Diablo’s core game play is…

Rhetorical question: so riddle me why many are doing T6 chest runs in tank gear, and basically just popping bone piles, chests, and demonic vessels, as a means of getting a high amount of legendaries per hour?  It’s not like this isn’t anything new either as one of the farm routes (Core of Arreat) was popular in vanilla.  Act V has a bonanza of locales with a lot of chests.

Farming this way, yields more legendaries per hour compared to actually killing monsters.  And killing elite packs, lowers that rate even more due to the extra amount of time it takes to kill them (unless doing them in a lower difficulty where your gear allows them to be one shot – but you then lose out on extra experience, gold, and Torment specific drops).

However, I linked the above since it was one of the core reasons for why the auction houses were closed.  Many were gearing up via the auction houses rather than killing monsters.  Many were playing the auction houses flipping items for profit rather than playing the game itself by killing monsters.

So we are now just 1 week into Reaper of Souls, and for some reason, many feel compelled to do these chest runs in order to get their legendary items more quickly.  This amounts to a design failure when these chest farming runs, are still viable as opposed to actually killing monsters.  Seriously, it isn’t that difficult to code in checks which dynamically adjusts the chance level of legendary items dropping from containers and destructibles, relative to monster kills (taking into account the speed, difficulty, and challenge level based on the set of affixes thrown at the player).  You still want there to be a possibility for loot to come from these other sources; they need to be balanced relative to killing monsters (including their level of difficulty).

Instead, there is obviously no such system in place because chest farming has been done ever since Diablo III was released.  Instead of addressing the root cause, the loot tables for such objects were adjusted and/or drops removed completely.  And as many are finding out, loot 2.0 isn’t exactly that great as there are still layers of RNG (inherent in the core design) that still will give you more junk, than useful stuff (especially once you start to get moderately geared).  Some player accounts are blessed with luck when it comes to RNG while others are just plain unlucky.

It’s like how during beta, gambling blood shards with Kadala was a source of legendaries (that was nerfed, but her chances were again increased recently when they hotfixed the increased drop rate for Torment difficulty).  In 500 blood shards, I’ve gotten two legendaries (a Vigilante belt and a Triumvirate that I’m using on my main character).  Similarly, there’s the chance to get specific legendary items from bounty bags (I’ve only gotten one legendary item so far from a cache).

And as mentioned before, the RNG inherent in their core design, is enough to where they had to implement a safety check for certain outliers when it comes to drops.  If such RNG exists with just drops, then this also means that some players will never see certain rare items once they hit level cap.  I know my main account is one of those; a Witching Hour never did drop for me until the day before the expansion launched (the one I have on my hardcore witch doctor which didn’t even roll main stat).  A standard wizard set item like a Chantodo’s Will and Force, didn’t drop for me until patch 1.0.7, and a Mempo didn’t drop until 1.0.8.  This amounts to around 850+ hours of game play, and none of these rolled well.  Sure, that amount of hours over close to 2 years, isn’t that much – but it’s because the game was so unrewarding to begin with, where I ended up playing it less and less as time passed.

If I have similar poor RNG in the expansion, seasonal ladders will be out way before I even get any one character decently geared.  I’m reserving judgement on this until I’ve hit 100 actual game play hours on one character (I’m currently playing several characters so my play hours are spread out).  I was decently geared during beta, but it was on another account.  And during beta, there were some accounts that did have very poor drop rates (to where a developer looked at them, and confirmed those accounts had some very bad RNG – thus there are indeed accounts that do have poor RNG associated with them – and I know my main account is one of those).  It shouldn’t be that way, but I believe it’s an outcome of their poor core design which results in this being a possibility.

With soul binding, it’s no longer an easy matter of just playing on one of my alt accounts, and trading the items over; I’d have to actually multi-box (I could just have my main AFK but I’d need to remember to always move that character every 29 minutes so as to not be disconnected due to inactivity) – not something I want to do.  If need be, I’ll probably just end up playing on that other account with better RNG (though it means rebuilding everything from scratch).  I’m also not going to do these core runs either as I’ve already experienced the short circuiting of the reward loop by gearing up via the auction house during classic D3.