I couldn't find a large amount of opinions or data that could reveal anything new to me. I would really like to know what makes items awesome in D2 so that I can apply those techniques to my game.
I have searched far and wide and cannot get a very long and elaborate answer. Sorry if I seem like a leech for game design ideas, but I just want more of an overall general philosophy on what makes a good itemization system.
D2's itemization WASN'T good. You'll get people that argued for pvp you had to max certain stats or you were dead (like hit recovery) and for PVE (like FCR and lifesteal ect), but that didn't actually make D2's itemization 'good'.
The EXACT same problems plagued D3 as in D2; Only a handful of certain items were good, because they had all the right stats on them. Almost all builds of the same class used the same items, and the rest were left in the dust because of how bad they were.
BUT, the reason you're going to see people rage at me for even mentioning that D2's itemization was horrible, is because it gave the illusion that it was at least all right, because even though you had like I said before a handful of items that were by far the best, you *could* use almost any item you wanted and still be successful. That's not because of good itemization, that's because by the time you were level 85 or around there, you out-leveled the game by so much that you could roflstomp hell mode with relative ease using whatever combination of gear you wanted.
Because D3 has inferno mode, every monster out levels you and we don't have broken affixes like crushing blow, skills like sorc's static, the game is actually hard. Because of how hard D3 is (compared to D2), it forces people to actually try and stack both DPS increasing gear and EHP increases, which with the current state of gear makes it near impossible to FIND all the gear you need, thus, bad itemization.
Now I'm a die hard D2 fan, but at least I can sit back and look at exactly what was going on. *queue up people raging*
1. the items looked Awesome both when equipped and in your inventory IMO diablo 3 items look average in inventory.
2. There were many low level unique's and sets which were easy to acquire.
3. Items you found in normal and nightmare still had the potential to be useful and usable in Hell difficulty.
2 + 3 meant that progression through the difficulties was smooth, farming nightmare was a Viable way to progress to hell.
4. Damage was not absolutely determined by your gear and stats, In diablo 3 the problems which Bleu mentioned above are accentuated because of the gear and main stat dependence.
5. Etheral items + self repair mod.
6. Huge variety of Socketables.
Note many of these D2 strengths/D3 critques are adressed in some way by ROS/ next patch
Maybe the lack of good (A)RPGs back then with lore-related items that had unique effects on your character? A novelty feature has quite some power the first time we see it. See how big the fuss is about levolution on BF4.
I believe one of the things that made itemization in D2 better than D3's was that all classes had the same resource system :mana. This is something I think is crucial for a successful ARPG - what we have now to me feels like an import of WoW class mechanics in a Diablo game. Things like this are why you see many items are not accessible/desired by other classes because it only does somethin like "on cricical hit refunds X fury/spirit/etc." leaving all other classes out of the picture.
Whereas in D2 it would be as simple as "3% mana stolen per hit" where its much more likely that all classes could find such an item useful. Having to rely on solely gear rather than character stat distribution for character customization or to acquire a certain playstyle build also plays in to this. Items are the sole generator of one class becoming different from the rest, and even then players are very limited in that regard as the game is currently - and it probably won't make you "efficient" to play like that. Where in previous iterations yes good items helped you get your identity but you didn't solely rely on that - you had many castable and passive skills that played into this.
Anyway the more I think about D3 the more I ask my self "what's the point?", In diablo 2 it was all about fun for me; I'd farm for gear and when I couldn't find what I wanted I could at least find things to trade for them. Then when I'd get them I'd hit the PvP games and have hours upon hours of fun. Now what.. we're all farming and using the AH for.. efficiency at killing the computer AI? There's nothing appealing about that, everyone's just standing around looking at everyone to see who does the most DPS. I can't even remember if there was a type of "inspect" in D2.. I kind of remember having to open trade and show items to see what we were using but maybe my memory is foggy on that but I think I prefer that instead of just knowing what we're all using.. takes the mystery out of things.
