You know, I get they've made some minor band-aid changes to the game to improve it, but one must wonder what exactly they're doing for an entire year almost to go by without one single major patch.
It's been almost a year and I'm really trying to love the game. It's the same process with every single character though, the game's only a year old and I loathe leveling. I don't mind Act 1 but Act 2 makes me want to rip my hair out. Act 4 is FAR too short and I think we can all say we're tired of farming Act 3 over and over again.
All these band-aid changes are helping in some way or another but they're still not trying to address the real issues of this game.
- Itemization is stupid. They did this in order to focus people more towards the Auction House. They knew it would happen, there's no way you couldn't know it would happen by introducing such a bogus itemization. Diablo 3 is a farming game, not an Auction House game.
- There's no way Chris Metzen or any of the other talented writers they've employed have worked on this storyline. I love the stories of all Blizzard games but this one felt ridiculous. Bosses always told you their diabolical plans and it just felt like watching a cartoon from the 90s. "You may have beaten my Lieutenant but my armies still flow through the hell rift.. HAHAHAHA!" "Oh you killed my Hell Rift? That's fine, that's not my only one!"
- Not only is the story beyond terrible in-game but you're forced to follow it. There's no free-roaming allowed, you HAVE to play the same tired out story over and over. Not only that, but there's still no option to auto-skip cinematics. We get it, you want us to watch the cinematics and in-game pauses, but skipping them 200 times per character just to get through Inferno isn't fun.
- I'm not a hardcore PvPer but the PvP that was displayed before release looked fun. Yet, we still have no hopes of ever having arena like PvP come our way. Don't you dare bring up the Brawling feature either, that was a slap in the face.
- Also forced monster affixes are the idea of someone that needs to be fired. You have no control over being walled in, jailed, feared or anything else. Players should have an opportunity to avoid these attacks before they happen. We can smash through demonic sieges, 10 foot monsters and we can destroy the environment but we can't break 3 foot walls when monsters surround us with them?
Let's look at some old videos of how Diablo 3 was looking before the release:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEvThjiE038 (this video is one of the videos that got me hooked)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZrGE3VLiSk (Ah... PvP)
This one still gets me to lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsqUZkmO-zk (How I felt on launch day)
Just a quick overview of what I remember was brought by patches:
1.0.8
- Adding AH Tooltips
- Giving players more incentive to play Multiplayer
- Increasing the MF cap
- Fixing Monster Density so that players do more than two sections of Act 3
- Giving players the ability to Identify All (I'm not sure why there's UNID in the first place since they don't require a tome)
- More nerfs and more buffs
1.0.7
- NV persists through Acts
- MF was increased in MP games
- Nerfed res timer
- Buffed gold pickup radius
- MP came to public games
- Blizzard added Brawling (only further enraging people who want to PvP)
- Demonic essence was added
- Reflect damage got a nerf
- A bunch of crafting plans were added (most of them being BoP)
1.0.6
I don't remember what this did.. a couple of bug fixes? I'm not looking it up.
1.0.5
- More buffs
- Added MP
- Added Ubers
- I remember a couple of monster nerfs
1.0.4
- Paragon levels
1.0.3
I don't remember... I think they buffed item drops in this one? Or something? I know they made it so you couldn't kite mobs into town anymore.
1.0.3
1.0.2
If I recall, they fixed a bunch of embarrassing errors that shouldn't have been there in the first place.