PoE's combat is not nearly as fluid as D3's. However, I think that PoE has much more support for suboptimal builds than D3. In PoE, it's not trivial to fully respec a character, so if you play a non-standard build, while you can correct errors in the build, it actually means something.
For instance, I have a claw spec witch, which is a pretty unusual build. If I were to play that deep into the game and share the link to that, or play with friends or whatever, there would be an acceptance that, while it's a shitty build all told, I was able to make it work, and I've put effort into it. It gives my character a little more flavor than the average witch. In D3 on the other hand, if you choose a comedy build, there's no indication that you've ever played it prior to choosing it that session, and as soon as things get to be a challenge, you can switch to a more optimal build, and potentially even back again.
Likewise, the tuning in PoE means that with some careful planning, your unusual build can still compete. In D3 the offensive strength of champions post 61 is so high that either you have a perfect build (which you can completely change whenever you want) or else you can't even kill anything. PoE on the other hand just forces you to kill things more slowly or more carefully, or spend more portals or something.
I do really like the fluidity of combat in D3, but I prefer the customization of PoE, and pretty much all of the late game and post-game decisions they've made. I really enjoy that you can find an item that's awesome, but slightly flawed, and can attempt to improve on its flaws. And the more I've played PoE the more I get used to the combat, and it ends up not feeling so bad.
Just spent 3 hours in PoE... got bored after 20 minutes. Kept playing hoping it would get exciting...
The game appears to have a lot of depth, but the gameplay is terribly boring.
PoE definitely doesn't have the same initial hooks as Diablo 3. Also, the game's complexity is built on skills and items, many of which you get over time. The start of the game is very bland because you will probably be using your regular melee attack or a single skill most of the time, and you will have no passives or anything to really differentiate you.
However, when you do get some time into your character, I find it's pretty fun. The story is bad, the graphics look kind of plasticy, and the game takes a while to get into. However, I found once I got past the initial part of the game and got my character up and running it was actually pretty fun.
It's actually in stark contrast with D3 which is really engaging early on, story is good, graphics are very well done, but once you get to the end-game D3 really loses a lot of it's charm due to no real progression and very steep difficulty tuning coupled with intensely low drop rates.
PoE has some interesting end-game ideas, end game maps are variable difficulty, you know what you're getting into before you go into it, they're kind of dynamic in that bonuses on end-game maps vary, and from what I see cooperation is generally encouraged rather than heartily discouraged.
I was very disinterested in PoE the first few hours I put into it, but by the time I got to maybe level 15 or something I started to actually enjoy it a bit more. Lack of story or engaging environments stopped bothering me when I ended up comparing it to D3, moving through uninteresting environments to progress and differentiate my character in PoE was still more fun than moving through uninteresting and repetitive environments for the miniscule chance of finding an item that might be an upgrade for some other player that I could sell for a fraction of the cost of an upgrade for myself in Diablo.
I'm convinced that there were multiple identical bows on the AH, enough people made note of it and the video would have been difficult to fake. It would have had to be quite an effort to organize for a hoax.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that it was a reproducible or intentional dupe. If it were, I would expect to have heard of additional multiples on the AH. To me, you either shut up about it and put them one at a time on the AH to not draw attention, or you want to draw attention and put 8 up at a time. If that's the case, why not put up another 8? Why not buy a higher quality item with the proceeds and dupe it?
Perhaps the answer is that some guy encountered some server glitch and got 8 duplicate bows, and placed them on the AH. Maybe it's a 1 in a billion situation that came about when battle.net was crapping out the little while ago. Maybe the reason there's only 8 mediocre bows for sale is that's just what happened to drop.
I find an upgrade about once every 2-3 days playing maybe 4 hours a night. By upgrade I often mean a sidegrade. Typically it's something like "increases my damage, but decreases my defense a bit, but overall better" or "Great boots, but no movement speed" or "good for my MF set, but not better than my non-MF options".
