I seem to be enjoying the topical nature of some of the discussions that I see happen very frequently on the forums and what some other people have to say about them. I find myself disagreeing with a lot of what people say but there are some extremely good points out there so I thought I'd try to analyze some of the loot systems and mechanics in the two games and compare them to see how they function and where they sink or sail.
To start I think the important part is to address why is gear important and why do we have things like stats on them. What use are they and why do we want them? These answers appear simple at first and are the core of almost any RPG type game.
Gear, what is it good for? There are several ways to direct player power in an rpg. The first and most common, and often the easiest, way to approach player power is through one's "Level." This can be thought of in many different ways but ultimately it comes down to either spending a certain amount of time in the game or completing a certain amount of content or even just rewarding players for participating in the game. Levelling can be something completely different and have a different function in the game, but the concept of a level and what it grants players is universal. With levels come increased base statistics, increased health and a way of comparing yourself to other players including the way you might interact. For example a warcraft player of level 50 would likely destroy a player of level 15 even without trying. A warlock might throw out a corruption to toy with a lower level but even if the level 50 player was having a bad day and zoning out, clearly they're going to win. This is player power.
What happens when two players are of the same level? They have the same statistics, the same abilities, the same skill level even. What differentiates them? This is one approach to why we want gear. It's a form of player power beyond level. This is especially useful when the game designers want to limit your level to make content relevant to you. Imagine that same level 50 warlock going into the stockades. Not really that much fun. It would be the same if there was no real level cap and a level 86 paladin went into the black temple when it was the toughest content. So having a level cap has to happen and you want to motivate players once they hit this level cap. People like getting things, especially as rewards for accomplishing things. Players also want an easier time going back to do things again. For example, once you've cleared Dragon Soul a couple times, H Firelands should be a lot easier for you. You shouldn't have the same difficulties there as you did the first time you entered the instance. So gear increasing power level is an essential part of the game especially due to the vast amount of content at the level cap.
This brings us to stats. D3 takes a somewhat different approach to stats on gear than WoW does. In Warcraft there are specific pieces of gear that have fixed stats. They drop from fixed locations and fixed NPCs. You can find out what they are ahead of time if you wish, and if you want to go kill the same one over and over again to try and get that specific item, you know where to go and you can get it several times if you really want to. D3 on the other hand sticks to it's design philosophy in that things are completely random. You'll find a gear with random stats, you'll find it anywhere in a large area from any npc (higher chance from some such as bosses/champions), and even an item with the exact same name might have a couple different variants. One might have 32 dex with some other stats, one might have 36 dex with the exact same other stats. This is just how that game functions. Running the same content over and over again to get those items is exactly what defines diablo. The bosses are a lot easier, there's no lockout system the way there is in wow and you can bring basically anyone you want with you (the npcs scale directly with the number of people in the group).
So with these two varying stat systems, which one is "better?" The short answer is neither, they both suit their game styles. The long answer takes a look at how exactly the stat systems are set up.
Warcraft has the following stats (going to ignore tanking stats since it's easier this way):
Primary stats-Strength, Agility, Intellect.
Secondary stats-Spirit, Haste, Crit, Hit, Expertise, Spell Penetration, Mastery
It also has some pvp stats.
D3 has a much larger set of stats so I'll list a couple of them:
"Primary" attributes-Strength, Dexterity, Intellect
"Secondary" attributes-Chance to crit, Crit damage, Attack speed, Life on hit, Life on kill, Vitality (stamina), extra damage in various elemental types, resistances, armor, and I'm sure I've missed various stats.
So the primary stats in each system are usually valued more than the secondary ones, as fits the names. Because of the implimentation however there are some problems that crop up. Both suffer from the problem that your primary stats are just so incredibly more valuable than your secondary stats that you take them to the exclusion of all else. In D3 primary stats increase all damage you do by 1% for each point in your class' primary stat while in WoW it's just attack or spell power that you get from them.
In warcraft this is less of a problem because the design team can fairly accurately predict how much strength you're going to have at a given point since you're going to get it on all of your gear, every piece for you is given strength and you are expected to have those pieces instead of ones that use agility for example (it helps that it's usually restricted by cloth vs plate as well). D3 is completely different, gear has random stats so it may not even have *any* dexterity on it at all. An item might have a bunch of dexterity and no vitality or it might have an increase to experience gained on an item that requires level 60 (haven't seen this but in theory it can happen unless blizzard has specifically coded this case out). This is part of the game, getting the gear with ideal stats just functions differently and makes it harder for the designers to predict where you fall at a given point in the game, though the auction house greatly mitigates this and you are expected to use this to help with your gear.
