One of the best decisions I ever made was locking myself out from the D3 forums. It turned out to be a colossal waste of time both reading, and getting drawn into even more time wasting topics.
I also decided to start playing D2 ladder (which I haven’t done in a few years now) since I’m basically burnt out from playing Reaper of Souls. The last time I logged in (right after adding in the firewall rules), I ran several rifts, salvaged over 10 items, and promptly logged out (as I just could not fathom running another bounty/rift again). Before that, I was mixing in Whimsyshire runs to try and get the Spectrum transmog (fruitless after 100+ runs). I seriously did not expect that to happen in under 3 months from launch, but my overall poorer luck on live (compared to what I experienced during closed beta), has contributed to this.
My current profile would seem to contradict this, but that’s because the majority of the decent items came in a short 10 hour time frame several weeks ago (outside of that, most of the 300+ level 70 hours on just my main wizard, has been fruitless). The only recent addition have been two Stone of Jordan’s at around the Paragon 320 mark (note that I started 2.0 at P85) on softcore.
My focus was mainly on gearing up my main to be able to do T5 effectively. But I’ve reached a dead end for the time being, and don’t feel like trying to go through the same grinder at the moment with my monk and witch doctor (or playing the other classes for that matter). I also do not want to utilize RiF to accelerate the rate of blood shards to get my gear. I’m also holding off on hardcore play until they’ve done more balancing (like with the rift guardians) as well as fix the issues with the Mac client. Bottomline, I just don’t find D3 fun to play at the moment (had the rest of adventure mode been made to be at least equally rewarding in terms of experience and drops, I probably would not even be posting this).
So I ended up leveling a sorceress on D2 ladder (might as well play for the ladder specific runes). Given that it’s been close to 9 years now that I last played Diablo II Lord of Destruction in any serious form, it was sort of like getting back on a bike again after a long time. I’m leveling casually (i.e. not doing power rush runs) going through all the content again. So it’s going to take me awhile to even get the kind of gear I used to have before All my higher level D2 realm characters are long expired/non-retrievable with the double-click trick as I didn’t use uncommon names before (thus I only have a level 19 barbarian from around 2012 which I created and played casually just before the launch of D3 and this new sorceress).
The key downside is the graphics; trying to play an 800×600 pixel resolution game that is scaled up on a 30″ 2560×1600 flat panel display, is unsurprisingly not the best user experience (I’ve tried playing it in a 800×600 window; while it graphically looks better in that small window, everything is just too tiny for my aging eyes). I’ve already said it before but there are a few things that Diablo III got right like the overall graphics (in terms of the visuals and physics), the characters combat mechanics, the revised resource and health system, increased personal bag/shared stash, balancing the amount of space items take up.
Like right now, half of my personal bag is charms and my tomes of town portal/identity. A portion of the remainder is health and mana potions (my current belt is still two rows of potions). This leaves very little room for drops (which at this juncture, I pickup all rares and magic jewelry since if I can’t use them, comes in handy for gold which I’m having to build up). My private stash is also filled (with jewels, low gems, various rings/amulets for use with certain bosses, items I can’t yet use) and as of this writing, only halfway through Act II.
As far as the skill system though, I still remain ambivalent. The itemization system in D2 IMHO, still works a lot better (not having the majority of my damage scaling off my weapon damage where a weapon is primarily a stat stick or having cast speed for caster spells separate from actual weapon attack speed for example). Before doing Blood Raven, one of the first things I bought from a vendor was a socketed staff (which I tossed in my first few gem fragments; sapphire for cold damage, ruby for fire damage, and skull for life/mana steal). 12 levels later, I was still using the same weapon (most of my damage increase came from skill points). I eventually got two nice weapon drops; my last one being a unique mace with crushing blow chance after killing Radament.
In D3, items generally do not scale well at levels below cap because of how their stat ranges roll depending on your character/monster level. Thus I probably would not even be using the same weapon that I got at level 5 at say level 17 for example (ruby socketed weapons being an exception). In D2, many items have item quality levels (a stat not displayed unless you use something like the PlugY mod in single player) that are actually much higher (with the item itself having a lower equip requirement – this is not including -% requirement which can lower the required level even further). That quality level is also dependent on the monster level that dropped it.
The key downside with D2 items is having the right amount of stats (like strength or dexterity) to equip them (like I’ve got this nice unique sword that dropped earlier from the Smith, but it requires 43 strength for me to equip; I currently have 26 strength with 2 of those points coming from my amulet). I currently have this stashed, but realize that it may no longer be an upgrade by the time I get that much points into strength. Since higher quality level items roll higher ranges/more sockets, the higher stat requirements are used to offset this (as opposed to relying only on character level like how it is in D3 – which is why its always a goal to get to level cap in D3).
I know that was one of the things that drove me crazy playing Path of Exile; where it was this constant jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces where once I found an upgrade, that the older item happened to have +stat on it which when unequipped, rendered items that required x-amount of that stat, unusable. I then needed to waste nodes on the passive skill tree or find another item to make up the difference.
From what I recall for D2 though (plus looking at some of the higher level items on my offline characters), that outside of amulets, rings, jewels, and some charms, the +stat amounts for strength and dex were usually reasonably small compared to PoE items (which is probably why I don’t remember this being as huge an issue in D2).
I realize that I’m still in the leveling phase while playing through normal difficulty, and that the real game begins in hell difficulty. But unlike D3 where I know that most every item as I level is merely transitory until I hit max level, there are pieces of gear found in normal difficulty in D2 that will last well through nightmare difficulty, and also transition into hell difficulty until I can farm better items. And that is what I remember about how items feeling less difficulty and character level dependent than how it is in D3 (though with loot 2.0 and the 4/2 affix system + stat inflation, some level 60 items like a legacy Witching Hour, is still viable for its damage increase when you can make up eHP elsewhere).
Playing D2:LoD again is reminding me that while it still has issues, that there are many other reasons why the game has managed to stand the test of the time for this long, and why so many other hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers including D3, are compared against it.
