I hate that too. These little % modifiers are so mechanical and dull. Ooh, look, now I have +38% instead of +34%! Awesome! Totally worth spending two hours in that cave furiously clicking!
But whaddaya gonna do? An entire generation of gamers has been taught that this is the correct way to play. The old-fashioned way, with leveling, where you will perhaps level seven times throughout the game, is rejected as insufficiently rewarding. They want constant reinforcement and cheering, all the way. It's why they play the games in the first place.
This makes me think of paper Mario where you get the ultra hammer. It does 1 more damage and you can break rocks that are 1 tier higher and it gave me giga dopamine when I knew it was coming up. You get 2 hammer upgrades and 2 boot upgrades and you miiiight find 2 attack up badges which also increase your attack by 1. When you level up you choose between 5 hp, 5 for, or 3 badge points.
The function of increased % attack is for comparison and slow progression. Over time your damage goes from 72 per hit to 1049 per hit to critting 50% of the time and your gear goes from patchwork grays and missing slots to full blues that are decorated with straps to purples that have animations on them.
I do like 'stat upgrades', but I prefer it to be in the realm of 'starting sword does 2, next sword does 3, final sword does 5'. I like it when getting a new weapon, or a level up, or a perk, noticeably changes game-play. A noticeable, and ideally significant, change in gameplay. 50% damage up, a double-jump or a second dash. 50% bigger attack area.
I feel like, in most cases of 'diablo loot', getting that next tier of rarity, or a better weapon mod, you're going from like, 385% damage, to 390% damage. Technically, it does measurably change things, but killing the boss in 39 hits instead of 40 doesn't really 'noticably' change things.
And yeah, going from a 'full set of piecemeal greys' to 'full purples with perfect mods' will give you, like, 1000%+ damage overall, but that progression is mostly made of tiny steps over 100+ hours, and involves sorting through vast piles of randomly generated garbage. Like, I know 'low rarity' items aren't useful at all later on, but why are you still giving them to me if its trash? I don't want to need to pull up a spreadsheet to see if an item is better, or to spend 2 minutes after every run comparing items to see if I got a new +2% damage.
Dead Cells does this well, every weapon is bespoke with unique attack animations and fixed stats, item level upgrades those stats but it's tied 1:1 with progress through the game and basically just exists to discourage getting attached to your build (it's a roguelite after all). And then it rolls a couple random modifiers, but it's bigger and often build-defining effects like "+40% damage to burning enemies," "+100% damage dealt and taken," "splash burning oil when you take damage." You know pretty easily whether you want the weapon's playstyle and/or mods, which is perfect because again, it's a roguelite and you're supposed to keep moving and not get too attached to your items.
I don't love Dead Cells's item system (I still prefer my roguelikes to be more like Gungeon, e.g. no level and random mods, minimal stats, 90% skill based.), but I feel like on the spectrum of 'random loot systems' its very tolerable to me.
As you say, there's not too many item level, the 'random modifiers' are weighty and build-defining, and its a roguelike, so there's no such thing as 'grinding a boss over and over to get "the perfect item"'.
It's really egregious in games with really strict break points. Like in Darktide the numbers don't matter unless they hit a specific breakpoint - being able to kill trash zombies in one hit instead of two, killing a special in three hits instead of four. If you do 150 more damage than you need to to hit the breakpoint those numbers are useless.
But people still obsess about getting perfect stats. The game's crafting system wasn't fully implemented at launch and people lost their goddamn minds that they couldn't play slots for an extra 10 or 20 points of damage that literally will not change the game in any way.
Fortunately the weapons have perks that do dramatically change gameplay and how you use them, but they could easily drop the base stats and keep the perks and very little would change.
I agree with you. But I think to my good friend who has a natural inclination to minmaxing. I've found a lot of peace in my life from letting small things go and finding a certain cessation of anxiety for just embracing things I think are cool. He has found himself an adult who has been in therapy who still has a reflex for opening up the spreadsheet. He loves to look at leaderboards and see if he can eek out 2% more damage.
