Very fun and awesome... until the shallowness becomes apparent

[Repefe]

How much fun would it if all awesome items were just thrown at you the instant you desired it? That would get old real quick. It is kind of a WoW-mindset to want items to always be proper and what you expect, but it only works in WoW because there the fun-factor comes from something else. In Diablo 3 the difficult and long item hunt is part of the fun and thus should be more difficult.

I am not saying the items must be awesome, not at all. I am saying the items should make sense. At least when you are leveling up the crafting feature is complete nonsense. You can throw tens of thousands of gold on crafting one slot and never get anything useful. Especially with the rare crafts. It's much more viable to forget all this fun item crafting/farming and go buy the items on ah.

Not to mention you say wow-mindset when D3 has real life money ah. So much for item hunt.

[Deleted]

I am not saying the items must be awesome, not at all. I am saying the items should make sense. At least when you are leveling up the crafting feature is complete nonsense. You can throw tens of thousands of gold on crafting one slot and never get anything useful. Especially with the rare crafts. It's much more viable to forget all this fun item crafting/farming and go buy the items on ah.

Not to mention you say wow-mindset when D3 has real life money ah. So much for item hunt.

I will completely give you the point that crafting during levelling is absurdly worthless. As far as I know it is quite a bit better at end level tho.

As for RMAH, all gear on that has be hunted too by someone. If anything it should give people that enjoy item hunting more motivation to hunt.

[Deleted]

As strange as this might sound for anyone that played D2 for a very long time (I did too) but the real item hunt starts at 60 when you get the valor buff increasing your mf. Without that I think it's almost impossible to hunt for items and get good rewards. Not long after reaching 60 I farmed one area a few times and ended up with some really nice rares and combined with some mf on items I was getting mainly rare items.
Once you get to 60 and can farm areas with the valor buff stacked you should have no problem finding rares and then it's just hoping for a good roll or a useful legendary item

It took time in D2 to find good items, it'll take time in D3.

[Whitepepper]

Item hunting simply isn't fun and doesn't feel rewarding

Because you didn't find all the best items in the game in the first week? For me all the fun in D2 was the treasure hunt. If you're rewarded with all the best gear so quickly it defeats the purpose of a grind game. There was never any big secret that this game would be about grinding, but after its release the malcontents are all like "grinding -_- this blows".

I see some valid critique of the game but a large part of it is caused by players who just don't like this genre.

[Repefe]

I will completely give you the point that crafting during levelling is absurdly worthless. As far as I know it is quite a bit better at end level tho.

As for RMAH, all gear on that has be hunted too by someone. If anything it should give people that enjoy item hunting more motivation to hunt.

I don't know. tl;dr All this crappy drops that don't make sense become fun to farm once you beat the game three times and start for the 4th time. I think that's nothing to be happy about.

[Goretex]

Anyone serious about making it far in D2 was on d2jsp. Right now I could get a trapsin over 10k LS with infinity in a day or two of playing, from nothing, because the medium of forum gold on d2jsp makes trading a 75% block level 9 shield for an ohm possible where it would never happen if you made a game saying "LLD SHIELD FOR OHM LOL" and waited.

The "colorful or exotic unique modifiers" did wonders for D2. There were tons of ways to screw with the skillset of a hero because of the abilities items, especially runewords, gave them. Shapeshifting barbarians, whirlwind assassin duelers, riftsins, there were tons of extremely interesting fringe builds that were possible in D2. D3 is very obviously less complex in this area. You can't teleport as a barbarian (as much as people hated enigma for this, it still added depth and customization to the game), all you can do is stack more and more "stats."

this is what dyes are for so you can change the color of your gear duh!

[Orange Joe]

Anyone serious about making it far in D2 was on d2jsp. Right now I could get a trapsin over 10k LS with infinity in a day or two of playing, from nothing, because the medium of forum gold on d2jsp makes trading a 75% block level 9 shield for an ohm possible where it would never happen if you made a game saying "LLD SHIELD FOR OHM LOL" and waited.

The "colorful or exotic unique modifiers" did wonders for D2. There were tons of ways to screw with the skillset of a hero because of the abilities items, especially runewords, gave them. Shapeshifting barbarians, whirlwind assassin duelers, riftsins, there were tons of extremely interesting fringe builds that were possible in D2. D3 is very obviously less complex in this area. You can't teleport as a barbarian (as much as people hated enigma for this, it still added depth and customization to the game), all you can do is stack more and more "stats."

This isn't true. I made it to 99 on 2 toons and had gear to solo 8 player baal runs. Never once went to d2jsp. Yes I knew about it but still never went there.

[jaakkeli]

Because you didn't find all the best items in the game in the first week?

Can you read? He said pretty much the opposite of that: the items are boring so even if you do find the best stuff it just feels meh.

