Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[smegged]

You're arriving at the conclusion that others have before as well. I've argued that the fundamental design of the game is to get players using the Auction House, and by extension, the Real Money Auction House, because the only character progression that exists in the game is gear. There's nothing else.

It doesn't sink in until you've hit 60 and you're in Inferno difficulty. And even then, it might not sink in until you see Some Other Guy™ playing alongside you, who is the same level, with the same skills, and is basically the same exact character as you - but he/she does twice as much damage, can survive packs of mobs that sneeze on you and you die, and generally makes you irrelevant. And the only difference between you and them is that they spent a few hours on the Auction House buying and selling gear.

If you mostly play solo, you can be generally immune from that. But then you'll get to some point in progression (say, Inferno Act II, where there's a gigantic jump in difficulty), and realize that you can only progress through hundreds of hours of farming gear. You will either like this setup, or you won't. To each their own.

And before I'm accused of being a total hater, please note that I'm still playing Diablo III and still having fun. I just don't particularly like how the "end-game" is designed, which will severely impact the long-term playability of the game for me personally.

The gear issue has been burning in the back of my mind for a while. I hit the soft enrage timer on the Butcher in Nightmare using a ~40dps weapon, which I did not replace until half way through act 2. While I was using it, the game was challenging (well challenging for Nightmare difficulty) because I would often end up in fights where potion cooldown management was a genuine concern. After I got the 100 dps replacement, suddenly nothing at all was a genuine threat until the phasing beasts.

The biggest concern I have with the longevity of the game centres more around the inability to customise or specialise a character. Seriously, who cannot remember how exciting it was to get to level 30 in Diablo 2 and unlock the skill(s) that you had been saving all those skillpoints for, and then watching that skill get more and more powerful as time progressed and how much of a reward it felt after getting by on level 1 glacial spike for all those levels.

Diablo 2 was very broken, but part of the fun of it was that you could compensate for that brokenness by working around it. Diablo 3 feels a lot more polished, but a lot less customisable, which will ultimately lead to its early demise.

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Belive me, I've seen plenty of over-geared 60s go down, because all-though they have the gear, they just don't know how to play ( I had the misfortune of being under-geared and dumb ).
Gear only gets you so far in D3/Inferno, and that is one thing I like about it. Yes, gear makes it easier, but you still have to have some form of skill. And the more skill you have, the less gear you need.

Starting a new barbarian would let you choose different strengths and weaknesses, so you experienced an entirely different game, even with the same character class. Now, you're a generic barbarian right the way through the game. All it takes is a change of skills and you're at exactly the same point as you would have been if you'd levelled the entire way with those skills.

This is one thing I actually enjoy. If I want to try a longsword-based DH, I don't have to roll a new one and get him to Hell to see if it's workable or not.
The other thing I enjoy is that pretty much any play-style will get you through nightmare.

There's a lot of problems w/ D3, but it's a month past launch. Wow had its problems, D2 had plenty also. Give Blizzard time, and I hope that they'll eventually be able to bring the game up to par with the others that have had almost a decade to develop.

The biggest problem I have is that no amount of skill can compensate for having bad gear. Ever. And I don't even get the reward of seeing my items drop any more. They've dropped for someone else who didn't want them, they wanted something else. I might even be getting a hand-me-down that's been through half a dozen characters. It could have dropped three days after launch.

Secondly, the point of playing a variant generally isn't to see whether they're workable, it's about taking something that genuinely isn't really that workable and getting as far as you can with it. It's about progressing the character while relying on those underpowered skills or by putting all your attributes into energy instead of vitality. There's just not that flexibility in D3. That's the real problem. Ironically, Diablo 3's skill flexibility tends to remove the incentive to actually use the skills.