Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
Why not? Keep in mind that "useful" is not the same thing as "valuable." I wouldn't argue for half of what drops to be "valuable," but I'm not sure how half of what drops being "useful" somehow becomes not fun.
So they're level 1-10 items whose purpose is for using a short time on your first untwinked character, but they're going to drop constantly from level 1-60 and beyond to get more item tags on the ground to make it harder to notice the pages of training, potions, etc. (i.e., valuable non-colored items).
I think it's pretty clear that their intention is not to "make it harder to notice real loot". In the face of Diablo 2's unrelenting hail of gold piles (which must be manually collected), ammo (arrows, bolts, javelins, throwing axes, throwing daggers), scrolls, and fully 5 types of non-restorative potions, I don't see how anyone can consider Diablo 3's compromise to be offensive.
Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
I played D2 with no trash items and it was significantly improved. The same was true of Torchlight and TitanQuest.
If something's worthless, don't drop it and make me waste time finding out if it's worthless or not.
TitanQuest, if you remember, had a button specifically to hide non-magical items. There were equally plenty of mods for D2 that colour-coded items and only displayed the colours you selected.
Except that all colours in D2 have potential value depending on the item. They may seem worthless to you, but that doesn't mean they are worthless to the rest of us. You just need to memorize the valuable item names and ignore the rest, which honestly isn't that hard and time-consuming, unless you can't be arsed to hold alt at various intervals, glance through colours and matching words and use your other hand to move and kill stuff.
From what I can surmise, there are two distinct camps and I'm glad Blizzard is in the 'the more items the better' camp.
Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
Why not? Keep in mind that "useful" is not the same thing as "valuable." I wouldn't argue for half of what drops to be "valuable," but I'm not sure how half of what drops being "useful" somehow becomes not fun.
Because you have to pick them all up and read them and sell them and whatnot? Wasn't that what people were bitching about?
I think it's pretty clear that their intention is not to "make it harder to notice real loot". In the face of Diablo 2's unrelenting hail of gold piles (which must be manually collected), ammo (arrows, bolts, javelins, throwing axes, throwing daggers), scrolls, and fully 5 types of non-restorative potions, I don't see how anyone can consider Diablo 3's compromise to be offensive.
Just because there was a greater amount of something disagreeable in the past, doesn't mean we should ignore a lesser amount of it, if it's still disagreeable. Additionally, it's been over ten years since Diablo II and sensibilities have changed. What was fine back then may not be fine now.
There's the fact that they already had a more agreeable system in place and THEN chose to change it, which will rub people even more the wrong way about this.
They changed it because they think this system is better than the one they had. "Amount of shit on screen" is not the sole consideration here.
Any day of the week I will "deal with" having to encounter slightly more white junk drops in exchange for not being strongly compelled by game mechanics to stop and transmute every single one of them with the Nephalem/Cauldron
Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
Why not? Keep in mind that "useful" is not the same thing as "valuable." I wouldn't argue for half of what drops to be "valuable," but I'm not sure how half of what drops being "useful" somehow becomes not fun.
Because you have to pick them all up and read them and sell them and whatnot? Wasn't that what people were bitching about?
That's why you also reduce the excessive quantity.
Any day of the week I will "deal with" having to encounter slightly more white junk drops in exchange for not being strongly compelled by game mechanics to stop and transmute every single one of them with the Nephalem/Cauldron
But that's exactly the problem here.
By making white/greys extremely common, and valuable (if you mulch them with the Neph), people now want to pick up every white (up until they recognise they've got enough white to keep them going for weeks, at which point you now just have white trash all over the floor). Which Jay then realises is not going to enthuse players about trash items.
So their response was to make them no less valuable, but to make it more annoying to mulch the items (even though you will still need to - the white crafting item has no less demand for crafting) by forcing players to go back to town to mulch them.
If they'd reduced the value, it'd have gone back to D2 style; vast amounts of worthless shite clogging the screen.
If they simply reduced the excessive quantity of trash, but kept the value and ease of mulching, that would be the ideal compromise from where I'm sitting.
I also found the mechanic of breaking down every white item for crafting ingredients to be annoying. It's not a bad idea, but I found that it encouraged me to pick up every single item ever. Whenever my inventory got full, I would then go through and break tons of items, and I had to take care to not break the wrong things. This meant that I would randomly choose to waste my own time, because it felt like the right way to do things. If I instead know that white items are only occasionally worthwhile, and cannot be broken down, then they are treated like white items in WoW. Occasionally, you will get a white item that is useful for a brand new non-twink character. Beyond that, they are crap that you seldom even pick up to sell.