However, I don't use the AH any more. I've killed Inferno Diablo, so I don't need much except to play the game for playing's sake. If I were to use the AH, it would quickly turn out that upgrades are better earned by farming gold or spending money than farming in game, and once I got to that point with my gear there's little to no chance I'd ever find a real upgrade. So instead, I play in my motley gear which happens to be just good enough for right now and still actually find the occasional upgrade.
The junk that I get while playing gets sharded, and the money that I earn goes to crafting the 4-5 affix gear that I have, which typically turns up more crap, but keeps me from spending my money on AH gear. If ever I start playing the AH again though, I expect I'll lose any opportunities to find any new upgrades. I haven't found anything I'd consider godly, but since I'm playing in shitty gear compared to what's available on the AH, when I find slightly-less-shitty gear, it is an upgrade.
When you started caring about just farming for items in D2, you had finished the game and you could do anything you wanted. You could just play the game.
In D3 it's pretty much impossible for many classes to get the gear that would be needed to just do the kind of mindless efficient farming that was done in D2. And by the time you got to the point that you had enough gear to do that kind of farming, there's no more gear that you actually want, since you've got the best there is.
In D2, the majority of the play happened after you'd finished everything the game had to offer and you could just screw around and see how powerful you could make your character. D3 has been designed so that you can never screw around, at least not at the end of the game. And if there's any time you'll ever be able to screw around, all of a sudden there's no reward for doing so. You already have the best gear, and there's no new levels to grind.
There's a lot of EHP calculators out there, but not all the time do people want to sit down and plug their stats into a calculator to get an idea of their effective health.
It seems like it is really complicated to determine your EHP, but it's really not that hard, and you can do a really good estimation of it in your head if you're just trying to determine what's better between two pieces of gear.
For instance, if you have 670 resists, 8900 armor and 43000 health how much EHP does that give you? If you know the formulas for damage resistance you might try and figure it out like:
670 resists means against a level 63 monster I take 1- (670/(670+315)) = 32% damage
8900 armor means against a level 63 monster I take 1-(8900/(8900+3150)) = 26% damage
Between armor and resists I take 32% * 26% = 8.3% damage
43000/(0.0832) = ~517k EHP
That's not something you can easily do in your head, but I think that's how most people expect to try to figure out EHP. There is a simpler way though.
1: Take your resists, and divide by 300, then add 1. (670/300 + 1 = 2.23 + 1 = 3.23)
2: Take your armor, and divide by 3000, then add 1. (8900/3000 + 1 = 2.97 + 1 = 3.97)
3: Multiply those numbers together (3.23 * 3.97 = 12.82)
4: Multiply your health by that number 43000*12.82 = 551k
5: For level 63 mobs, take off about 6%, for level 62 mobs, take off about 4%, for level 61 mobs take off about 2%. (This is the only real bad math to make estimation easier.)
6: 551k * 0.94 = 517k
Just estimating you get with no calculators and no significant effort:
1: 670 is twice 300, and 70 is about a quarter of 300, so 2.25, plus 1 is about 3.25
2: 8900 is about 3 times 3000, less 100 which is 1/30th of 3000, so about 3-0.033 or 2.97 plus 1 for about 3.97
3: 3.97 is close enough to 4, 4 times 3.25 is twice 6.5 or about 13.
4: That means my EHP is about 13 times my health, which is enough info for a lot of decisions, but to get my EHP, 13 times 43k is about 430k + 120k or about 550k
5: To get it with relation to 63 mobs, generally shave off about 6 percent, so like 30k or so, (10 percent is 55k, so we take off a little more than half that) so we have about 520k
If you have passives and stuff, like a 30% damage reduction, and you reduce mob damage by 20%, just tally that up before hand 1.2/0.7 = 1.71 and multiply it to the end result. Most of the time though that's totally unnecessary because when you want to estimate this on the fly you're comparing stats with static passives.
