Items/Archive
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.
Contents
Item Quality
We'll still see magical blue items, rare yellow items, and golden unique items. We might see sets as well, but the team wants to improve them from how they worked in D2. We will not see Runewords in D3, and probably won't see crafted items either, though there is a new type of item making system the team has not yet revealed. Purple items were seen dropped in early gameplay videos, but it's not known if those were a new type of item with new stat arrangements, or just a different color they were testing for some known item type. The team has mentioned "legendary" items a few times, but it's not clear if this is an actual type of item (better than rare or unique?) or if it's just a generic term for a really good item of whatever type.
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. No new types of weapons have yet been seen, though it's not known what the round, crystal ball-looking object the Wizard wields in various screenshots. Perhaps it's still an Orb, as in D2, with a new, more appropriate in-game graphic? If there are other new item types, new varieties of weapons or multiple levels of jewelry, it's not been announced.
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.
Keep in mind that 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. So it's quite likely that the D3 team is going to add more item types and varieties in the various Diablo III expansion(s).
Inventory
The Diablo III inventory system has been overhauled. In Diablo III (as of December 2008) all items fit into one slot in the inventory. No more 2x4 or 2x3 items in a 4x10 grid, as we saw in Diablo II. Like items will stack, but only potions and elixirs are like (so far). The belt is an item in Diablo III, but it does not tie to your inventory space; characters start out with 4 belt slots that double as controls; they can hold potions, or be mapped to skills like hotkeys. This forces a trade off between carrying more potions, or having more hotkeys available.
Players start off with 12 inventory spaces available from a grid of 30. There are also 4 bag slots, and each bag adds more inventory spaces. Bags found in the early going at the Blizzcon demo in October 2008 added just 1 or 2 slots, but clearly there will be larger bags found later in the game.
In addition to the inventory there was a special 10-space inventory accessed through the skill tree, that held only skill runes. (It was confusing, since skill runes when picked up went directly to that skill rune inventory, which was not visible from the main item inventory.) No one found enough skill runes to see what would happen once those 10 slots were full; if the runes would go to the main inventory, or simply not be possible to pick up.
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.[1]
- 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.