imho a very bad basis.

If we didn’t have these item affixes split into Primary and Secondary, we wouldn’t have a way of easily pushing the “power slider” slider to adapt our character as we play. Yes, a manual stat system with permanent choices might feel more compelling at times (instead of giving you that “my character is a chameleon” feeling), but it can also make you easily end up in a dead end, stuck in the game and never able to truly progress.

That’s also a problem when you consider the “optimal stat builds” that the developers have talked about so much. As soon as there’s an “optimal stat build” to even make your character work, any slight deviation from that is automatically an efficiency loss, and that’s when everyone with similar builds will have the absolute same stats. Which most people did in D2.

The way I see it, it is their system of choice for “customizing” your character power (but again, not how he uses such power). Since the power slider can only go in two directions, people feel like they can’t make an “item build” that feels unique, and that’s where Secondary affixes and Legendaries with crazy affixes come in (and both could and should be better than what they are currently!).

Those aforementioned defensive prerequisites were insanely high for each Act of Inferno when the game was released, and a lof of people were left having to “slide” all their item power into defense just to survive. That paired with the way items dropped back then made playing Inferno a “grind” (slowly killing elites with kiting or with 12k DPS Monks/Barbs).

Despite the fact that it was known beforehand that we would have to dedicate months of farming to be able to slowly progress through Inferno (legit farming, not Gobling/RespChest exploiting), people were still mad at how low their chance of getting a good item was.

Some people enjoyed the “difficulty”.

Either the absolute pain that it was to “zerg” elites for minutes, or the fact that it would take 10+ minutes of absolute top-notch micro/kiting to down one of hem. Some enjoyed the fact that playing 500+ hours to gear up was a requirement, as that’s a synonym of hardcore gaming (I agree it is o.O).
Some just exploited and pretended to be hardcore, and then they complained about how some “exploits” (unintended game mechanics) were removed - and yes we all saw these guys complain and whine (on forums or on vídeos/streams). Aren’t they so good?

Most average players felt that they were being “robbed” of experiencing part of the game. Because it fels natural to just go forward (instead of backawrd, to farm Hell/Act 1). These same people do not complain that Monster Power 10 is out of their league, because they’re happy they “completed the game”. It’s weird, but easy to understand.

And despite what some may say Monster Power delivered what it promised. Monster Power 10 was absolutely brutal when it was released. Insanely geared players were barely surviving there, let alone effectively farming it. Even today, you simply cannot do MP10 unless you’re at a very high gear level (even if you’re using the known permadisable build, but skill balance comes later).

Right now, some people claim it’s too easy, either because they’ve reached near perfect gear or because “there’s too many casuals doing it”. Again, that’s a whole other issue I’ll elaborate later – imho related more to the AH and the lack of a gear sink (or a BoE feature).

For those who don’t know (and I’ll try to be straight to the point), items can only roll a specific set of affixes. You normally can’t roll Attackspeed on a Pants. You can’t roll “average dmg” on a Shield. You can’t roll “critical hit damage” on Boots.

Some people believe this hurts the “itemization”, because it causes us to only be able to get certain affixes on specific gear slots, and thus making things like Jewelry have a lot more desireable stats than a Bracer, for instance.

I think the developer team actually discussed this thoroughly, they didn’t just get together one day and said “ok, Shoulder are gonna suck and Amulets are gonna rock!” – I really don’t.
The way some stats are currently assigned to specific gear slots is supposed to grant some cohesion to what an average player would expect of each slot. As a rule of thumb, Armor should improve your defenses.

Being able to roll “100 average Fire Damage” on a Pants might seem awesome from an “item finding” standpoint, but it simply doesn’t make much sense. They wanted their gear pieces to have cohesion.
That’s very likely (again, we’re trying to dig into the developers’ thought process) why we have Pants, Shoulders, Chest Pieces, Belts and other armor pieces with a strong focus on Defense /EHP, and very little available Offensive affixes.

And why we have weapons as being the most important piece of our DPS puzzle. Because it makes sense. The more powerful the weapon that I have, the more powerful my attacks.
That in itself isn’t a bad design decision (calm down, I’ll explain further down below).

“Why have crit-chance on Helms/Bracers then? Why do Gloves have tons of affix variety?”
Having some variety (like Critical Hit Chance on Helm and Bracers) seemed to be the way of adding another interesting offensive affix to these slots without breaking the “EHP focus” mold. And with so many skills/runes relying on critical hits to have any effect, it seemed like the obvious choice.
If they simply had these slots able to roll “average damage” and “attackspeed” naturally, suddenly everyone wants 3 out of those 6 affixes to always be offense-focused.

