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[LASD]

* Certain aspects of the game feel dumbed down and simplified to an extreme that really disappointed me.  I don't expect an MMO-type time sink, but they made the game way too easy in my view: Infinite town portals. Infinite free identify.

Those aren't difficulty, they are an annoyance. And what is Deckard Cain of Diablo 2 if not infinite free identify? Also, the change to town portal makes D3 harder than D2. In D2 you can make a town portal and instantly escape from battle. In D3 you have to wait, undamaged, for 3 seconds until you get away.

Great point. The counter-point is that Diablo 2 is almost unbeatable by someone who is just playing the game without builds as your damage output just won't be enough in Hell if you have "wasted" your skillpoints. This problem was "fixed" in Diablo 2 only last year by skill point resets, but it is pretty unsatisfying as a mechanic.

So... That me and a friend rolled new characters during a local lan and beat Hell around lvl 60 didnt happen? Okay, so we didn't spread out skillpoints everywhere and just focused on a main tree except for utility skills... But that applies to any character building game.

Well, how many times had you played the game before? And didn't you honestly have any idea about builds? I was alluding to someone who plays the game for the first time. The character they make then will most definitely never finish the game on Hell, which is okay in a roguelike-like, but I can see how the Diablo series is now too mainstream to let that happen.

[Andir]

* Certain aspects of the game feel dumbed down and simplified to an extreme that really disappointed me.  I don't expect an MMO-type time sink, but they made the game way too easy in my view: Infinite town portals. Infinite free identify.

Those aren't difficulty, they are an annoyance. And what is Deckard Cain of Diablo 2 if not infinite free identify? Also, the change to town portal makes D3 harder than D2. In D2 you can make a town portal and instantly escape from battle. In D3 you have to wait, undamaged, for 3 seconds until you get away.

Deckard Cain's identify was something you achieved.  It wasn't given away immediately.  It's like "Holy crap, I have to identify all this stuff?"... "Thanks for saving me!  For that, I'll give you free identifies."... "OMG, Deckard Cain is awesome!"

So really, if he didn't give you free identifies, he wouldn't be as well known or popular.  He'd just be some old guy with a story you skipped.  Before, he was some mystical guy who was wise and could tell you about everything you picked up.  You knew he had some power and wisdom that you wanted to obtain.

Also, When I first played I picked a barbarian and my friend picked an amazon.  We put all available points into skills we thought would be great without spreading around too many points.  We would stop when we leveled and pick skills based on the descriptions and values they gave.  We'd spend tons of time looking for just the right piece of armor to fit that specific build.  It was awesome.

[Darkmere]

I think there's a great deal of nostalgia coming into play here. D2 offered pigeon-holed builds with synergies forcing you along X path to stay competitive, pigeon-holed gear forcing grinds or forum trading (Windforce bows and zod runes didn't rain from the heavens, no matter what the majority claims), pigeon-holed stat assignments for efficiency, and pigeons. Oh, and broken skills, the Lying Character Screen, repetitive endgame (kill Baal X1000, repeat), and nonsensical diluted classes with oskills, duped/hacked weapons permeating top-level play, bland copy n paste world generation, lack of gold sinks, lack of crafting options, enforced lack of storage space via charms, dull potion-spam gameplay...

I have zero doubt that if D2 was released today, it would be universally panned and forgotten. However... it was fun when it came out, and there wasn't anything else to compete with.

D3's 1.0.4 patch did get me back in the game, though. I took my barb, who was struggling to sword n board through A2 inferno, gave her an 1150 DPS 2-handed axe that I found, and started crashing through A2 with much less trouble. My WD can now pet-tank A3, which felt hopelessly impossible before. I found half a dozen upgrades in a couple days, with less than 80% base magic find. My first impressions are very good, in that it's a move towards balancing engaging gameplay with engaging metagame.

[Andir]

I think there's a great deal of nostalgia coming into play here. D2 offered pigeon-holed builds with synergies forcing you along X path to stay competitive, pigeon-holed gear forcing grinds or forum trading (Windforce bows and zod runes didn't rain from the heavens, no matter what the majority claims), pigeon-holed stat assignments for efficiency, and pigeons. Oh, and broken skills, the Lying Character Screen, repetitive endgame (kill Baal X1000, repeat), and nonsensical diluted classes with oskills, duped/hacked weapons permeating top-level play, bland copy n paste world generation, lack of gold sinks, lack of crafting options, enforced lack of storage space via charms, dull potion-spam gameplay...

I have zero doubt that if D2 was released today, it would be universally panned and forgotten. However... it was fun when it came out, and there wasn't anything else to compete with.

Zod runes and Windforce bows weren't required to beat the game or farm Baal.  I never had to forum trade (I never logged into Battle.net to trade or play with others because I figured they cheated, I didn't want to be involved in that. and we only ever played with my friends and we could do that with direct connection.)  The repetitive end game was fine with me personally because my game was improving my character by finding the items I needed to complete that particular build.  When the boss runs became so easy that I didn't die, I'd start another character or try another build or find a different set of items.  With the new skills-for-everyone there's no replay value there for me.  If I failed in a build, I'd make a new one.  That was my game.  That game is non-existent in D3.  There's no point farming for specific items because you can just buy what you need.  There's no character building because every character comes pre-built.

