Everything about D3 IMO is better, and the biggest improvement in my mind is the speed that Blizzard are recognising the issues and fixing them, offering updates to improve gameplay and taking into account customer feedback for future improvements.
I'm not trying purposely to be argumentative....Do you honestly think the diversity of items is better?
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D3, you hope for it to drop a 4 iLvL range of rares, one of a few worthwhile set pieces or one of a few worthwhile Legendary pieces....and THAT'S IT!!!
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D2, you hope for it to drop....
1) A rare ranging in iLvL's anywhere from approx 40-87
2) A Unique ranging in iLvL anywhere from approx 35-87
3) A rune
4) A high-tier Jewel
5) A unique jewel
6) A cube-able white
7) A superior socketed armor/helm/shield
8) A sc/lc/gc ranging in ILvL anywhere from approx 40-87
9) A high-end Blue Magic items
Ohhh boy....I'm sure I'm forgetting something....because...ya know...there was such a jaw-dropingly massively diverse range of iLvL's and gear, charms and jewels and runes and and and....
The items in D2 smashed the item system for D3 into the shit-can 6feet friggin deep.
Please don't misunderstand me. I really like D3. I play it often and have high hopes for it to match D2's unbelievable items tiers. But as it is now...the items in D3 are a pithy shadow of what they once were in it's predecessor, D2.
The one improvement I will give D3 in relation to items; I really like the random affixes for Legendaries. However most of them are attached to garbage. So if you get lucky and receive an awesome set of random affixes to your Legendary....you now have a piece of worthless shit with great random affixes.
I really like D3...have high hopes for it...but the items are just flat-out fucking stupid. I mean 'hurr-durr OMG WTF were they thinking when they conceptualized this garbage' fucking dumb as a bag of hair, stupid. How did these Legendaries even get off the damn table in such a state?
Everything about D3 IMO is better, and the biggest improvement in my mind is the speed that Blizzard are recognising the issues and fixing them, offering updates to improve gameplay and taking into account customer feedback for future improvements.
I'm not trying purposely to be argumentative....Do you honestly think the diversity of items is better?
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D3, you hope for it to drop a 4 iLvL range of rares, one of a few worthwhile set pieces or one of a few worthwhile Legendary pieces....and THAT'S IT!!!
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D2, you hope for it to drop....
1) A rare ranging in iLvL's anywhere from approx 40-87
2) A Unique ranging in iLvL anywhere from approx 35-87
3) A rune
4) A high-tier Jewel
5) A unique jewel
6) A cube-able white
7) A superior socketed armor/helm/shield
8) A sc/lc/gc ranging in ILvL anywhere from approx 40-87
9) A high-end Blue Magic items
Ohhh boy....I'm sure I'm forgetting something....because...ya know...there was such a jaw-dropingly massively diverse range of iLvL's and gear, charms and jewels and runes and and and....
The items in D2 smashed the item system for D3 into the shit-can 6feet friggin deep.
Please don't misunderstand me. I really like D3. I play it often and have high hopes for it to match D2's unbelievable items tiers. But as it is now...the items in D3 are a pithy shadow of what they once were in it's predecessor, D2.
The one improvement I will give D3 in relation to items; I really like the random affixes for Legendaries. However most of them are attached to garbage. So if you get lucky and receive an awesome set of random affixes to your Legendary....you now have a piece of worthless shit with great random affixes.
I really like D3...have high hopes for it...but the items are just flat-out fucking stupid. I mean 'hurr-durr OMG WTF were they thinking when they conceptualized this garbage' fucking dumb as a bag of hair, stupid. How did these Legendaries even get off the damn table in such a state?
OK OK OK we all are pissed about legendaries/sets.
But Blizzard *is* fixing them. It's a moot point because it's something they're fixing. A lot of people drone on and on about it as if Blizzard isn't aware of the problem and isn't fixing them. What more do you want at this point? Incessantly whining about the state of legendaries isn't going to do anything so it's best to make the best of what you have at this point.
While I understand your frustration it's a bit ridiculous to keep citing something that you know will be fixed as if it's not going to be fixed. It's a shame that it didn't ship wonderfully out-of-the-box, but could we at least give Blizzard feedback about things they're not already working on? Continuing to re-hash stuff that's already on their radar and already on thier list of things they are fixing doesn't really help them make additional, beneficial, changes.
How did people even get past like level 5 in D2? I bought it just cause in was only 9.99 and its terrible. Even for a game released in 2000 the graphics are horrible, regular NES games had better graphics. Ultima Online released 3 years earler had better graphics, Everquest released a year earlier had better graphics. Both had better control over your characters. I played it for 30 mins and uninstalled it because it was a pile of crap.
OK OK OK we all are pissed about legendaries/sets.
But Blizzard *is* fixing them. It's a moot point because it's something they're fixing. A lot of people drone on and on about it as if Blizzard isn't aware of the problem and isn't fixing them. What more do you want at this point? Incessantly whining about the state of legendaries isn't going to do anything so it's best to make the best of what you have at this point.