I liked the relation of unique to rare items in D2.
Usually, uniques were better, which made them more valuable, but yellows could be better, so you still wanted to pick them up. Also, uniques felt unique in that they all had a different feel to them and usually unique attributes. In addition, a lot of uniques opened up new build possibilities. This, along with their attributes not being that variable (no random additional attributes, which few exceptions), gave uniques a sort of identity.
It doesn't matter how often this picture gets posted, it still doesn't make it true. This picture does not take a fair and objective approach to compare D2 vs D3 itemization, this picture just shows how nostalgia and narrow-minded views deceive people's mind. Besides, the picture helps OP absolutely zero in his game design.
I think a strong indicator that D2's itemization was better was the fact that people didn't throw a god damn fit about how bad it sucked.
We could argue in frantic circles all day about the technicals, the why's and if's and but's ........people loved D2 itemization and the only complaints I ever heard about them was that there were too few BiS selections of Uniques/RW's.
I think a strong indicator that D2's itemization was better was the fact that people didn't throw a god damn fit about how bad it sucked.
We could argue in frantic circles all day about the technicals, the why's and if's and but's ........people loved D2 itemization and the only complaints I ever heard about them was that there were too few BiS selections of Uniques/RW's.
As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
I think a strong indicator that D2's itemization was better was the fact that people didn't throw a god damn fit about how bad it sucked.
We could argue in frantic circles all day about the technicals, the why's and if's and but's ........people loved D2 itemization and the only complaints I ever heard about them was that there were too few BiS selections of Uniques/RW's.
As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
I did years of competitive PvP (GM Elite Zeal Duels) and I thought the itemization was brilliant. Maybe you PvE addicted laymen thought it was bad, but not I.
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!
As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
Imo it didn't hurt that the game was so damn easy. The focus in Diablo 2 has always been to progress the character even though hell was trivial once you had a few standard uniques equipped. A lot of people also just cared for PvP in either open games or leagues.
Grinding modifier, Vision modifier, ethereal, rolling items up to their next highest classification, charms, rolling Baal charms up, jewels, wider selection of gems, runes (socketed~i.e. Ber'd Vision helm), ITD, CbF, FhR, Rune Words, Socket Quest, Charsi, .........I'm forgetting much......LoD took a steaming shit on D3 vanilla's itemization.
Arguing against that makes anyone look foolish.
The good news is, Loot 2.0 stands to even the field, theoretically.
I kinda knew that as soon as someone would post this damn picture, the thread would get derailed. Can we try to get this back on topic?
OP asked for what made D2's itemization so great, not to discuss the meaning of life.
In my personal opinion, rune words where the one thing that kept me playing, especially the ladder-only rune words as mentioned in a different thread. Most of the items itself and the "itemization" was, in my opinion, not better than in D3 - probably even worse, considering that I played self-found and switched to ladder because playing self-found without these ladder rune words as a casual player was almost impossible. You had to get all the different resists (there was no allres), you had to get to a certain amount of str/dex to meet item's requirements, you had to get some life leech, and then (if there was anything left on the wish list) you had "mandatory stats" just in D3: +skills, and for my Teleport+Blizzard sorc FCR+FHR.
If I were to build a game, I'd rather copy D3's itemization (or TL1). The other thing is that for a quick game, it doesn't matter what kind of stat system you use, it's only when playing for a long time that balance of endgame gear really matters, and this is where D3 cannot keep up with D2 yet. Though, as someone already pointed out, there was no AH in D2 and we had frequent ladder resets as well. Look at Torchlight 1 - the first 15 hours of that game were the absolute best ARPG experience I've ever had. Once you reached endgame it was totally boring, there was nothing to aim for and the high-level items were not balanced with regard to higher char levels.
Contextually I think it's important to remember that D2 benefited from a drastically different market and player base than D3 has today. That notwithstanding, D2's itemization had more "creativity" than D3's, but it was superficial. As many have already expressed the game allowed for more open itemization because of the level curve. It would be interesting to see how D2 would have differed had there been a level cap in line with monster levels. I think you would have seen a very similar pattern to what we see now.
