I recently roped a friend into playing Diablo 4 with me, but he made the ill-advised decision of sprinting through the campaign so he could get to Season One by the time it started two days later. Because he was short on time, he asked me for pro tips to make his rushed journey a little easier. After listing off a couple of the basics, I added, “Don’t sell junk equipment, it makes more sense to salvage it.”
That was just advice I’d read online and decided to follow, but the logic behind it was sound. Materials are more important than gold, which you get plenty of from fighting enemies, searching chests, and breaking containers anyway. I’ve never found myself short on gold when I needed to repair equipment or imprint an aspect, but you’ll frequently find yourself short on materials if you don’t start salvaging early on.
More importantly, I realised that I almost never go to vendors at all. I’m not selling equipment to them much, unless I notice that my gold stores are low. And I’m certainly not buying equipment – the gear in stores is no better than what I could collect on my own working through dungeons. It’s more fun to put on a podcast, mindlessly kill shit for an hour or two and check my drops later than it is to check vendors every few hours hoping they have something good. Vendors have the same inventory map-wide and they only refresh every hour with only a handful of pieces to choose from each time. Not all of them are rare drops, and seldom will you find a piece of equipment better than anything you’ve already got equipped.
Also, equipment is expensive. An uncommon item can somehow cost five figures, but sell for a fraction of that. A rare or legendary item will cost you far more, to the point where it might bankrupt you if you haven’t been hoarding gold instead of materials. This makes it even rarer that you’ll get something that you want, can afford, and is worth the money. In this case… why does the game have vendors at all? They feel like an afterthought, there to provide an alternative (but somehow worse) option to hunting for gear the regular way: through drops. It isn’t to encourage a player-driven economy, it isn’t to give viable alternatives to grinding, it’s just there.
It’s a shame. Much of Diablo 4 seems very well thought out, with quality-of-life features added to make grinding more fun and less of a chore. It’s because of that attention to detail that the uselessness of the game’s vendors seems so egregious – for most players, especially filthy casuals like me, vendors are mostly places to offload equipment and nothing more. Most people aren’t going to be checking these stores constantly for great equipment after finding out early in the game that most of what the stores sell is junk. I hope Blizzard improves the vendor system in future patches, but knowing how long it takes to get big features updated, we might not see this for a while. In the meantime, players like me can only hope they eventually become usable.