Diablo III: Not Just a Vitality Race!

[Chen]

You guys seem like you're making a lot of assumptions based on what you think that Inferno drops are like, but the fact of the matter is all legendary items seem to have set ilvls, and more importantly they all have pre-set base stat ranges and types so Wizardspike's stats are never going to roll on top of an ilvl 63 Dagger. Thus, its DPS will never roll high enough to compete with ilvl 63 daggers with decent mods. Weapons like Azure Wrath have terribly low base values, and the fact that they inherently roll modifiers like +cold damage and +% damage means that they can't possibly roll a higher-ilvl version of those affixes.

The game guide doesn't have ilvl of the item on it. It has the level requirement of the item. Nothing on that guide is higher than 60, yet the article Blizz posted explicitly mentioned ilvl 63 items.

Now whether this can affect Legendaries or not may not be relevant in a lot of cases. If a Legendary has + damage and + damage% as fixed stats, then yes its not going to get that much higher in listed DPS (+ attack speed will be the only one that increases it more I believe).

If it does NOT then it has the same potential to be great as a rare, assuming it has fixed stats you can work with. The main problem with the Legendaries is that their fixed stats are not the same ranges as the fixed stats on high ilvl rares and blues. All they really need to do is bump them up to match and they'd be fine.

Even with such a change, very good Legendaries are still going to be extremely rare since you need the high end of the stat ranges AND good rolls on the random stats. Combined with the fact that their drop rate is so low, it only makes sense to see tons of rares and blues on the AH at high values compared to very few Legendaries.

It doesn't help that people tend to remember things that stand out rather than those that are commonplace. This means when people finally get that Legendary they think its crappy and thus extend it to all Legendaries being crappy. The crappy blues and rares you get are forgotten since they're FAR more common. I suspect if you took the percentages of the godly items vs ALL the total items dropped of that type, they'd look pretty similar for magic items, rares and legendaries. I mean that supposition on my part but if I wanted things to be truly random that's how I would design it. I also bet that if we reduce our threshold from godly to good, you'd have a FAR higher % of Legendaries (compared to the total pool of them) that were "good" than if I did the same with magic items or rares simply due to the fact most Legendaries have desirable stats on them that are fixed.

Since the drop rate on them is so low, I don't think there's much of a problem with buffing them so that they are almost strictly better than blues/rares or at least equivalent. I don't know what buffing they are going to be doing, but I suspect it won't be too difficult to put them in line.