I prefer Bola Shot to Hungering Arrow myself. 1 second delay takes a little getting used to but Volatile Explosives is really good. Huge area and it seems to cause an animation stun to regular enemies.
I don't agree with your assumptions.
1. If they make godly equipment easy to come by then the end game is severely nerfed.
> Nothing wrong with end game being nerfed, maybe most people don't care if people finish Inferno in one month.
2. Items would adjust accordingly and people would flood the forums saying their ilvl63 stuff isn't sellable.
> Why wouldn't they be sellable? Regardless of how many ilvl 63 items there are, there still will be good rolls and bad rolls. It just means everyone is on a higher average gear level. It's the same issue but at a higher level. What it does mean here is that ilvl 61-62 items are worth less and that's already true in the game.
3. With D2 these people eventually left leaving the people who enjoyed the game for what it is - a random loot game (with hopefully a balanced and enjoyable pvp later on).
> I never really played D2, but just because that's how D2 worked doesn't mean they wanted to repeat it.
I'm just saying you're putting your view on how D3 should be on others and ignoring how people might see the game. Just laying it out that it's possible for D3 to be designed differently than what you expected. Of course it's also as likely that the D3 designers didn't have a clue what they were really doing.
End game being nerfed is always a problem for the people who want the game to last. Especially if they don't do ladder resets, which is something they haven't really talked about. The quicker the average player has access to gear that can steamroll inferno, the quicker that player will move on. Trading and upgrading equip is part of why this series is so successful. If you take that away then you have the average ARPG that people play and forget about after they've beaten.
Yes, there will be good rolls but if it's flooded then those good rolls will have to be that much better. Say a Stormshield dropped 5x as often now as it did pre-patch - it'd be worth less. The market would adjust making Stormshield drops less significant.
Obviously they don't care about the game having a long lasting community outside of people being around for expansions. They want to make the game more enjoyable for the people who will quickly play through inferno and quit, allowing them to put less money into servers. If it was subscription based then they'd want a long endgame. It's really a shame that Blizzard has changed their attitude since D2 originally released.
I guess it depends how you are defining "endgame" gear. Just because you found lvl63 items wouldn't necessarily mean you were off to the races. Hell, from my own experiences a vast majority of the ones I found were massive duds. Half of finding loot is getting the drop, the other half is how the item rolls imo.
So are you defining "endgame" gear as the highest item level, regardless of quality, or are you defining it as "I would want to wear this or make mad bank off of it?"
The less rare ilvl63 the less they will be worth. The quicker we find high tiered gear the quicker we're at the point we're steamrolling inferno. The rolls of the rares, when you get them, should be the same pre and post patch unless they purposely changed it.
Finding loot is only fun if it has a chance to be something. If everybody is getting ilvl63 at a 20% rate then your roll needs to be that much better to be worth anything.
I'm defining endgame gear as the best gear for that spot. Obviously you can do it with less but most people will want their ilvl63 weps and armor pieces. When they get a good roll on those pieces then upgrades are pointless. How quick they get those rolls is determined by how common those high tiers drop.
edit: anyways I'm spending too much time on this argument lol. If you guys don't understand why making highest tier items more common would kill that buzz from finding one then I don't know what else I can say.