While I understand your frustration it's a bit ridiculous to keep citing something that you know will be fixed as if it's not going to be fixed. It's a shame that it didn't ship wonderfully out-of-the-box, but could we at least give Blizzard feedback about things they're not already working on? Continuing to re-hash stuff that's already on their radar and already on thier list of things they are fixing doesn't really help them make additional, beneficial, changes.
My frustration is compounded by a lack of faith. Said lack of faith is derived from being handed such flimsy itemization (especially toward Legendaries) in the first place. In other words.....the fact that our gear was set to such a screwy low-ball standard in the first place makes me hold quite shaky faith toward them actually getting this area of the game shaped up.
Why continue to rehash this subject when they've said "we're working on it"?
Because, my fellow fan, they must get this right. They must get the message.
As of now, there are two areas of this game that stand in absentee status;
1) Poor itemization/Poor state of Legendaries~Sets
2) PvP
Both of these areas of the game are "being worked on". Both of these areas should have shipped in a far better state than what is currently present. PvP specifically ~We should be able to duel our friends ......why this was omitted from the game I am absolutely clueless.
Why these issues need to be echoed ad-nauseam, repeatedly, with a sickening refrain, is that it is absolutely critical that Blizzard gets this right. If they mess up and offer forth more sub-par coverage in these areas....this game may, no, it will fail.
Can you imagine the backlash if they offer forth a "buff" to sets/legends and the community as a whole shakes it's head in disdain of what is considered a frail buff? They had better knock us out our shoes and socks with 1.1
.......or else we'll provide our own definition of "end-game" ........as in....an end to the game.
Please don't take me the wrong way...I'm a huge fan of the Diablo franchise. Despite my protestations above, I'ma huge fan of D3. I just recognize that there are serious issues and I haven't read a blue post yet that concretely acknowledged, properly, the need for a serious retooling of the item tiers from top to bottom. I'm just a concerned fan.
How did people even get past like level 5 in D2? I bought it just cause in was only 9.99 and its terrible. Even for a game released in 2000 the graphics are horrible, regular NES games had better graphics. Ultima Online released 3 years earler had better graphics, Everquest released a year earlier had better graphics. Both had better control over your characters. I played it for 30 mins and uninstalled it because it was a pile of crap.
^^^Doesn't get it
It was always about the items and PvP, my friend. It was never about the graphics. That is why D2 maintained a faithful and large following well past the point whereas the the technology had become sorely antiquated.
Anyone else remember not being able to transfer gear between your toons without dropping them on the floor and swapping chars before the game timed out? And Blizzard basically said "yeah we don't intend you to give gear on one toon to another".
And I remember how in Hell every mob was immune to one element, meaning all Lightning Sorcs were screwed, but Cold Sorcs were okay because their top tier talent reduced resists. And you could use curse of elements on a wand (ugh) but then they patched it so -resist from that wouldn't break immunities. And when asked about it Blizzard said "you're not supposed to solo Hell, join up with others fool".
Also, High Runes being a "low drop chance" is the understatement of the century. Everything in the game was either so rare you had 0 chance of finding it legitimately (people just bought off hackers anyway), or completely worthless. In all the years I played I never once saw a SINGLE SOJ. And a SOJ was the BASIS OF THE ECONOMY. Imagine playing D3 for 4 years and never seeing a single gold coin drop.
I remember bosses dropping cool uniques and set items while lvling.
I remember the cutscene story being better than the d3 story consisting of even more cutscenes and story parts with no real importantce.
Wow, no offence dude but your memory is completely wrong. The uniques and sets that dropped while levelling were very rare and by the time they dropped they were worse than your current blues. I collected all the sets and uniques in the game in Normal and Nightmare, it took years. Still only got about 2/3rds of the Nightmare ones. Apart from a piece or two that was useful for a few levels they just sat in my bank.
I guess cutscenes are subjective but as I remember it the cutscenes in D2 were pretty much irrelevant to the main plot. Just following Marius' side story who you never actually encounter in game. And mostly just talking about how he feels about the situation which was kind of irrelevant.
I remember a lot of viable end game builds and quite abit good end game builds (read every class had alteast 4 good end game specs and even more viable specs).
Er well it depends, what do you mean "viable"? There's a huge difference between viable and optimal and the important thing to remember is DIABLO 2 WAS EXTREMELY EASY. You could beat the whole game with ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING because there was NO CHALLENGE WHATSOEVER. Well unless you were fighting the 1/5 mobs that were immune to your main damage type and therefore impossible to kill (except for certain classes/trees with -resists). If you mean optimal then the number of builds was pretty small, certainly compared to the enormous number of completely useless skills. 20/20 Increased Stamina wooooot! And of course, put a talent point in the wrong place and too bad, so sad, char ruined. Horrible system.
I preferred Diablo 2 because you could do what you wanted. Wanna join a game and hostile & pk someone? Fine. Wanna kill diablo? Np. Wanna move from act to act in the same game? Sure. Farm act 2 then act 3? Ok.
