DiabloFans

Before I get started - I had multiple level 99s in Diablo 2 LoD. I only played hardcore.



Does this feel like a Diablo game? More than Diablo 2 ever did.



Trading

Diablo 2 at the core was a Trading Simulator. Even then , I -never- traded with random people because scamming, hacking, and duping were such rampant problems for as long as I can remember. The longevity of D3 is extended in a great way due to BoA. I welcome it with open arms.

PVP in Diablo 2 - As a real pvper, a hardcore perma death lose everything pvper. I can honestly say that Diablo 3 brawling is even a step in the right direction. I take it you never seriously pvped in D2 so let me give you an example of what would happen EVERY game. People would unlock their screens with hacks and aim nonstop fireballs at you from an off map teleported location. There was no pvp, there was no challenge. It was "who can kill the hacker first". Even on my softcore pvp only characters, it was the same 2 builds over and over with people who spent too much money on item sites (Sounds a lot like the RMAH huh?). To what you were doing, the in game hostile killing whether for griefing or redemption was boring. It ruined the game for straight up everyone. No one wants to watch your babyrage drama spill out in the middle of a game.

Skill Trees

Ah skill trees, artificial character progression. In early D2 when you couldn't reset them , it punished new and or bad players. That's horrible game design. At high levels of play, I was rerolling characters every 80 levels or so because it didn't feel "right" which again, is horrible game design. After they allowed respecs? It let people 100% min max every stat and the perfect cookie cutter builds were created almost over night. It was an illusion of choice and nothing more. Same with stat points. You look at your perfect future gear that you got from TradingSimulator : Lord of Economics and figure out your stat bonuses. Find the minimum STR, then keep your dex high enough for block and the rest vit(. (Dex was more of a hardcore thing). It was all an illusion of choice and a time sink, nothing more.



Itemization

Even the devs themselves came out and said they ruined the core of the game with rune words and I couldn't agree more. Why would you want such grossly overpowered items back in the game? Especially if you claim to love pvp so much?


End

Don't get me wrong, I don't think D3 is perfect, but I 100% feel they learned from their mistakes with Diablo2. I also spent MANY years playing Diablo2, MANY. I loved that game, but we all quit for reasons. Mine was I ended up finding better games where money didn't win the game for you. (I also quit D3 for EXTENDED time periods for this, came back for this magnificent patch/exp) There is a lot to be done, but overall, everything Diablo2 had has been done better at this point in Diablo3. Pre patch? Hell no. Now though? All my yes.

Cheers

Two words.

Cognitive bias.

Before I get going on my response, I'd like to preface it by saying that I have strong opinions about this stuff, and it may sound as if I'm being condescending at some point. That's not my intent, as the OPs opinion is every bit as valid as mine, just that sometimes the blinders get the best of me.

To me, D3 (especially v2) is very much a Diablo game. Many things have changed from D2, but many things changed between D1 and D2. Also, as much as I loved D2, there were quite a few glaring issues that I always hoped would be resolved in some way in D3.

On the skill system. It's true that the devs probably could have come up with a way to keep skill trees and make it work, but they also had a lot of data that we as players only make assumptions about. They probably noticed that there was very little usage of many of the skills, and very few points invested in most (minus very niche specs). They probably also realized that no matter what they did, there would be skills that were mostly unused. It's just too hard to balance them . The problem with skill trees is that they (at least in every RPG I've ever played that used them), never really add as much depth as they appear to. Most skills fall into one of three categories for any particular spec/build:

1. If you want to use it, you max it
2. one point wonder (this includes prerequisite skills)
3. not worth a point

Basically, you either max it, only put a single point in it, or don't use it at all. That means that all of the levels in the middle are useless at the end game, and only useful during the leveling phase of the game. The lone exceptions are the final skill you try to max in your build if you don't have enough points to finish it off, or skills that have diminishing returns and there is a point where you have effectively maxed it.

The reason I bring up other RPGs is that many have tried to break this trend, but I've never played one that successfully did for the majority of the player base. When skills trees are looked at in that light, you can start to see how they are really almost as binary as the D3 trend (you are either using it or you aren't).

That's not to say that I think the current skill system is perfect, but just to say that I see reasons for designing this way, and don't really think it's a step backward, or not in the spirit of Diablo.