Items/Archive

Paper doll, April 2009.

Item hunting is the biggest joy in playing the Diablo games for many players. The item system in Diablo III is bigger and better, but it's a refinement on the system used in Diablo II, not a radical change.

The D3 Team has not yet revealed many specifics about items in D3, but we do know a few things at this point, from playing at BlizzCon 2008, and from what the team has said in interviews.

For a list of items, check out the Known Items Listing.

Item Quality and Color

The D3 Team has confirmed that there will be magical, rare, and unique items in Diablo III. Set Items aren't in yet, but the team has said they're thinking about them. Runewords will not return in Diablo III, and Crafted items seem unlikely to return, though there will be some method to "craft" or create/customize items; it just won't involve a Horadric Cube-like object. There is also known to be at least one other type of item that's not yet been revealed.

Jay Wilson spoke on this issue in Blizzcast #8, in March 2009. [1] His comments on color confirmed various item types, while opening a whole new can of worms on the color scheme.

Bornakk: Have you settled on a particular color scheme for item drops?

Jay Wilson: We've kind of gone round and round on color scheme. I know with World of Warcraft when they decided on a color scheme to fit quality, they were taking that from Diablo 2 and other MMOs, but they chose a color set that they felt was easier to read. We actually tried to emulate that for awhile, I think actually our announcement build or maybe our BlizzCon build was actually using a color scheme very similar to World of Warcraft and we generally found we just didn’t like it, it didn’t feel Diablo. So something as simple as that didn’t feel Diablo anymore.

Color scheme is pretty solid right now, it follows very closely to the Diablo 2 color scheme. We slightly shifted some of the hues to help, especially with color blindness, to try and get some of the more problematic combinations. We took out, for example, uniques were gold, we’ve changed their color I think we did purple which is a bit of a nod to World of Warcraft but the problem was gold and yellow were really close. Even though the gold lettering was unique and everything it was often very difficult to tell the two apart. So we just did that not to get away from Diablo but to try and fix that kind of readability issue. What we found is that if we try and get too far from Diablo it doesn't feel right, so right now magic items are blue, rare items are yellow, unique items I think they're purple – I'm operating off memory here but they might be different actually because I think we use purple for something else for an item type we haven’t announced yet. Then if we do set items they'll be green, we haven't made a call on set items yet.

Fans were just about unanimous in their disapproval of the color change from gold to purple for uniques. Most fans think uniques should stay gold and if something must change, it should be rares, to purple or some other color that won't be confused with gold.

Top End Items

What type of items will make up the end game gear is always a popular topic for fan debate. This issue came up in the March 2009 Blizzcast, in a question to Jay Wilson. [2]

Bornakk: Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.

And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it's up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we're definitely not shooting for a, "oh here's the barbarian armor", there is a set and when you get the full set you're done. That's just not very Diablo and it's not really the kind of gameplay we're going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Bornakk: Always something to collect right?

Jay Wilson: Exactly, always a new build to try out.

Item Variety

A few new item types have been seen so far. Characters now wear shoulder pads and pants, in addition to all the other types of armor found in Diablo II. See the paper doll for screenshots and details.

No new types of weapons have yet been confirmed. Screenshots show the Wizard wielding a sphere like a crystal ball. This may be the return of Orbs, albeit orbs not mounted on wands as they were in D2.

There are many changes to small items. Charms, runes, and jewels appear to be gone, but there are many more types of gems. Another new item are the skill runes, which are socketed into active skills and add bonus effects of various types. These items can not be used in items and provide no benefit except when socketed into a skill.

Bags of holding can also be found, which add additional inventory slots when equipped in special bag slots. (This feature may or may not last into the final game. Inventory space issues have changed repeatedly during development.)

If there are other new item types, new varieties of weapons or multiple levels of jewelry, it's not been announced. However, lots of the item types so popular in Diablo II were not added until the expansion; there were no jewels, charms, runes, or runewords in regulation Diablo II; those all came in the expansion pack. It is therefore conceivable that a similar amount of item types and/or varieties could be added by the team in D3 and its expansion(s).

Class Specific Weapons

There are a lot of class-specific weapons in Diablo 3. There are more types of items than in Diablo 2, but a lot of them are limited to one character type, or exclude some character types. Full details have not yet been determined, but the general theory is that characters can only use items that they would normally be able to use. Barbarians can't use magical items, mage characters can't use axes, and so forth.

Bashiok spoke on this issue, from a design standpoint, in July 2009.[3]

...we do now have some restrictions on weapon types usable by each class. It’s been part of the game for a while now. Allowing every class to use every weapon type was actually going to require a huge amount of time and effort and it would have meant cutting out or cutting into other features. We evaluated really how often people would want to have their class holding a weapon type that (traditionally) contradicted their class-style versus that work going in to other features - specifically having a lot more skills and a lot more skill-rune effects. We made the obvious choice which is making sure there are a ton of awesome skills and rune effects to choose from.