In contrast, Diablo 3 feels like a guided tour with "Do Not Touch" signs on everything interesting. And every now and then the nerf stick comes around and makes it even less fun. If anything was in competition with Blizzard's love of money, it's their love of nerfing the shit out of their games.
Things that I loved about D2 and are greatly missing in D3:
Cube
Runes / Runewords - insight for merc , infinity etc
Stacking skill points (items: +x cold skill , for example) - Not everything based on weapon dmg
Crafting with the cube (Bugging eth shields / armors , unsocket items , roll charms , craft amulets , etc )
Open world , finding a waypoint actually ment something .
8 players , Party option , Open PvP , Town portals (instant) , using cain for quick Item ident.
Ingame trading !!!! yes , best thing in d2 if u ask me ... even with the scammers , it was actually fun to be careful as it was part of the game . It really added a lot of social aspect to the game .
Public games with names - For any reason , chill , help kill dat and dat , trading , PvP , Boost help - A lot of social thing here . I had like 50 ppl in friend list because of public games . I have 0 now . (d3)
Yes there are more , still I like diablo 3 , it has great engine and really fun physics . Also , Diablo 2 classic was boring until the expansion came up, so I still have my hopes high for the future plans .
/sarcasm
It seems like a ton of people wish D3 was a D2 clone, because "it was better".
This brings me to a couple of comments...
-I remember Arctic gear dropping from hell Baal, and 99% of rares in the game being junk..
-I remember having to carry around a tome of tps and id scrolls(or talk to cain) to identify these crappy items just to find out that they are only valuable as ground decorations or gold... which had only 2 purposes in the game...(repairs and resurrecting mercs)
-I remember the only story for D2 (other than the cut-scenes), occurred if you manually listened to each npc, during which you could do NOTHING.
-I remember only a handful of viable end-game builds
-I remember having to farm for HR's which were rare as !@#% just to trade for gear that made your cookie-cutter build efficient.
-I remember much less dynamic combat.
-etc..
How can people say that this game sucks in comparison?
-Because Arctic gear was good for something. It had something that most gear pieces of that level didn't have, so if you happened to want to use it to an easy legit play through, it was available to you. Sure what the boss dropped was junk for you, but it wasn't always junk to everybody else.
-So now you don't have to carry around tomes of tp/id but in a regular run in Diablo 3 you most likely aresalvaging or selling over 100 pieces of loot just to keep up with repairs and make a tiny bit of side gold, which in this current economy is completely useless seeing as the most you'll come out with is 60-100K. What's different here?
-This is personal preference, but I enjoyed the story of Diablo 2 a lot more. Sure it was less convenient to listen, but at least it wasn't chocked full of predictable cliche's which makes the convenience of D3's story telling a lot less impressive.
-You remember wrong. The pally alone had Hammerdin, Auradin, FoHer, Smiter, Zealer, and charger, all playing much different then the rest. The amount of viable builds a paladin could go alone not to mention the less-viable but still workable builds almost surpasses the TOTAL amount of viable (very unique) builds that Diablo 3 players have options to. (And I'm not talking about changing Arcane Orb for Blizzard and calling it a new spec either).
I'll take time on this one since I really want to remind players how much variety D2 really had. I've already listed off the major Pally builds.. so.
so by my count you've got over 29 different builds that play completely different from each other and that's just from memory... Now I don't know how big your 'handfuls' are but I'm fairly sure there are only about a 'handful' (9 at best) viable builds in D3.
-Atleast the high runes were there and not there in mass. Apart from duping, if you got something as rare as jah, or bur, or god forbid you even got a ZOD or a Vex you felt GOOD. you KNEW you just struck gold but at the same time it could only net you 2 maybe 3 top tier items that didn't use those runes as runewords. You didn't find a 1900 DPS 2 hander just to sell it for 200 million gold just to look at the pretty numbers.
- Combat may have been less dynamic but the focus of Diablo 2 was on how you built your characters and what they could do. In Diablo 3 all you have is the dynamic combat and it stops there. The items are boring and generic ( Main stat, vit, resist all, IAS, CRIT, crit dmg on EVERY SINGLE ITEM YOU COULD GET IT ON), and the character development stops at the skill system.
To put it into perspective, lets look at shields. In Diablo 3, if you're going to use a shield it's going to be stormshield.. and that's about it - if you're using much else it's pretty subpar and there are thousands of shields similar to compare. In Diablo 2, Stormshield was a staple piece of gear for those in melee, the DR it provided was unparallelled with any other shield, but apart from its small bonuses and fast block rates that's all it was good for. Depending on your spec, you didn't always WANT Stormshield. You wanted HoZ, Spirit runeword, or lidless eye, exile, a specific rare shield or a few others.
