What makes the item system so bad?

[Athenau]

I disagree. Making the CC affixes much more than a gimmick on items causes serious problems with balance. You very quickly get into Tornado-Wizard territory, where certain builds essentially become invincible because you can keep any enemy CC locked in perpetuity.

It's easy to balance this, just scale it according to proc coefficients like everything else.

I suppose one way you could make these affixes work would be to remove them as they stand now and move the CC chance back onto the damage type on weapons (Holy - Blind, Fire - Stun, Poison - Slow, etc.) giving weapons with that damage a base chance to proc the effect. Then you can add in an affix on other items that can magnify the effect, thus still allowing people to try to build around it but not to the point where the CC effect would be all-encompassing as it was with Wizards.

I like the idea of having the type of elemental damage be meaningful again, but this isn't necessary to balance things. Actually, having resists matter would make items more interesting. In D2 the best builds had multiple damage types (or a single rarely resisted type, *cough* magic damage, *cough* blessed hammer) via skills or weapon swaps. That seems totally missing from D3, either because there are no significant one element resists on enemies, or because people don't know what they are.

The last 10% of the character's growth is where the difficult/fun choices start coming into play. My present WD is trying to balance INT, VIT, All Resist, LoH, Health Regen, Crit, and Crit Damage, all while trying to maintain as much Pick-up Radius as I can possibly get my hands on. It is a super fun build and the item choices associated with it go pretty deep. Having said that, I'm sure that there are many builds that don't go that deep into the item well. It wasn't too long ago when every build out there only wanted massive Attack Speed and LoH. After that was balanced, Crit started to factor into people's choices. I think the best thing Blizzard can do for the item system is to keep building on the Legendary stable that they have while continuing to make more builds viable. When a build has to factor in more stats then they can reasonably expect to get on items (such as the WD I'm playing) you are forced to make interesting choices. And when you do get that one piece of gear that is perfect for your build it's that much more rewarding.

But everything but pick-up radius is the same balancing act other characters do as well (with a different primary stat).

The problem is that the utility affixes are not powerful enough. Options that are more than just bigger numbers on the character screen need to be viable to lend flavor to the item game, just as the unique legendary proc effects do.