DraQ
Arcane
That's not item fever. That's item apathy. When items with colored names and 1% advantage over what you already have pop out of every mob, chest and orrifice, you no longer care.
Good itemization has you excited about new items but for that interesting modifiers should be diverse, but rare and new items should rarely supplant old ones.
A cool item is only cool if you don't switch it 15' after you've found it.
Another thing is weapon/character stat inflation. Continuous item treadmill and character HP inflation make for orders of magnitude increase of stats during the gameplay, which means that the numbers game display no longer mean anything on intuitive level.
A disconnect between mechanics and simulation was one thing that plagued D:OS - yes, D:OS was heavily on gamist side of things, but its elemental system was heavily based on elements having their intuitive meanings.
The problem is that when you have damages and HP counts that can mean anything and nothing, abstract elemental damage types (hurr... earth damage), and strength based skill that somehow flattens distant enemy with a giant airborne magical fist, then your ability to make sense of game's mechanics shuts off and you start seeing just tokens. And abstract tokens no longer make it apparent that, for example wetting an exploskeleton will put out its fuse and prevent it from exploding, because the only thing you can still be sure of is that "wet" token cancels out the "burning" one, and exploskeleton with lit fuse lacks the latter.