To someone who is a veteran to the ARPG genre you could introduce them to Diablo 3 and I can confidently say that in less than 100 hours you could fully understand the scope of the game. you could understand what affixes you want on every character you play, you could understand the play style of every single build in the game and what items you want. Put that same player in Diablo 2 and I can guarantee that in the same 100 hours they could maybe learn 2 builds and what items to get on those builds to optimize them. I can almost guarantee that most players who play Diablo 3 or browse the forums couldn't even name me one D2 build gearset in completion without looking it up.
That is what makes Diablo 2.. SO much better.
Just want to point out...all the stuff you named in your post wasn't D2. That was LoD -- which included 7 patches over a year, an expasion, and then 3 more patches over 2 additional years, and then several more patches adding in additional content over the next several years.
At this point in development, we are so much farther than we were in D2 at the same time.
Necros had 1 viable build until patch 1.07 -- a full year after release. And to make this build, the necro had to be powerleveled basically 60 levels and was still unable to solo. Bone spells didn't scale past normal. Posion spells all relied on the necro having high melee stats, which was basically impossible to achieve in classic. Summons were 1 shot by mobs in Act 3...even with 20 skellies and 20 skelie mastery. Necro was forced to be a support character as a curser.
Paladins were a mess for a long time. Were they support/buffs? Were they DPS? They were similar to pallies in classic WoW. Auras or GTFO. People would rage in a hell game if a pally joined the game and didn't have high level auras.
Amazons could do bowazon, but required you to have a REALLY good rare bow. People would save their imbues for 3 good bows if an amazon was their main, wait till at least 75 and then try to roll 3.
Sorcs could do decent for a while -- Static Field was imba early on. Meteor was their only big damage spell for several patches and most monsters in hell had 75% fire resist which crippled them. Most were Teleport / static field support until 1.04 -- notice that was almost a full year after release...
Barbs were kings until 1.04. Dual leech rings + whirlwind + a lance. Any other build wasn't viable. A barb was the only character until 1.04 that could solo all of hell difficulty.
D2 at release was considered a huge insult to the Diablo series. Gold was worthless. The only thing that mattered was SoJs which people could easily get for a long time with magic find + gambling, especially if you had a Manald Heal and Nagelring.
Unique items were awful and capped at level 31 with Silks of the Victor Ancient Armor. There were no charms, no runes, no jewels, gems were awful (couldn't get socketed items with magic properties). People only used rare generated items until LoD. In classic, yes they were guaranteed to drop a unique/set quality item, but most of the time it was level 14-25 level garbage, and you would be in the 60s.(I think I could have filled several mules with Isenhart's set, let alone just the stupid breastplate)
Character builds were almost always the minimum str/dex to wear gear, and the rest vitality. Not a lot of variety.
Oh yeah, and once you made a decision about a skill point, it was set it stone. Even though a ton of early tactics were balanced out and fixed, they didn't refund your talent points. You were forced to reroll.
Should we have picked up where LoD left off though? Yes. I'm just suprised at all the nostalgia compared to actually remembering how bad D2 was for the first entire year. How ticked off the fanbase was and how many people made 'threats' if the expansion didn't fix all the issues.
I can't explain why really, it's kind of weird. All I remember is that D2 consumed me for a very, very long time. It must've done something right.
D3 on the other hand, got me just over 100 or so hours before I got bored of it. I don't even log on anymore, nor do any of my friends. I check the forums every once in a while for updates or to see if anything has changed that might interest me.
This is the main point that should be considered. If D2 and D3 are very similar games (and they are, with D3 having improved on a lot of what D2 did), then why is it that people could pour hundreds of hours into D2, while the same can't be said for D3?
Fairly simple answer really. 10 years ago we were a lot younger. Our tastes are different to back then. We also probably had less disposable income, so couldn't buy tons of new games all the time: as such, we were forced to make the most out of the few games we did own.
In other words, it isn't the game at fault. It's us. Our tastes have changed as we grew older. That isn't a bad thing and I'm not blaming anyone for it (before we get over-defensive posts replying to me, haha), it isn't as though anything can be done about it. It's just a fact of life.
The other fact of life (and is the one that I'm blaming people for), is that people have an unfortunate tendency to blame everyone else and refuse to take responsibility for anything. It can't be ME that's at fault, it must be the game! There must be something wrong with the game! BLIZZ WHY HAVE YOU FAILED?!?!
As such the same tired arguments are brought out over and over and over, trying to make the game seem worse than it actually is. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge that D3 has its issues: it's still a fantastic game though and Blizzard definitely don't deserve the level of hatred they're getting.
For the most part, it isn't Blizzard that's at fault. It's us. Take responsibility instead of blame Blizzard constantly when all they did was try their best to deliver the best game possible.