This is not to apologize for poor game design. I think it was the WoW expansion after Legion where you had the pirate humans. You had to get lucky thrice to get best-in-slot gear. Once for the drop, once for item level, and once for perfect modifiers. They had no anti-luck where you accumulated enough tokens to go to a vendor to fix the gear you found to your liking. It was literally just a casino with bosses who ceased to be a challenge.
I'm enough of an old grognard to have played Ultima Online when it first came out and there was none of this and I miss it so much. There was random loot, and even random magic weapons, but almost no one used them bc of the five tiers of magic weapon damage the gear made by grandmaster blacksmith players did equivalent damage to tier 3 magic weapons. If if you found a cool magic weapon you could use it until it broke, but there was none of this stat maxxing bs. There were three meta armor load outs based on whether you were tanking, kiting, or casting. And it was all player made gear. There were no levels - your skills went up when you used them and your skills were capped at a total of like 600pts or something. There were "perks" but instead of picking them off a list it was stuff like being able to rez dead players with bandages if you got your healing skill to 70, or being able to reliably cast Gate from scolls with 70 magecraft so you could move groups of players across the continent rapidly. The classes were defined by what players found best for different roles but since it was all skill based you could go off meta however you wanted.
And there's nothing like it these days because god forbid your motive for exploring and adventuring is fighting challenging monsters in chaotic dungeons that aren't restricted by levels or any other arbitrary means. Brand new players could join in the hardest content in the game bc the difference between a new players hp and maxxed hp was like 45hp compared to 100hp, and even if a newbie sucked at everything they could still let another player tank while they whacked at monsters ineffectually. Even if you sucked at healing the extra healing you would apply when you succeeded was helpful.
Did i mention dungeons weren't instanced and the part system let you have an arbitrary number of party members so sometimes you'd go in alone or with a few buddies, but other times you'd roll in 60 deep and absolutely wreck the dungeon? I guess that's not strictly true bc i think their might have been some kind of queue system limiting the number of players in a dungeon at once, but i don't remember. But it wasn't arbitrarily limited to three or four or six players. You'd be battling skeletons in a relatively safe part of the dungeon when a party of dead and dying adventurers run past you screaming with the most godawful op monster in the dungeon hot on their heels, and suddenly everything erupts in to chaos as people scramble to form a fighting line and take down the monster, only for the line to collapse when it starts dropping people and everyone feels for their life in terror.
I miss it so much. You played the game because it was fun.
I get the impulse for min-maxing. I like min-maxing in a lot of ways. When I played League of Legends, one of the main appeals to me was knowing the math and figuring out optimal item choices on the fly (not that league is a overall a good game). Similarly, I love TTRPGs, and have a tendency to at least theory-craft min-maxing. Or even card games, I like mathing out the cost-benefit analysis of swapping two similar cards.
But, something about the change from "Here's a list of discrete choices you can choose between, with different costs and benefits, individually designed by people", vs. "Here's a pile of randomly generated stats to dig through, 95% of which are garbage", is just soul-crushing boring to me, especially knowing that I have to make that choice again after every level, whereas in other games, I can actually plan out specifically what I want to be buying and speccing into.
I have gotten in to it with friends who explicitly play games to optimize numbers and sneer at me when I imply that the game itself might actually be fun if you weren't minmaxing so goddamn hard. It's very frustrating. Like go play with a calculator if all you want is to see number go up. I've no interest in diablof for that exact reason. I don't want to spend dozens of hours in front of a slot machine looking for +3% to your sex magick resistance or whatever.
We used to call these "spreadsheet gamers". Their favorite game is not what they're playing, their favorite game is Microsoft Excel. They'll open it up, populate a spreadsheet with all the modifiers, and analyze the numbers for optimal results.
They find this way of playing games very satisfying and will never stop. Nerds ruin everything.
