why bind on pickup is a great game mechanic

If you've ever played Diablo 2 -- and as a devoted Blizzard fan you've killed Baal at least on Nightmare difficulty -- you'll quickly realize that getting into Hell difficulty requires you to do boss runs or cow level runs over and over again. Even afterwards you will then spend the rest of the game avoiding monsters because they are too difficult (Extra Strong Multishot Lightning Enchanted Physical Immune? More like "fuck you, player") and not worth the ensuing repair bill.


The game shifts from steadily progressing to being stronger and taking on swathes of enemies to avoiding those monsters so you can go kill the boss that has a much better chance at dropping something worthwhile. Part of this has to do with the fact that if Boss monsters ALWAYS dropped Unique level items, everyone and their pet dog would have them -- rather than just the botters or the devoted grinders. Suddenly the game no longer is challenging once you have a single high level character because they can just farm all the overpowered gear a new character would ever need, and hand it off to them. They could even create a looping progression cycle of hand-me-downs that they never get rid of when they want to reroll a new character.

World of Warcraft's avoids this by binding equipment. By having equipment bind, you can no longer have an overinflated item economy due to people just shoving off their hand-me-down equipment when they are done with it, or farming the same boss over and over and trading it out.

Bind on Equip items force a choice of either using said item for yourself, or getting trade value from somone else who wants it. There is an opportunity cost with equipping it, so you either have to choose to use it or get rid of it entirely, rather than trading it away the moment it loses its usefulness.

Bind on Pickup forces you to actually be present in an attempt for the item. Usually contributing towards getting it. It's still quite possible to take a higher level character in and trivialize the encounter, however its not possible anymore for you to bring in your own high level character, gather all the items, and then hand them over to one of your lower level characters. You need somone else to help you to twink out, and they are often busy grinding something else in the game.

With this, Blizzard no longer has to agonize over drop rates of the best equipment like they did in Diablo 2. The economy doesnt become oversaturated with powerful items because once they are placed on an owner, they cannot be put back on the market again. So now when you get through the effort of killing a "really hard guy" you dont have to sigh as it again drops a bunch of items that are useless for everyone. (Instead you sigh because once again, they didnt drop item X for you).

Overall the improvement is noticeable, when killing a boss you have a 10-33% chance of getting an item you want to drop, drop, rather than having a droprate below 1%.