(as a final disclaimer, I'm not saying the person I quoted is the same as the people I describe above: he just demonstrated my point quite nicely)
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.
m8 i do agree on that....the thing is, it's about taste - some ppl want D3 so u can screw around while farming(which means u can run through all mobs in inferno without a scratch), and some ppl want D3 to be challenging(need tacts and effort and always to be on ur toes while fighting mobs in inferno). as u can see it all depends what kind of "ppl" u r - and as much as i can understand that it's fun to just kill thousand of mobs with out a scratch while finding good gear,i prefer a more challenging inferno. so what can i say u can't have both things...cuz the way i see it happening it's only if in addition to the challenging aspect of inferno all the best items will have the same chance to drop in hell - so eventually ppl will have the best gear which makes inferno as challenging as hell(which means "faceroll" it like in hell - and we loss the Challenging aspect of inferno).
so bottom line is - blizz can't satisfy every1, so we can choose to adjust or change to a different game or back to D2.
I can understand where you're coming from Kintner as I do remember the days of Vanilla Diablo 2 but here's the issue.. as you already said. You don't expect those problems to exist and we as the community should not have to endure a lackluster game for a year before it gets good. It's called learning from you're mistakes and Blizzard is doing a damn good job at doing quite the opposite. When you've had a game that (after some work) is critically acclaimed for it's insane depth of gameplay and replayability, and combine that with 10 years of observations of the players opinions and how the game evolved to suit needs... just to go and make another game and take 10 steps backwards. I for one refuse to lower my expectations and look at it in retrospect as something we should have expected from the beginning. When you go out to the store and buy something, you expect a product that was created for TODAY'S market, with TODAY'S innovations and technologies, not the late nineties.
Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
I can understand where you're coming from Kintner as I do remember the days of Vanilla Diablo 2 but here's the issue.. as you already said. You don't expect those problems to exist and we as the community should not have to endure a lackluster game for a year before it gets good. It's called learning from you're mistakes and Blizzard is doing a damn good job at doing quite the opposite. When you've had a game that (after some work) is critically acclaimed for it's insane depth of gameplay and replayability, and combine that with 10 years of observations of the players opinions and how the game evolved to suit needs... just to go and make another game and take 10 steps backwards. I for one refuse to lower my expectations and look at it in retrospect as something we should have expected from the beginning. When you go out to the store and buy something, you expect a product that was created for TODAY'S market, with TODAY'S innovations and technologies, not the late nineties.
Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
I was trying to point out that a lot of the nostalgia is ill-placed.
I agreed with you that it isn't what it should be.
I'm cautiously optimistic about any expasion pack that may come to be as LoD is a huge reason why D2 is so fondly remembered. LoD fixed the train wreck that was D2. Hopefully Blizzard learns from all the mistakes they made, just as they did 10 years ago.
Just want to point out...all the stuff you named in your post wasn't D2. That was LoD -- which included 7 patches over a year, an expasion, and then 3 more patches over 2 additional years, and then several more patches adding in additional content over the next several years.
At this point in development, we are so much farther than we were in D2 at the same time.
Necros had 1 viable build until patch 1.07 -- a full year after release. And to make this build, the necro had to be powerleveled basically 60 levels and was still unable to solo. Bone spells didn't scale past normal. Posion spells all relied on the necro having high melee stats, which was basically impossible to achieve in classic. Summons were 1 shot by mobs in Act 3...even with 20 skellies and 20 skelie mastery. Necro was forced to be a support character as a curser.
Paladins were a mess for a long time. Were they support/buffs? Were they DPS? They were similar to pallies in classic WoW. Auras or GTFO. People would rage in a hell game if a pally joined the game and didn't have high level auras.
Amazons could do bowazon, but required you to have a REALLY good rare bow. People would save their imbues for 3 good bows if an amazon was their main, wait till at least 75 and then try to roll 3.
Sorcs could do decent for a while -- Static Field was imba early on. Meteor was their only big damage spell for several patches and most monsters in hell had 75% fire resist which crippled them. Most were Teleport / static field support until 1.04 -- notice that was almost a full year after release...
Barbs were kings until 1.04. Dual leech rings + whirlwind + a lance. Any other build wasn't viable. A barb was the only character until 1.04 that could solo all of hell difficulty.
D2 at release was considered a huge insult to the Diablo series. Gold was worthless. The only thing that mattered was SoJs which people could easily get for a long time with magic find + gambling, especially if you had a Manald Heal and Nagelring.
Unique items were awful and capped at level 31 with Silks of the Victor Ancient Armor. There were no charms, no runes, no jewels, gems were awful (couldn't get socketed items with magic properties). People only used rare generated items until LoD. In classic, yes they were guaranteed to drop a unique/set quality item, but most of the time it was level 14-25 level garbage, and you would be in the 60s.(I think I could have filled several mules with Isenhart's set, let alone just the stupid breastplate)
Character builds were almost always the minimum str/dex to wear gear, and the rest vitality. Not a lot of variety.
Oh yeah, and once you made a decision about a skill point, it was set it stone. Even though a ton of early tactics were balanced out and fixed, they didn't refund your talent points. You were forced to reroll.
Should we have picked up where LoD left off though? Yes. I'm just suprised at all the nostalgia compared to actually remembering how bad D2 was for the first entire year. How ticked off the fanbase was and how many people made 'threats' if the expansion didn't fix all the issues.
