Diablo 3: To Buff or Not to Buff Items

There’s an ongoing thread regarding some of the upcoming patch 2.4.1 changes that can be seen on diablofans. One of the comments someone on the d3 forums mentioned was the observation that mostly this patch will just buff items and some skills, leading to more power creep. While I don’t know if this particular patch will be in line for the next season, one thing that has been a common philosophy for the Diablo 3 development team is that pretty much each season we’ll be seeing more progress somehow in terms of the Greater Rift scaling. Now, with various items getting buffed, I’m certain the rationale here is to make the sets more in line with each other. But a different thought came to mind: should the developers simply buff the items?

I suppose in the act of balancing content out, buffing sets to make each build gain parity with the others is a great goal. However, I think there’s a struggle in that method where adjust numbers to meet a certain cap may not be the most efficient nor fun way of handling the situation.

My proposal is to not just buff sets automatically but having other mechanisms to allow them to reach a maximum power level through a recipe similar to Caldesann’s Despiar. Instead of just focusing on raw stats like Dexterity, perhaps the adjustment to numbers such as multipliers and additive bonuses can be applied through similar mechanisms like Caldesann’s Despair.

I’ve always felt that one thing missing is other ways to augment legendaries via supplementary legendaries. So here’s a few ideas that I’ve been tossing around:

• Augmenting multipliers/additive bonuses through sharding duplicate pieces. Say you keep finding set pieces of a set you already have. Rather than just sharding them for Forgotten Souls, what if a new material can be extracted where you can apply the material for small gains on your set. Obviously, this idea would need work since set bonuses that do things such as add a rune to a skill would not normally be affected by this concept. But just having that extra bonus defense/damage could help.
• Create a new defensive/offensive bonus for a certain skill where it starts low but can be improved through adding the said special shards up until a cap. So rather than getting a flat buff, we get the buff from improving it until that cap is hit.
• Extraction of non-secondaries such as thorns damage, elemental resistance, etc. from legendaries that can be improved on pieces. Those extractions can be improved upon to a maximum number. This will give a new slot on each piece of gear and will allow us a path to continue hunting for items to improve our gear.

I’m not entirely in favor of a raw buff. I want to be another small, but somewhat meaningful grind to get that buff as well. At the very least, I want to continue looking for items and really putting them to their full use while improving upon what I have.

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