Diablo 3 designer discusses 'underlying philosophies' of item changes

Items in Diablo 3 will continue to undergo changes affecting the link between the frequency of rare items and their subsequent power, designer Travis Day announced via the Battle.net forums.

Day writes that Legendary items in particular need to be rare and powerful, rather than just the former.

"When a Legendary drops," Day wrote, "the question that goes through a player's mind should never be ‘is this a good item?' It should be ‘how awesome is it?'"

Future Legendary items will also be able to roll base stats at the level of the monster that dropped them in order to give players more diversity. The team plans to reduce the frequency rare items drop at in order to "make it fun and rewarding to hunt down new items." According to Day, this simply means that "bad rares" will be less frequent.

Day also addressed the problem of auctions, which have arguably "done more harm to the game than good" by encouraging players to farm the auction house, rather than monsters. Although the auction house cannot be removed outright, the team will continue to discuss different ways to fix it, most of which revolve around giving players additional ways to find items. This includes NPCs having increased drops for specific items through "targeted Legendaries," changing drop rates for Rare and Legendary items and allowing bosses to drop Legendary items the first time they are killed on different difficulties.

You can read the full post here. Diablo 3 lauched in May 2012 for Windows PC and Mac. Recently, the game was announced for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.