Ever since 1.0.3 came out the game has been falling short on the fun side bit by bit.

Drops are worse, stat rolls on items are worse, the decrease in attack speed made the game feel more sluggish, and nothing I am putting up in the AH is selling anymore.

I am very disappointed right now, as I hoped Diablo 3 would entertain me for months on end as Diablo 2 did.

The rolls didn't change unless I somehow missed a post about it. They were also increased in the earlier acts and they will be fixing the later acts soon to have higher drop rates.

I never understood the longterm appeal of D2, and I don't see where D3 is any different. In both games you get to the highest difficulty and farm the same content ad infinitum. Where is the fun in that?

What was so fun about D2's "end game"?

the fun part about D2's endgame was the endless possibilities of items, itemization was the best that there ever was in a game. Period.

There was never a "best" item to be had in any slot for a specific character, just for a specific time and it was also based on what other items you had so if you upgraded 1 item the entire "best in slot" for all other slots changed. In D3 its all about stacking you mainstat, some vit and some special stat like all resist or attackspeed (depending on if you run hardcore or softcore)

The problem for me is the retartedly high repair costs.
I play through act 1 inferno and make like 35K-40K gold prior to repairing and then lose at least half of that repaining.. what's the point.

People seem to forget that Diablo 2 had more problems to start with than Diablo 3 has had.

Kalick, I'd say D3 has the better endgame since you can do various different places and get the same result.

Martian; you are dying in act 1?

it doesnt deliver for u jiman cause it knows u turned ur back on ee... it just figures u will turn ur back on it next, when something else comes out

http://www.alexc.me/...ictive-than-diablo-2/417/

cows

Jiman:

http://us.battle.net/...en/forum/topic/5978860598
http://us.battle.net/...en/forum/topic/5835775092
http://us.battle.net/...en/forum/topic/5889190446
http://us.battle.net/...en/forum/topic/5592453985
http://us.battle.net/...en/forum/topic/5151274074
http://www.alexc.me/...ictive-than-diablo-2/417/
(Yes Detmer linked the last one, but its widely read because Blizz responded to it publicly)

These are excellent threads describing the D3 problems, why D2 worked, and why D3 doesn't.

Mainly, the problem is, D3 has a brick wall you bang your head against in Inferno, D2 doesn't - that's the key difference. In D2, the hardest difficulty was easy enough no matter how badly you screwed up your build and stats, you were still a _viable_ character no matter what (though you would clear inefficiently).

Through experimentation people got weird builds working in D2. Javazons, Melee Sorcs, etc. It was fun. In D3, you are pigeonholed into a few select skills to even progress. That's not fun.

In D2, you mowed through crowds of monsters (Cows anyone? Chaos Sanctuary?) in the highest difficulties. You feel powerful and awesome. In D3, you ran in circles from FOUR champion monsters until they died for 5 minutes. You feel weak.


And here's my list of reasons why D3 failed:

- Quests are not rewarding, do not offer unique rewards. In d2, they offered you a high level rune/gem/socket, skill point, etc

- Game types. In D2, you could name the game, trade game, rushing game, foothills farm 2 game, achievements game, etc.

- Lack of chat channels to form a community around - we have to resort to external forums. You can't even display your avatar to the world like in D2.

- NV buff - my friends don't want to leave games to help

- Boring loot, items are bland, they removed over 50 interesting affixes that gave +skills, +skill procs, +chance to cast X skill, +faster block, +faster recovery, legendary/set-only affixes... They "streamlined" the gear so there is no longer any differentiation between caster gear and melee gear.

- Less item affixes that are unique, stuff to proc skills, immunity, faster cast, block speed, block recovery, etc

- Legendaries are crap, not usable past maybe 5 levels beyond their ilvl

- Legendaries contain too many random affixes

- Less gem types, less legendaries

- Clunky UI, I have to tab though several pages to find the skill I want

- Inferno isn't hard, but its CHEAP, its full of 1-2 shots, that makes it incredibly frustrating, it does not make me feel powerful. Consider the Jar of Souls event (Act 1 Crypts), that was fun, that massive amount of skeletons made you feel powerful.

