So, lately I've been really excited about the reset. For some reason, that leaked in to my dreams, and I had one of those fruity ones; a dream in which I was arguing the following points...here. It was really weird. Don't ask.

I know Bashiok has already fended off rumors of any magnitude of a patch coming with this reset, but here's a simple thing which, I believe, could be made in to a small patch with only the basest amount of thinking to the greatest effect:

Besides charms, it's been a long, long time since we've seen any new equipment added. Bashiok, himself, and I believe the rest of the Diablo III team, has noted that gear is the elementary block of the Diablo series. Those two things said, I believe it would be a good idea to consider adding more gear to Diablo II through a patch sometime in the future.

Though somewhat downplayed by players at large, even a handful of the 1.11 Rune Words are still used (Bone on a mercenary? Treachery for Uber runs? I even see Peace now and then). In all honesty, I am getting sick of Rune Words. I am happy for the ones we have, and those also that we were given, but I would like to see an expansion of Sets and Uniques, and maybe even some tweaking of Rares to make them more attractive to even the unseasoned players.

Adding some more equipment, some more *useful* and slightly-end game-oriented equipment, would allow a lot of us to reassess our builds we've used for so long. Depending on the stats (Raise Skeleton a general skill - Enchantress with Skeletons? Eh? EH?), entirely new builds could be created. I think this could have the potential to really jump start activity on Diablo II, for old and new players, alike. While the skill rebalancing of the latest patch was welcomed to varying degrees, skills are not really what matters in Diablo II. It's always been the gear!

Think of all the fansites now having to redo drop statistics on all their Wiki pages, all the calculators that would need to be recalibrated to suit new builds, all the new builds that could be imagined, all the players testing, playing, and tweaking those builds and web resources. I'm not talking more items with +100% to damage and +2 to all skills, I'm talking some interesting, though powerful, items. Most of the game is pretty much broken by the time the end game arrives, so why not go all out? Let Diablo II's reign end with a bang when Diablo III comes to fill the throne!

Furthermore, adding equipment isn't really that hard. Just using some basic logic will keep most of it reasonably balanced, so testing isn't required to such a great extent as 1.13. Gear can be created in seconds on an editor, and even adding gear is just a matter of editing some files (I've done it, it's really not that hard!).

So, in summary, I believe that adding new, diverse equipment :

Is a simple way to encourage old and new players to return to the game.

Brings more complexity and choice to plausible builds.

Would require fansites to reassess their data resources for readers.

Is relatively simple to implement.

What say you (anyone reading this)? Any ideas or criticism?

I too am very disappointed that runewords seem to clutter all "final" builds and would prefer to see more Sets and Uniques put into place that'll actually RIVAL such runewords.

As it is now, pretty much all items about 2 weeks after a reset are sought after, but then after that, less actual items that can be MFed and more runewords end up shifting market prices and demands so 80% of those items you found have little to no value in the major trading market.

My PERSONAL thoughts is to severely dumb down the power of Runewords and make it so Sets and Uniques are the ultimate goal in a player's gear selection. Make runes much easier to find because it's easier to get a socketed item or socket an item than it is to do dozens of monster runs to try and find a good Set or Unique.

Runewords as an "intermediate" setup until you can improve your equipment with Sets and Uniques would work fairly well in my opinion. So instead of people mass-duping runes to make runewords that won't poof, they'd end up having to dupe said Sets and Uniques, but since they're dupes, most people will only want legits...and because of that, item sites will likely crash because they get their stock from mass duping.