Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

Bandwagon said:

I honestly don't know why everyone loves D2 and hates D3. They feel the same to me.

Don't tar & feather me....can I just get an honest tl:dr about what D2 did so well that D3 fucked up? I'm aware of the launch issue with skills and not being able to assign whatever you want, but that's about it.

Click to expand...

Skill trees

Skill choices matter

Rune words

Item types

Targeted farming

Just for starters. It was a better game and had no in game cut scenes you were forced to sit through. It was an amazing game for its time and D3 may not be better in any way besides graphics.

OU Ariakas said:

Skill trees

Skill choices matter

Rune words

Item types

Targeted farming

Just for starters. It was a better game and had no in game cut scenes you were forced to sit through. It was an amazing game for its time and D3 may not be better in any way besides graphics.

Click to expand...

Thanks. None of that really makes any sense to me. Link an in depth article if you don't mind and have one handy. I'm not looking to defend D3 or anything, I've just never felt the chasm that other people have between the two and I think I need it spelled out for me.

I probably spent 10 hours playing D2 online and maybe 30 hours for D3, so not much experience.

Bandwagon said:

Thanks. None of that really makes any sense to me. Link an in depth article if you don't mind and have one handy. I'm not looking to defend D3 or anything, I've just never felt the chasm that other people have between the two and I think I need it spelled out for me.

I probably spent 10 hours playing D2 online and maybe 30 hours for D3, so not much experience.

Click to expand...

I don't have any articles to back that up, it is just my own opinion. I put at least 500 hours into each and probably twice that into Diablo 2 and D3 feels like they tried to make everything from D2 friendlier without realizing that it made the game worse.

Skill trees - Diablo 2 had branching skill trees that rewarded players for either investing points into single skills to make them more powerful or branching into more powerful skills deeper in the tree with less investment. There were multiple trees for every class so you could really make some wild builds. In a later patch they made points in some skills give bonuses to other related skills (i.e. every point spend in Fire Nova gives +1% damage to Fireball).

D3 had none of that fun, you get skills at predetermined levels and later on gear can make them better.

Skill choices matter - There was no refunds on skills so you had to choose wisely and the internet didn't have many popular best build sites so you really had to figure it out. However, the game was easy to restart and leveling to a decent level was not hard so the process did not feel as burdensome.

D3 thought making skill choices interchangeable and not matter would mean that no one would need to relevel another character, but in doing so made the skills bland and...interchangeable. Also, a huge part of the replayability was then gone because there was no reason to grind up more characters once you did one of each.

Rune words - This is more that Diablo 2 introduced sockets and then in the expansion introduced a way to make sockets matter in new and interesting ways. I also want to mention Charms were a huge and cool thing that was added in the expansion that really changed the way the game was played and opened up new builds.

D3 actually regressed in this area by not finding a cool way to include charms, eliminating rune words, and makes sockets pretty much a requisite instead of a trade off that was good in some cases and bad in others. They "streamlined" the game by taking away player choice and making items bland.

Item types - Diablo 2 pioneered the formula that the more hybrid an item became the lower the stat cap could be. Blue items had less mods but the mods could go higher than yellows or uniques. Uniques sometimes broke this rule, but most had stats not found on any blue/yellow and almost always had downsides. This made some builds actually covet lower tier items and made farming that much more enjoyable because blues were not just throw away items. Hell, sockets only appeared on white items and that made them some of the most sought after items in the game. Set items were released in the expansion and, again, were not the be all end all but gave players a reason to gamble and some different choices.

D3 threw this all away with an item system built around the Real Money Auction House and now we are at a place where the best items are clearly a few uniques and the set items. The set item skill bonuses along with the boring skill tree makes a few builds the 'best' options bar none and reduces player choice to almost nil.

Targeted farming - In Diablo 2 there were many farming spots that you could run for items depending on your build. If you wanted Runes you ran the Countess, if you were a teleport Sorceress you ran Mephisto, non-teleport builds would run the Council. If you had freeze immunity or the freeze immune boots you could run the Slug Boss. Poison resist could run Andariel. The result was even more build options focused around farming specific content to acquire the items for better farming.