- IAS nerf is overdone, especially with a RMAH value on items

- First kills beyond normal don't drop rares - people used to create new characters just to farm good Runes/Rares on certain quests (Hephaesto, etc)

- Nerfing MF on chests and pots, removing treasure goblins, chests, etc farming areas, is removing playstyle choices

- Crazy unkillable combinations of traits on champion packs too often, and usually too close to each other

- Normalized everything by weapon damage means there is little gear differentiation between caster loot and melee loot

- Enrage timer is an arbitrary restriction on playstyle

- Cheesy storyline

- The lack of a level cap (lvl 99 was so far away the level cap was as good as non-existant in D2) meant there is a goal of leveling up towards the next skill point, you always felt like you are doing something even if lousy loot dropped.

- Game philosophy of forcing players to get 5 NV then kill boss (and nerfing every other method) is stupid

- Lack of character customization options compared to D2, and I don't mean dye colours and gear style. Here, I mean stat allocation, Skill points allocation, Playstyle choices, Lesser gem colours...

- Only a few builds are usable in Acts 3/4 because of gear dependency

- RMAH has reduced the sense of achievement of finding rares, shifted item hunting towards gold hunting ("find item to sell to buy item")

- Maps in the open world are a lot less random (same perimeter all the time, the exits are always in the same corner)

- No Ethreal items, barely any superior items, no transmuting. They even made items just be 0 durability when it reaches 0. In D2, they broke and disappeared.

- Only act 1 felt the right mood, the rest of the game had little horror atmosphere, bright colors everywhere

- Dialogue is so cheesy and the player (dialogue) is so haughty. I'm the one broken out of immersion by lines my character wouldn't have said. Act 3 is beyond stupid.

- Low replayability due to free respeccing, lack of character attachment

- Lack of character uniqueness/identity/ownership - all builds are freely changeable, many builds in the late game are similar or identical - no character permanence + lack of customizability

- And there isn't even PvP or PKing.

- Botting still exists, a bot costs about $30 and you can make that investment back in a day. The current rate of gold is about $2.5 per mil gold (though in the first weeks it was over $50). You can still bot over 400k gold per hour in Nightmare.

- The ability to dupe gold using the gold AH (by cancelling your auctions by setting your system clock back so D3 thought you have 5 minutes to cancel your item - this caused any existing bidder's gold to go to you, and had a good chance the bidder's gold also returned to him - it sometimes does/doesn't). This exploit crashed the economy (inflation) really early in June and the price of gold plunged from $30+ to $12 per million within 3 days until it got fixed.


Game design and balance is fluffed. I don't know what Jay Wilson was thinking.

omg tl

Same. They lowered the rate of non-death deterioration, but still, with all the jailer-molten-votrex-arcane guys in little tiny passageways, you WILL die.

I refuse to play 1.03, the whole game turned into a giant funnel for the RMAH. All the items you get are absolutely worthless, you almost HAVE to buy everything.

If they fix it enough to be slightly playable, i'll do a few days of item grinding to get my 60 bucks back. After that, the game needs a MAJOR overhaul.

What Xinhuan posted. It seems like they dumbed down everything and made one way of playing the game for everyone so that it would be more appealing ot the general public without much difficulty (that you couldn't overcome by just purchasing something).

And the reason why I only play Hardcore mode (D2 too), is because it is the only meaningful game to me.

In softcore, it is essentially a rat race. Are you the fastest rat (farm a lot)? Or are you the richest rat (RMAH)?


Another HUGE issue with D3 is the lack of a ladder system. Without a ladder system which publicly shows who is leading the leveling race (especially in hardcore), and a regular 6 month reset, the game loses quite a bit of replayability.

For those unaware of what a ladder reset is, basically, the ladder is wiped periodically of all characters, all existing characters are marked non-ladder, new characters created are ladder-eligible. Ladder and non-ladder characters may not trade or join the same game. So a ladder reset is exactly that, people looked forward to it, to race to the top.