In D2, there was an exciting feeling when you saw a particular unique or a rune drop. There was the excitiment of killing Mephisto and getting anything from boring crap to a rain of recognizable goodies on the ground, the excitement of not knowing what he's about to drop and then being either disappointed or awed. Now you know the big boss is always going to drop a couple of rares - it's always the same so no thrill there. There's little excitement in identifying them either since it's just too random - sure, it will be thrilling to find the good rare when it actually does drop but mostly it's going to be so average crap that you'll just be wondering whether to vendor or AH it.

For me all the fun in D2 was the treasure hunt.

For a lot of us that was fun in D2 but not in D3.

[Kuntantee]

So I was a huge Diablo 2 fan, played the hell out of it for many years, have obviously been excited for D3 since it was announced.

There were many things about it that made me nervous, I didn't like the art direction, the lack of permanent choices kinda bugged, me whatever, I was gonna get it regardless.

So my first playthrough on normal I was all, "This is awesome!" all the areas are new, the combat is great, and everything is hunky dory.

Well I'm now level 55 half way through hell difficulty and bored out of my mind, I barely even played tonight and really have no desire to play new characters either.

The game is absolutely and completely shallow in every sense of the word. Not that Diablo 2 was the most deep game ever, but it at least had a little.

I can forgive a ton of D3's flaws but one I simply cannot

Item hunting simply isn't fun and doesn't feel rewarding

Diablo games have always at their core been about the item hunt, you can do a lot wrong but if you make the item hunt interesting and fun it will keep people hooked.

The itemization is terrrrrrrible and the items are borrrrring. With every mob or boss in D2 I killed or every chest I opened there was a titilation that the super item I'd been searching for would pop, or maybe something awesome I didn't even know about.... there is no such thrill in D3. The legendary items are terrible, there's no desire to find them, you'd rather the vendor spawn some good blues.

The second problem is how boring the items are. There are no colorful or exotic unique modifiers, everything is the same old 5-6 affixes you've seen a million times before.

That brings it back to the main point of shallowness. Everything in the game is shallow, it's like Blizzard has grown scared of complexity. I mean look what they've done to WoW over the past few years. The pejorative term you hear a lot is "dumbed down", I prefer shallow myself.

Anyway, that's my review of D3, the combat is fun, seeing the world the first time is fun, the game is highly polished and visually impressive, but the game lacks depth and has a very poor item system and as such I don't see it having nearly the same legs as Diablo 2 did unless they drastically overhaul it with patches or expansions.

The game is up for two weeks and you say item hunting is no fun...What would you expect? Get best items in two weeks???? You're either lying about you played D2 for years or forgot how was the item hunting in D2. If this game is like D2 you will spend months for item hunting in hardest difficulty which is inferno...Diablo was never a complex game the only thing that looked like deep and shit was it's talent system and it was not deep at all, there was few builds that was working in hell and if you spent wrong points you're fucked. In D3 there will be few different builds which will work in inferno for each class so it's all same. You're just complaining for the sake of complaining. There are huge problems with Diablo 3 but things you listed are not in that list. About legendaries, I can agree that they need to tune down the amount of randomization involved with legendaries

[Throrion]

The "colorful or exotic unique modifiers" did wonders for D2. There were tons of ways to screw with the skillset of a hero because of the abilities items, especially runewords, gave them. Shapeshifting barbarians, whirlwind assassin duelers, riftsins, there were tons of extremely interesting fringe builds that were possible in D2. D3 is very obviously less complex in this area. You can't teleport as a barbarian (as much as people hated enigma for this, it still added depth and customization to the game), all you can do is stack more and more "stats."

But when were Runewords added? They weren't in D2 at launch. They were added, to a degree, because people were complaining about itemization being too straightforward - itemization at D2 launch was far more boring than the D3 one, really. I think Blizzard are gonna take a lot of the D3 launch feedback and change some things around. Legendaries in particular seem to be in for some degree of workover. We'll see what happens.

For instance, did you know that there used to be a third artisan in D3 called the Mystic? She was supposed to provide Torchlight-style item enchantments, but Blizzard deemed her redundant because they essentially were just extensions of gems. However she's still in the game files and Blizzard said they'll probably add her in when they have found a use for her. So, odds are they'll take the D3 launch feedback and come up with an item customization system that uses the Mystic somehow.

[Deleted]

Can you read? He said pretty much the opposite of that: the items are boring so even if you do find the best stuff it just feels meh.

In D2, there was an exciting feeling when you saw a particular unique or a rune drop. There was the excitiment of killing Mephisto and getting anything from boring crap to a rain of recognizable goodies on the ground, the excitement of not knowing what he's about to drop and then being either disappointed or awed. Now you know the big boss is always going to drop a couple of rares - it's always the same so no thrill there. There's little excitement in identifying them either since it's just too random - sure, it will be thrilling to find the good rare when it actually does drop but mostly it's going to be so average crap that you'll just be wondering whether to vendor or AH it.



For a lot of us that was fun in D2 but not in D3.