Also on Gloves, I think the idea is that they are the closest gear slot to your weapon (and rings too), hence having these “channel” a crapload of offensive power seemed like another intentional, and very logic based, choice.

“So what?”
So that people think that because these items already have a sort of predefined role, there’s no choice involved.

The rarity of certain stats aggravates this feeling. Since people can only get CritHit Dmg on their Weapon, Jewelry and Gloves (and Weapons can have by far the most of it – nearly double/triple the other slots), they’re left with the feeling that all these choices are already made for them.

“How about Weapons? They all NEED to have a socket, and they NEED lifesteal and high base dps!”
True, that’s not wrong at all. But why do they need a socket? Because a socket means 100% critical hit damage, and since that’s an insanely powerful and rare stat, again there’s very little choice.
The lack of possible defensive affixes for Weapons isn’t a bad thing imho, though. Weapons should be heavily tied to our offensive capabilities, and while I don’t mind a Legendary Weapon having +200 Res All, I definitely don’t want that to be the norm.

The huge dependence of your DPS on your base weapon dps makes things like “+% bonus damage” and “+elemental damage” absolutely crucial affix rolls for a weapon to even have a chance or being interesting.

Weapons are by far the least interesting item right now in D3 (affix-wise), and they’re the most important piece of equipment of our character.

The choice (as far as Armor is concerned) relies in how hard you wanna push the slider in one direction or the other. Either 200 Int/50 Vit/60 AllRes, or 120 Int/150 Vit/300 Armor. The choice is there, but why doesn’t it feel significant?

It’s because of the “70% Offense + 30% Defense” dilemma. Since that particular focus is already decided (because of the PvE nature of the game), people are left yet again with a feeling of very little choice.

Any changes (or suggestions) to itemization should have that in mind. Not breaking the mold they have, because it is very cohesive.

That’s where Legendaries should step in to make the itemization more interesting by breaking said mold. And they’re headed that direction, at a painfully sluggish pace.

So, remember where we started off this quest?

Quote

We are left with some questions:
-> Any item that doesn’t have those “primary” stats is instantly trash, then?
Yes, pretty much, indeed.

-> Is that a completely bad thing?
I tried to show how, from my point of view, it isn’t. They promised that the “stats system” was being transferred to items, and that’s precisely what happened.

It feels bad to get items without any of those Primary stats, without a combination of high rolls of those, but that’s something that would happen whether or not we had such system in place.

-> Does that make finding those “trash” items a crappy feeling?
Yes, it does I played the game too guys, I know how it feels. I’m not saying you’re wrong for feeling this way.

-> How do they fix this?
I can’t imagine an easy way to “fix” this need of primary stat rolls on items.
They could implement a system that guarantees that items will always have at least 2 of these primary stats, basically removing a little bit of RNG from the rolls.  This way you’d always see items that have some of these “slider” elements. I think this would require higher affix “ranges”, though, and much testing/coding.

What they are planning (for the itemization patch), if I’m not mistaken, is guaranteeing that once we see a certain “affix”, it will roll high enough to be considered useful. I personally don’t like this approach, considering the existence of the AH and no BoE feature.

But they they could implement a controlled crafting system, in order to guarantee that these “guaranteed high roll” items (even when they’re trash) are taken out of the economy.
A crafting system that requires say 100 “high Int rolled” items to guarantee that you’ll have a high roll on your crafted item instantly makes these “trash items” have some value.

That’s, imho, a lot more compelling than simply giving us the recipe with 180-300 Mainstat; and then having to kick the Material Cost and Gold Cost way high to balance this out. It also makes rich players feel like they’re getting “free upgrades” and poor players feel like “hey, another upgrade that’s way out of my league” – which is sort of what happened to the amulet Crafting system. More RNG, and then people spent 15-20 million gold and got nothing.

Making the crafting system support the item hunt by making it more compelling is to me an absolutely crucial change to improve the current situation of Diablo 3.

Add to such system a way to influence at least 2-3 of those secondary stats, and suddenly you’d see people searching for those 40-50 “useless” Bracers to create one that they actually like, instead of vendoring everything to use only the AH.

-> Shouldn’t they make these “secondary” stats as interesting as the primary ones?
I honestly don’t think so. I believe it’s fine to have these 2 types of affixes. But they could try it.
The thing is, no matter what they do, with the way the Stat System is setup, and Primary affixes being paramount to defining character power, no amount of change will make people chose a +60 Cold Resist over a +200 MainStat, even if that was like +200 Cold Resist. The difference is they’re going to want those insane Secondary rolls on every item (hurting the item hunt even more with the feeling you’re never going to see lucky rolls on all 6 affix slots).

That’s not to say some of these don’t need rework to be a little more powerful and have better impact on defining who your character is, so long as the general design phisolophy doesn’t change.