The gear is basically segregated between ladder and non-ladder. Ladder gear and loot was extremely VALUABLE (within the ladder period).

Heck, I remembered when I had 7 characters (all alive) in the top 100 hardcore USWest ladder.

Heh...HC is the only thing somewhat keeping it interesting here too, except I've only found motivation to login like once a week for the last 3-4 weeks already after rushing 3 chars to 60 in SC the first two weeks.


Ladder resets will happen...once Blizzard makes enough off the RMAH and the market collapses. It's like basically they don't want to give the common gamer knowledge so they can milk it as much as they can later.

D3 was fun for 3 days. Waste of money

I think it's really about how you look at the game.

Item Affix: If you add on a lot more item affix, then people start complaining about not being able to get items they want since it'll be even harder to get that perfect roll.

Item drops: Ever since blizz upped 63 item drops, AH has been terrible. I mean the more loot your able to get, obvious the more loot others get and are trying to sell. I vendor everything 63 and under unless it's near perfect roll, 61 items i dont even bother. Even perfect rolls are too garbage to sell. For one, I probably would like to complain that items drops are too common. Reduce drop percentage in act 1 and 2 plz. Make it pre 1.3. Stuff that used to sell for 5mil is like 200k now.

AIS nerf: I mean seriously, it was just too OP. My monk with 3.2 AS and 2500 LoH just straight up crushed act2. I was using blue rings and amulet. Those machine gun hunters were straight up crushing everything. AIS was just a bug honestly, they over powered the stats and just diminished everything else making the game easy mode. I play monk and dont know much about other classes, but with high AS and high LoH, even 25k dps can farm seige breaker without deaths. The game wasnt meant for players to straight stand in molten or descrate and tank mobs down.

Bosses drop reduced: It's not bad, cause 5 stack seigebreaker was just too easy. It takes less than 30 mins (depending on your route) and you come back with a full bag of rares usually resulting in 6+ peices of 63 items. That's not very hard now is it. A highend player can farm out on average 10-20mil a day unless your luck is dirt crap and never get a semi good roll.

Mob Affix difficulty: It's be greatly reduced already. Act 1 is LOL (3mil worth of gears can farm without death/skipping, act2 is LOL (10mil worth of gears can farm without death/skipping), act 3 and 4 is even LoL now (2 good top tier drops and you beat the game, 3 or 4 good drops resulting in prolly 50 or 60mil gold can give u enough gears to farm act3, 100mil+ worth of gears can let you LOL the game without dying). What's 100mil really, urr like a 900 dps+ 1h with crit damage and socket. THAT'S IT, i mean seriously if you get one lucky godly drop, you can sell it and put the game on farm. No very challenging. They made AI pathing smarter, so it does take some skills to play. I mean whats the fun if a molten mob just stands there and not utilize molten? How about vortex mobs that dont use vortex or just pulls you over for no reason even if your 5 yards away? I actually enjoy not being able to sleep while farming.

I must admit, D3 is pretty much a 1month game. I've played my monk starting late may, and right now i'm at 45k+ dps facerolling act3/4/rainbow. The only push for me now is to get perfect peices, but they cost 20mil+ and most upgrades cost 50mil+_. I have friends with 80k unbuffed monks, and all they do is farm act3 and play AH, waiting for that 1 peice of upgrade. I'm sure once the PVP system comes out, it'll be even more upgrading going on, as i think pvp will require a lot more affix on items we just dont use in PVE.

Honestly those that played wow seriously, it's just as tedious, but the only difference is, diablo is more of a solo game and the contents are made just too easy to crack. But I still see a ton of complains saying the game's too hard. Cant please them ALL!

it wasnt meant for players to stand and bang elitemobs? what is my barb supposed to do, run up make 2-3 hits hope to not get 2 shotted/jailed/frozen and run away for 2 mins waiting to heal so i can run back and get 2-3 hits while im trying to kill a vampire thats healing while im healing? thats stupid to even say.

i love how you claim its so simple "oh just got buy 30m worth of gear and youll be good" in my entire D3 career which is over 100 hours im sure i have made maybe 2-2.5m gold. if i have to spend 200 hours farming lower levels so i could buy 1 peice of gear to up my stats that i should have realistically rolled myself during that time then id rather not even play the game.

ive had a level 60 barb for a good while now and ive still got lvl 54 gear equipped (bought on AH). there is no reason after all that time spent i shouldnt have picked up SOMETHING thats got a better stat on it.

there are far fewer people who dont think D3 has issues then there are people complaining its broken. that says alot.