Note: You can do the second process and get accurate results by skipping step 5, and dividing by 315/310/305 instead of 300. However that's a bit more challenging to do in your head.
2.5% lifesteal in Inferno is actually 0.5% lifesteal.
A rare with large health pool has maybe 2 million health. That means over the course of killing a rare with 2 million health, you recovery about 10,000 health regardless of your DPS. I don't think lifesteal will ever become viable because of that.
If you ever get enough DPS to make it worthwhile, monsters will die so fast that it's unnecessary and you'll heal yourself with health globes faster.
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For instance, I have a claw spec witch, which is a pretty unusual build. If I were to play that deep into the game and share the link to that, or play with friends or whatever, there would be an acceptance that, while it's a shitty build all told, I was able to make it work, and I've put effort into it. It gives my character a little more flavor than the average witch. In D3 on the other hand, if you choose a comedy build, there's no indication that you've ever played it prior to choosing it that session, and as soon as things get to be a challenge, you can switch to a more optimal build, and potentially even back again.
Likewise, the tuning in PoE means that with some careful planning, your unusual build can still compete. In D3 the offensive strength of champions post 61 is so high that either you have a perfect build (which you can completely change whenever you want) or else you can't even kill anything. PoE on the other hand just forces you to kill things more slowly or more carefully, or spend more portals or something.
I do really like the fluidity of combat in D3, but I prefer the customization of PoE, and pretty much all of the late game and post-game decisions they've made. I really enjoy that you can find an item that's awesome, but slightly flawed, and can attempt to improve on its flaws. And the more I've played PoE the more I get used to the combat, and it ends up not feeling so bad.
PoE definitely doesn't have the same initial hooks as Diablo 3. Also, the game's complexity is built on skills and items, many of which you get over time. The start of the game is very bland because you will probably be using your regular melee attack or a single skill most of the time, and you will have no passives or anything to really differentiate you.
However, when you do get some time into your character, I find it's pretty fun. The story is bad, the graphics look kind of plasticy, and the game takes a while to get into. However, I found once I got past the initial part of the game and got my character up and running it was actually pretty fun.
It's actually in stark contrast with D3 which is really engaging early on, story is good, graphics are very well done, but once you get to the end-game D3 really loses a lot of it's charm due to no real progression and very steep difficulty tuning coupled with intensely low drop rates.
PoE has some interesting end-game ideas, end game maps are variable difficulty, you know what you're getting into before you go into it, they're kind of dynamic in that bonuses on end-game maps vary, and from what I see cooperation is generally encouraged rather than heartily discouraged.
I was very disinterested in PoE the first few hours I put into it, but by the time I got to maybe level 15 or something I started to actually enjoy it a bit more. Lack of story or engaging environments stopped bothering me when I ended up comparing it to D3, moving through uninteresting environments to progress and differentiate my character in PoE was still more fun than moving through uninteresting and repetitive environments for the miniscule chance of finding an item that might be an upgrade for some other player that I could sell for a fraction of the cost of an upgrade for myself in Diablo.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced that it was a reproducible or intentional dupe. If it were, I would expect to have heard of additional multiples on the AH. To me, you either shut up about it and put them one at a time on the AH to not draw attention, or you want to draw attention and put 8 up at a time. If that's the case, why not put up another 8? Why not buy a higher quality item with the proceeds and dupe it?
Perhaps the answer is that some guy encountered some server glitch and got 8 duplicate bows, and placed them on the AH. Maybe it's a 1 in a billion situation that came about when battle.net was crapping out the little while ago. Maybe the reason there's only 8 mediocre bows for sale is that's just what happened to drop.
However, I don't use the AH any more. I've killed Inferno Diablo, so I don't need much except to play the game for playing's sake. If I were to use the AH, it would quickly turn out that upgrades are better earned by farming gold or spending money than farming in game, and once I got to that point with my gear there's little to no chance I'd ever find a real upgrade. So instead, I play in my motley gear which happens to be just good enough for right now and still actually find the occasional upgrade.