Now, when it comes to filtering through what dropped to find the good bits, I think this means we need a tweak. If white items are considered to be generally crap, then things that have a different sort of value, but are currently white (Page of Training, Scroll of Companion), should be recolored. It doesn't have to be blue or indicative of some degree of rarity, they just need to be easy to distinguish. Scrolls of Companion aren't really of much value and serve as a convenience. This means that they shouldn't show up as magical, but I'd like it if I could see them more easily. Perhaps they need a paper color that is just a pale off-white. Enough so that you can pick it out of the clutter, but not enough so that you'll think it's a good item and be let down.
I think that the loot pinata needs white items. In WoW, white items (and grey items -- that's an example of redundant filler types to me) served as the filler that helped to highlight the good drops. When I open a chest in Diablo 2, it spews out a bunch of stuff. Gold, items, who knows what. I don't even care what it is, I like the pinata aspect of it there as well, and then I look closely to see what is good. Now, I would be completely OK with an option to only show magical items (labels on the ground... I assume you can always pick them up), ala TitanQuest, for those that don't appreciate the pinata, or have grown tired of it over the course of the game. Giving the player choice over whether they see items that are generally accepted to be crap seems like a good idea.
schmads on
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So their response was to make them no less valuable, but to make it more annoying to mulch the items (even though you will still need to - the white crafting item has no less demand for crafting) by forcing players to go back to town to mulch them.
They did make white items less valuable. Not only are they not used for salvaging anymore, and they now sell for trivial amounts of gold (see totp), so you won't be pressured to haul them back to town now that the Cauldron has been removed.
If they'd reduced the value, it'd have gone back to D2 style; vast amounts of worthless shite clogging the screen.
If they simply reduced the excessive quantity of trash, but kept the value and ease of mulching, that would be the ideal compromise from where I'm sitting.
They did reduce the value, and it's not going back to D2 quantities of trash by pure virtue of there being less types of completely worthless consumable garbage in the game. The quote from Jay is "we've gone full circle back to D2" (regarding whether every item should be useful), but unless they are dropping truly ludicrous amounts of white equipment, which I trust is just not going to be the case, we aren't going to see "screen clogging" piles of junk. They want more junk than they had because after testing they have concluded that the presence of junk makes the loot pinata system feel better.
Scosglen on
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
You seem to be missing some critical information, or I completely don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Yeah, I missed the whites being unmulchable from changelogs since I assumed they'd already patched (since my chars are all wiped), and whites are still mulchable in-game.
Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
I played D2 with no trash items and it was significantly improved. The same was true of Torchlight and TitanQuest.
If something's worthless, don't drop it and make me waste time finding out if it's worthless or not.
TitanQuest, if you remember, had a button specifically to hide non-magical items. There were equally plenty of mods for D2 that colour-coded items and only displayed the colours you selected.
Except that all colours in D2 have potential value depending on the item. They may seem worthless to you, but that doesn't mean they are worthless to the rest of us. You just need to memorize the valuable item names and ignore the rest, which honestly isn't that hard and time-consuming, unless you can't be arsed to hold alt at various intervals, glance through colours and matching words and use your other hand to move and kill stuff.
From what I can surmise, there are two distinct camps and I'm glad Blizzard is in the 'the more items the better' camp.
Well, apparently the plan is for D3 to have a worthless items category, so it would be nice if it was given a distinct color that no useful items shared, and we could just train ourselves to ignore it.
I haven't played the beta but in d2 white drops were a necessary evil because of how the game generated loot, not to mention that you might actually want a white or non-magical socketed item from time to time. If they have no use (and the item generation system is not similar to d2, where the items is generated, THEN its properties decided), throwing them in as white noise to make other loot seem cooler is dumb.
I'm conflicted about the policy of the policy of adding in the extraneous white items. I'm aware that I've played a lot of Diablo 2 which could be why they seem like soothing background noise for me. When I fish out something cool from a sea of junk there's some accomplishment there. But it also makes no sense and objectively seems like it would be distracting.
In the end I don't see it mattering that much. Color coding lets you easily filter them out with a quick scan.
Profile -> Signature Settings -> Hide signatures always. Then you don't have to read this worthless text anymore.
I haven't played the beta but in d2 white drops were a necessary evil because of how the game generated loot, not to mention that you might actually want a white or non-magical socketed item from time to time. If they have no use (and the item generation system is not similar to d2, where the items is generated, THEN its properties decided), throwing them in as white noise to make other loot seem cooler is dumb.
