Blizzard gain a flash of insight?

[Roland]

This is not true.

Yes, it is true.

I just had a tense elite fight in Inferno that I only won through kiting and some smart use of terrain and skills (leap between two levels, whale on isolated minions when I get the opportunity, time my furious charges to relocate between leap cooldowns, repeat). That fight took skill. This game definitely has room for player skill.

I didn't say the game required no skill. I said the game has been designed to require gear over skill. Remove a single piece of your equipment, and redo that fight. I'd bet 100k gold you couldn't have won it. Remove two pieces, and I'll double the bet. Remove three, and I'll double it again. At no point will player skill ever trump gearing - period. That is the point I was making - the point you missed.

In fact, I will go so far to say that the skill system is far better than D2 in terms of encouraging skillfull play. Juggling your defensive cooldowns together with managing your offense is a lot more skillful than the mindless spam in a lot of the optimal D2 builds.

I never argued against that. I love D3's skill system much more than D2's. I find the gameplay just as engaging, if not moreso, as well. None of this has any bearing on anything I've said above.

It's true that D3 has a much more gear dependent endgame than D2, but that's a consequence of trying to give the item hunt more meaning than just bigger numbers.

That's because D2 barely had an endgame, or a gear dependency. D3 forces gear dependency in order to advance through the endgame.

They need to fix the bland item game. Make items interesting and desirable, make it possible (and effective) to gear up in more ways than just primary/vit/crit/armor/resists (buffing the CC affixes would be a good place to start), make the affix pool more diverse and interesting, make legendaries not suck, these things will fix almost all of what people are complaining about.

You completely miss the mark.

Because there are challenges that are impossible with the first setup, and possible with the second?

-Jester

Precisely.