Dungeon Crawling 101

I kill Brutus.

I see this:

My head immediately starts thinking of ways to thank Grinding Gear Games for this glorious legendary being relevant to my actual character!  A sledgehammer?  For me?  I LOVE sledgehammers!

LOOK AT IT!  There's so much awesome in this picture.

Then I ID the sweet sweet weapon:

It doesn't look any different than a white sledgehammer and the stats are worse than what I'm using.  Note the req level of 17 and str of 62.  I'm level 34.  It "might be" an upgrade if the +93% damage is applied after the numbers are crunched... but I haven't even tried it yet.


So, why did this merit a post?  Well, it goes back to why I love these dungeon crawlers and why other people don't.  A good friend of mine and I were playing Diablo 3 and a green legendary set piece dropped.  I flipped out on skype, scooped it up, and ID'd it the second I could.  I then spent the next hour trying to figure out how to make it worth having.  But, that moment in time between seeing that green "Chest Armor" on the ground and ID'ing it to find out that it wasn't an upgrade for any of my characters is amazing.  Thoughts of becoming the biggest badass to ever walk the earth wearing my shiny new "Chest Armor" are all I can think about.  Is this one of those perfect rolls that come once in a lifetime?  Will this be how I become the best Witch Doctor in the game?  Will I be able to progress further into Inferno now?  Ding!  Fail.

The way I handle this is like so, "Well, it's still really cool and I like it."  This is why I can play the hell out of any aRPG and have a lot of fun.  I love the gear hunt.  My buddy J is the opposite.  He gets a legendary that isn't an upgrade and he's flat out angry that the game would have the nerve to drop such a piece of junk and get his hopes up.  In fact, he ID's legendary items along with all the other rares very matter-of-fact-ly.  "Oh look, legendary pants... yup... junk."  He then goes into how everything in this game is junk for 20 minutes culminating in "The auction house is the only way to upgrade, all upgrades there are 100million gold, I hate farming gold, let's play something else."

In the same moment with the same stimulus I become more interested in playing and end up getting deeper into the game while my friend J is busy logging off and cursing himself out for falling for the game.  Who's right?