White drops in D2 were not worth picking up 99.99% of the time(except the ones that had skills on them), and you can't possibly tell me that they didn't have the ability to simply make them not drop. They were knowingly left there as useless junk for you to ignore. D3 is literally just going back to doing things exactly like D2.
No? Most elite white drops are worth picking up, if only because you can add sockets to them. Finding a sacred/vortex shield with 45 resistance is pretty satisfying I tell ya. It's not going to be the same as D3 looking at how Bashiok worded it, but then again, things could change before the release.
Jay explained why there needs to be trash items and I completely agree. It's simply not rewarding if half of what enemies drop are useful. MF is still in, so you can stuff it as much as you want. Sucks for people who don't have much free time, but then again, those people just used bot scripts in D2.
I played D2 with no trash items and it was significantly improved. The same was true of Torchlight and TitanQuest.
If something's worthless, don't drop it and make me waste time finding out if it's worthless or not.
TitanQuest, if you remember, had a button specifically to hide non-magical items. There were equally plenty of mods for D2 that colour-coded items and only displayed the colours you selected.
Except that all colours in D2 have potential value depending on the item. They may seem worthless to you, but that doesn't mean they are worthless to the rest of us. You just need to memorize the valuable item names and ignore the rest, which honestly isn't that hard and time-consuming, unless you can't be arsed to hold alt at various intervals, glance through colours and matching words and use your other hand to move and kill stuff.
From what I can surmise, there are two distinct camps and I'm glad Blizzard is in the 'the more items the better' camp.
Well, apparently the plan is for D3 to have a worthless items category, so it would be nice if it was given a distinct color that no useful items shared, and we could just train ourselves to ignore it.
D2 had this as well, they were light grey and holding the normal alt didn't let them show up, you had to push z to make the worthless items show
Yeah. Gray items in D2 were either ethereal or socketed. I'm not sure if the default UI was ever patched to make a distinction, but I don't think so. I remember running some program that made socketed shit appear different colored.
Correct. White items are now crap. With that you won't be picking up so many items as to have to TP as often as you may think.
They'll be good for new characters with no items. You still want pants if you don't have any! Otherwise not worth picking up.
They'll sell for very little. It will quickly become apparent they're not worth the inventory space.
I'm just not seeing why you wouldn't start the player off in a crap-grade armor and just get rid of white items altogether.
This. If they are making white items not worth picking up, I don't understand the point of dropping them beyond the first few levels. For that matter, why even have gray items? Apparently gray and white items are now equally worthless, why even bother having two categories of worthless items? I think the whole thing is just dumb.
*Scrolls of Identity are gone, just right click the unidentified item and after a short cast time your character will figure out what it is for free.
Just caught this post. Err, a cast time? That just sounds like a pointless annoyance. Why isn't it instant? Why isn't identifying items trivial? It's not at all an interesting part of the experience. It's just extra meaningless clicking and waiting.
Probably so you can't use it to run from a sticky situation.
The white items also have a lot to do with teaching, not just setting the pacing for loot drops. Seeing white items drop tells you about the breadth of the item space and the kinds of equipment that are available for you to potentially earn without necessarily giving you a version you would want to use. It dangles a carrot in front of your face and can help with planning. It also serves to rapidly notify you and update your knowledge when you enter a new tier of quality (there are 18+ equipment tiers, so a shitload of "base" item types to communicate). There are I'm sure other more subtle reasons that I'm not thinking of for why white items are beneficial.
Maybe Blizzard just conceptually likes the idea of your character started naked and literally scrapping for their first pair of pants. I kind of do too. It's a sort of pain-free way to teach new players about finding and equipping items that is a little more statistically safe than relying on magic item drops as players will almost immediately find upgrades over empty slots.
The stat change sounds good to me. In the previous system, an item with like 30 attack 15 precision would be good for anyone. A 1h sword with those stats could be a wiz/doc weapon just as easily as a barb/monk weapon.
If you were lucky enough to have some amazing +Attack 1h sword, way better than anything else you had, you'd have good reason to pass it around to whichever character you happened to be on at the moment. Instead, Str/Dex/Int will more clearly define who gets the best use out of the item. I imagine there would still be Int swords, etc.
The cube/cauldron change is upsetting. Unless they up the sell value on Commons, picking them up may be more trouble than it's worth.
This viewpoint confuses me. You LIKE that things are becoming more class specific? It's turning into WoW where instead of making smart decisions about x being better than y it's going to literally be a linear progress, save maybe Xn-1 having it's secondary stats being perfect, and Xn having it's secondary stats being the worst possible, then you might make a decision. I liked in D2 everyone wanted a Vamp Gaze, it didn't matter (well, anyone who had the STR for it), but now since the main stats work specific to a class (or two classes) it's going to severely limit the versatility of gear. I'll just roll a fucking Barbarian and have the best gear before the rest of my friends who are playing the other 4 classes because I have no-one to contend with my gear.
