Diablo 4
While I have enjoyed my time with Diablo 4, as evidenced by my 150+ hours and my daily articles about it, one thing keeps striking me as very strange, the way loot works in the endgame.
Sure, it’s possible to assemble fun builds, but that’s a separate thing from whether or not the game feels fun to farm to get those builds. It’s not really about the activities per se, it’s about the strangeness of how drops and gear-hunting works in Diablo 4.
- The second you arrive in World Tier 4, at level 60, 70, whatever, you start getting drops that you can take with you all the way to level 100. While that may sound good for early farming, what that means is there is almost nothing new to chase when you get about 75, 80, 90, 100. It’s all the same stuff you’ve seen this entire time. Nothing changes.
- No matter how high you get, you will never stop seeing Sacred items drop, where you can finish a tier 100 Nightmare dungeon and still see Sacred Legendaries dropping everywhere. While the Aspect might matter on Legendaries for extraction, any Sacred drop in World Tier 4 is automatically trash as an actual, usable item. Yet they are everywhere, at all levels.
- Blizzard has said that Uniques are not meant to be the most unequivocally best-in-slot items, they are just used for certain builds alongside legendaries and their affixes. But despite that, their drop rates are incredibly low, and you can take a character from level 1 to 100 and not see the one thing you need to make an entire build work just through sheer bad luck alone. So much so that you more or less have to build around what does drop, rather than waiting for something that may never actually come.
- In fact, despite a few “key” Uniques, most Uniques are worse than legendaries or even rares because they come locked with a set of affixes you cannot reroll or change, which often do not feed into your build at all.
Diablo 4
- Strangely, the Aspect situation means that it’s actually Ancestral rares that are the most valuable items in the game. These drop by the truckload and you have to go through every single one to make sure you’re not missing some perfect roll. Legendaries are essentially no different from rares at all, they just come with an Aspect built in already. So 99% of looting in the game is essentially pouring through every rare you find to see what is worth imprinting and upgrading. It drastically devalues legendary drops as a result.
- Gearscore is weird as well. There is no actual affix difference between a rare dropping at 725 and 820 score. The type of rolls and the range of those rolls are exactly the same between those levels. The only difference is the base armor or damage on a piece of gear, which often pales in comparison to getting a perfect roll of affixes.
- Finally, as we all know, the ultimate chase in the game, the uber-Unique drops, is just impossible. It might as well not exist. These are items where only a handful have dropped in the entire world since launch, so it’s not remotely possible to farm them. You just wander around hoping you’ll get struck by lightning but you, reading this article, you never will, at these rates.
Again, all of this cobbles together so that yes, you can make builds and yes, it is a greater degree of customization we’ve had in the past, but there are so many strange decisions within that system that it’s really throwing a lot of people off, myself included. I hope to see some changes to it in the future.
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