Because I can see the conclusions being jumped to RIGHT NOW in my old cranium - let me state that weapon types do not dictate stats. At least not wholly (barbarians can’t use staves so there’s no point in allowing fury related stats on them). We understand that the game is about variation, customization, and experimentation in class builds. We’re not World of Warcraft, we’re not looking to make weapon stats “optimal” for the types and classes that will use them. Which is to say, we’re not going to put specific stats in specific amounts on each weapon of a specific type because we’re making assumptions about what each class wants out of their stats. We want variation, and experimentation, and all that good stuff. These restrictions don’t affect those goals, it really just means you probably won’t see a wizard lugging around a two-handed axe. Kind of a bummer, but then think about what it affords us to work on with more and better looking skills, a more robust rune-skill system, etc. We want to spend our time and effort on what makes sense to making the game better.

The class-specific weapons, or class-excluding weapons, should also be considered in light of the fact that there will be no stat requirements to use items. No strength or dexterity minimums to meet, for instance, and since that requirement has been eliminated, making it impossible for traditionally weak characters to use heavy weapons (for instance) makes more sense. It also allows the designers to more precisely target the modifiers; if only one character type can use a given weapon, then they can set only mods useful to that character to spawn on the weapon. No more life leech on wands, for instance.

The main objection to this issue is that it limits play variety. Not many players used axes or polearms with their Assassins or Sorceresses, but what about the players who wanted to do so?

Blizzard has stressed that the selections are made carefully and distinctly, and that the lists are not yet finalized.[4]

The list of what weapon types are or aren’t allowed for each class aren’t final and could change. They’re fairly logical choices and what is most commonly seen as closely tied to the hero archetypes. In our current game the wizard can’t wield a two-handed sword for instance, but can still use a one handed sword and shield if so desired.

From that it seems likely that they weren't creating two-handed swing animations for the character. If that's the case then there's no point in letting the Wizard use two-handed swords if she can't use axes or polearms.

Class Specific Armor

It's not known if there are similar limits to armor, but if so none have yet been seen, and the D3 Team has stressed that all characters will be able to wear heavy plate as well as light armor. [5]

There still aren’t any armor restriction planned. Armor is a different issue as it’s shown in much the same way as Diablo II, so more types don’t actually increase the animation/modeling costs like weapon types would.

The Diablo 2 Expansion added class-specific armors; helms that only the Druid and Barbarian could wear, as well as shields that were Paladin only. Unlike the class-specific weapons added in the expansion, the armors were cosmetic and fairly illogical; there were plenty of other helms and shields in the game, and it's not like there was something special about the shape of the Druid's or Barbarian's head.

Bind on Pick-Up/Equip

The items in Diablo 3 will not "bind in pickup" (BoP). In other words, there won't be any items that are untradable, and that can not be dropped by a character without destroying them. The D3 Team feels that item trading and twinking is an indispensable part of the Diablo play experience, and they want to encourage trading.

That said, they are considering making the very highest end items Bind on Equip (BoE). That means that once such an item is equipped it can not be traded to or used by any other character. The point of this feature is to create some turn over amongst the end game gear. If the best items can be passed around and reused, then players will just use the same item on all of their characters, and eventually the trading market becomes clogged with the item as more and more of them are found and none are ever removed from the economy. (This is less of an issue with Hardcore characters, since there items are removed from the economy with unlooted character deaths.)

The D3 Team has said that BoE items might be bind to account, rather than to character. (It's not yet been determined.) This would let players transfer them between characters on the same account. It's unclear how useful this would be; from what we've seen of the character design thus far, items are fairly exclusive, either by class-specific type or just by only being useful for one of the classes, so it's unlikely that a player would have more than one character who could or would want to use a given high level weapon anyway. But with BoE:Account, it would at least be useful to pass around a super item between characters of the same class, with different builds. [6]

Jay Wilson: We have no “Soulbound” or bind-on-pickup, except for quest items. We do have bind-on-equip for the highest end items in the game. We targeted, roughly, any item above level 85. These we will do as bind-on-equip. The reason for this is that we want people to be able to trade them, but we also want to remove the high-end items from the economy. One of the greatest ways that you can do that is with bind-on-equip. What we don’t want is to have a situation where you find something on the ground like, “Oh, man. This would be a perfect weapon for my Monk. Oh, but I just picked it up and now it’s on the wrong character.” We don’t want that at all.

Most of our focus on Diablo 3 is as a trading game. So, if you take trading out of the item space, you ruin the core of the game. Finding a really great item that is not for you is still a great event because it means you have a bartering tool to get the item that you do want. We definitely want to make sure that that still exists.

Quest Items BoP

There's been a fair amount of confusion about how Quest Items will bind on pickup, after Bashiok gave several unclear explanations of the feature in a series of forum posts. [7]

This is not a big deal; characters in Diablo 3 have a Quest Items tab in their inventory menu. Only quest items are stored in that window, they are automatically slotted there when picked up or received from an NPC, and they are automatically removed/used when required by the quest. The point in making them BoP is that a clueless new player might drop or throw away a quest item which would make that quest unfinishable.