D3 started with bosses giving a *slightly* higher drop table than other enemies but rerunning the boss would cause the in-game cutscenes to kick off every fight which made them last FOREVER. This oversight made it so that boss running was worthless and the most valuable money/MF builds were simply as much item find as possible on a fast character to break vases and open treasure chests since destructible items were easier to "kill" than mobs. They didn't want farming because they wanted to pimp the RMAH as the way to get gear and it broke their game such that now you are farming and gambling for the one set of items that is best for your class.


These are all problems that I glossed over because I wanted a new Diablo game so badly that I was OK with whatever I got. I played it a ton so it isn't like I hated D3, but the points I laid out are why D3 will never be considered a classic like D2 is and why now that I invested some time into PoE I realize that I wouldn't have played D3 more than a few hours before realizing that PoE is the true D2 sequel that I wanted. If you like D3 then great, but it is not the game for me and with the new Blizzard philosopy there is a 99.9% chance that D4 will not be either.

j00t said:

i'm not going to address the other aspects of your post because i didn't play 400 hours of diablo2 so those meta game aspects are lost on me. however...

no in game cutscenes are part of your reasoning for it being a better game? i mean, you can just hit escape...

also, "it was a better game" it entirely subjective and requires more information to be taken at any kind of value.

don't get me wrong, i'm not here to argue the merits of d3 vs d2, i personally prefer d3, but i'm a different gamer now than i was when d2 came out. i loved it, but like i said, i didn't play much more beyond just beating the story.

Click to expand...

The ARPG genre, a genre that Blizzard created and defined with D1 and D2, has been defined as one where the story is usually light in the game and the replayability and farming are what fans stay for since the game depth isn't in the story. If you played these games once through just for the story then you spent about 10-20 hours to play and D3 would have been head and shoulders above D2 because the story is much more fleshed out through in game cutscenes.

If you played D3 expecting it to be a better ARPG than D2 then you, like me, were in for huge disappointment because it was not better in any way for the genre except graphically and even that was debatable because of the bright graphics in a gothic franchise. So yes, in game non-skippable cutscenes on bosses in a game defined by farming bosses efficiently and quickly is a huge problem and hindered enjoyment of the game immensely. It would have been worse if bosses were the best place to farm but in my post above you can see that Blizzard fucked that up badly also.

OU Ariakas said:

I don't have any articles to back that up, it is just my own opinion. I put at least 500 hours into each and probably twice that into Diablo 2 and D3 feels like they tried to make everything from D2 friendlier without realizing that it made the game worse.

Skill trees - Diablo 2 had branching skill trees that rewarded players for either investing points into single skills to make them more powerful or branching into more powerful skills deeper in the tree with less investment. There were multiple trees for every class so you could really make some wild builds. In a later patch they made points in some skills give bonuses to other related skills (i.e. every point spend in Fire Nova gives +1% damage to Fireball).

D3 had none of that fun, you get skills at predetermined levels and later on gear can make them better.

Skill choices matter - There was no refunds on skills so you had to choose wisely and the internet didn't have many popular best build sites so you really had to figure it out. However, the game was easy to restart and leveling to a decent level was not hard so the process did not feel as burdensome.

D3 thought making skill choices interchangeable and not matter would mean that no one would need to relevel another character, but in doing so made the skills bland and...interchangeable. Also, a huge part of the replayability was then gone because there was no reason to grind up more characters once you did one of each.

Rune words - This is more that Diablo 2 introduced sockets and then in the expansion introduced a way to make sockets matter in new and interesting ways. I also want to mention Charms were a huge and cool thing that was added in the expansion that really changed the way the game was played and opened up new builds.

D3 actually regressed in this area by not finding a cool way to include charms, eliminating rune words, and makes sockets pretty much a requisite instead of a trade off that was good in some cases and bad in others. They "streamlined" the game by taking away player choice and making items bland.

Item types - Diablo 2 pioneered the formula that the more hybrid an item became the lower the stat cap could be. Blue items had less mods but the mods could go higher than yellows or uniques. Uniques sometimes broke this rule, but most had stats not found on any blue/yellow and almost always had downsides. This made some builds actually covet lower tier items and made farming that much more enjoyable because blues were not just throw away items. Hell, sockets only appeared on white items and that made them some of the most sought after items in the game. Set items were released in the expansion and, again, were not the be all end all but gave players a reason to gamble and some different choices.