[SalmonGod]

I would rather have the option to play a build that can't make it to the end game than have no options.

When I played D2, I never looked up any information about anything online.  I played Hardcore, did things purely based on whatever felt right at the time, and pushed forward until I died.  Repeat.  Every play was different enough to hold my attention, and I never made it to end game where things could get repetitive.  If I had, I wouldn't have stayed there long anyway.  Starting over was my favorite part of the game.

As Andir just pointed out, that style of play is just completely impossible or non-rewarding in D3.  Everything is decided for or given to you (in the interest of guaranteeing you access to the end game), progress is very linear, everything I've heard indicates that the difficulty curve is stupid easy until you hit an impenetrable wall where you have to farm, and there is absolutely no reason to ever start a new character for a class you've already played.

[nenjin]

I'm with Salmon. I never looked up builds, never worried about competitiveness and just played the way I wanted to. That got me through normal and I felt satisfied, like I owned my own play experience.

And that's the complete opposite experience I've had with D3 to date.

[Darkmere]

There's some fundamental schism here, to the point that I feel we're playing different games. When I look at D2, there's the 6-level breakpoints where you get new skills, which ends at 30. Once you hit 30, your character, to me, feels complete. You'll never get a new skill, just put more points into what you have so the numbers get bigger. Then into synergies, so the numbers get bigger. Then +skills, so the numbers get bigger. Everything else beyond that point is grinding out the same content with the same skills in the same setup, forever. Then you can... go grind out another character I suppose.

After the first handful of characters, I had absolutely zero interest in slogging through the lower-difficulty crap so I could juggle a few points around and be finished by 30 yet again, so I skipped them all via friends every single time afterwards. What I was really after came directly before I made a character and at level 70... planning everything with the gear I had, then getting all the skill and stat points from levels I had to have so it worked properly. The in-between was boring.

D3 gives me a reason to care about the in-between parts, because there's new stuff constantly around the corner and I want to try out at least some of everything before I get to inferno, gear up, and start bashing heads in earnest. Also, once I hit 60 and find upper-end gear, I have the option to completely change what I'm doing without trudging through everything all over again to get frenzy instead of cleave.

I will say the brick wall difficulty certainly was a thing, but the recent rebalance did a good job of removing it. Strategies that were flat-out impossible before seem completely feasible. As stated, my barb is about halfway through inferno with self-found gear from act 1, and stats that a week ago would have been deemed "suicidal." People were doing full inferno clears with 300k gold gear sets pre-patch, which means godly legendaries aren't mandatory for finishing the game now, either. I don't mean that as an AH endorsement, just that such things are possible with modest gear.

[toomanysecrets]

I played the bejeesus out of DII for many years and also never looked up "builds."  I did start some new toons due to mis-spent points but this was back when I had never even heard of "respecs" so it didn't cross my mind to even be upset or give it the slightest thought.

For haters, maybe it is just nostalgia.  When DII came out I was a teen and hadn't a care in the world and I was living with my parents still and I had all kinds of spare time....who knows, maybe if I were in that situation when DIII came out I would be in love with it.

But please don't think that "haters just want to hate." I was really excited about DIII and extremely optimistic (DL'ed the game in advance and started playing on release night, subsequently called into work) and I was ready to enjoy it as much as DI and DII but within a couple weeks I just had this feeling like the franchise had been picked up by ham-fisted, slimy, profit-obsessed goons who didn't truly give a shit about the Diablo series.

[nenjin]

D3 gives me a reason to care about the in-between parts, because there's new stuff constantly around the corner and I want to try out at least some of everything before I get to inferno, gear up, and start bashing heads in earnest. Also, once I hit 60 and find upper-end gear, I have the option to completely change what I'm doing without trudging through everything all over again to get frenzy instead of cleave.

What "constant new stuff?" What is there to see after 1 play through, other than different combinations of elite types and the handful of item attributes Blizzard deliberately withheld? The events and set pieces that only show up in Nightmare+, and that you're guaranteed to recycle several times on your way to Inferno?

I appreciate switching skill and rune set ups on the fly. For those that put 1000 hours into D2, that's gotta be a big improvement point.

For those of us that didn't play D2 that way or to that depth, the ability to be anything at any time translates to "you are nothing." Or more appropriately, you are this pre-arranged set of skills and you're just walking the thoroughly trodden path Blizzard laid out for you. Sure after 3 characters and 1000 hours, the ability to make choices seems like tedium instead of freedom. To me, however, the amount of player choice in D2 was good because I never played it to overkill. Being able to invest points in abilities even after you unlocked them, still being able to spend attribute points, let me feel like what I was doing was still ultimately up to me. I didn't grind anything, I simply played what I thought would be interesting and that was a fresh experience to me, every time, even at normal.

[Ivefan]

Well, how many times had you played the game before? And didn't you honestly have any idea about builds? I was alluding to someone who plays the game for the first time. The character they make then will most definitely never finish the game on Hell, which is okay in a roguelike-like, but I can see how the Diablo series is now too mainstream to let that happen.

