If there’s one thing I can’t stand in a game, it’s wasting my time by being forced onto a hamster wheel and going nowhere. For all the number of people that supposedly works on Diablo 4, it honestly feels like one of the laziest contemporary games around. Outside of bugs, poor performance and other issues, the game mostly suffers from an over-reliance on RNG to take the place of actual content. Probably, three of the worst so-called end game offenders are Tempering, Masterworking and Enchanting. These are built on RNG built upon RNG built upon RNG. There’s nothing interesting about these systems and the philosophy of the “big boom” upon hitting the thing you want is downright rotten. I’m going to blast the Diablo 4 developers’ egos in talking about how these systems are faulty in their philosophy and the actual answer to what is needed in place.
First, let me talk about the layers of RNG that take place into gearing. Aspects could be included here because of the rarity of certain Aspects and gate keeping behind World Tier levels, but I think Aspects is the model they should go for all ideas of gear enhancement. That’s the one system they got right. But before talking about how to fix the other three systems, I want to enumerate the process of getting an ideal piece of gear:
- Find the base piece of gear you want
- Make sure it has the ideal stats
- Make sure it has at least one Greater Affix on a stat you need
- Temper where you not only have to worry about nailing the correct temper but get the value you want in 4-6+ tries.
- In the case of Ancestral items, you have to Temper twice, which means your overall tries go down
- Once you get the Tempers you need (and hopefully the base value you want), you Enchant to reroll affixes that suck. In some cases, the stat you need is pushed all the way to the bottom, so you require a high degree of luck to get certain things. For non-uniques where you require key skill bonuses, good luck. Your fucked. Also, most likely you’ll run out of gold quickly. I don’t care if you can run T8 or whatever Infernal Hordes, you’ll probably spend all night trying to reroll and run out of something (most likely patience)
- Now, you’re ready to apply your Aspect (the only part that really feels good)
- If you’ve got an ideal item, you probably will want to Masterwork it. Except you not only need a shit ton of special materials, you really need to hit the bonus on an affix. And those go quite fast (especially if you’re struggling to push into higher tiers of Infernal Hordes or Pits). And if you don’t hit the ideal affix, you CAN reroll but that costs more.
That’s the normal path. There’s additional layers of RNG with Aspects where you need to find them and slowly get higher levels of the Aspects you need and Tempering Recipes, which, thankfully for this season, were mostly built into the base. But the point here is that there’s at least 10 levels of RNG into the itemization. Let me repeat this:
10 LEVELS OF FUCKING RNG BUILT INTO ITEMIZATION
I have never seen a game so entrenched into this level of RNG. It’s just bullshit upon bullshit upon bullshit. I honestly would break the jaw of whoever thought this was a good idea and use a baseball to break whoever’s legs that approved of this. These types of people should be placed in an Elon Musk rocket and shot straight into the sun for being a waste of humanity. They should be tied with chains and tossed into the bottom of the ocean where sharks can maul them over and over.
That’s how pissed off I am with this dogshit system. If the developers thought that they could drag the game out longer by placing misguided bets into RNG, they’re sadly mistaken. If anything, shit like this is what drives off players. Players recognize bullshit and it burns them out. You think you’ve created an enticing cake at the end of the tunnel but it’s still the proverbial carrot on the stick analogy. Even a dumb donkey is going to figure out that this is a horrible waste of time. It’s the same level of stupid that they put in World of Warcraft that drove me off (along with a toxic community and just waiting around all the time)
More than anything none of this garbage makes sense. It’s a thoughtless, simple minded, lame system. First of all, the blacksmith and occultist have to be the absolute dumbest people on the planet. You’re telling me that after I yell at the blacksmith and give this asshole all my materials and money, he can’t fucking do a simple task? Same thing with the occultist (although that person probably is some Scientologist). But seriously, where’s the fantasy in any of this? The bozos over at Blizzard keep talking about this stupid fantasy concept. Okay, how the fuck is RNG at this level of bullshit integrated into ANY fantasy world outside of the crap Blizzard shits out these days? This level of frustration makes me believe that the developers at Blizzard are like that duo in Prometheus, who, despite being scientists of some sort, not only get lost in a giant alien ship, but fucking try to pet a potentially dangerous species. There’s a reason that one dude gets a Hammerpede shoved down his yap.
Anyway, before I piss myself off more, I’m going to talk about solutions (because I don’t just like to complain. I care enough about this game where I want to see it in a far better state than it is and I think my suggestions WOULD get my friends to play again).
First, the model that Tempering, Masterworking and Enchanting should follow Aspects. Aspects was the right way to go for all these systems. You find the thing you want, but you get incremental upgrades (sometimes the whole shebang). Tempering should have individual recipes with a value that fits the Tier of difficulty. So low level tiers would have small values. Once you unlock the highest end Tempering recipe, you simply should just select the affix you want and you add it to the item. You want the recipes to be the chase items not the customization of an item. Heck, I would lock recipes behind Dungeon bosses because then there’s a clear purpose for farming Dungeons as Masterworking materials will be also put in Nightmare Dungeons but on mobs too.
Masterworking should be simplified where on the 4th upgrade, you select the bonus. You still need the materials but I don’t see a good reason to make the bonus RNG based. Reworks are for when you want to change the Masterworking for a different character or build. The cost should be significantly higher but the target are mostly for items with GAs and Mythic Uniques. But it should be treated more as a re-spec where you’re avoiding the cost of time for re-rolling a character.
Also, I think the way they’re redoing item level power is dumb. Instead, Masterworking should be the thing to upgrade an item’s power. Perhaps, common materials and rares can be the base of how one can update the item power. You can make it a degree of improvement too. But the current system is flat out dumb. For instance, I have a triple GA ring which is amazing but the item power is under 925. There’s really not much of a benefit to upgrade the item power but having straight 925s with a triple GA too is more appealing as a power gamer than having a great item that reached its limits. I think if Masterworking had multiple purposes and was actually thought out properly, it could have been a far more interesting system.
What about Enchanting? I don’t think anyone in Diablo 3 said, “Hey we love the Enchanter!” It was a bullshit thing but at least it never felt impossible to get what you needed. It’s bad enough that we can’t re-roll a Greater Affix into another Greater Affix but just the fact that certain pieces of gear (I’m looking at you Amulet!!!) have the worst offenders with weighted values. The fact that you have these guides that talk about the really high end builds that 99% of the player will never achieve (nor want to if they figured out how to min/max their builds) and you get into scenarios where there’s no way one can further push without a major screw up or just plain luck (there’s that RNG again Mr Frodo see it?) are just more instances of myopic Blizzard bullshit.
The easiest fix to this crappy system is still allowing the one fix. But again, just make the values discoverable via the Dungeons as recipes. You still need to find a reasonable base to perform an Enchant but at least if you get the perfect enchant, you can get the value you need. And yes, I do think Enchants should allow for Greater Affixes but at a much higher cost.
Again, I think the main idea is to make the recipes the hunt, remove useless layers of RNG that are frustrating and don’t extend the life of the game and increase the base cost so the boom is the achievement of getting what a player wants. There’s no logical reason why these systems have to be this complicated. In fact, I argue that Itemization 2.0 would have been a much bigger success if people probably didn’t get demotivated by the RNG factor and made the hunt for the thing they needed the key. You’re close Blizzard to a home run but you need to get your head of out your accountants’ and PMO’s asses especially with their fetishization of RNG. I mean when you get jacked off, you don’t want random rhythms do you?
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