This post makes me feel I'm not alone being a really old-school Diablo player that isn't just jumping on the "I played D2" bandwagon like a lot of people do. Thanks for that Kintner. Were you an avid reader back then? Do you remember all the criticism the game received from specialized critics and the playerbase? Literally getting 5-6 out of 10 from the game reviewers.
The official forums could use some enlightenment on this matter as well. Every "diablo fan" wannabe should read his post and review some of their own nostalgic memories.
And saying problems shouldn't happen is like saying "hey we've had wars in the past, we shouldn't have wars nowadays". Yeah, right. It doesn't matter how hard people try to avoid problems, because whenever you fix an issue, another one is created (see the whole AH drama, when it was only supposed to be a feature to ease trading, or the legendaries drama, which was only supposed to make people have varied itemization possibilities later in the game).
I think that Diablo III is a massive improvement over Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. It's not perfect, but it's a total work in progress.
The constant bitching by people on this forum (and especially the official forum) is bullshit because Blizzard is working diligently to address the issues people have with Diablo III. You don't need to bring up the same complaint a thousand times. You don't need to spew hatred. If you have a problem with the game that you would like to bring up, do it in a constructive manner without throwing insults at Blizzard and calling the game a pile of shit. That's not constructive at all.
If you've read this thread, then you now know that D2 wasn't perfect at launch either. The fact is that you probably can't name me a better hack n slash dungeon crawler from the last five years.
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I'm not trying purposely to be argumentative....Do you honestly think the diversity of items is better?
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D3, you hope for it to drop a 4 iLvL range of rares, one of a few worthwhile set pieces or one of a few worthwhile Legendary pieces....and THAT'S IT!!!
When you kill a high-end enemy in a high-end area in D2, you hope for it to drop....
1) A rare ranging in iLvL's anywhere from approx 40-87
2) A Unique ranging in iLvL anywhere from approx 35-87
3) A rune
4) A high-tier Jewel
5) A unique jewel
6) A cube-able white
7) A superior socketed armor/helm/shield
8) A sc/lc/gc ranging in ILvL anywhere from approx 40-87
9) A high-end Blue Magic items
Ohhh boy....I'm sure I'm forgetting something....because...ya know...there was such a jaw-dropingly massively diverse range of iLvL's and gear, charms and jewels and runes and and and....
The items in D2 smashed the item system for D3 into the shit-can 6feet friggin deep.
Please don't misunderstand me. I really like D3. I play it often and have high hopes for it to match D2's unbelievable items tiers. But as it is now...the items in D3 are a pithy shadow of what they once were in it's predecessor, D2.
The one improvement I will give D3 in relation to items; I really like the random affixes for Legendaries. However most of them are attached to garbage. So if you get lucky and receive an awesome set of random affixes to your Legendary....you now have a piece of worthless shit with great random affixes.
I really like D3...have high hopes for it...but the items are just flat-out fucking stupid. I mean 'hurr-durr OMG WTF were they thinking when they conceptualized this garbage' fucking dumb as a bag of hair, stupid. How did these Legendaries even get off the damn table in such a state?
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
OK OK OK we all are pissed about legendaries/sets.
But Blizzard *is* fixing them. It's a moot point because it's something they're fixing. A lot of people drone on and on about it as if Blizzard isn't aware of the problem and isn't fixing them. What more do you want at this point? Incessantly whining about the state of legendaries isn't going to do anything so it's best to make the best of what you have at this point.
While I understand your frustration it's a bit ridiculous to keep citing something that you know will be fixed as if it's not going to be fixed. It's a shame that it didn't ship wonderfully out-of-the-box, but could we at least give Blizzard feedback about things they're not already working on? Continuing to re-hash stuff that's already on their radar and already on thier list of things they are fixing doesn't really help them make additional, beneficial, changes.
My frustration is compounded by a lack of faith. Said lack of faith is derived from being handed such flimsy itemization (especially toward Legendaries) in the first place. In other words.....the fact that our gear was set to such a screwy low-ball standard in the first place makes me hold quite shaky faith toward them actually getting this area of the game shaped up.
Why continue to rehash this subject when they've said "we're working on it"?
Because, my fellow fan, they must get this right. They must get the message.
As of now, there are two areas of this game that stand in absentee status;
1) Poor itemization/Poor state of Legendaries~Sets
2) PvP
Both of these areas of the game are "being worked on". Both of these areas should have shipped in a far better state than what is currently present. PvP specifically ~We should be able to duel our friends ......why this was omitted from the game I am absolutely clueless.
Why these issues need to be echoed ad-nauseam, repeatedly, with a sickening refrain, is that it is absolutely critical that Blizzard gets this right. If they mess up and offer forth more sub-par coverage in these areas....this game may, no, it will fail.
Can you imagine the backlash if they offer forth a "buff" to sets/legends and the community as a whole shakes it's head in disdain of what is considered a frail buff? They had better knock us out our shoes and socks with 1.1
.......or else we'll provide our own definition of "end-game" ........as in....an end to the game.
