“You have a chance at acquiring the loot you are looking for…”

It’s the nature of Diablo games when itemization isn’t flawed like it is in Diablo III/Reaper of Souls AND there isn’t this much amount of soul binding along with restrictive trading.  To be absolutely clear, I’ve always been ambivalent when it came to soul binding (pros/cons associated with it).

When you have the restrictive set up that currently exists, drops have to be balanced out via some sort of system; one way to accomplish that is basing it on the challenges and difficulty; by actually measuring effectiveness of ones game play (kill rate for example; and all of this is already logged – plus Blizzard loves statistics).

This type of metric can be factored into the drop rate chance; it basically gives players something to shoot for where their actual game play and effectiveness, has the potential for a better reward.  Right now, their design leaves what drops for you entirely up to luck.  And with this flawed itemization system still in place,  soul binding and a very restrictive trading system, it’s pretty much self-explanatory how this development team, misses the point about how this randomness worked in Diablo II.

The game needs a new lead content designer and strategic decision maker; nothing will change going forward with this franchise without crucial changes at this level.

Myself, I finally had some good luck; Tal Rasha chest, almost all of the Firebird’s set (which I don’t really care about since they aren’t better than my crafted items – plus they are going to be the most common wizard specific set items that will drop) where 4 of them dropped within the same gaming session, and a Thunderfury (which honestly, is a bit overrated and probably not as rare as people make it out to be – it’s a good weapon and much better than the Slorak’s I was using, but an item like a Wand of Woh or Shard of Hate are loads better IMHO).

All of this was based on pure good luck as I was doing absolutely nothing different.  And most of the Firebird’s came from popping a chest.  But this is the biggest issue with the current game where it’s all left to luck; where all this stuff can drop early on, or not for a long time.  And that is exactly what happened with some players where they hit that lucky streak early on.

Again, in an open system like Diablo II, this kind of randomness will work well as one can potentially trade for items that aren’t dropping for them.  I’m not going to debate the pros/cons associated with trading though since it’s all been said ad nauseum before.  Put it this way, for myself, I don’t want something like the AH’s returning given it’s impact on the sort of itemization system (and the affect it had on the quality of drops) as well as how it turned into a meta-game of its own.