(07-09-2012, 04:37 AM)the Langolier Wrote: Honestly, a new player will be just as effective as a seasoned player so long as they have some of the best gear in the game. If your items aren't good enough, you'll just keep getting one-shot and cheesed. Once they are, this game takes no skill. Contrast that to Diablo 1 where new players would get owned in hell/hell even with the best, hacked items in the game.
In Inferno you can easily spend a long time in a gulf where elite stuff doesn't one shot you and yet you can't afford to stand a second in the various fires either. There's a number of BS combos that are unfair to many characters (hello vortex + arcane), but there's even more that can be beaten with patience and good timing. Waller champs are one of my favorite combos as a melee toon because they make maze chunks to navigate without pinning you down too often, particularly when paired with the various fire skills. Sussing out the real mobs when you split an illusion monster and navigating the maze of monsters to not get trapped. Arcane when not matched up with some BS control is also great, you get to dance around the foes like clockwork while whittling them down. All the while you need to be planning how to use your defensive cooldowns to survive an encounter's relatively unique affix combos, rather than just guzzling potions and avoiding stunlock.
From a D1 perspective I think some people's idea of "skill" means learning a rote strategy and executing it flawlessly over and over on predictable enemies. Set yourself up in a door or corner and wait to swing when mobs step on a tile. Teleport on a tile adjacent to the one a succubuss is walking to. Carry stone curse + golem for killing advocates. But throw in some randomly spawning desecrators or arcane beams and it's just "cheap bullshit" that you need items to solve rather than walking a few feet to the safe ground between whatever modifiers.
Quote:Inferno revolves around farming elites in the same area of the game over and over. If you want to get to Act 3, you have to farm Act 2. When you get bored of that, you can't go farm somewhere else - you're just stuck. Contrast that to Diablo 2 where you could do any one of a dozen different kinds of runs.
Everywhere in Inferno can drop max items now. I found a several million sword in act 1. In fact, some people are complaining that act 1 is too profitable given how fast it can be cleared, and there's no point in farming the later acts. Diversity *is* limited early on when you still can't kill wasps, but not in the long run. (Albeit, balance might be improved between areas, but Diablo games were generally not good on this point...)
Quote:Drops in these games were exciting even if they weren't upgrades to your gear. In Diablo 1, every single ring/amulet drop was exciting. In Diablo 2, it was always exciting to find a unique such as a shako even if you really didn't have use for it. It was still fun to find somewhat decent gear even if it wasn't the best. Of course, when an item was an upgrade to your gear, it felt just that much better.
In the case of D2 this reads like a coded way of saying "sets/uniques/runewords are better than random rares." I won't argue that preference but that's basically what it boils down to. And I do find rare amulet/ring drops exciting in D3 because they are even harder to find that D1 jewlery.