Blizzard gain a flash of insight?

[smegged]

I feel this deserves its own thread because it's probably the single most cogent, honest admission I've seen that as it is right now, D3 isn't everything it should be. Will they manage to fix it eventually? Who knows. That they're realising that no, it's really not working out too well as-is, at least is a start.

I guess I'm a little lost. Have our expectations changed?

The only difference between where D3 is and where D1 was, in terms of the "endgame carrot" mechanic, is that D1 and D2 had a higher exp. cap, and D3 doesn't. Other than that, it's exactly the same - go down, kill stuff, get loot, come back up. Why is this more or less satisfying than a laz run? Or a mephisto run? You can already beat all the content, and variant play is now, as it was then, a choice you have to enforce on yourself.

One can argue that this just never was a very satisfying mechanic. (I would.) But it's basically the same mechanic it was going back to the beginning of the series, no?

-Jester

I was never really around for Diablo 1 (I ran through normal difficulty once with Sirian and then once again by myself). But to me you are right in that Diablo 3 feels a lot more like Diablo 1 than Diablo 2. From more than just a story point of view, the actual gameplay and the way you build your character feels more like D1 than D2. The thing is that I feel like there was plenty of good stuff - fun stuff - that should have been carried over from Diablo 2.

Diablo 2, for all its flaws, had enough gameplay and customisation in it to allow nearly infinite builds. The only real problem with its build system is that you had to start at level 1 (why they couldn't have allowed you to start naked at level 30 in nightmare after you had beaten normal once is beyond me). Now there were huge flaws in itemisation (if you were to play the game normally, you would never see a rune higher than Vex and yet in nearly all of the runewords, Vex was one of the lower level runes) and combat system (defence was entirely useless for 99% of builds) but you had concrete choices which gave you an entirely different game each time.

There are really three types of characters:
1) Power characters (use cookie cutter builds)
2) Sub-optimal characters (either intentionally poorly build or badly built through ignorance) - these were sometimes called variants
3) Bone-fide variants (these characters imposed conditions that were not just conditions on how the character was built)

The real problem with D3 is that the whole second group of characters has been entirely removed because of these reasons:
a) Skills require no investment to change or upgrade
b) Stat points are not allocatable
c) Itemisation has been optimised

Point c is an interesting one that I'd only really thought about recently, but is entirely true. Currently every single barbarian wants exactly the same gear as every other barbarian. An axe is as good as a hammer is as good as a sword. A demon hunter wants exactly the same boots as a monk and a wizard wants exactly the same amulet as a witch doctor. You can gear your character badly, but you cannot gear your character well without gearing it almost identically to a power character of the same class.

An example of what I mean. In Diablo 2, as a sorcerous you could invest heavily in energy in your stat allocation and make up the hitpoint shortfall by using items which favoured +life. In Diablo 3, as a wizard, you want items which favour int, vit, resist all and +damage. In Diablo 2, I could have my giant axe of humongousness, which was really awesome for my axe barbarian that if it had have dropped for my mace barb would have been vendor trash.

Players build characters specifically to take advantage of certain items that they had drop (frostburns, the Grandfather etc...). Spiked shields were of great use to smitadins and of little use to sorcerouses. This made the game fun. The possibilities were endless. One could have an infinitely varied game without even having to create bone-fide variant characters.

People who are still with d3 these days seem to be moving to hardcore characters, because it is the only thing left with character-altering choices, even if the only choice it offers you above softcore is essentially to win every battle or reroll.