So lets devise a couple metrics to compare the two systems. I'll propose that the ability to generate extra content for the game and how that factors into the loot system is important (think warcraft patches or diablo expansions). Also important is comparing players that have a similar "level" of gear and how their stats might stack up against each other (similar gear should mean similar player power). Complexity of loot system is important for depth in game (choosing the right stats instead of the wrong is part of the game). Availability of loot is important. There are more metrics that one could use and if you think of any that are important please let me know but these are sufficient for now.
Generating content: The WoW system of gear requires that the designers know how it's going to scale and how much content to create before tossing in more levels to the game. They have to have a way for things like crit and haste to depreciate (usually with level). D3 system since attack speed and crit are the only ones that suffer from crazy scaling problems (I know the %age based increases create crazy scaling problems but not the same way) they have to be limited. This just means not throwing more than x% attack speed or crit on gear. Both systems allow extra content quite easily.
Similar gear level, Similar stats: WoW's system really hits home with this while still allowing players to play with different secondary stats like haste or mastery. Mastery might be really bad for you and you should grab haste instead (I think some type of hunters are in this situation) but similar gear levels means you'll have similar amounts of agility meaning that for the most part you're hitting as hard as the other guy and there aren't terribly huge disparities in player power generally speaking. D3 system does not support this philosophy. In D3 two players can both be decked out in A1 inferno gear while one player has 1000 dex and the other with barely 500. Double the dex, double the damage. Sure the second guy might have 20k more hp or armor and resistances of an a4 barbarian but the damage output and player power is going to vary VASTLY. Since the game is almost exclusively PvE (especially right now) this isn't so much an issue but in terms of completing the difficult inferno content this is a glaring problem. I do not think a normalized stat distribution is a good solution for this problem under the D3 design philosophy, though I don't have a really good alternative. WoW item system clearly has the advantage here and D3 has some glaring problems.
Complexity of loot systems: Warcraft has stats that all interact in very straightfoward ways. Attack power and spell power make you hit harder. Haste makes you hit faster, dodge makes you dodge more attacks. There's a couple cases where things get confusing such as mastery or things like the additional parry you get from strength but those are still somewhat straight forward. How the stats interact with each other is completely different and makes for a great system with some scaling issues occasionally (see: fire mages) but isn't too bad that it stops players from even trying. D3 most stats just don't interact with each other at all with 2 very specific exceptions. Str/Dex/Int give you armor/dodge/resist respectively and those stats reduce all damage take in some way and stack with each other. Armor reduces damage from spells, and you can resist physical damage. Dodge is the way you think it works, and over a large number of attacks it will normalize itself. The plethora of secondary stats in D3 makes the system a bit confusing, tedious and troublesome, but is the core of the game. Sometimes trying to figure out how much vitality or armor you *should* have, or what your effective health should look like compared to how much damage you need is hard to discover for yourself. This presents a problem but again is part of the game design. Both systems function well in their settings and I think D3 has some glaring flaws again that need to be addressed, though I don't have a solid solution for them just yet.
Lastly availability of loot: This is somewhat loosely defined such as where the loot comes from, how often you can get the loot and what sort of effort you need to put in to get the loot. WoW comes on the predictable effort in, minimal (but still present) rng and not capable of farming, though the effort is much larger to take down the boss. D3 is the polar opposite of this. You can farm out gear, though you are at the whimsy of the rng gods. You don't know how much farming you have to do but once you get to the point to farm things are fairly easy which means farming a boss over and over again isn't a problem. I like the WoW system better but it does hurt the replayability of the game drastically. D3 you could play over and over again because it's just fun and relaxing to kill the bosses and because you really need that pair of gloves with 120 dex.
Summary! They are two different types of systems and Warcraft has a very robust workable system that is amazing for the competitive environment with a few flaws, for example after clearing 8/8 H DS for months now we have only seen 1 windward heart, few breathstealer bands and the like. Most of this is the problem with shared loot tables but you can suffer from terrible rng. D3 on the other hand isn't designed for a competative, progression oriented group of players. With that in mind it still has some issues but for the most part is pretty decent, though the main criticism I see lately is that it does not have the same breadth of stats as D2 did (though I'd say just wait on it I'm sure that more will come later in the development cycle, stop hating on them).
All in all loot and gear is extremely important and I'm sure I didn't get through all the points on it. I know there are people out there who hate gear and would rather see it gone from games and I'd like to hear what your arguments are and why you don't like gear as a function of player power at level cap.
That's all for now on gear (I look back and I've written more than I intended and probably covered less than intended) so a little bit of an announcement. I'm moving next week and will be mostly without internet starting middle of this week ending middle of next week. I will try and get something out for next weekend but at the very latest I'll be back the weekend of June 8th. Also I'm happy to recieve feedback in any way (questions, comments, complaints, rage anything really) so feel free to either pester me here on blogger or through google+
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