Dazedboy, you might have 3-10 mil worth of gear, but my entire 200 hours of gameplay has not even net me 6 mil gold yet.

Also you're playing a monk, as long as you have sufficient resists using +allresists along with one other resist stat of your choice, and then using One With Everything, you can easily reach 900-1.2k resists and easily tank everything, especially if there's a barb behind you with warcry.

Barbs have ridiculous life leech abilities that prevent them from dying even if they are surrounded by 20 mobs. DHs without sharpshooter can reach 250k dps while monks theoretical max damage in theoretical perfect rolls can only reach 50k.

Try playing a witch doctor, its a snore festival. DHs kill about 10x faster. It'll be ok if it was 2x or 3x faster, but 10x faster is a whole magnitude of difference, once you started a DH you'll realize just how unfulfilled playing other classes are in terms of reward vs time spent.

Where's the class balance?

If you're a DH or a Wizard, 2-3 stray hits from any ranged enemy, you're dead instantly. How about the offscreen charges from the Corrupted Angles in act 4? You can't even see those coming to dodge!

The ridiculous thing is if you compared your skill slots with your friends (of the same class), you'll probably find that at least 3 or 4 of the skills are the same skills, where's the 2.8 trillion different viable builds that Blizzard kept talking about 1 year ago?

A solid issue with possible build diversities is the Neph Valor stacks. Are you able to try to experiment with different skills half way through playing? Nope. If you do you loss all your stacks and at least an hour of playing is gone to waste.

You end up wanting to pick the one and single build that you think will allow you to farm as much as possible without needing to switch skills, because you have no choice.

I like the buffs themselves, I think its interesting, but now that a month has gone by its an obvoius issue.

Dazedboy, you might have 3-10 mil worth of gear, but my entire 200 hours of gameplay has not even net me 6 mil gold yet.

200 hours of gameplay I"ve made maybe 2 mil gold total. I can't get any upgrades for that that would let my dh reliably survive act 1 inferno at this point, even if the repair costs weren't an issue.

"3mil worth of gears can farm without death/skipping, act2 is LOL (10mil worth of gears can farm without death/skipping)"

I call b/s on that. I went through act 1 and got maybe 100K worth of gold in terms of items and 35K gold pickup. That's *if* I'm lucky.
You can be LOL *if* you happened to be lucky and rolled the right things before they got nerfed/you farmed pots.
If you start a character now you are at a huge disadvantage. GOod luck getting to 10 mil gold unless you are extremely lucky.

Also if you play the game in any inventive way then blizzard will nerf it.

I really dont understand why they want to nerf/change gear switching with MF gear. I did it and its ok, but I went from switching gear to having gear on all the time because it simply suited me better.

Now they are going to punish those players whom didnt switch gear in and out. Simply does not make sense to me.

Martian... I hate to say it but you are dead wrong here dude. You can definitely get good enough gear to pass act 2 inferno with only minor difficulties on a DH with 2-3mill gold. Hell you could probably do it for less really. Also if you don't have even 2mill gold at 200 hours then I think you need to evaluate how you are getting your gold. I think you should buy a really cheap gold find set, keep your current weapon which better have over 900-950 dps, and farm act 3 nightmare starting at machines of war. You can get 250-300k gold an hour just from pickups easily. Get some pickup radius if you choose to do that though. Once your weapon is good enough you could do the same on hell.


Jiman, I have seen plenty of builds which work in inferno and many variations. Not every skill is useful but there are quite a few combos which can work. Also.. how on earth do any of these changes really harm anyone who didn't switch it in and out before hand? http://us.battle.net/...nd_Gear_Swapping-7_3_2012

If you weren't switching it in and out before then you wont have any change from any suggestion they made.

