Yes, you need to farm different sets. It’s not hard to do, you can get a full set in a few hours (or less depending on your luck). But if you want to have multiple sets of augmented ancients with the right stats, that’s a long grind.
Fair enough, i never got far enough along in rifts to see the end. But the point is, infinite progression is bad because of power creep.
Being able to switch specs whenever you want is objectively bad. D2 TODAY strikes a good balance. The old days before respecs were terrible, but the fact that we all get 3 free ones, then have ways to farm for more is good, it means that you can still respec, but there is a cost to it, making your choices much more meaningful and part your identity as your character rather than just: “im a sorc”
There’s a reason that D2 added the respec reward as part of literally the first quest you do.
I saw the AH crap coming. Noticed that people could manipulate it very early on. I reached end game and realized the one time I might get back into PvP it wasn’t possible. My build was near best it could be at the time, there was almost nothing left to do. I could have made a few more characters, but I just knew it was going to go bust. Went over to play conquerors blade and never looked back.
Thats cool at least there is some grind. The way that one post was worded I thought that gear/class switching was easy and that everything was universally good. I don’t know how to explain it. Like perhaps maybe the destiny type of itemization? Where you just get Armor and the only +stat is defense. No variety, and only one question. Is the plus stat higher?
I see where you’re coming from but my personal experience with several games that added respects was always positive. When that stuff was introduced in WoW, it literally made me play the game twice as much, because I felt more encouraged to try different playstyles, PvP more, etc, without going through the whole process of rolling out a new toon. As for D3, respecs are merely a formality tbh. All it does is reduce the number of alts you have to create. It takes a few minutes to power level a character to 70, and paragon is account wide, so if you already have the gear for a different build, it wouldn’t be a massive process to get it going even without them. They just make things less cumbersome, and it’s something I’m thankful for considering you have limited character slots and want to run several builds during the season.
Couple things though:
- WoW had a respec cost though. I don’t know about now as i haven’t played since cata, but 50 gold a pop was not cheap in OG WoW, even in BC that was relatively costly until they added dailies. However, i actually think the respec cost in WoW was too low in general.
- Alts are actually a good thing, gives you a chance to specialize your character. Again, giving it an identity. There’s a big difference between a gold find barb, a whirlwind barb, and a berserk barb, and a support barb. But if you can respec whenever you want, your character is just: “a barb”
- Character slots are dumb and they should give us at least 50.
- Paragon being account wide is also not good, because again, it trivializes the content you play on that second character because of the power creep, making it effectively meaningless.
- The fact that you hit “level cap” so fast, again makes the leveling experience meaningless. The fact that in D3, items aren’t really usable until you hit 70. The best strat is to just replace all your gear with crafted gear when you hit 70 to hit the higher numbers, because they increase your DPS by tens of thousands of percent, in D2, i might find a skin of the vipermagi early on, and that becomes an item i use for quite some time. Making the leveling experience much more meaningful and exciting.
In general, my biggest problem with D3 is everything is so meaningless:
- Who cares if i get a cool upgrade because i’ll just replace it with the exact same item the next day that has slightly higher stats, or is an ancient item.
- Who cares if i found a cool item at level 60 because at level 70 a blue item is going to give me 10,000% more DPS
- Who cares if i died because the punishment is basically non-existant.
- Who cares if i found a cool piece of gear i can’t use because i can’t give it to someone else.
- Who cares if i just did rift level 100, because rift level 101 is basically the same thing just with slightly more powerful mosnters
- Who cares if i found a legendary, because i’ll find another one in 3 minutes.
To me, D2 gives me the same fix that gambling does. I kill a monster, and i’m probably going to get nothing, but one out of every 10k times, i’ll get something really special, and even if i can’t use it, someone else can get some use out of it.
At this point, if you like D3 so much, why are you here? And i don’t mean that in a mean or angry way. I mean seriously, why are you here talking about D2. It sounds like D3 is already a great game for you, so why are you playing D2 and attempting to change it into something it isn’t?
No worry, D4 is out soon.
The skill curve for D2 is nearly flat. It’s only game knowledge and time investment. The actual systems in D2 aren’t deep enough to facilitate a wide range of skill expression from players. Anyone who starts D2 completely blind and fresh only needs to go through a single ladder season to learn 90% of what they’ll need to know going forward. Maybe after a couple more seasons, they’ll be positioned to compete with anyone else should they choose to spend that much time on the game.
It doesn’t take 20 years to learn how to play D2. It doesn’t even take 1 year. Like any other game, from 20 years ago or recent, it only takes a few months of real investment to learn how to play it competently. Have any of these streamers really advanced in the past 20 years? Is Llama actually a better player today than 10 years ago? No. He’s at the same peak and playing the same way that he’s been playing the game for years. It’s why these streamers are so eager for all these new runewords. It gives them something new to do, finally. It’s why they’ve branched out to dozens of D2 mods over the past decade, because it gives them something new to do.
D2 is a slot machine, and players learn the most efficient way to pull the lever. It’s that shallow, but nonetheless addictive.
Which skill gap are we talking about though cuz I really think the average player would get destroyed in many things and a lot of them have been playing for 20 years on a game that is indeed fairly easy to learn.
Race to 99? Most get destroyed, most would still get destroyed in a SSF ladder comprising of everyone. I get not wanting to group, but most would still see no improvment in their position.
