Loot hunters are trapped in a prison of their own making.
Last week Adam Jackson—the lead class designer for Diablo 4—tweeted out a list of the game’s rarest items, and the internet has been acting very normal about it. Several of these items are references to gear from past Diablo games, such as the Harlequin Crest, and Jackson clarified that their drop rate is something of a grind within a grind.
Each of these super-rare collector’s pieces has a chance to drop in the place of another Unique, so you need to get lucky to even roll the dice. Baal help you if you’re aiming for a specific one.
Instead of calming the rumour mill down, Jackson seems to have accidentally set players on a desperate scavenger hunt powered by false hope, as evidenced by a Reddit thread from user Shaka_Walls with the grim title: “You’re vastly more likely to die falling out of bed than to get Shako.” They plead: “It’s just not going to drop for you. The chances are effectively 0%. Stop wasting your time.”
This has been followed by another user, Tyzerk1925, asking if they could “target farm” a death by falling-out-of-bed. That can’t be a good sign.
In the same thread, Kanenite3000 has been a devil whispering in the ear of loot-hunting hopefuls: “Fact. 90% of Diablo players quit farming just before a Shako is about to drop,” calling to mind that one meme of a miner stopping just short of a hoard of diamonds.
Despite all of this, we still don’t know the actual drop rate of this gear—which Jackson didn’t reveal beyond it being “realllly rare”. Still, you miss every shot that you don’t take, and the temptation of theorycrafting a build that would jive nicely with one of these rare pieces is a potent carrot on a stick.
All this hype has me thinking that Lilith had it all wrong: if she wanted to corrupt humanity, all she had to do was dangle a pair of shiny keys in front of us and tell us we had a 0.1% chance of obtaining it. It would’ve worked a treat.
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