/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.
3
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.