I dunno if you know anything about Path of Exile, but they also recently went thru a similar dilemma with Harvest league 3-4 leagues back. At least this way it still took a very rare unique drop to get that BIS item, a kind of fusion of the two functions, RNG + determinism. Small tangent but I recently thought about a way in which I personally would be a bit more cool with 1.10 runewords and it would be if those runewords had to be made in very rare unique item bases that transformed into a few different items depending on the runes used. Huge swaths of uniques and rare items were rendered pretty useless because of it, and that's just extremely bad design IMO. Ultimately it breaks very large parts of your whole RNG itemization system when allowing for the kinds of item power 1.10 deterministic runewords held. I much prefer deterministic crafting to be a supplemental part of the gearing up process, like your Stealths your Smokes your Lores.

I don't agree with the design philosophy of being able to deterministically craft BIS 10/10 items. 1.10+ made the ultra-rare items less rare while still keeping them absurdly rare, and I think it's a better balance.Д«esides, with the exception of grief and maybe enigma, I think the added runewords were a good thing. Paradoxically, though, getting that other 5% is insanely difficult: you could play years without ever seeing valor or windforce. I'd estimate that I was able to fully gear an endgame sorc (and make good progress on a bunch of other characters) after maybe 200 hours of gameplay just because there's less depth in terms of possibilities. It doesn't take too long to find 95% of the useful items in the game, especially compared to how long it takes in 1.10+. Having said that, I think it's much easier in 1.09 to run out of stuff to do. In particular, if you're playing a melee build you have options besides just grief and it's pretty reasonable to start a character from scratch and gear your way through. I definitely appreciate that in 1.09 there are a pretty broad range of useful items across rares and uniques. I did a hardcore singleplayer 99er earlier this year, which took an incredible amount of work to do (grinding out solutions for MSLE and hell duriel was. Is the concept of permanent death such a turn off?Д«lizzard really needs to work on their servers me and my friend have been trying to play the game in the morning for the past two days after work (we both work the night shift) and like clockwork the see ers seemingly tank around the same time each day (around 7:30 am CST) and I can't understand why this has been a consistent issue.Д¬lick to shrink.I'm a big 1.09 player so to some degree I sympathize with you. I never played Diablo II ( I played I and III only) but we immediately jumped into nightmare mode and it was fun we made it all the way to Diablo before we got jumped by a pack of super fast demons and died so thanks to the permanent death that Amazon is gone.ДЇor a while there we both thought that there was something wrong with our game because there was hardly any loobys being displayed (not that we intent to join any anyways) than my friend created a normal character and found out that there was nothing wrong with our game people are just casually playing in Normal Mode.

I wasn't planning on buying this game since I'm busy with FFXIV trying to get things done before Endwalker comes but I bought this game recently at the behest of a friend so we can play together.

Diablo 2 runewords faith