That being said, even if it was more of an illusion of choice, there was still some cool stuff with D2 itemization. I have always been a massive fan of Rune Words and think the concept is fantastic. You got a decent white item with the right number of sockets and it was something to be excited about! IMO the right combination for good itemization is customization and fun.
.
Why are most of you saying D2 Hell difficulty could be "beaten nude" / retardedly easy etc., when that is not the case at all? I don't remember the earlier patches too well, but from v1.10 on Hell was hard, far harder than D3 Inferno mp0 is nowadays.
NO CLASS could beat it nude, and some classes (sorc for example - or basically any that relies too much on 1 element) could not beat it at all (except by skipping a lot of mobs - and even then, some parts like Travinical Council just weren't possible without Gosu items like Infinity)
It only became easy once you outgeared it by a huge margin, just like it is now in D3. So the fuck is up with all the talks of D2 easiness.
Yeah, good point (though slightly derailing the thread), but I just don't get it despite people writing that in every one of these discussions. As a self-found player and someone who refrained from using duped high runes and other stuff, hell was sometimes a pain in the ass for my Blizzard sorc. But then, I'm also not a pro gamer. It could be beaten nude though, there were some groups doing that (there was even one group who did the entire game including uber events nude).
Why are most of you saying D2 Hell difficulty could be "beaten nude" / retardedly easy etc., when that is not the case at all? I don't remember the earlier patches too well, but from v1.10 on Hell was hard, far harder than D3 Inferno mp0 is nowadays.
NO CLASS could beat it nude, and some classes (sorc for example - or basically any that relies too much on 1 element) could not beat it at all (except by skipping a lot of mobs - and even then, some parts like Travinical Council just weren't possible without Gosu items like Infinity)
It only became easy once you outgeared it by a huge margin, just like it is now in D3. So the fuck is up with all the talks of D2 easiness.
I believe when people compare the titles in terms of difficulty, they're comparing them based on D3 being at MP10, which is fair imo.
There's a guy who got to 75, naked, hardcore, in 1.11, with an Amazon.
There are tons of people who did stuff like this. These were just the first two Google results I pulled up.
I'll stop saying D2 was easier than D3 when people start showing that they can clear all of D3 naked (they can use a weapon for obvious reasons), on hardcore. The bar was set by the D2 players who did it. The only thing that keeps me saying it is that no one in D3 is recreating those feats. The minute people start doing it in D3 you can bet your ass I'll stop using the "people beat D2 naked" argument. Until that point, it's completely valid and based in fact.
EDIT
Also can we please keep this on-topic? The OP isn't asking people to debate whether or not people did beat D2 naked, especially since everyone knows it was done many times, and it's been archived on many sites. He's asking about what he can do to draw from D2 (and presumably other ARPGs) to make his game better.
EDIT
Also can we please keep this on-topic? The OP isn't asking people to debate whether or not people did beat D2 naked, especially since everyone knows it was done many times, and it's been archived on many sites. He's asking about what he can do to draw from D2 (and presumably other ARPGs) to make his game better.
I'm hoping he can extrapolate from all this the general idea that people want to be able to fiddle with items post-drop. The fun isn't just in having great items drop. Part of the fun is tinkering with them through some mechanism that creates randomized (gamble style) outcomes.
Collecting reagents and [hollow shells] and being able to utilize them to create new items, that dynamic has tremendous appeal.
I couldn't find a large amount of opinions or data that could reveal anything new to me. I would really like to know what makes items awesome in D2 so that I can apply those techniques to my game.
I have searched far and wide and cannot get a very long and elaborate answer. Sorry if I seem like a leech for game design ideas, but I just want more of an overall general philosophy on what makes a good itemization system.
