Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[ErickTheRed]

I think you will find most of the people complaining about that are not melee players, but ranged players who are sick of melee attacks hitting them from half-way across the screen. They have added a lot to melee combat, indeed, but ranged play has taken a severe hammering as a result. For a personal view, I always play the archer-class and love ranged combat in all games, finding melee quite boring. In Diablo III, I despise the mechanics for ranged play, finding most of the fun and tactical elements have been removed, and instead find myself enjoying melee more than ever before.

I haven't made up my mind about ranged combat yet, except that the endgame is broken for demon hunters. I always play a melee character first and then try a ranged later. I find games hit and miss with ranged characters. Sometimes they have tools that let them trivially kite or pets that tank for them, or other crowd control tools, and sometimes they don't and things get tedious. It's a hard balance to find.

I have a demon hunter that is part of a static group that is level 36 now in nightmare. At this low level I think the class works pretty well. A variety of skills let me avoid trouble in different ways, and while I'm fragile nothing seems unfair. I don't remember frustrating instances where online lag causes monsters to hit me when they shouldn't. I'm sure it happens, but I'm able to recover so it's ok.

I know what's coming though. Every single demon hunter that plays with this style gives up in inferno, at either act 1 or act2. The reasons are pretty well understood, they need to use discipline to kite to kill boss packs without any abilities, and of course there are many very unfriendly abilities that make damage unavoidable. Gearing defensively doesn't seem like the solution because even if you get to the point where you survive many hits you still run out of discipline and die. Going full offense just means you die all the time.

I think the issue isn't that ranged combat is terrible, but that Demon Hunters don't have the tools available given gear or skills to match the Inferno damage profile. For my barbarian there is no set of champion mods that can't be answered. Take something stupid, like a champion pack illusionist, nightmare, arcane. Each of the illusions can fear and make arcane sentries (This is very dumb and should be fixed) so I'm chained feared running uncontrolled through a room of death. Except I have Wrath of the Berserker which makes me immune to all crowd control effects and more than doubles my damage for 15 seconds allowing me to burst one of them down. This doesn't cost me that much - I still have my other abilities available. Demon Hunters don't have anything that comes close to this when dealing with their problem packs.

The other problem is the itemization. I did a Google search, and it turns out Demon Hunters are viable in act 3, and I wasn't that surprised when I saw what someone did. They geared defensively with a lot of Life on Hit, and stacked skills that proc it well: gas grenades, jagged spike caltrops, shuriken cloud, ball lightning. Preparation and Shadow Power: Gloom were the defensive skills. All of a sudden you have a very tanky character that doesn't have to kite and in fact does not want to because of the placed aoe damage. The listed damage was low, but good enough with all the stacking effects. There are other options, but all classes seem pushed in this direction.

I wish there were other ways that gear amplified skills. As it is now all snares and stuns become worthless. What if there were item abilities that made crowd control effective again? I'd love seeing something like that instead of the unimaginative take less damage from elites. Really anything that you could stack and maintain the more ranged oriented style that works in nightmare.