I made a Fissure druid which didn't have any build on the web at the time as far as i know.
Fine. So my first char ever was a barb and i put points in everything, so ofc he sucked, but i got to try the skills.
D2 was something you could come back to and try something new and a lot of items mattered in different ways, and could even make a viable character of strange skills.

D3 gives me a reason to care about the in-between parts, because there's new stuff constantly around the corner and I want to try out at least some of everything before I get to inferno, gear up, and start bashing heads in earnest.

Okay, so I didn't play the third or forth patch which might matter, though i doubt it. My experience as a wizard of the in-between parts, which as you say it seems to be everything before inferno, was mostly, find random weapon/armor with a higher dps/armor than my current piece with sockets, stats were just a bonus. Skillwise it was either orb or beam as soon as they were available and that kept untill the end, So that that wasn't really different from D2 except that it felt like i was just leveling up a blizzard premade character.
This might be fine with the first character, but getting through Norm-hell on a second one is just tedious.

Everything else beyond that point is grinding out the same content with the same skills in the same setup, forever. Then you can... go grind out another character I suppose.

The same as D3, except that it takes a lot longer and then you hit inferno where you either die from a bullshit combo champion or grind for items where anything below ilvl 61 is vendor trash. yay.

[SalmonGod]

The replayability with D2 came from every character feeling completely different.  It's not just about putting a point in everything to see what it looks like.  It's about every character actually forcing you to make different choices and handle situations in different ways.

Even if you built the same stats and skills, there was tons of improvisation in the first 3 or 4 acts on normal difficulty based on what drops you found.  This assumes you didn't trade excessively or store stuff on mules for new characters.  I would often find myself using completely out-of-character equipment for short periods, because something rare would drop that was simply better than my class stuff.  I might be a necromancer running around with an axe for a while.  It made the game interesting.  Compare to D3, where a low-level demon hunter isn't even capable of a melee attack, denying you the ability to make use of most of what the RNG gives you.

I also doubt I put thousands of hours into D2.  A few hundred, maybe.  Still much more than most games for me.

[LASD]

But please don't think that "haters just want to hate."

I did think a bit like that when I did my first post in this discussion, but I definitely don't think that anymore. I now see where people are coming from and I appreciate people explaining their reasons for disliking the game.

It's interesting to see in what ways and with what attitudes people play the Diablos and I think those have a lot to do with the reaction to Diablo 3. D3 did many things that were perfect for me. I hated wasting skill- and statpoints, hated fiddling with scrolls and couldn't bother with figuring out the item prices or setting up trades, even though I wanted the late game items. D3 fixed all that.

I guess I happen to play with the same mindset the D3 dev team is, so I'm pretty happy, but I do see the many flaws and I understand how some of the design decisions can feel really grating to other people.

[toomanysecrets]

Yeah I'm torn on the AH issue because I have made some pretty decent gold off rares in D3 but only about 1% of rares are even worth trying to sell.  It is efficient and quick if you find something good.

I liked D2's trading because it gave you a reason to try to work on a sweet collection of items.  When you would trade with someone, you would basically show them all of your best stuff.  You could also occasionally be surprised by unusual gear you had never seen.  Noobs would say "woooooaahh nm I ain't got shit" and people with a lot more spare time than me would tell me I had pathetic trash. It was definitely interesting. A bit outdated, I guess.

[Darkmere]

Normal difficulty D2 can be and has been beaten in nothing but low-quality cracked gear, or naked. Also, stuff in the early areas would literally never attack you.

Synergies felt exactly like blizzard designed a pre-packaged class for me, except that then I knew they did it on purpose and plugged in a half-assed fix for underbalanced, boring skill design. Oh and they came in YEARS after the game was released. So did runewords. So did charms.

When I said there was always new stuff while leveling, I specifically meant difficulty ramp-up, new champion mods, and new skill/rune combinations that affected how my character played. I.e. all the stuff synergies and unlocking all skills by 30 prevented from happening in D2.

That's not the side of D2 trading I remember, either. All I remember was "wug" "wuw" "lol gtfo faget" being the vast majority of exchanges I witnessed. The audacity I had not to show up with duped dualmax eth colossus blades and max stat enigma armor still brings my family shame. It's a tough road, living with something like that.

[nenjin]

When I said there was always new stuff while leveling, I specifically meant difficulty ramp-up, new champion mods, and new skill/rune combinations that affected how my character played.

See, that pretty much petered out after normal in my view. It didn't take much imagination to know what Arcane + Invulnerable Minions + blah was going to be like. And the drastic reduction in the rate of new skills and runes, for me, meant that I was basically using at the end of normal what I was going to use for the rest of the game. I didn't find that the game called for dramatic re-slotting of skills to meet challenges. I think the most I felt I needed to do was swap in an invulnerability shield.

So yeah. I felt the end of the skill system long before I'd unlocked everything. The only thing I really had to look forward to was how the abilities looked.....and at least with Monk, that was pretty underwhelming. Mechanically, I knew the effectiveness of most runes before I'd ever used them. And at least back when I was playing, many of them didn't see worth the time to slot.