Identify

Unidentified items are weapons or pieces of armor or jewelry that must be identified, to reveal their properties, before they can be equipped. Identifying items has been a suspenseful delight throughout the Diablo series, and while it remains a game feature in Diablo III, the amount of items to be identified has been reduced, and it's been made easier to identify things.

Only Rare, Set, and Legendary items, found from monster drops, need to be identified. Magical (blue) items do not; their prefix or suffix is stated clearly as soon as the item is found.

Another change from earlier titles is that NPCs are no longer required, or able to identify items. Deckard Cain returns, and can be seen in town in Act One of Diablo III, but he does not identify items. Players have speculated that Cain will not be present in town throughout the entire game, and thus it wouldn't have made sense for the developers to make him a useful source of identification when he was not going to provide it throughout the entire game.

Identify yourself

When the Artisan system was first introduced in 2010, the Mystic had item identification listed amongst her talents. She eventually lost that talent, before she was removed from the game during late testing in January 2012.

NPC assistance is not required for item identification, since characters now have identification as an inherent ability. This process required scrolls during most of Diablo III's development, but those scrolls were removed in a major game system overhaul in January 2012, and players were given the inherent talent. To use it, a character need simply right click on any unidentified item, and after a short (two second) status bar, the item's properties are revealed.

Gameplay Tool

Identifiable items have been around since early days of pen and paper RPGs (and, ironically, there's a Diablo pen and paper RPG), where a player found loot they had to spend some resources to identify in order to make use of them. It created a level of realism that magical items found are mysterious. One of the good reasons to identify rather than just start using was the fact that weapons and items were not always benevolent, but could be cursed.

There are no cursed or deleterious item mods in Diablo II or Diablo III.

Diablo

Diablo I had this implemented in the shape that the player needed to buy Identify Scrolls or consult Deckard Cain in order to get treasure identified and Diablo II had just the same system.

Diablo III was initially set to not have Identify, as the team felt it added an unnecessary, "unfun" step." They changed their minds at some point during development though, and ID scrolls were back in force as of the August 2010 Gamescom demo.

Lore

Any object imbued with magic exhibits an aura that is easily noticed. To determine the exact nature of this enchantment, however, requires intense study and an extensive knowledge of arcane materials and symbols.

It's extremely difficult to master the ability to memorize a spell of this magnitude but the Vizjerei mage clan have developed a means for the untrained to discover the secrets of an ensorcelled object by using a rare crystal that is extremely sensitive to magical auras.

This sensitivity makes it very fragile, however and the crystal will shatter if it is brought too close to an enchanted item. The very act of Identifying such an object also destroys the crystal. Scrolls and staves have been crafted and imbued with the spell that identify virtually any magical aura. By using special inks and dyes that contain tiny grains of these crystals, the stability of the crystal is maintained until it is used to examine the enchanted object.