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Other D3 developers said much the same thing at Blizzcon 2009. [http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/exclusive-blizzcon-interview-julian-love-and-kevin-martens/] These are all noted so that when the final game arrives, and everyone is wearing nothing but rares, or uniques, or set items for the first six months, you can point to these quotes in the wiki and shake them overhead, like angry villagers with torches, on the heels of Frankenstein's monster.
==Item Rarity==
Another key question about items and item components in Diablo 3: just how scarce will they be? Diablo 2 did a fairly good job making the top items hard-but-not-impossible to find, until {{iw|Runes Runes}} were added in D2X and blew the curve, with the higher level runes incredibly rare; far too scarce given their enormous utility in {{iw|Runewords Runewords}}.
Though we won't have an answer to this until much later in the development process, at least in theory, we will not see useful items with such astronomical drop odds in Diablo 3. [http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/156898.Diablo-III/features/133759.20090831.BlizzCon-Diablo-III-devs-discuss-design-decisions-direction-depth-drops/]
::'''''GamePlanet:''' So we're still going to see the same level of rarity - like with the Zod Rune that nobody ever really picks up?
::'''[[Kevin Martens]]:''' That's yet to be determined. I'm not exactly sure if we're going to make it a little less rare or not. Hard to say yet, we'll keep tweaking the numbers and we'll have to do a lot of testing to find out if we're happy with things. Even if we do change it in one direction or the other, we may change it back as we're testing it.
==Item Variety==
A few new item types have been seen so far. Characters now wear shoulder pads and pants, in addition to all the other types of armor found in Diablo II. See the [[paper doll]] for screenshots and details.
There are many changes to small items. Charms, runes, and jewels appear to be gone, but there are many more types of [[gems]]. Another new item are the [[skill runes]], which are socketed into active skills and add bonus effects of various types. These items can not be used in items and provide no benefit except when socketed into a skill.
If there are other new item types, new varieties of weapons or multiple levels of jewelry, it's not been announced. However, lots of the item types so popular in Diablo II were not added until the expansion; there were no jewels, charms, runes, or runewords in regulation Diablo II; those all came in the expansion pack. It is therefore conceivable that a similar amount of item types and/or varieties could be added by the team in D3 and its expansion(s).
Jay Wilson (sort of) confirmed that we would see new item types in an October 2009 interview. [http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/jay-wilson-exclusive-full-transcript/]
::'''''Diii.net: '''Are there going to be any completely new item types?
::'''Jay Wilson: '''Will there be any completely new item types?... Yes. *laughs* That’s all I’m going to say.
::'''''Diii.net: '''Does that mean the Monk’s fist items? Or something else.
::'''Jay Wilson: '''*pauses* That’s all I’m going to say. You asked the question. “Are there going to be any new item types?” That’s all I’m going to say.