It seems that I start to warm up to base item stats and affixes.
My problem with base stats and affixes on items was that they felt insignificant and by that some of them felt completely useless. Meaning wearing one piece vs other was not really a difference. After reaching lvl 50+ I think that is no longer true. At start of the game rolls are uber small and even at start of the game with character having small total life etc. it doesn't matter. But at 50+ Stats starts to matter a lot as difference between bad and best roll increase up and up and up.
Another thing is that previously I didn't have access to blacksmith upgrade. Meaning you can take item and upgrade it 3 times at start and when you get to 50+ 5 times. Upgrades aren't that big but they work on EVERY stat on item.
So previously +3 to fury (on my 100fury limit barbarian) was joke i wouldn't even consider. But now I get rolls on items in vein of 7-10. With 2-3 items i can get roughly 30% more. That seems interesting but with upgrades suddenly those 7-10s change into 12-15 so at best nearly 50% more. Add to that 10 from tree and fury reduction again around 20-30% and suddenly you get double resource.
There are other stats like that. Armor always at start was like 1%. I mean who the fuck would invest into 5% better armor stat. Armor is very important in game as it handles both physical as well as elemental damage reduction (50% of whole res) but 1% is nothing. Even if you stack multiple pieces you get at best 7%. Aka nothing.
Now enter lvl 50+ gear and suddenly you can have 30% more armor almost equivalent of running Determination aura in POE and probably more because it has effect on elemental damage as well.
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passive tree (lvl50+)
Paragon tree seems to be POE tree. It seems pretty barebones if you look at singular boards as most of stats are just +5 to strenght or other stat but I didn't know how glyphs worked when you insert them into that board. Turns out that glyphs power is directly aped from POE jewels and they have activation requirement. So for effect to start working you need in range of say 3 or 4 +25 to dex. The difference from POE jewels is that each glyph has base stat and requirement. Base stats always work regardless of requirement. So like each point of dex in range of glyph gives you +0.1% to crit strike but requirement gives you some flat bonus and some of those can be major. Kind of how people in POE want to use those memories jawells to change rest of nodes into different stat or get another like %fortify effectiveness.
My weapon master glyph has "If you use weapon master skill it randomly removes 2sec from cooldown on other weapon master skill." aka something that actually can change how you play.
The other part about it that is pretty hard to spot is that all those base stats overrepresent them to eye it so it feels like it is filled to brim with shit. But the thing is that you get 4 paragon points per level not 1. So with 50 levels you get 200 points + other points you get from quests etc. If you want to focus only on major powers you can go from one board to another in 2-3 levels picking up rare nodes that are equivalent of POEs bigger nodes (but not the biggest ones). So it is kind of more spread out unlike POE tree and stuff hidden behind glyphs which then transforms those base stats into useful stuff.
I'm yet to make statement about it as I don't have many paragon points to play with and theory craft so final verdict may change. So far it is much better than i expected.
Even if you accept level scaling, which is fucking retarded and completely warps power progression, the itemization is straight up D3. Completely uninspiring stat stick. I can’t see a shred of innovation or creativity. D2 which was made more than two decades ago with no competing ARPGs to compare with had better ideas.
D4 itemization isn't D3 itemization, like at all. Only thing resembling it are aspects from legendries but even those are changed in how they work and function.
