Based on what information has been released publicly, it seems there were several goals with Loot 2.0. As others mentioned, an economy reset will be one of them now that the level cap has been made (this wasn’t surprising since the objective is progression and as it stands now, there are parts of the player base who are facerolling MP10 due to consequences of some of previous decisions (relatively better legendaries including higher drop rates + easy availability on the AH’s).
Another issue was Critical Hit Damage. While it’s not detailed yet, it’s my belief these numbers will be tuned down on the newer loot so that we don’t get into this whole scaling issue with insane monster health pools (maybe more focus on the actual abilities/mechanics to add challenge). Older loot which rolled pre-Loot 2.0 will still have modifiers with higher roll ranges (and thus remain useful on content that is at the lower end scale of the upgraded levels of the monsters in the expansion).
One of the other goals (based upon things said in various interviews) was how they didn’t want to the AH’s to be destination of the best gear. They actually want players to play the game to acquire most of their gear. Some of the slides shown revealed new iLvl 70 legendary items that were account bound. How they plan on actually executing this remains to be seen though. Is it only for smart drops? Is it only for a percentage of smart drops that roll at the high end? Myself, I’m undecided about this move (with more BoA) since the trading aspect is something that is part of the franchise (it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand their rationale for doing it).
As for selling current gear, that needed to be done before this news hit if the intention was to always profit from it. For those who are basically just playing the game though, it doesn’t really matter. Some players who have fairly high end gear won’t go through much upgrades now. Furthermore, one will still need decent enough gear in order to tackle the initial parts of the new Inferno level content in the expansion.
The actual lower level system changes in Loot 2.0 aren’t the sort of dramatic changes I was expecting for expac so non-smart drop items will still be subject to RNG. Thus I can see higher end iLvl-63 items still being useful through most of the monster levels for at least half of the new act (at which point, there should be a larger statistical chance of much better upgrades to clear the entire Act before one goes into farming mode).
The ones (like myself) who don’t use the RMAH and are piddling behind in terms of not constantly chasing the higher end, will actually now have easier access to some better pieces in the interim as the prices drop and stabilize. I remembered doing this after 1.0.4 and was able to re-gear relatively cheaply to get to the 150k damage level (from sub 50k) on my softcore wizard.
The changes to Paragon also offer an incentive to level alt’s (especially if one already has a P100 since any current max level Paragon character will be rewarded with 100 Paragon points plus playing it won’t earn any additional experience points) cumulative Paragon XP across characters will determine the account Paragon level. Thus they are attempting to reward those who both grinded out characters to max Paragon level as well as those who played alternate characters (and now also gives those who don’t have a P100, to get there before expansion). Thus there will still be a demand for current gear in the interim since Loot 2.0 and expansion won’t drop until some time in 2014.