I hate that too. These little % modifiers are so mechanical and dull. Ooh, look, now I have +38% instead of +34%! Awesome! Totally worth spending two hours in that cave furiously clicking!
But whaddaya gonna do? An entire generation of gamers has been taught that this is the correct way to play. The old-fashioned way, with leveling, where you will perhaps level seven times throughout the game, is rejected as insufficiently rewarding. They want constant reinforcement and cheering, all the way. It's why they play the games in the first place.
This makes me think of paper Mario where you get the ultra hammer. It does 1 more damage and you can break rocks that are 1 tier higher and it gave me giga dopamine when I knew it was coming up. You get 2 hammer upgrades and 2 boot upgrades and you miiiight find 2 attack up badges which also increase your attack by 1. When you level up you choose between 5 hp, 5 for, or 3 badge points.
The function of increased % attack is for comparison and slow progression. Over time your damage goes from 72 per hit to 1049 per hit to critting 50% of the time and your gear goes from patchwork grays and missing slots to full blues that are decorated with straps to purples that have animations on them.
Its a matter of degrees to me.
I do like 'stat upgrades', but I prefer it to be in the realm of 'starting sword does 2, next sword does 3, final sword does 5'. I like it when getting a new weapon, or a level up, or a perk, noticeably changes game-play. A noticeable, and ideally significant, change in gameplay. 50% damage up, a double-jump or a second dash. 50% bigger attack area.
I feel like, in most cases of 'diablo loot', getting that next tier of rarity, or a better weapon mod, you're going from like, 385% damage, to 390% damage. Technically, it does measurably change things, but killing the boss in 39 hits instead of 40 doesn't really 'noticably' change things.
And yeah, going from a 'full set of piecemeal greys' to 'full purples with perfect mods' will give you, like, 1000%+ damage overall, but that progression is mostly made of tiny steps over 100+ hours, and involves sorting through vast piles of randomly generated garbage. Like, I know 'low rarity' items aren't useful at all later on, but why are you still giving them to me if its trash? I don't want to need to pull up a spreadsheet to see if an item is better, or to spend 2 minutes after every run comparing items to see if I got a new +2% damage.
Dead Cells does this well, every weapon is bespoke with unique attack animations and fixed stats, item level upgrades those stats but it's tied 1:1 with progress through the game and basically just exists to discourage getting attached to your build (it's a roguelite after all). And then it rolls a couple random modifiers, but it's bigger and often build-defining effects like "+40% damage to burning enemies," "+100% damage dealt and taken," "splash burning oil when you take damage." You know pretty easily whether you want the weapon's playstyle and/or mods, which is perfect because again, it's a roguelite and you're supposed to keep moving and not get too attached to your items.
I don't love Dead Cells's item system (I still prefer my roguelikes to be more like Gungeon, e.g. no level and random mods, minimal stats, 90% skill based.), but I feel like on the spectrum of 'random loot systems' its very tolerable to me.
As you say, there's not too many item level, the 'random modifiers' are weighty and build-defining, and its a roguelike, so there's no such thing as 'grinding a boss over and over to get "the perfect item"'.
I do love Gungeon but a run often starts to feel stale by floor 5, I think I just like having the extra push to change my gear over time.
It's really egregious in games with really strict break points. Like in Darktide the numbers don't matter unless they hit a specific breakpoint - being able to kill trash zombies in one hit instead of two, killing a special in three hits instead of four. If you do 150 more damage than you need to to hit the breakpoint those numbers are useless.
But people still obsess about getting perfect stats. The game's crafting system wasn't fully implemented at launch and people lost their goddamn minds that they couldn't play slots for an extra 10 or 20 points of damage that literally will not change the game in any way.
Fortunately the weapons have perks that do dramatically change gameplay and how you use them, but they could easily drop the base stats and keep the perks and very little would change.
I agree with you. But I think to my good friend who has a natural inclination to minmaxing. I've found a lot of peace in my life from letting small things go and finding a certain cessation of anxiety for just embracing things I think are cool. He has found himself an adult who has been in therapy who still has a reflex for opening up the spreadsheet. He loves to look at leaderboards and see if he can eek out 2% more damage.