Please don't take me the wrong way...I'm a huge fan of the Diablo franchise. Despite my protestations above, I'ma huge fan of D3. I just recognize that there are serious issues and I haven't read a blue post yet that concretely acknowledged, properly, the need for a serious retooling of the item tiers from top to bottom. I'm just a concerned fan.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
^^^Doesn't get it
It was always about the items and PvP, my friend. It was never about the graphics. That is why D2 maintained a faithful and large following well past the point whereas the the technology had become sorely antiquated.
BurningRope#1322 (US~HC) Request an invite to the official (NA) <dfans> Clan
And I remember how in Hell every mob was immune to one element, meaning all Lightning Sorcs were screwed, but Cold Sorcs were okay because their top tier talent reduced resists. And you could use curse of elements on a wand (ugh) but then they patched it so -resist from that wouldn't break immunities. And when asked about it Blizzard said "you're not supposed to solo Hell, join up with others fool".
Also, High Runes being a "low drop chance" is the understatement of the century. Everything in the game was either so rare you had 0 chance of finding it legitimately (people just bought off hackers anyway), or completely worthless. In all the years I played I never once saw a SINGLE SOJ. And a SOJ was the BASIS OF THE ECONOMY. Imagine playing D3 for 4 years and never seeing a single gold coin drop.
Wow, no offence dude but your memory is completely wrong. The uniques and sets that dropped while levelling were very rare and by the time they dropped they were worse than your current blues. I collected all the sets and uniques in the game in Normal and Nightmare, it took years. Still only got about 2/3rds of the Nightmare ones. Apart from a piece or two that was useful for a few levels they just sat in my bank.
I guess cutscenes are subjective but as I remember it the cutscenes in D2 were pretty much irrelevant to the main plot. Just following Marius' side story who you never actually encounter in game. And mostly just talking about how he feels about the situation which was kind of irrelevant.
Er well it depends, what do you mean "viable"? There's a huge difference between viable and optimal and the important thing to remember is DIABLO 2 WAS EXTREMELY EASY. You could beat the whole game with ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING because there was NO CHALLENGE WHATSOEVER. Well unless you were fighting the 1/5 mobs that were immune to your main damage type and therefore impossible to kill (except for certain classes/trees with -resists). If you mean optimal then the number of builds was pretty small, certainly compared to the enormous number of completely useless skills. 20/20 Increased Stamina wooooot! And of course, put a talent point in the wrong place and too bad, so sad, char ruined. Horrible system.
In contrast, Diablo 3 feels like a guided tour with "Do Not Touch" signs on everything interesting. And every now and then the nerf stick comes around and makes it even less fun. If anything was in competition with Blizzard's love of money, it's their love of nerfing the shit out of their games.
Cube
Runes / Runewords - insight for merc , infinity etc
Stacking skill points (items: +x cold skill , for example) - Not everything based on weapon dmg
Crafting with the cube (Bugging eth shields / armors , unsocket items , roll charms , craft amulets , etc )
Open world , finding a waypoint actually ment something .
8 players , Party option , Open PvP , Town portals (instant) , using cain for quick Item ident.
Ingame trading !!!! yes , best thing in d2 if u ask me ... even with the scammers , it was actually fun to be careful as it was part of the game . It really added a lot of social aspect to the game .
Public games with names - For any reason , chill , help kill dat and dat , trading , PvP , Boost help - A lot of social thing here . I had like 50 ppl in friend list because of public games . I have 0 now . (d3)
Yes there are more , still I like diablo 3 , it has great engine and really fun physics . Also , Diablo 2 classic was boring until the expansion came up, so I still have my hopes high for the future plans .
Just want to point out...all the stuff you named in your post wasn't D2. That was LoD -- which included 7 patches over a year, an expasion, and then 3 more patches over 2 additional years, and then several more patches adding in additional content over the next several years.
At this point in development, we are so much farther than we were in D2 at the same time.
Necros had 1 viable build until patch 1.07 -- a full year after release. And to make this build, the necro had to be powerleveled basically 60 levels and was still unable to solo. Bone spells didn't scale past normal. Posion spells all relied on the necro having high melee stats, which was basically impossible to achieve in classic. Summons were 1 shot by mobs in Act 3...even with 20 skellies and 20 skelie mastery. Necro was forced to be a support character as a curser.
Paladins were a mess for a long time. Were they support/buffs? Were they DPS? They were similar to pallies in classic WoW. Auras or GTFO. People would rage in a hell game if a pally joined the game and didn't have high level auras.
Amazons could do bowazon, but required you to have a REALLY good rare bow. People would save their imbues for 3 good bows if an amazon was their main, wait till at least 75 and then try to roll 3.
Sorcs could do decent for a while -- Static Field was imba early on. Meteor was their only big damage spell for several patches and most monsters in hell had 75% fire resist which crippled them. Most were Teleport / static field support until 1.04 -- notice that was almost a full year after release...
