Diablo fans, I believe you have noticed that the developers revealed a series of new changes in Season 4 in the latest Diablo 4 Campfire Chat. Indeed, with the current poor state of Diablo 4, some improvements are urgently needed. The large-scale itemization overhaul announced by the developers of this time seems to have really achieved this goal.
However, I have some major concerns with the changes, especially the large amount of RNG involved in the process of obtaining actual Diablo 4 items using the new and updated system. Here, I’ll discuss the most important itemization changes and the potentially huge flaws that could push Diablo 4 back into failure.
Itemization Changes
But first, I’ll cover the major changes related to itemization. In general, itemization has many variations, and I will only mention the most influential ones here.
- Base items will have fewer affixes: 3 for rare items and 4 for legendary items.
- Only Sacred items will drop in World Tier 3, and only Ancestral items will drop in World Tier 3.
- Legendary and Unique items are now tradable, but Uber Uniques are still not.
- Monsters of level 95 or higher will always drop 925 item level gear.
- Codex of Power will store all Legendary Aspects you extract, and you will apply the strongest Aspects you extracted to items an unlimited number of times.
- Three brand new systems will be added that can be used to improve the new items you loot. These are Masterworking, Tempering and Greater Affixes.
New System
Masterworking replaces the current item upgrade system and makes it more complex. Players will be able to “masterwork” each item 12 times, and most of these upgrade levels will increase all the item’s affixes by one point, once every 4 levels. Therefore, a random affix will be added at levels 4, 8, and 12, and the same affix can be added multiple times using this system.
Tempering is the name of the second newly added system, which involves adding entirely new affixes to items. Recopies that add affixes drop randomly, and once you get them, you can randomly add an affix to an item from 4 different affixes.
You will temper Ancestral items twice, so you can add 2 new affixes to these items. But you cannot adjust Unique items.
Greater Affixes are affixes that only Ancestral items can have. These affixes always roll max, and the value of these affixes is increased by 50% compared to normal items.
An item can have multiple Greater Affixes. These Greater Affixes can be increased through Masterworking, but items with Greater Affixes cannot be crafted or re-rolled.
Is Too Much RNG Really A Good Thing?
All of this looks great, but I have some very serious concerns about each of these systems: they involve too much RNG.
This, in itself, is not necessarily a problem. Some items dropped, or some low-probability events do not break immediately. For example, the rarest rune in Diablo 2 was really hard to come by because of its rarity, but Rune System was, and still is, beloved by the community.
However, RNG case that Diablo 4 is about to add is not a pleasant or exciting type of RNG. Unlike the excitement of rare drops, you just need to farm materials to keep re-rolling items until you get the perfect result. The difference is that repeatedly re-rolling items to get rare results is more frustrating than farming for rare drops.
Potential Problems With The New System
But let’s look at the specifics of each system one by one!
Tempering
The problem with Tempering comes from its randomness: you randomly add an affix to your item from a list of 4 affixes. This means you can easily get the wrong affix, which will most likely be useless to you. You can re-roll it, but only a limited number of times. The number of times you can re-roll Tempered Affixes is called Tempering Durability.
So what happens when you use up all your re-rolls and still don’t get a good affix? Then the item is destroyed.
This is new in Diablo 4: you can easily and irreversibly destroy an item if you don’t get the right affixes using this new Tempering system.
Masterworking
Not only is Masterworking more complex than the current item upgrade system, it also involves more RNG. Keep in mind that levels 4, 8, and 12 of Masterworking process involve randomly adding an affix to an item, which may affect the same affix multiple times.
Obviously, you want to spend hundreds of materials to masterwork your item until you randomly roll the correct affix for an increased number of times?
Let’s look at an example. If you have an item with 4 affixes, one of which is critical strike chance, you want to maximize that. In this case, you have a 1.5% chance of getting 3 critical hits. Therefore, if you want this to happen, you have to masterwork your items until you reach the 1.5% chance.
Greater Affixes
Greater Affixes are not inherently bad. Although RNG obtains them through random drops, you don’t have to farm some hard-to-summon boss to get Greater Affixes. You farm them just by playing the game, without forcing you to do any targeted farming.
But Greater Affixes can become problematic when they interact with other systems. Ideally, if you want Greater Affixes with Masterworking, then you can only hope that RNG gods will bless you.
All in all, I like the changes the developers have planned for next season, but I’m definitely worried about the execution. But what do you think? Will Season 4 have too much bad RNG? Or will it be better than Season 3 situation? Let’s wait and see!