D3 threw this all away with an item system built around the Real Money Auction House and now we are at a place where the best items are clearly a few uniques and the set items. The set item skill bonuses along with the boring skill tree makes a few builds the 'best' options bar none and reduces player choice to almost nil.

Targeted farming - In Diablo 2 there were many farming spots that you could run for items depending on your build. If you wanted Runes you ran the Countess, if you were a teleport Sorceress you ran Mephisto, non-teleport builds would run the Council. If you had freeze immunity or the freeze immune boots you could run the Slug Boss. Poison resist could run Andariel. The result was even more build options focused around farming specific content to acquire the items for better farming.

D3 started with bosses giving a *slightly* higher drop table than other enemies but rerunning the boss would cause the in-game cutscenes to kick off every fight which made them last FOREVER. This oversight made it so that boss running was worthless and the most valuable money/MF builds were simply as much item find as possible on a fast character to break vases and open treasure chests since destructible items were easier to "kill" than mobs. They didn't want farming because they wanted to pimp the RMAH as the way to get gear and it broke their game such that now you are farming and gambling for the one set of items that is best for your class.


These are all problems that I glossed over because I wanted a new Diablo game so badly that I was OK with whatever I got. I played it a ton so it isn't like I hated D3, but the points I laid out are why D3 will never be considered a classic like D2 is and why now that I invested some time into PoE I realize that I wouldn't have played D3 more than a few hours before realizing that PoE is the true D2 sequel that I wanted. If you like D3 then great, but it is not the game for me and with the new Blizzard philosopy there is a 99.9% chance that D4 will not be either.

Click to expand...

Hot damn, OU. Thanks for the writeup, that helps a lot. I never spent much time with a lot of this stuff, but these two I can definitely see where D2>D3. I remember those.

D3 actually regressed in this area by not finding a cool way to include charms, eliminating rune words, and makes sockets pretty much a requisite instead of a trade off that was good in some cases and bad in others. They "streamlined" the game by taking away player choice and making items bland.

Skill choices matter - There was no refunds on skills so you had to choose wisely and the internet didn't have many popular best build sites so you really had to figure it out. However, the game was easy to restart and leveling to a decent level was not hard so the process did not feel as burdensome.

Bandwagon said:

Hot damn, OU. Thanks for the writeup, that helps a lot. I never spent much time with a lot of this stuff, but these two I can definitely see where D2>D3. I remember those.

D3 actually regressed in this area by not finding a cool way to include charms, eliminating rune words, and makes sockets pretty much a requisite instead of a trade off that was good in some cases and bad in others. They "streamlined" the game by taking away player choice and making items bland.

Skill choices matter - There was no refunds on skills so you had to choose wisely and the internet didn't have many popular best build sites so you really had to figure it out. However, the game was easy to restart and leveling to a decent level was not hard so the process did not feel as burdensome.

Click to expand...

Man, all of that stuff was off the top of my head and as I was typing I was getting super angry at how bad they fucked up D3 and how terrible the game was at release. If you started after Reaper of Souls came out then you got a game that was literally ten times better than the original and still not half the game D2 was.

Mr Creed said:

I would not even say that. As far as you can say that about the setting, magic and demons and all, D2 paints a world and believable characters within that world.

D3 traded that away for saturday morning cartoon villains based on a lesson that Blizzard believes to have learned from early WoW expansions, without realizing that just doing the same for D3 does not make sense. The concern was that Illidan was too absent and out of the picture during leveling in BC, which led to subsequent Lich King cameos throughout Northrend leveling. Their conclusion that we need Azmodan live-blogging our progress towards his lair was hilariously dumb, and shit like that is all over D3 and ruins any immersion the cutscenes create.

Click to expand...

I was really trying to throw D3 a bone because all I remember was too many in-game cutscenes and a terrible story.

It is amazing that every single time I am forced to remember new things about this game my opinion of it becomes worse.