The EXACT same problems plagued D3 as in D2; Only a handful of certain items were good, because they had all the right stats on them. Almost all builds of the same class used the same items, and the rest were left in the dust because of how bad they were.
BUT, the reason you're going to see people rage at me for even mentioning that D2's itemization was horrible, is because it gave the illusion that it was at least all right, because even though you had like I said before a handful of items that were by far the best, you *could* use almost any item you wanted and still be successful. That's not because of good itemization, that's because by the time you were level 85 or around there, you out-leveled the game by so much that you could roflstomp hell mode with relative ease using whatever combination of gear you wanted.
Because D3 has inferno mode, every monster out levels you and we don't have broken affixes like crushing blow, skills like sorc's static, the game is actually hard. Because of how hard D3 is (compared to D2), it forces people to actually try and stack both DPS increasing gear and EHP increases, which with the current state of gear makes it near impossible to FIND all the gear you need, thus, bad itemization.
Now I'm a die hard D2 fan, but at least I can sit back and look at exactly what was going on. *queue up people raging*
2. There were many low level unique's and sets which were easy to acquire.
3. Items you found in normal and nightmare still had the potential to be useful and usable in Hell difficulty.
2 + 3 meant that progression through the difficulties was smooth, farming nightmare was a Viable way to progress to hell.
4. Damage was not absolutely determined by your gear and stats, In diablo 3 the problems which Bleu mentioned above are accentuated because of the gear and main stat dependence.
5. Etheral items + self repair mod.
6. Huge variety of Socketables.
Note many of these D2 strengths/D3 critques are adressed in some way by ROS/ next patch
Maybe the lack of good (A)RPGs back then with lore-related items that had unique effects on your character? A novelty feature has quite some power the first time we see it. See how big the fuss is about levolution on BF4.
Whereas in D2 it would be as simple as "3% mana stolen per hit" where its much more likely that all classes could find such an item useful. Having to rely on solely gear rather than character stat distribution for character customization or to acquire a certain playstyle build also plays in to this. Items are the sole generator of one class becoming different from the rest, and even then players are very limited in that regard as the game is currently - and it probably won't make you "efficient" to play like that. Where in previous iterations yes good items helped you get your identity but you didn't solely rely on that - you had many castable and passive skills that played into this.
Anyway the more I think about D3 the more I ask my self "what's the point?", In diablo 2 it was all about fun for me; I'd farm for gear and when I couldn't find what I wanted I could at least find things to trade for them. Then when I'd get them I'd hit the PvP games and have hours upon hours of fun. Now what.. we're all farming and using the AH for.. efficiency at killing the computer AI? There's nothing appealing about that, everyone's just standing around looking at everyone to see who does the most DPS. I can't even remember if there was a type of "inspect" in D2.. I kind of remember having to open trade and show items to see what we were using but maybe my memory is foggy on that but I think I prefer that instead of just knowing what we're all using.. takes the mystery out of things.
Usually, uniques were better, which made them more valuable, but yellows could be better, so you still wanted to pick them up. Also, uniques felt unique in that they all had a different feel to them and usually unique attributes. In addition, a lot of uniques opened up new build possibilities. This, along with their attributes not being that variable (no random additional attributes, which few exceptions), gave uniques a sort of identity.
It doesn't matter how often this picture gets posted, it still doesn't make it true. This picture does not take a fair and objective approach to compare D2 vs D3 itemization, this picture just shows how nostalgia and narrow-minded views deceive people's mind. Besides, the picture helps OP absolutely zero in his game design.
We could argue in frantic circles all day about the technicals, the why's and if's and but's ........people loved D2 itemization and the only complaints I ever heard about them was that there were too few BiS selections of Uniques/RW's.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
As already mentioned, the game was easy and it had no AH economy. These are much bigger factors than item lovers will give credit for.
I did years of competitive PvP (GM Elite Zeal Duels) and I thought the itemization was brilliant. Maybe you PvE addicted laymen thought it was bad, but not I.
The Horadric Cube says D3 vanilla is ....vanilla.