Did you play D2 before LoD was out? If you did, compare it to that instead, half your complaints will become invalid.

[Aurinax]

The OP is basically a mediocrely disguised complaint toward not being handed things on a silver platter.

So what if an ideal item is incredibly rare? That's the core of Diablo. Sorry you can't find perfectly itemized legendary and set items as easily as you did in D2. Itemization in this is better than it ever was in D2. Also like someone else said, hit 60 please.

[DeadmanWalking]

Every time I see item with int and str on it I want to punch a baby. Or items with +exp or increased range on gold collect ... waste of property slot.

There is a witch doctor build so you can get 4 zombie dogs without using the zombie dog summoning power. There is a talent that says, "You have a 5% chance of raising a zombie dog for every enemy you kill within 12 yards + bonuses from gear that increases gold/health orb range." So you want that range to be as far as possible to increase potential of raising dogs and increasing distance to targets to ensure safety behind pets. Not only that but you will pick up health orbs during combat rather than after combat and it heals your dogs as well as your self.

So +range gear and +health healing from globes are very useful to the witch doctor. This build allows you to have z dogs and the horror ability at the same time, and while 5% seems small its basically 1 in 20 mobs and it takes only about 3-4 mins to get 4 zombie dogs with +20% durability.

[asher1611]

Reading this post it looks like some people didn't know what to expect when they booted up Diablo III. It's a dungeon crawler first and foremost. Not an MMO. Not an RPG. Not something else that it is not. You hack and slash through baddies til you die, then you hack and slash some more.

I'll agree that the dungeon crawler genre as a whole could use some evolution. I'll also add that Diablo III adds a lot new to the mix, and from what I've been reading most of the population would be a lot happier if two simple fixes were put into place:

1) Itemization was re-tuned so that legendaries felt more legendary and rares were preferable to blues.
2) Inferno was re-tuned to still be very hard but to not favor just one class/one type/cookie cutter builds.

These aren't genre problems. These aren't even shallowness problems. These are simple early release issues that are easily fixed.

[Finangus]

The game is up for two weeks and you say item hunting is no fun...What would you expect? Get best items in two weeks???? You're either lying about you played D2 for years or forgot how was the item hunting in D2. If this game is like D2 you will spend months for item hunting in hardest difficulty which is inferno...

Congratulations for completely fucking failing at basic reading comprehension! Go back and re-read what he said. It's not that he hasn't received the best items already, it's that the itemization system flat out sucks donkey dick. Why spend time hunting for items when 99% of what you find is utter shit? Or better yet, why even hunt for items when vendor magic gear is better than a legendary?

Compare the system in D3 to the one in D2 and tell me it isn't shallow and idiotic. I dare you.

[Nurvus]

Not all items are supposed to be useful. Did you know the Gorilla & Monkey affixes in wow? ye. These items were terrible aswell.

WoW itemization is stupid. Please don't compare.

D2 had interesting effects. You had loads of Unique Gloves/Weapons with stuff like On Hit 12% chance to cast Iron Maiden Level 5.
A Bow that gave Guided Arrow and could be used by anyone (often by Paladins with Holy Lightning Aura)

You had Runewords that made items awesome, though alot of them were underused and others overused.

[Deleted]

Congratulations for completely fucking failing at basic reading comprehension! Go back and re-read what he said. It's not that he hasn't received the best items already, it's that the itemization system flat out sucks donkey dick. Why spend time hunting for items when 99% of what you find is utter shit? Or better yet, why even hunt for items when vendor magic gear is better than a legendary?

Compare the system in D3 to the one in D2 and tell me it isn't shallow and idiotic. I dare you.

It is not shallow and idiotic. I have not seen or felt it on level 60 and neither have most of us. Also please mind your language a bit.

[Erous]

sorry, but I read this as 'item farming in D3 is not as fun as item farming in d2'. I played both, and I don't really see much of a difference. Item farming is item farming, its been the same practice from then to now

[mathfurion]

There are skill modifiers on gear, and other on hit effects. However I agree that itemization could use a little more flavour. Furthermore, I think Blizzard said they are working on the legendaries, which really is my main gripe, they're currently just terrible. Having said that I feel that most people compare D3 to D2 LOD and not classic, and in that regard D3 is very near D2 classic in item design. Let us hope that Blizzard held back the crazy stuff for the expansion.

you are the first that i see that share my vision.

people are all comparing D3 with LOD, not only for items, but for everything

in my opinion, D3 is way more fun than D2 patch 1.

[Deleted]

you are the first that i see that share my vision.

people are all comparing D3 with LOD, not only for items, but for everything

in my opinion, D3 is way more fun than D2 patch 1.

Well to be fair to a certain extent that is to be expected. I mean blizzard does have a lot more knowledge of what works and what does not work than they did when they released diablo 2 patch 1. So for one half at least I would call that fair, the unfair half being that d3 did not yet have a live chance of getting polished, something d2 ofcourse did after a few patches and xpac.