The only thing gay for DH on act2 is the the serpents i guess. anything else should be a breeze

The uselessness of legendaries is real disappointment tho, i'd happier with a lv63 rare

lol

The serpents were evil till I got a bunch more health :/ they were one shotting me and dont always make their noises :(

Legendary items sucks.
And the difference in D2 and D3?
Well they made some mobs that were kill you if you play alone.
They designed it so people will play in coop and combined skills can easily kill those.

ive been on act 4 inferno for quite a long time. The IAS nerfs bugged me and made me re-gear. THen 1.03 broke act 3. Now im just bored for the most part. I have a 60 Barb and 60 wizard and have no desire to play the game through 3 times again just to play a different class, doesnt seem fun.


I am taking a little break, and then will see about starting a HC toon. Never played HC before, and hopefully will see how far i can get as a Barb.

Have you even checked the AH recently? This was certainly true 2 weeks ago. It's not true now. My 1100 dps weapon that I bought for about 100K and something about the same is selling for more than 5 million now.


On act 3 nightmare? If you are lucky you can pick up an item that sells for more than 1K on the AH. Do you mean act 3 hell? Even then the best I've done is like 30K in sales plus gold pickup.

It's not just me either. I've seen better equipped DH's die just as much on act 1 inferno if not more.

martian, stack 200% gold find with gold pick up radius and just run through the whole thing (either with ball lighting or multi-shot). When you get 5 NV, you'll be up to 275%.

The goal isn't to pick up all the blue items to sell, it's just to pick up the gold and you can clear up to Azmodan in 5-6 minutes. I think each run might get you like 30k gold, 10 times an hour = 300k.

yes, farm the hallway before Azmoden Martian. On nightmare. With 220% GF gear plus you still get the Nephelem buff on nightmare. Hallway is 3 min long, usually 2-3 rares and a treasure goblin. Make about 7k -10k per 3 min.

I will testify that Act 3 Nightmare remains the best gold farming spot (not Hell, martian, Nightmare). The reason being that you pretty much 1-shot anything with any skill without using any brain power, so about 25 yards gold pickup radius picks up everything, and you can gear specifically for 200-300% Gold Find, and still 1-shot everything with gimped damage.

Once you get your initial 5-stack NV (NV increases gold find too), everything else in the remainder of Act 3 drops an insane amount of gold, that's if you choose to go the clear whole Act way, but its faster to start at the Azmodan checkpoint (just before you go down to kill him), and work backwards to the start of the level where the waypoint is, go to town to vendor, then repeat from the checkpoint in a new game.

I play to get gear not gold -_-

well 6mil in 200 hours played off of pure gold coin pick up should still be slightly low. I'm not gonna elaborately defend my comments, but i'll say this, if i spend 10 hours on AH i'm sure I can put together a barb/monk/DH (sorry dont know wiz/WD enough) set for 3mil and be able to put act1 on farm. Especially monk, since that's my main. Obviously 10 hours on AH hunting items is no fun, but then if your banging your head against the monitor and smashing your keyboard and mouse after over 100 hours of play and still not be able to go through act1, then i suggest make valuable assessments of gear direction, and look for good solid upgrades at rock bottom costs.

Martian, a 1100 dps without stats is prolly 20k. Obviously you either have a 2 of 3 stats (high dex/crit damage/socket) on your weapon for it to be worth 5mil. properlly valuing gears when you either buy upgrades or sell loots is the best way to advance. If you rely strictly on soloing out gears and not utilizing AH, then this game becomes extremely tedious. I had rings with 100dex, 60vit, 30 resist, and 3crit that I was using. I switched in rings with +80 combine damage, 60 dex, 60vit, 30 resist and 4 crit for roughly 3-5mil each. Those upgrades gave me at least 2k dps per ring. On top of that, i sold my old rings for more than 5mil each. That's gear evuation and people just dont pay attention to easy upgrades.