Yes, I do like it. I don't see "everyone wants vamp gaze" as letting the player make a smart decision. The extreme overlap in suggested gear for builds in d2 was incredibly dull, imho.
Hopefully these unknown bonus effects will be balanced against the core stats, unlike WoW where "if it has more ___, use it."
- I used to pick up white items to salvage them. Now I won't pick them up at all.
- I used to care about which stats I wanted (strength, precision, defense, vitality), and now I only need to pick the stat that boosts MY class' damage.
- Mystic provided a level of *control* over the stats you got on your items when you didn't want to waste a jewel or the jewel didn't give you what you want. Now it's gone.
Seriously, these changes have made me reconsider getting the game entirely.
edit - that, and the fact that I got banned from the diablo 3 forums for trolling a troll.
edit 2 - I'd rather see a game where every drop is useful in some way (salvageable, valuable to a vendor, equipable, recipe, consumable, etc.) and have the overall drop rate on items lowered than have worthless items drop to make worthwhile drops seem more precious by comparison.
Chubby Bunny on
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Hmm, I just realized I was trapped in a WoW mindset regarding str/dex/int. Too easy to look at it like classes want just their 1 stat and fear stats being mutually exclusive...
Now I'm thinking that the "secondary" stat effects are probably universal. So, dex would give +Dodge to any class, but only increase monk/dh damage, etc. Likewise, it could be that more than one of these 3 stats can appear on items.
As far as caring about the previous stats, the losses of precision and defense are essentially meaningless. Precision was strictly converted into %-to-crit and it was replaced with... %-to-crit! Defense's bonus was shifted to armor value, and Armor's bonus was replaced with a Physical Resistance modifier.
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I'm just not seeing why you wouldn't start the player off in a crap-grade armor and just get rid of white items altogether.
Except that all colours in D2 have potential value depending on the item. They may seem worthless to you, but that doesn't mean they are worthless to the rest of us. You just need to memorize the valuable item names and ignore the rest, which honestly isn't that hard and time-consuming, unless you can't be arsed to hold alt at various intervals, glance through colours and matching words and use your other hand to move and kill stuff.
From what I can surmise, there are two distinct camps and I'm glad Blizzard is in the 'the more items the better' camp.
Because you have to pick them all up and read them and sell them and whatnot? Wasn't that what people were bitching about?
Just because there was a greater amount of something disagreeable in the past, doesn't mean we should ignore a lesser amount of it, if it's still disagreeable. Additionally, it's been over ten years since Diablo II and sensibilities have changed. What was fine back then may not be fine now.
There's the fact that they already had a more agreeable system in place and THEN chose to change it, which will rub people even more the wrong way about this.
Any day of the week I will "deal with" having to encounter slightly more white junk drops in exchange for not being strongly compelled by game mechanics to stop and transmute every single one of them with the Nephalem/Cauldron
By making white/greys extremely common, and valuable (if you mulch them with the Neph), people now want to pick up every white (up until they recognise they've got enough white to keep them going for weeks, at which point you now just have white trash all over the floor). Which Jay then realises is not going to enthuse players about trash items.
So their response was to make them no less valuable, but to make it more annoying to mulch the items (even though you will still need to - the white crafting item has no less demand for crafting) by forcing players to go back to town to mulch them.
If they'd reduced the value, it'd have gone back to D2 style; vast amounts of worthless shite clogging the screen.
If they simply reduced the excessive quantity of trash, but kept the value and ease of mulching, that would be the ideal compromise from where I'm sitting.
Unless they have removed the white crafting item entirely, white items are not valueless above level 10.
Also, get off your high horse, I read it when I read the page.
Now, when it comes to filtering through what dropped to find the good bits, I think this means we need a tweak. If white items are considered to be generally crap, then things that have a different sort of value, but are currently white (Page of Training, Scroll of Companion), should be recolored. It doesn't have to be blue or indicative of some degree of rarity, they just need to be easy to distinguish. Scrolls of Companion aren't really of much value and serve as a convenience. This means that they shouldn't show up as magical, but I'd like it if I could see them more easily. Perhaps they need a paper color that is just a pale off-white. Enough so that you can pick it out of the clutter, but not enough so that you'll think it's a good item and be let down.