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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!
Grinding modifier, Vision modifier, ethereal, rolling items up to their next highest classification, charms, rolling Baal charms up, jewels, wider selection of gems, runes (socketed~i.e. Ber'd Vision helm), ITD, CbF, FhR, Rune Words, Socket Quest, Charsi, .........I'm forgetting much......LoD took a steaming shit on D3 vanilla's itemization.
Arguing against that makes anyone look foolish.
The good news is, Loot 2.0 stands to even the field, theoretically.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
OP asked for what made D2's itemization so great, not to discuss the meaning of life.
In my personal opinion, rune words where the one thing that kept me playing, especially the ladder-only rune words as mentioned in a different thread. Most of the items itself and the "itemization" was, in my opinion, not better than in D3 - probably even worse, considering that I played self-found and switched to ladder because playing self-found without these ladder rune words as a casual player was almost impossible. You had to get all the different resists (there was no allres), you had to get to a certain amount of str/dex to meet item's requirements, you had to get some life leech, and then (if there was anything left on the wish list) you had "mandatory stats" just in D3: +skills, and for my Teleport+Blizzard sorc FCR+FHR.
If I were to build a game, I'd rather copy D3's itemization (or TL1). The other thing is that for a quick game, it doesn't matter what kind of stat system you use, it's only when playing for a long time that balance of endgame gear really matters, and this is where D3 cannot keep up with D2 yet. Though, as someone already pointed out, there was no AH in D2 and we had frequent ladder resets as well. Look at Torchlight 1 - the first 15 hours of that game were the absolute best ARPG experience I've ever had. Once you reached endgame it was totally boring, there was nothing to aim for and the high-level items were not balanced with regard to higher char levels.
That being said, even if it was more of an illusion of choice, there was still some cool stuff with D2 itemization. I have always been a massive fan of Rune Words and think the concept is fantastic. You got a decent white item with the right number of sockets and it was something to be excited about! IMO the right combination for good itemization is customization and fun.
.
I think he means as an affix. There was in Diamonds if I recall. My memory is a bit fuzzy, it's been 5+ years
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Can't remember. Been too many years.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
Yeah, good point (though slightly derailing the thread), but I just don't get it despite people writing that in every one of these discussions. As a self-found player and someone who refrained from using duped high runes and other stuff, hell was sometimes a pain in the ass for my Blizzard sorc. But then, I'm also not a pro gamer. It could be beaten nude though, there were some groups doing that (there was even one group who did the entire game including uber events nude).
I believe when people compare the titles in terms of difficulty, they're comparing them based on D3 being at MP10, which is fair imo.
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These guys cleared all of D2, naked, hardcore, including Pandemonium and Ubers, post-1.10.
http://diablo.incgam...11-HC-naked-zon
There's a guy who got to 75, naked, hardcore, in 1.11, with an Amazon.
There are tons of people who did stuff like this. These were just the first two Google results I pulled up.
I'll stop saying D2 was easier than D3 when people start showing that they can clear all of D3 naked (they can use a weapon for obvious reasons), on hardcore. The bar was set by the D2 players who did it. The only thing that keeps me saying it is that no one in D3 is recreating those feats. The minute people start doing it in D3 you can bet your ass I'll stop using the "people beat D2 naked" argument. Until that point, it's completely valid and based in fact.
EDIT
Also can we please keep this on-topic? The OP isn't asking people to debate whether or not people did beat D2 naked, especially since everyone knows it was done many times, and it's been archived on many sites. He's asking about what he can do to draw from D2 (and presumably other ARPGs) to make his game better.
I'm hoping he can extrapolate from all this the general idea that people want to be able to fiddle with items post-drop. The fun isn't just in having great items drop. Part of the fun is tinkering with them through some mechanism that creates randomized (gamble style) outcomes.
Collecting reagents and [hollow shells] and being able to utilize them to create new items, that dynamic has tremendous appeal.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan