Quote:
Originally Posted by
whnay. 
Random thought...
I think one of the things I'm struggling with is overuse of the AH - I have so much gold that I can almost buy anything outside of the rarest of rings and weapons. One of the things I love most is the random / chance aspect of playing - its a lot like gambling but less messy. Anyone else feel like I do?
i agree. i initially blamed AH overusage on increased playtime, but i only have 350k gold and 1 lvl 60 character and all of his gear is from the ah. it's poor man's gear, but from the AH nonetheless since everything i've bought on there far outperforms anything i've found. i think there's three reasons for AH overusage, in order of importance:
1. crafting sucks
2. drop rates for useful stuff is very low. not actual drop rate values, the chance that you'll find a godly rare or useful legendary
3. AH is too accessible
crafting is really the meat of the issue here. in my mind pre-release, crafting was the extension of the skill system since in order to get stronger skills you needed greater DPS and mods which meant you had to put in a lot of work to level your smith up. this was probably the only thing i was really let down about post-release; they need to find a way to scale blacksmith leveling so that you must rely on the smith to survive. drop rates in and of themselves aren't terrible; i would be okay with poor drop rates if the smith became the default source for gear. give the smith had a level cap of 30, so you would level him up for every 2 levels you gained, and make a new smith for each character. a lot of the AH complaints come from the fact that its way too easy to get incremental benefit for negligible cost, so force people gunning for that incremental benefit into crafting for it. the rarity of crafting materials means that you would have to get really lucky to get that incremental benefit plus you'd be sacrificing the opportunity cost of leveling your smith with those materials. you would have to make the smith unique to each character since the craft vs level issue would become irrelevant once he hit lvl 30.
drop rates are being buffed, which is nice. i would love to see a rare guarantee on elite packs/bosses; whether that is every pack or every other pack, knowing you'll at least have one shot at a good rare for all the grief elite packs put you through would make it more worthwhile.
finally: restrict the AH to godly blues and rares, legendaries and sets. set a minimum value in both the number and quality of mods; ie, only blues/yellows with X # of mods + base value of Y for each mod would be auctionable. plus, set a price floor so that godly shit is really inaccessible. if people had to cough up millions for that extra 10dps, i doubt we'd see people playing auctioncraft instead of diablo.
