If there's one place the team at Blizzard knows it messed up with Diablo III's initial design, it's the Legendary items. These items should are fairly rare, but fans have long complained that they weren't powerful or useful enough to reflect how hard they are to acquire. In blog post on the Diablo III site, Senior Game Designer Andrew Chambers wrote that while most people's comments about Legendary items, "were fairly harsh...they were also dead-on accurate." Chambers maintains that since Diablo III's release that he and the team have been hard at work to resolve this issue, and we'll finally get to see the results with patch 1.0.4 (to read about changes outside of Legendary items, check out our previous 1.0.4 story).
The first thing Chambers acknowledged is that the team didn't manage to make Legendary items unique enough. "A truly legendary item should have history behind it, something that you can imagine a powerful wizard imbuing with special magics from withi the depths of his musty library," wrote Chambers. Over 50 of the Legendary items will have custom effects when 1.0.4 is released, including powers that grant players monster affixes like shields and minions with fire chains. Some items like the Fire Walkers boots, which have a fire trail ability, are something the team hopes players will use to change how they play. Still other items have even crazier effects, such as the Skycutter, a sword that now has a chance to, "summon angelic assistance when attacking."
Chambers and the rest of the Diablo III team also hope that the revamped Legendary items will encourage more diverse builds. For instance they've added a spear that gives lots of bonuses to barbarians, increasing their thrown weapon damage. In Chambers' words,"Some people want to try out a ranged barb. We think that's awesome. Here you go." Also shown in the blog were new unique items that make a melee wizard more viable, as well as a special witch doctor off-hand that greatly reduces the cooldowns of various summoned creatures. Chambers acknowledges that these items may not result in, "the highest DPS stats in the game, but they can help you play your class in new and interesting ways."
Other changes coming to in 1.0.4 include more powerful stats for Legendary items and revamped "Ancestor" items. Ancestor items, also known as Legendary items carried over from previous Diablo games, have undergone changes, "to make sure they remain as true to their name as we could make them, and in some cases we've made them even better," wrote Chambers. Speaking about how powerful Legendary items will now be, Chambers provided an elaborate explanation:
We used to reduce the value of certain affixes on Legendary items because we were concerned that having fixed affixes would make them unbalanced. What it actually did was make those items kind of crappy. For example, if the item's level (ilvl) was 50, the first affix would always roll at 50, then the next would roll at 47, and the next would roll at 43. This was done to offset the power of fixed affixes in a random world, but we've learned it's not necessary, and Legendary items being powerful is OK. So lesson learned, we no longer reduce the value of any of the fixed affixes on Legendary items. For example, if an ilvl 50 Legendary item had Strength as one of its fixed affixes, previously it may have rolled a range that you would have seen on a level 45 item, making it seem really underpowered, but now it will always roll within the range of a level 50 affix.
Legendary items will also now go as high as item level 63, "giving them access to the highest possible affix rolls that are in the game." Additionally, two-handed weapons are being reworked to be better.
It should be noted that these changes will only affect items collected or identified after patch 1.0.4, and that not all Legendary items are getting reworked if deemed good enough. Set items are also getting reworked stats and affixes, though set bonuses will not work between pre and post 1.0.4 items.
To read Chambers words for yourself, as well as check out a number of images that show how stats are changing, check out the official blog post.
Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on Twitter and on IGN.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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