Right now people look at big natural stats like int/dex/strength, oh the more the better. After you reach a certain point, +damage, +crit, +chd, +AS just scales better.

I know general numbers for monks, so i'm only gonna comment on monks. Act1 is basically 500 resist, 16k dps, 30k hp and minimal maybe 500 LoH, and you can pretty much breeze through it. Your not gonna faceroll molten/descrate/arcane mobs, but obviously you can sidestep descrate, facetank molten, or give yourself a good 10yards on arcane till you can see the beam position. I know those numbers are fine because my full MF gears when i farmed butcher had roughly those stats.

Now about not being able to farm gold. Locket already posted act3 nightmare has the best undergear gold farming in the game. It's widely accepted and why perfect roll Goldfind gears are so high. U dont even need perfect roll, a 18GF body peice with 100+ main stat can sell for upwards of 500k. This leads me to believe just how many people is doing act3 gold coin farming. If your having problems with act1 inferno, go to act3 hell and farm for some gold to buy gears. If your having problems with act2, go farm butcher some more. Drops are fine, each run will yield at least 1 or 2 peices of 63 (usually more), just look on the forums for a good path.

Most guys that complain about this game is the ones that wont put in the time to farm. Normal mode was a teaching tool, nightmare was slightly harder but still faceroll, hell was a wakeup call but still doable with whatever u found and bought for 10k or less, but inferno just bashed people over the head. Suck it up, accept it, and farm some gears. For the wow players, you werent exactly rolling in to MC with full greens right? You did scholo/BRS/Strat runs. You got gears first. Dont undergear and keep trying to progress, if your dying on trash or weak affix elites, that means your not gonna progress with your gears. When you get a peice of gear that looks good (150 primary stat, 100vit, 50+ all resist + whatever the slot had extra or sockets for pants/helm/chest or life% on belt), look up AH for similar quality gears and put it at 80% BO. Sell your loots for max value and 10mil is literally 4 or 5 days work in act1. Again if you roll like garbage for weeks on end...then GG, quit diablo, cause blizz hates you=)

BTW if anyone wants to play together, I do act2 coop runs pretty often, I'm not gonna do act3 coop unless I have a high dpser with me while i tank or else my dps gears cant withstand 2man. Emao#1902 is my ID.

Yah read the other reply's since you didn't read mine right :P I have a DH and I almost never die in act 1. Hell my barb doesn't die there either. I don't have insane gear with either one. I would tend to assume it is your skill setup that is the issue if you die a lot in act 1. You should be able to burst most stuff down pretty quickly and avoid most of the deaths. I havn't counted my deaths on act 1 before but it is only certain affixes on certain mobs like the giant bull like things that cause me trouble. What skills you using dude?

play with the ozzite (NA):

BananaRaffle#1573

dazedboy feel free to come help me beat act2 if you enjoy it so much :P

my sugar daddy trife bought me some new gear today and got my resists up over 300 on all of them. pretty much made act1 no challenge sans a few elitemobs. just got done finishing act1 and actually started to pick up what seemed like decent drops, quite a few lvl 62/63 rolls. not sure what ill get on the AH but i listed a bunch.

monk is ridiculous without a decent 1h from act3 onwards, or is it just me? It takes WAY too long to kill mobs, it's like their HP going down is watching my HP go down... SO SLOW!

Let Gene Kelly provide the entertainment in 2 minutes than any game will in decades:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aus1PA5-SyI

Like most people have said, I also got bored once I reached inferno and got pwned by the elite mobs. The ammount of time required to put in to farm gold for better gear is just not worth it. It's not like MMORPGs where the game only starts when you hit max lvl. In games like WoW you have alot of things to do once you get to max lvl. Here there is only one thing to do, farm gold and upgrade your gear. fluff THAT! :)

The AH has really started to suck since 1.0.3, I made a good amount buying and reselling before that.

I find I only really enjoy farming when I have a friend or two on to do it with, otherwise it can get a bit boring; I'll usually just level hc characters otherwise.