PvP? Most would get 5-0’d by any regular PvPer
Even when magic finding there are still people who don’t understand the basics at all or how any of it works. There are threads constantly here/jsp/reddit about why they don’t find anything. If you ask them to detail what they do in game you’ll realize very quickly why they don’t find anything.
You are right though even with just some basic knowledge and not even understanding all the math behind it the game is very easy. You don’t need to know everything perfectly either. And yet still people can’t even manage that.
Prep and time investment. The full race is easily mapped and mathed out, and there is some amount of RNG, lucky early drops and that type of thing, but it comes down to spending the time to have a strong race start and stay committed to finishing it. The actual execution in game isn’t the hard work of racing to 99. D2 just isn’t a hard game to play.
A fun meme, but D2 PvP is a meme and the only people who think about it will bring it up constantly. D2 PvPers are like vegans or cyclists.
These forums caters to only the extremes of playerbase. You have the highly knowledgeable and invested talking to people who only just discovered the game. Most people who play any game never touch a dedicated forum about it. So yeah, you’ll find people who don’t understand how to farm or MF in D2 on this forum.
Yes, I’m specifically talking about wrath when that changed. I put about as many hours in wrath alone as I put in the previous expansions together and it’s primarily because of that change.
I like both games for different reasons.
When did I ask for any changes? That’s the funny thing I was mentioning. The very notion of not hating D3 in the D2 fanbase seems to bring out a response of “get out of here, you’re trying to ruin our game” even if no changes whatsoever were brought up. It’s like you have some sort of fight or flight response at the mention of this game, and you start to imagine people said things they didn’t.
The funny thing I observed is that I often see D3 haters asking in this very forum for things that D3 has, or even making mods for D2 that adds such things (even free respecs are a part of plugy which is a very popular mod). I, myself, made no such requests.
Probably because D3 was a wretched dumpsterfire of a game rife with both flagrantly obvious and subtle downgrades from D2. Did I mention tons of false advertisement? It is the title that really cemented the theme of new Buzzard actively !@#$ing on it’s dedicated player base. Now, here we are in D2R with more blatant false advertisement and gradually more and more D3 mechanics being added. The classic D2 experience indeed /s.
Maybe because people keep asking for them. One day I wanna go and count how many posts I see asking for stackable gems, more stash tabs, more endgame content…
Fully mapped, but any 15-30 man group can win it. But only the no-lifer fueled to do the grind will get 99 first. It isn’t crazy difficult or whatever, but who is really competing? They don’t even know how to.
PvP is for sure a meme they also think they’re super valuable to the general gameplay experience, regardless they’re still going to trounce the average player who has zero PvP experience and doesn’t know how to make a build.
My point was that even though there isn’t a massive curve it is zero or 100 sort of. Either you’re just cool rolling along slaying a few mobs or you’re near the very top. Nobody exists in the middle ground and the top dominate the bottom in whatever it is that they’re doing.
Inventory space is one thing, completely altering the skill systems, buffing everything through the roof, and adding insane new RWs is quite another. Not a second of that dev time spent on combatting the swarm of RMT bots. Can’t say I’m surprised.
As someone with a job and a life, I couldn’t care less about the leaderboards. What would you have them do about it anyways? Create a purely solo league to accommodate people like yourself? Sounds like a giant waste of development time.
Sure, how exactly are those “D3” mechanics though?
Have you not even considered the idea that D3 doesn’t hold a patent on bad game design? D3 messed up a lot of things, and D2 also messed up a lot of things (even before D3 released). The “ruining of D2” started back when they added synergies, and that was almost 10 years before D3 released. Hell, some purists will argue that the ruining of D2 started when LoD released.
You are basically trying to justify an emotional response. You had such a negative experience with D3 (as did many people and that’s fair) that you can’t even entertain the idea that not every idea from that game was a bad one.
No, I just recognize as many others do that D3 is hot garbage. This is a D2R forum, why are you surprised that people don’t want/like D3 here?
Every idea in that game was bad. Unless it changed completely after I quit, which was ~2 days after RMAH launched. There was literally nothing redeeming about that game, nothing. Okay, the best thing in the game was the treasure goblins which was a stolen monster from a SEGA Genesis game, and doesn’t really fit into a real Diablo universe. It was a false advertising cash grab that launched in pre-alpha. Like pretty much everything else new Buzzard presents; great artwork and wretched gameplay, design, bug-ridden pre alpha packaged as complete and usually heavily falsely advertised.
But D4 ain’t D2
D4 is basically D3 enhanced edition
I want those systems with the D2 quality of content
It’s like asking parmesan on your Lasagna
And you come and say “I’ve reheated Chicken&rice soup and added parmesan to it… risotto is coming soon”
Most people don’t care. It’s not because D2 is 20 years old either. Nobody cared about D3 either. Nobody cared about OW league rankings. Nobody cared about M+ rankings. Nobody cared about race to world first. The lack of competition stems from the lopsided barrier to entry, requiring literal full teams akin to running a small business, and that’s solidly Blizzard’s fault in not just this product, but all of their products; players have been “buying power” forever. As a result, the vast majority of players don’t care about any game related rankings for these products.
Play Single Player, its FAR more rewarding.