Quest items can be removed, permanently, by abandoning quests. When a quest is dropped in that way, the items associated with it will vanish from the inventory window.

Inventory

Item hover information.

The Diablo III inventory system has been overhauled repeatedly during the development process. It changed a great deal between the game's debut in June 2008, and the Blizzcon build in October 2008. Many more changes were noted in screenshots released in March 2009, and more changes can be expected before the final game.

See the inventory page for the latest updates and screenshots.

Item Sockets

There are item sockets in Diablo III. Runewords are not returning, but magical and rare and unique (and other yet-unannounced item types?) will have sockets.

Not much is yet known about what can be put into sockets; gems of various types have been seen in the gameplay movies and in the BlizzCon 2008 demos, but their bonus properties are unknown. No jewels have been seen, and runes in Diablo III are for socketing into skills, not items. There may be (and probably are) other things to put into item sockets, but no info has been released about them.

Official Comments

Bashiok commented briefly on item sockets in February, 2009.[8]

We haven't released any information on our site, but it was possible to collect socketed items as well as gems in the BlizzCon demo... The gem stats at this point are more or less just the basics yanked from Diablo II to get the system running and have something to play around with.

Individual Drops

One major change to items is that players only see items drop that are theirs, and theirs alone. No more of the "ninja looting" of D2, where everything that dropped was first come, first served. This results in more total items dropping, since bosses drop an item or two for every character in the area, but each character only sees their items. If that boss dropped four items in a four player game, each player would only see their item. Trading or giving items away is easy; simply pick them and then drop them. Once a character drops an item any other player can see it and may pick it up.

Official Item Comments

One of the few specific comments about items yet made by the D3 Team was made by Jay Wilson in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com.

Jay: I believe I mentioned in the past that we are considering crafting systems. But we're not really announcing anything about that right now. But we took a few things out, like Rune Words, essentially because Rune Words is a very simple crafting system, and we're planning to do something different there. I'd say that most of the changes are minor. We've made lots of statistical changes. For example, with the more magical classes, like the Sorceress, their items were in some ways less valuable to them because they didn't have a lot of effect on their damage output, so we've added more attributes that control magic damage and things that allow Wizards to get items that do more damage and bolster their defenses and health. We have more [weapon name] affixes that play into the broader set of resources; the Barbarian has fury, so we added affixes that play with that. We generally tried to expand our approach to affixes to make them smarter.

Those are fairly simple, though. There are other things, like how we've changed the way that gems work. In Diablo 2, gems could only go on white -- or nonmagic -- items, while gems are now a separate chance for a weapon, meaning that we roll the item's base attributes, and we roll for its chance to have gem slots. So now any item, even legendary ones, can have gem slots. That plays a lot into the core of the item system [...] even if you find the best item in the game, the stats on that item have some randomness to them that means there could be a better version of that item. Well, now, if you find the best item in the game but it doesn't have any gem sockets, then it's not the best version of that item. In terms of creating item variance, we're looking to enhance that within Diablo 3.

There're still a few things that we haven't made decisions on yet -- set items, for one. I didn't like the way they worked in Diablo 2, as by the time you finally got a set together, you generally leveled beyond the use for it. So you might save them for alts, which is OK, but I'd rather that they be useful for you to begin with. We haven't really decided how we're going to fix that. We also have some new item types that we haven't announced yet that are related to some systems that we're planning. But I don't think they vastly change the system -- they mostly play into the strengths of it.

Jay's comments on "gems" are a little confusing, since he seems to be using "gems" as a synonym for "sockets" in the whole answer. Apparently the only things to socket in D3 will be gems, rather than gems, jewels, and runes as in D2?

Other Item Reports

None of the many Diablo III previews have spent much time on items, or given us any specific details about them, yet. The most detailed commentary on items so far came from Flux's Wizard gameplay report, written after his BlizzCon experience:

All the low level armor was equivalent to what we’re all familiar with from D2. Blue (magical) gear with minor bonuses to attributes, mana, life, and so forth. I never saw any jewelry in the Blizzcon build (not enabled or the monsters weren’t high enough level to drop it), and since I wasn’t taking many hits (or at least trying not to) with my wizard, I wasn’t much worried about defense or defensive bonuses on armor.

I did find a few nifty wands and other light weapons, with useful mods. As was the case with my Witch Doctor, I found weapons with +% damage (around 11%) and +% experience gain (7 or 8%). Those didn’t greatly change the gameplay, but I did notice the improved damage, once I had it. Eventually (D2 style) my Wizard transitioned to magic find equipment, and while the % I had from boots, shield, and chest armor with MF on it wasn’t more than about 40%, it did seem to increase the number of rares I found. Not greatly, and not to my benefit, since I kept wearing the magic items I had found earlier, but it was fun to see more shinies drop.

I didn’t find any uniques with the Wizard, nor any of the crystal ball-looking items she uses in the BlizzCon gameplay and most of her screenshots; I assume those are a higher level item type. I ended up using odd weapons; wands and clubs and short swords and the like, based entirely on their magical bonuses. And they served well enough.

More Item Information