I think that the loot pinata needs white items. In WoW, white items (and grey items -- that's an example of redundant filler types to me) served as the filler that helped to highlight the good drops. When I open a chest in Diablo 2, it spews out a bunch of stuff. Gold, items, who knows what. I don't even care what it is, I like the pinata aspect of it there as well, and then I look closely to see what is good. Now, I would be completely OK with an option to only show magical items (labels on the ground... I assume you can always pick them up), ala TitanQuest, for those that don't appreciate the pinata, or have grown tired of it over the course of the game. Giving the player choice over whether they see items that are generally accepted to be crap seems like a good idea.
They have. It's on the changelog. White items cannot be salvaged anymore.
I'm still able to salvage whites in-game.
I don't think the beta has been patched yet. The whites can't be salvaged thing is mentioned in the systems article. Link.
Not a fan of having worthless white trash anywhere. Oh welp.
They did make white items less valuable. Not only are they not used for salvaging anymore, and they now sell for trivial amounts of gold (see totp), so you won't be pressured to haul them back to town now that the Cauldron has been removed.
They did reduce the value, and it's not going back to D2 quantities of trash by pure virtue of there being less types of completely worthless consumable garbage in the game. The quote from Jay is "we've gone full circle back to D2" (regarding whether every item should be useful), but unless they are dropping truly ludicrous amounts of white equipment, which I trust is just not going to be the case, we aren't going to see "screen clogging" piles of junk. They want more junk than they had because after testing they have concluded that the presence of junk makes the loot pinata system feel better.
Talking shit out my own arse it seems.
This is still completely contradictory to my experiences with modding ARPGs to hide trash drops.
In the end I don't see it mattering that much. Color coding lets you easily filter them out with a quick scan.
White drops in D2 were not worth picking up 99.99% of the time(except the ones that had skills on them), and you can't possibly tell me that they didn't have the ability to simply make them not drop. They were knowingly left there as useless junk for you to ignore. D3 is literally just going back to doing things exactly like D2.
D2 had this as well, they were light grey and holding the normal alt didn't let them show up, you had to push z to make the worthless items show
huh, thought D2 had that as well. Oh well
This. If they are making white items not worth picking up, I don't understand the point of dropping them beyond the first few levels. For that matter, why even have gray items? Apparently gray and white items are now equally worthless, why even bother having two categories of worthless items? I think the whole thing is just dumb.
Probably so you can't use it to run from a sticky situation.
The white items also have a lot to do with teaching, not just setting the pacing for loot drops. Seeing white items drop tells you about the breadth of the item space and the kinds of equipment that are available for you to potentially earn without necessarily giving you a version you would want to use. It dangles a carrot in front of your face and can help with planning. It also serves to rapidly notify you and update your knowledge when you enter a new tier of quality (there are 18+ equipment tiers, so a shitload of "base" item types to communicate). There are I'm sure other more subtle reasons that I'm not thinking of for why white items are beneficial.
Maybe Blizzard just conceptually likes the idea of your character started naked and literally scrapping for their first pair of pants. I kind of do too. It's a sort of pain-free way to teach new players about finding and equipping items that is a little more statistically safe than relying on magic item drops as players will almost immediately find upgrades over empty slots.
Yes, I do like it. I don't see "everyone wants vamp gaze" as letting the player make a smart decision. The extreme overlap in suggested gear for builds in d2 was incredibly dull, imho.
Hopefully these unknown bonus effects will be balanced against the core stats, unlike WoW where "if it has more ___, use it."
- I used to pick up white items to salvage them. Now I won't pick them up at all.
- I used to care about which stats I wanted (strength, precision, defense, vitality), and now I only need to pick the stat that boosts MY class' damage.
- Mystic provided a level of *control* over the stats you got on your items when you didn't want to waste a jewel or the jewel didn't give you what you want. Now it's gone.
Seriously, these changes have made me reconsider getting the game entirely.
edit - that, and the fact that I got banned from the diablo 3 forums for trolling a troll.
edit 2 - I'd rather see a game where every drop is useful in some way (salvageable, valuable to a vendor, equipable, recipe, consumable, etc.) and have the overall drop rate on items lowered than have worthless items drop to make worthwhile drops seem more precious by comparison.
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Now I'm thinking that the "secondary" stat effects are probably universal. So, dex would give +Dodge to any class, but only increase monk/dh damage, etc. Likewise, it could be that more than one of these 3 stats can appear on items.
As far as caring about the previous stats, the losses of precision and defense are essentially meaningless. Precision was strictly converted into %-to-crit and it was replaced with... %-to-crit! Defense's bonus was shifted to armor value, and Armor's bonus was replaced with a Physical Resistance modifier.