The junk that I get while playing gets sharded, and the money that I earn goes to crafting the 4-5 affix gear that I have, which typically turns up more crap, but keeps me from spending my money on AH gear. If ever I start playing the AH again though, I expect I'll lose any opportunities to find any new upgrades. I haven't found anything I'd consider godly, but since I'm playing in shitty gear compared to what's available on the AH, when I find slightly-less-shitty gear, it is an upgrade.
In D3 it's pretty much impossible for many classes to get the gear that would be needed to just do the kind of mindless efficient farming that was done in D2. And by the time you got to the point that you had enough gear to do that kind of farming, there's no more gear that you actually want, since you've got the best there is.
In D2, the majority of the play happened after you'd finished everything the game had to offer and you could just screw around and see how powerful you could make your character. D3 has been designed so that you can never screw around, at least not at the end of the game. And if there's any time you'll ever be able to screw around, all of a sudden there's no reward for doing so. You already have the best gear, and there's no new levels to grind.
It seems like it is really complicated to determine your EHP, but it's really not that hard, and you can do a really good estimation of it in your head if you're just trying to determine what's better between two pieces of gear.
For instance, if you have 670 resists, 8900 armor and 43000 health how much EHP does that give you? If you know the formulas for damage resistance you might try and figure it out like:
670 resists means against a level 63 monster I take 1- (670/(670+315)) = 32% damage
8900 armor means against a level 63 monster I take 1-(8900/(8900+3150)) = 26% damage
Between armor and resists I take 32% * 26% = 8.3% damage
43000/(0.0832) = ~517k EHP
That's not something you can easily do in your head, but I think that's how most people expect to try to figure out EHP. There is a simpler way though.
1: Take your resists, and divide by 300, then add 1. (670/300 + 1 = 2.23 + 1 = 3.23)
2: Take your armor, and divide by 3000, then add 1. (8900/3000 + 1 = 2.97 + 1 = 3.97)
3: Multiply those numbers together (3.23 * 3.97 = 12.82)
4: Multiply your health by that number 43000*12.82 = 551k
5: For level 63 mobs, take off about 6%, for level 62 mobs, take off about 4%, for level 61 mobs take off about 2%. (This is the only real bad math to make estimation easier.)
6: 551k * 0.94 = 517k
Just estimating you get with no calculators and no significant effort:
1: 670 is twice 300, and 70 is about a quarter of 300, so 2.25, plus 1 is about 3.25
2: 8900 is about 3 times 3000, less 100 which is 1/30th of 3000, so about 3-0.033 or 2.97 plus 1 for about 3.97
3: 3.97 is close enough to 4, 4 times 3.25 is twice 6.5 or about 13.
4: That means my EHP is about 13 times my health, which is enough info for a lot of decisions, but to get my EHP, 13 times 43k is about 430k + 120k or about 550k
5: To get it with relation to 63 mobs, generally shave off about 6 percent, so like 30k or so, (10 percent is 55k, so we take off a little more than half that) so we have about 520k
If you have passives and stuff, like a 30% damage reduction, and you reduce mob damage by 20%, just tally that up before hand 1.2/0.7 = 1.71 and multiply it to the end result. Most of the time though that's totally unnecessary because when you want to estimate this on the fly you're comparing stats with static passives.
Note: You can do the second process and get accurate results by skipping step 5, and dividing by 315/310/305 instead of 300. However that's a bit more challenging to do in your head.
2.5% lifesteal in Inferno is actually 0.5% lifesteal.
A rare with large health pool has maybe 2 million health. That means over the course of killing a rare with 2 million health, you recovery about 10,000 health regardless of your DPS. I don't think lifesteal will ever become viable because of that.
If you ever get enough DPS to make it worthwhile, monsters will die so fast that it's unnecessary and you'll heal yourself with health globes faster.