This is going to be a long post, because I've kind of hit a wall with this game in terms of wanting to play it. Skip to the bottom for the tl;dr, but I'm pretty sure what I have to say in between is going to be pretty good.
Honestly, the biggest problem is that the items we're hunting for are statistically more likely to be useless vendor trash than something you can use or sell for gold/real monies. In later game scenarios, there are very, very few stat modifiers that matter. They're attack stat(str/dex/int), vitality, all resist, armor, crit chance/damage bonus, increased attack speed, life on hit, and maybe regeneration for the kite-ier builds out there. To compound that, most pieces of gear have to have MULTIPLE DIFFERENT USEFUL STATS in order to be desirable. So, you basically need to hit the lottery on a drop in order for an item to be a) lv 61 or above, b) have useful stats. I've farmed the fuck out of the first half of Inferno and found about 3 useful pieces of gear- a legendary ring that I actually got in Act 3 or 4 of Hell, a pair of gloves with +dex/ias/crit chance, and the one hander my barb is using, which is good but not GREAT because while it has +150 vit and over 900 life on hit, the dps is kind of low at 650ish.
So, you farm and farm and farm and maybe get lucky and get a really desirable piece of gear. It's not for the class you're playing but that's ok! Go sell it on either the gold or real money auction house and then use the funds to buy gear you need, right? WRONG. Right now, the economy of the game has been fucking nuked by botters and lunatics. There's so much fucking gold floating around out there from botters that ANY useful piece of gear is going to have comparable listings in excess of 10 million. So, lucky Johnny finds a bad ass pair of bracers, checks the gold AH and sees comparable bracers with buy it now at 20 million. Fuck yeah! says Johnny and lists his at buyout of 18 million. The problem is, NO ONE IS BUYING THOSE FUCKING BRACERS BECAUSE THAT'S A DUMB FUCKING PRICE AND NO ONE HAS THAT KIND OF GOLD BUT THE FUCKING BOTTERS. Who may buy Johnny's bracers with their Chinese slave labor gold and then decide that it's time to list the fuckers at 25 million gold because fuck you, inflation that's why!
This is the point I've reached with my wizard- all the gear that would be an "upgrade" for me is 10+ million gold for each piece. Realistically, I need to upgrade my off hand source and bracers, and could probably upgrade my helmet. I would probably need to farm gold for like a month to do so, and by the time I had enough to upgrade anything inflation would likely put it out of my price range- today's 10 million gold source is next week's 15 million gold source, etc. I don't feel like fucking with this, so I've just been fucking around trying to level alts and upgrade my gems, which is a quicker, sure fire way to increase my dps if even marginally.
I would now like to offer a potential solution to help fix this for people. It involves that useless piece of shit, the Blacksmith. For all of the iLV 61+ shit he's able to craft, there should be an option to double, triple whatever the gold/material cost so that you can GUARANTEE a modifier. Double it AGAIN to GUARANTEE another. That way, I can grind for a day or two, salvage all of the useless shit and use that along with the gold I've earned to craft something that DOESN'T FUCKING SUCK, because I AM NEVER GOING TO GET IT TO DROP. The only other viable alternative would be to make it so it's more likely for iLV 61+ drops to have the good stats- don't completely abandon the RNG nature of loot but don't make it equally likely to get useless shit like thorns, life steal and increased pick up radius as it is to get the shit you NEED TO PLAY THE GAME AT INFERNO LEVEL. I would prefer either of them to having to use the gold or RM AH's- I don't mind using them to upgrade, but a large part of the enjoyment for these types of games is EARNING LOOT BY GRINDING. Making it more likely to get USEFUL (not just high level but actually RELEVANT items) to drop or by earning them from grinding a bunch of shit and then smithing it yourself just seems way more rewarding to me.
Also, I would like to see some sort of "guaranteed drop" from a boss if you have a 5 stack of Nephalem valor- Leoric drops pants, Butcher drops amulets, Maghda drops rings etc. This way, if there's something you NEED to upgrade you can have a better shot at getting it. Just a thought.
promised tl;dr- shitty items and auction house inflation are a large part of what's killing the latter stages of the game; this could be combatted by actually making the blacksmith useful. Also, guarantee a type of equipment drop with a 5 stack of NV on bosses.
I know it's not even two months after release but playing this game has become kind of a non-rewarding chore. More content and better itemization are needed to make the later game more enjoyable. Worrying about shit like "nerfing switching to increased magic find gear" is just kind of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic when you could be trying to nuke the iceberg.
edit- forgot to say, let the jeweler craft rings and amulets plz
