The Beauty of Diablo 2's Itemization Complexity

[MrLlamaSC]

Later we discussed runewords and the pros/cons of those. I'll probably highlight that and put it up as well

[RaidPerspective]

When you said "in POE all you do is run maps" while chain farming Andy I laughed at the ignorance and irony. POE has a variety of end game content, it is not just maps. I find the crafting system and itemization to be more interesting than any other game without question. D2 is a great game and it is fun, but lets not be silly here.

[HondaRider]

"D2 is so complex" *runs the same map thousands of times like a robot.

[dimas.]

The loot and the way items are generated is why D2 has such replay value and longevity. No other game has been able to replicate that to date.

[Mr.E.Fragrance]

I agree Llama D2's itemization is great. You know what's not great? The fact that you're running the same boss 1000 times in the manner you are.

[MythrilZenith]

The reason gear in Diablo 2 is so much better than gear in D3 is because while in D3 your gear affects your "core attributes" (damage, health, and other things that only meaningfully impact damage and health) and does so in an EXPONENTIAL way, in D2 your gear augments EVERYTHING about your character in a linear or sometimes percentile way.

For instance, in D3/DI you pick up an item that says do 1000% extra damage with one skill, with affixes that increase your vitality by 900, strength by 900, crit chance, crit damage, "fire damage, " etc. But all of that just means "Yeah you get more HP and this one version of the skill you want to use does absolutely insane damage." The game has picked specifically one skill, given it a set or legendary all about one rune of that one skill, and then says "To play this skill optimally you need this gear, and to use this gear effectively at all you need to be using this skill." The only "depth" the system has after you figure that out is just getting bigger numbers.

In Diablo 2, you pick up an item that says +1 to all skills, +x to all resistances, +attack rating, +energy, +% life stolen per hit, etc. and while not every attribute is useful to your build, you can get some level of use out of most of them on most builds, generally speaking. D2 does have +X to specific skill items, and those often end up being effective BiS for those builds, but the variance in other rolls on the items, especially when leveling up before you hit the Hell endgame, is what provides Diablo 2 with item variety and depth even if you're just running the campaign over and over again.

Another HUGE point is that in Diablo 3 every item rolls at your character level, so there's no point in really caring about optimizing until you hit level cap. In Diablo 2 every item rolls at a specific level pre-determined by the item. This goes hand in hand with D3's level sync of mobs making every area feel the same and making gear arbitrarily the only thing that matters.

Basically, in D3/DI, you NEED better gear to progress but the gear itself is boring, despite being incredibly over-the-top to try and be "not boring." In D2, you WANT better gear to optimize your character but a decent core of your build is within your character itself, which somehow makes you care more about the gear that you have because it works with you, instead of completely defining you.

[ashvalkyriee]

"all you do is run around and do maps", he says, while killing the same mob for the 25th time in 3 minutes, on a fixed tileset xD

[KevinCarlino]

This was great, very well said. The itemization path is a weird bell curve where you progress and then regress in quality based on specific affixes.

[wmolders]

I prefer the itemization of Diablo1, where armor actually mattered and needed to be considered along-side resistances (as one example). I also prefer the much, much lower drop rate of blue items and unique items. A unique might be seen once in 20 hours or more of gameplay, and were often not an upgrade over a blue. There was much less clutter of items on the screen, and finding a white item might be an upgrade because of the armor or damage. I think Diablo 2 really set games back by putting way too many items on the screen at once and almost all ARPG games have followed suit. Just look at your runs on Andarial as an example where you see a bunch of junk on the screen that you don't even consider.

[shawndriscoll]

I don't think I fully appreciated the item complexity until I got into LLD/VLLD. Both force you to look into every aspect of items you're talking about - monster levels, prefix/affixes, rare item attributes @ certain level etc. Agreed - have yet to find a game that matches this complexity and depth.

[EvoPortal]

Did he seriously compare D2 to POE? D2 is a TINY game with no end game. it's a slot machine with no gameplay and on top of that you can just buy any item for like $1. There is nothing to do in D2 after a single play through. Just look at the video, how many times can you sit there and run the same 15 second run over and over for items that you just just buy for $1. It's beyond silly.

[SpliffSized]

It's crazy how your talking about this like the game hasn't been around for 20+ years

[lightningandodinify]

I'm still somewhat new to D2R and I'm still blown away with how awesome the itemization in the game is. Probably my favourite in any RPG ever. To think Brevik and co. thought of these ideas two decades ago.

[ImVeryBrad]

D2 is basically a never ending game. The hunt always continues

[sickingc]

you litterally are able to kill andy like 10 times while my console is still in a loading screen.... console really needs load optimizations. Farming for gear is so awful atm on console just because of the insane load times.

[iwatchtoomuchhaikyuu]

All this does for me is make me think how many possibly good items I might've thrown away over the years especially as my knowledge for d2 increases 😅

[TraxisOnTheLines]

While I agree that things like MClass and TC are both complex enough to be another layer while simple enough to be understood, it's rude to say that PoE "doesn't have this" when it comes to diverse farming. It's not built in the same way, but there are zones worth farming for for different reasons, there are bosses worth killing for different reasons, and just as much as there are only a small niche of uber characters, or a specific way to design them, there's content in PoE that you need to specialize for.

[kay_keik]

The only problem games like these have is that in order to get better loot you have to do what you are doing which is unfun and tedious. Grim Dawn also has rifts but that game made it so exploring early areas can rewarding by adding monster totems which when activated it can spawn high level heroic monsters which can give amazing loot. This makes it so players can still go back to areas looking for monster totems while adding randomness since monster totems are never in the same place while having a well crafted static map that you get to know like the back of your hand. I have never gotten bored from grim dawn because of that. And the loot in grim dawn is just as wild if not wilder.

[Zingo]

I think its really cool how some of the blue items in D2 are literally BiS, like Jmod, like 6/40, like 40/15jewels, like 20fcr 3soc circlet etc etc, diablo2 got a really good balance of loot drops to make this feel right, if PoE or diablo3 or such had similar system with magic items it would just be a headache due to the overwhelming amunt of item drops so its probly hard to balance it just right to make this feature feel as good as it does in D2 but as it is in D2 I love it.

[oopomopoo]

Regarding poe at the end, the only difference is pow has more trash and low tier Stat rolls. You still have low level build enabling uniques, best in slot rares, and so on.

Regarding the farming maps comment... Purely the choice of poe. I personally cannot stand d2 farming anymore. I hate it, I genuinely can't do meph runs more that twice because it's so tedious and boring. Leaving the game and rejoining, I just hate it. Even playing my trapsin running pit and such got boring because every map was the same, it was monotonous and repetitious. Poe on the other hand while a similar concept. Mixes it up by having different environments and mob types. The end goal is the same (kill everything) but it's visually different.

Now there's nothing wrong with how d2 does it. If you like it, that's awesome it's personal preference and it's great. D2 is a fantastic game still. Just understand the mapping VS bossing decision is also a preference.