Blizzard is outlining its plans for the future of Diablo 3, and it has begun with the publication of a developer journal detailing the game's itemization for its next big update.
The biggest change being brought to Diablo 3's itemization system is to make rare items not just rare, but also powerful. At the present, Legendary items in the game vary in their use, and some of them—while rare—are not very good.
According to designer Travis Day, the developers want the rarity of Legendary items to be reflected in their power.
"When a Legendary drops, the question that goes through a player's mind should never be "is this a good item?" It should be "how awesome is it?" For example, if you are playing a Demon Hunter wielding a Rare crossbow and a Legendary crossbow drops, we want your reaction to be "Holy crap, YES!" not "*sigh* another Hellrack." It's a problem if players don't want to bother identifying their Legendaries, let alone pick them up. We want to change this," he wrote.
Each of these Legendary items will be tweaked to draw from a much more diverse pool of stats to encourage players to try out new builds.
Additionally, Blizzard intends to do a lot more with the game's gold sinks, like the crafting recipes it implemented in the recent 1.07 patch. To that end, Blizzard says that they are looking to implement new vanity options and other potential ways for players to differentiate their characters from those of their friends.
The biggest change that Blizzard is bringing to Diablo 3 are new incentives for players to kill monsters and play the game as they did previous Diablo games, instead of relying on the Auction House for their best items.
You can read about the potential solutions the designers have proposed on the blog.
