Hi, after spending over 100 hours and finishing the Crucible several times with different builds, I feel there’s something wrong with the item system.
On paper, everything looks great:
White items offer more customization options.
Blue items provide magic enchants but less customization.
Purple items offer stronger enchants with a negative effect.
Yellow items are unique with exclusive enchants.
You can also upgrade a Tier 1 item to Tier 3, making all items theoretically useful.
But in the end, there is actually zero excitement when a new item drops.
Zero Excitement Due to Equal Item Qualities: All item qualities are essentially equal, and regardless of color, every item has an equal chance to be good or bad. This diminishes the thrill of finding new items.
Lack of Progression System: There’s no progression system beyond upgrading your current gear. In games like this, item quality often serves as a progression system. Lower quality items become stepping stones to higher levels of power and eventually become obsolete, which is their intended role.
Weak Unique Items: Unique items are not strong enough, and the inability to change their runes makes them even less useful.
Weak Purple Items: Purple items often have very strong negative enchants and weak positive enchants. They should consistently have 4 good enchants, as many currently have only 2.
Difficulty Comparing Items: It’s challenging to compare items’ base stats like damage and armor because they drop at different upgrade levels.
– Quick Fix: Show stat ranges for better comparison.
– Alternative Solution: Display upgraded stats when comparing items. For example, if you have a Tier 3 item and compare it to a Tier 1 item, also show the stats the second item would have if upgraded to Tier 3.
I agree with your post. I am at over 100 hours in the game. While I have yet to be able to beat the crucible. However, the itemization I totally agree with all you said. For instance, I am using the rapier that drops from the boss in Nameless pass. Fully upgraded it only has 20 damage. I think for something you get late game it should do way more damage. Also, when an item scales with multiple stats, to get damage increase you must upgrade both stats before you get 1 point of damage increase. Currently that makes weapons that scale from a single attribute gain more damage. A fix to that would to have each attribute point in either stat add damage to the weapon that scales with multiple stats. I also think any unique gold items should be way stronger than others you find because they are so rare.
The enchants I find are less than thrilling most of the time. Earlier today I enchanted about 30 times and did not see anything I found useful. With all games, I understand time put in and all that to equal better gear. However, for 30 or more enchants something useful should be obtainable. I find that the focus gain/health gain stats have already been nerfed so badly. Being that enemies can take you out in two to three hits, despite having extremely high armor, I do not think that it was the correct decision to nerf things like that into the ground. It feels like the devs just want us to do the busy work of consuming food and running around while we wait for 18 seconds to be able to use food again, instead of giving us good healing options from weapons/gear/infusion/enchants, etc. I really do not care for that decision and I truly hope to see some gain back to items related to focus and health from the recent nerfs. It is almost like the devs are nerfing the fun of the game (hello Diablo IV devs).
But also add bonuses to equipping gear sets. I wouldn’t know what types of bonuses but it makes sense to do something like this.
Like Kindler Set increases X% of Fire Damage and -X% of Focus and Stamina on Fire Abilities/Runes. Add more perks as the armor set when reaching certain levels: like +50% Fire Resistance and Flame Trail or whatever on whatever levels they have to be.
Farmer Set increases produce pickup amount. More health restoration on food ingredients. Focus Regen around produce.
Yes! i suggested that in a thread about rings as well. There should be (hidden) set bonuses for sets of rings or armor sets. this would also improve the basically useless cloth and leather armor sets.
Like for example give a noticeable defense buff when wearing all cloth or something, so people at least think about using it before selling it anyways
