Diablo III Four-Year Anniversary, Item Comparison Then & Now

A post on the Battle.net website alerts us to the fact that Diablo III is celebrating its fourth anniversary this week, while a subsequent post provides a quick look at how the item comparison mechanics have evolved over that course of time, given the release of the Reaper of Souls expansion pack and the game’s transition to consoles. An excerpt from the latter:

Patch 2.0.1 launched just prior to the release of Reaper of Souls, introducing many new systems to the game in preparation for the expansion. One change was replacing the Life and Protection stats with new and better-defined stats.

Enter Healing and Toughness. Toughness was intended to be an overall calculation of your Effective Health Pool, or EHP. This is a simplified summary of your hero’s survivability based on stats like maximum Life, Armor, Resistances, Dodge, and other types of damage reduction. Similarly, healing was meant to be an average of how quickly you could regain health. This first pass got the basic messages across, but some of the more variable stats (like Life Per Kill) caused confusing inflations and muddled the information given to the player. So in Patch 2.1.2, we made another change.

(Healing) was replaced with (Recovery,) and the name was changed to not only better encompass its purpose, but to clearly highlight that change had occurred. The new stat estimated how much Toughness you would expect to recover in an average encounter, and we changed the weighting of certain healing stats to provide a more accurate picture.

In our current iteration, these stat summaries provide enough information to be useful to the average player and helps shine a light on how each stat contributes to your character’s overall power. This feature was so useful that we received a lot of community requests for a similar overview of follower equipment. In Patch 2.4.0, we fulfilled this request!