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.
Contents
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.
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).
Inventory
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.[3]
- 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.