Did those of you complaining about a lack of endgame variety ever play d2? Because d3 is much better as far as variety goes, basically anywhere in inferno you can farm is viable.

I think the game is far from perfect and overall I doubt I will get as much playtime out of it as I did D2 (Was still playing HC up until this feb.), but they did address some of the major problems people had with d2 and they seem to be working to make a lot of the issues better.

I dunno... I stopped playing D3 when Max Payne came out. But now it kinda sparked again. Tho I noticed yesterday that the new extended ending is avalable on Mass Effect 3. Thinking wether I should invest time on playing the trilogy from start.

Anyways Diablo is fun as arcade.

i'd help you wanker ;p

Add me! de1i#1274

I should mention the 6 mil is low partly because I only play Hardcore (with a single softcore 60 to test stuff).

Also, it's not that people like me do not want to put in time to farm. it's that people NO LONGER HAVE THE TIME to put towards farming. I barely put in 20 minutes towards EE everyday now, compared to the 5 hours 10 years ago.

You have to remember that the crowd that played D1 and D2 are now 10 years older. Teens are now in their 20s-30s, most of us have jobs. So that begs the question, was D3 created to attract the young crowd (the current teens with tons of time), or to attract back the older players that played the original 2 games?

When making a game, you need to have a target audience and demographic in mind. Blizzard fluffed up big time here.

I do NOT want to spend 100 hours farming Act 1 just to progress to Act 2. Then I do NOT want to spend 100 hours to farm Act 2 just to go Act 3. That's not fun, that's just pure grinding. That 200 hours would take me 2 real live months at even 3 hours a day. Blizzard considered and posted this to be their end-game. They are mistaken, what people found fun in D2 wasn't JUST the loot, it was also the enjoyment of experimenting with different weird builds and simply facerolling the enemies.

People enjoyed therycrafting on Arreat Summit (you know what that is right?), to shave of a few seconds off each Mephisto or Baal run. People tried to do really hard things like Ironman mode, or Javazons or Melee Sorcs. You could do none of these in D3.

In D3, once you reached level 60, the only way to progress is through gear - AH offering the path of lower resistance. It removed/lowered the sense of progression/achievement. Efforts are aimed towards farming gold to buy items, rather than farming items. In D2, you had 2 ways to progress - both gear AND leveling up - which gave you another skill point and 5 stat points. Even if you didn't get gear upgrades, you still got more powerful, people look forward to that. There's a 5% exp loss on death in D2 (10% if you don't corpse run), but that's because dying is actually pretty hard in D2, it made you feel powerful. Inferno in D3 is just cheap 1-2-shots, especially if you aren't a monk/barb.

Consider also that gear in softcore is practically worthless unless it has All-Resists on it, plus your primary stat, there's no gear variety. In D2, you had stat requirements (say 75 Str for Pavise shield) to wear certain equipment. This led to players doing a lot of theorycrafting and figuring out whats the ideal way to reach that 75 Str cap, before dumping the rest of points into your primary stat, if you had gear that added Str, that meant you could have more primary stat, etc. It made you think hard about choices you have to make.

Elective mode disabled by default is another stupid decision. It's designed to ease new players into the game, but Elective mode in itself made the game so much harder. How many people found their SURVIVABILITY GO UP once they figured out if they turned Elective mode on, they can now use 2 Defensive skill at the same time?

It's all dumbed down in D3, Blizzard is treating the 20-30 year olds that enjoyed D1 and D2 as though we're still kids that need handholding.


D3 is a disaster, not as bad as FF14 became, but still a disaster. We're all just waiting for Guild Wars 2.

QFT

Don't speak for all of us Xin ;) I'm finding enjoyment in D3 as long as I don't overdo it anyways. Not sure how being run through by some teleporting person in baal runs is any funner than D3. You can theorycraft how to shave seconds off of doing the whole of act 4 in D3. What's stopping you? gear? Get it and then do it. It isn't like people in D2 were theorycrafting how to pass baal the fastest with random gear they had when they got there.

Locket, I'm saying there are tons of different ways to enjoy D2. There are a lot less ways to do so in D3.