Has anyone else noticed this? In many cases, Blizz removed the best types of affixes and prefixes in a category and made them proprietary to magic items. Also, they added many new one which are not so hot. The "of Charged Bolt" for instance...At first I was very excited about that. What fun! To try to make a 100% character or 200% character (perfectly impossible of course, but you get the idea) so that you're a walking, uh, sparkler? But anybody realize how incredibly incidental that damage will be? I mean, disregarding the chance to set it off....you can only get up to, what, lvl 5 or 6 charged bolt? And there are 4 other mods that are worse than that?? Let's see, yeah, useful in normal. Let's see...a slight bit of fun in nightmare, maybe offset by created lag? Maybe still worth it. But in hell difficulty, where 90% of great items are found...those suffixes will suck and I mean SUCK. What will 25 lightning damage do to a Balrog with 6000 life? Or even 800 life in single player? If you're anything but the strangest variant, you should have the monster dead before more than one or two bursts go off.

Is this variant only material? Maybe so, I'm not sure yet, but the numbers look bad. I think charged bolt was boosted a bit in the xpac, but without mastery and at slvl 5-6 tops...you're looking eye candy for the monsters to at least die an entertained death.

That's not all though; there's new plus to stamina 'fixes (oh my gawd, when's the last time you considered the idea of stamina? Outside of bed of course) Also, notice that there are now THREE fortune affixes and suffixes? So that, yes, you have a much higher chance of getting a magic find bit on those boots or gloves or whatnot, but the average is MUCH lower now. Of fortune, I think, used to be 20-35%, and now you can get as low as, what- 6% I think? That's taking up a valuable suffix spot, darnit.

So here's what I'm thinking: I'm no longer going to move my lvl 80 200% magic find pally over to the expansion..since most of the best rares in d2 will be found in vanilla, at least on items where a) you don't care about defense enough to get elites only and b) not on weapons.

So I'm probably going to work as hard as I can to get wonderful magic find items in vanilla so that I can USE them in the xpac, but really, I'm worried that after I find my weapon, I'm going to be trawling hell/hell vanilla style again.

Thoughts?

Go look at the new 'fixes. It blew me away how many unfun or just plain awful ones there are.