This is not to apologize for poor game design. I think it was the WoW expansion after Legion where you had the pirate humans. You had to get lucky thrice to get best-in-slot gear. Once for the drop, once for item level, and once for perfect modifiers. They had no anti-luck where you accumulated enough tokens to go to a vendor to fix the gear you found to your liking. It was literally just a casino with bosses who ceased to be a challenge.
I'm enough of an old grognard to have played Ultima Online when it first came out and there was none of this and I miss it so much. There was random loot, and even random magic weapons, but almost no one used them bc of the five tiers of magic weapon damage the gear made by grandmaster blacksmith players did equivalent damage to tier 3 magic weapons. If if you found a cool magic weapon you could use it until it broke, but there was none of this stat maxxing bs. There were three meta armor load outs based on whether you were tanking, kiting, or casting. And it was all player made gear. There were no levels - your skills went up when you used them and your skills were capped at a total of like 600pts or something. There were "perks" but instead of picking them off a list it was stuff like being able to rez dead players with bandages if you got your healing skill to 70, or being able to reliably cast Gate from scolls with 70 magecraft so you could move groups of players across the continent rapidly. The classes were defined by what players found best for different roles but since it was all skill based you could go off meta however you wanted.
And there's nothing like it these days because god forbid your motive for exploring and adventuring is fighting challenging monsters in chaotic dungeons that aren't restricted by levels or any other arbitrary means. Brand new players could join in the hardest content in the game bc the difference between a new players hp and maxxed hp was like 45hp compared to 100hp, and even if a newbie sucked at everything they could still let another player tank while they whacked at monsters ineffectually. Even if you sucked at healing the extra healing you would apply when you succeeded was helpful.
Did i mention dungeons weren't instanced and the part system let you have an arbitrary number of party members so sometimes you'd go in alone or with a few buddies, but other times you'd roll in 60 deep and absolutely wreck the dungeon? I guess that's not strictly true bc i think their might have been some kind of queue system limiting the number of players in a dungeon at once, but i don't remember. But it wasn't arbitrarily limited to three or four or six players. You'd be battling skeletons in a relatively safe part of the dungeon when a party of dead and dying adventurers run past you screaming with the most godawful op monster in the dungeon hot on their heels, and suddenly everything erupts in to chaos as people scramble to form a fighting line and take down the monster, only for the line to collapse when it starts dropping people and everyone feels for their life in terror.
I miss it so much. You played the game because it was fun.
I get the impulse for min-maxing. I like min-maxing in a lot of ways. When I played League of Legends, one of the main appeals to me was knowing the math and figuring out optimal item choices on the fly (not that league is a overall a good game). Similarly, I love TTRPGs, and have a tendency to at least theory-craft min-maxing. Or even card games, I like mathing out the cost-benefit analysis of swapping two similar cards.
But, something about the change from "Here's a list of discrete choices you can choose between, with different costs and benefits, individually designed by people", vs. "Here's a pile of randomly generated stats to dig through, 95% of which are garbage", is just soul-crushing boring to me, especially knowing that I have to make that choice again after every level, whereas in other games, I can actually plan out specifically what I want to be buying and speccing into.
I have gotten in to it with friends who explicitly play games to optimize numbers and sneer at me when I imply that the game itself might actually be fun if you weren't minmaxing so goddamn hard. It's very frustrating. Like go play with a calculator if all you want is to see number go up. I've no interest in diablof for that exact reason. I don't want to spend dozens of hours in front of a slot machine looking for +3% to your sex magick resistance or whatever.
We used to call these "spreadsheet gamers". Their favorite game is not what they're playing, their favorite game is Microsoft Excel. They'll open it up, populate a spreadsheet with all the modifiers, and analyze the numbers for optimal results.
They find this way of playing games very satisfying and will never stop. Nerds ruin everything.