Diablo 3's loot system is not a good exemplar. It isn't even inherently better compared to what it was before greater rifts. Pre greater rifts, D3 had a treasure hunting component. There were many affixes and the min/max value range for each affix was huge. The probability of finding anything good enough to be worth opening a trade window for was very low. This gave the auction house a useful function. You could skip an arduous treasure hunt by simply paying money for the items you wanted.
Post greater rifts, D3 has been re-purposed into a gauntlet style arcade game. The items don't matter. Paragon levels matter. Items are a by-product of grinding rifts to get paragon levels.
Damage calculation in D3 is a multiplication of factors. The items you need have unique bonuses that act as independent damage multipliers. You make huge damage numbers in D3 by wearing exactly the same gear as everyone else, running exactly the same builds as everyone else and then pumping main stat gained from paragon levels. That is the only real way to get competitive advantage in greater rifts.
Skills that are not supported by massive damage multiplication cannot scale damage output to keep pace with the doubling of monster hp every 4 to 5 greater rift levels.
D3 is instanced and therefore has an infinite number of chances to acquire loot. The game is perpetually online and the randomness in the loot system is balanced around a 3 month season, though in reality, if you hit the rifts hard, you can get most if not all the gear you need in days to weeks, not months. When you kill everything in a rift or kill the guardian in a greater rift, you pick up the loot, re-instance and go again. Repeat ad infinitum.
D:OS2 by contrast is a single player adventure role playing game. It does not need mechanisms to keep players online so the game retains large numbers of concurrent players for matchmaking and chat channel activity.
D:OS2 is not instanced and has a finite number of lootable containers. The way items are generated and distributed is also different and persists through save states (which D3 doesn't have) so it is possible to save/load and repeat container sequences to get exactly the same loot distributed in exactly the same container sets. This exposes the pseudo random mechanics of loot generation and distribution to the player. The same mechanism generates items in trade windows and the same techniques can be used to reset a trader's inventory if RNG serves up hot garbage and you don't want to wait an hour for an inventory reset.
I think the entire system is not appropriate for a single player game with limited opportunities to generate loot. Damage calculation and itemisation in D:OS2 already have too many analogues in D3, a game which is not even remotely similar, nor should it be.
D3 itemisation is designed around exponential scaling of damage output to keep pace with exponential scaling of monster hp in greater rifts. This is how you turn 100k damage hits into 10 trillion damage hits by level grinding for a month. In that time you will jump many difficulty levels and throw away a tonne of gear because you outscale it within hours or it simply doesn't facilitate exponential damage scaling in the first place.
D&D is a good point of contrast because the numbers are deliberately kept small so the requirement of doing mental math does not get in the way of people enjoying the game. Because the numbers stay small, a level 10 weapon isnt hundreds of orders of magnitude more powerful than a level 1 weapon. You dont outscale gear at an insane rate. The player keeps the stuff they find for longer. The longer players use the same stuff, the more you can tie loot into a story and the world of the game because it is a constant part of it.
Braccus Rex set is an example of hand placed loot in D:OS2 with an interesting back story and a fun associated treasure hunt which you will never use because you out-scaled it before you got all the pieces. It is a good idea to have more hand placed loot in D:OS2 but damage scaling does not give the player an opportunity to use it before it is redundant.
This is a difficult problem to solve because of how gameplay systems interact with one another. Changing damage calculation changes difficulty curve and may ruin the flow and continuity of the game. Difficulty spikes may become impossible requiring many combat encounters to be tuned by hand. It also has a knock on effect on itemization because a large portion of your character's damage stats come from items.
Last edited by Hayte; 23/10/17 07:33 AM.