Barbs were kings until 1.04. Dual leech rings + whirlwind + a lance. Any other build wasn't viable. A barb was the only character until 1.04 that could solo all of hell difficulty.
D2 at release was considered a huge insult to the Diablo series. Gold was worthless. The only thing that mattered was SoJs which people could easily get for a long time with magic find + gambling, especially if you had a Manald Heal and Nagelring.
Unique items were awful and capped at level 31 with Silks of the Victor Ancient Armor. There were no charms, no runes, no jewels, gems were awful (couldn't get socketed items with magic properties). People only used rare generated items until LoD. In classic, yes they were guaranteed to drop a unique/set quality item, but most of the time it was level 14-25 level garbage, and you would be in the 60s.(I think I could have filled several mules with Isenhart's set, let alone just the stupid breastplate)
Character builds were almost always the minimum str/dex to wear gear, and the rest vitality. Not a lot of variety.
Oh yeah, and once you made a decision about a skill point, it was set it stone. Even though a ton of early tactics were balanced out and fixed, they didn't refund your talent points. You were forced to reroll.
Should we have picked up where LoD left off though? Yes. I'm just suprised at all the nostalgia compared to actually remembering how bad D2 was for the first entire year. How ticked off the fanbase was and how many people made 'threats' if the expansion didn't fix all the issues.
This is the main point that should be considered. If D2 and D3 are very similar games (and they are, with D3 having improved on a lot of what D2 did), then why is it that people could pour hundreds of hours into D2, while the same can't be said for D3?
Fairly simple answer really. 10 years ago we were a lot younger. Our tastes are different to back then. We also probably had less disposable income, so couldn't buy tons of new games all the time: as such, we were forced to make the most out of the few games we did own.
In other words, it isn't the game at fault. It's us. Our tastes have changed as we grew older. That isn't a bad thing and I'm not blaming anyone for it (before we get over-defensive posts replying to me, haha), it isn't as though anything can be done about it. It's just a fact of life.
The other fact of life (and is the one that I'm blaming people for), is that people have an unfortunate tendency to blame everyone else and refuse to take responsibility for anything. It can't be ME that's at fault, it must be the game! There must be something wrong with the game! BLIZZ WHY HAVE YOU FAILED?!?!
As such the same tired arguments are brought out over and over and over, trying to make the game seem worse than it actually is. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge that D3 has its issues: it's still a fantastic game though and Blizzard definitely don't deserve the level of hatred they're getting.
For the most part, it isn't Blizzard that's at fault. It's us. Take responsibility instead of blame Blizzard constantly when all they did was try their best to deliver the best game possible.
(as a final disclaimer, I'm not saying the person I quoted is the same as the people I describe above: he just demonstrated my point quite nicely)
m8 i do agree on that....the thing is, it's about taste - some ppl want D3 so u can screw around while farming(which means u can run through all mobs in inferno without a scratch), and some ppl want D3 to be challenging(need tacts and effort and always to be on ur toes while fighting mobs in inferno). as u can see it all depends what kind of "ppl" u r - and as much as i can understand that it's fun to just kill thousand of mobs with out a scratch while finding good gear,i prefer a more challenging inferno. so what can i say u can't have both things...cuz the way i see it happening it's only if in addition to the challenging aspect of inferno all the best items will have the same chance to drop in hell - so eventually ppl will have the best gear which makes inferno as challenging as hell(which means "faceroll" it like in hell - and we loss the Challenging aspect of inferno).
so bottom line is - blizz can't satisfy every1, so we can choose to adjust or change to a different game or back to D2.
best regards,
Arrok
Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
I was trying to point out that a lot of the nostalgia is ill-placed.
I agreed with you that it isn't what it should be.
I'm cautiously optimistic about any expasion pack that may come to be as LoD is a huge reason why D2 is so fondly remembered. LoD fixed the train wreck that was D2. Hopefully Blizzard learns from all the mistakes they made, just as they did 10 years ago.
The official forums could use some enlightenment on this matter as well. Every "diablo fan" wannabe should read his post and review some of their own nostalgic memories.
And saying problems shouldn't happen is like saying "hey we've had wars in the past, we shouldn't have wars nowadays". Yeah, right. It doesn't matter how hard people try to avoid problems, because whenever you fix an issue, another one is created (see the whole AH drama, when it was only supposed to be a feature to ease trading, or the legendaries drama, which was only supposed to make people have varied itemization possibilities later in the game).
The constant bitching by people on this forum (and especially the official forum) is bullshit because Blizzard is working diligently to address the issues people have with Diablo III. You don't need to bring up the same complaint a thousand times. You don't need to spew hatred. If you have a problem with the game that you would like to bring up, do it in a constructive manner without throwing insults at Blizzard and calling the game a pile of shit. That's not constructive at all.
If you've read this thread, then you now know that D2 wasn't perfect at launch either. The fact is that you probably can't name me a better hack n slash dungeon crawler from the last five years.