Do tell me what I'm missing. And try and say it without referencing "avoiding dying", something we argueably should have been doing in the first difficulty but didn't have to.
That was glorious, thank you. It also ruined my chances of ever being able to take this game seriously, which were slim anyway
There's two things I don't like about this game.
First, there's Blizzards horribly anti-consumer policies. I've talked plenty about those (always online/making mods illegal).
Second, they've taken out all the reason I ever had for playing an ARPG. I don't play them to feel like a demi-god that can make uber-monsters explode with a menacing glance. I don't play them to look up cookie cutter builds and follow directions. I don't play them to try and unlock my own perfect munchkin formula. I don't play them for the story.
I play them for the thrill of getting lucky finding an interesting item once in a while. I play them for the challenge of staying alive in hardcore mode
without paying any attention to min/maxing. I start a character in hardcore and improvise everything about my character on the fly. I don't plan anything about my "build" in advance. I put points wherever I feel like it at the time and use whatever drops that seems interesting. I don't trade items between characters. I only trade with players that I meet in the game by chance. I enjoy getting to know the feel of how that unique character plays. Eventually it dies and I enjoy moving on and doing something new again. In Diablo 2, every character I played was a unique experience, even if they were a class I'd played 10 times before. I would end up finding completely different stuff (which mattered
a whole lot more when basic attacks were the default form of combat and mana-depleting abilities actually had to be rationed), combined with trying a different set of point allocations that made the experience of playing that character unique
due to being stuck with those decisions.
Diablo 3 basically removed all the appeal of my freeform style of play. I would go in with a new character and suffer through the dullness of normal mode (it doesn't deserve the word difficulty attached to it). Somewhere around the end of normal mode, I would have unlocked all of my character's abilities, and there would be nothing to look forward to but unlocking slight variations to those abilities. I would fiddle around with all of those abilities for a few minutes each and then have no reason to continue playing or ever play that class again, before even hitting half of max level. They made equipment the only semi-lasting form of character customization, and they even cheapened that with the auction house. You can get any equipment in the game with little effort and obliterate all their content with a minimum of enjoyable gameplay process involved. I just don't understand the appeal. Yeah, I can just opt out of things like the auction house, but it still cheapens the enjoyability of the experience to basically have a "finish game" button available to me the entire time that I'm playing.
Unless they somehow end up pulling some very satisfying PvP out of their asses or putting out expansion content very frequently, I would be surprised if this game isn't completely dead within two years.