Breakpoints in D2 could be specified in some Almanac in-game for example. If you have to look things up on the Internet the game is already failing at reaching bigger audience since the majority of players aren’t hardcore gamers digging the details outside of the game.
Yeah that is why it should be easy to play within reason as D2 is. You do not need knowledge of breakpoints to beat the game and such mathematical things. Only if you really want to min/max a build and get fast and efficient on command players 8 you ned to understand such things, it is completely optional though and not required. Another thing is that D2 always had dead end builds that could not really work, then again I always believed they just as Duriel were intentional. The game was intended for people who were challenged by that rather as put off.
Well of course a problem became when tooltips started to give wrong information on skills after changes in the game, making game harder to play as it should have been. Last patch D2R remedied some of that.
I can’t comment on D2R or DI since I don’t support games with botters, RMT and P2W.
Just from reading stuff on forums it looks like D2R is doing fine.
You can push any build on Normal. For NM/Hell you can brick your character, but back in 2000 that was the dominating design choice among many games.
The randomness continues to be there.
It just allows for a bit of item targeting. Like Smart loot does. Except smart loot 1) forces the item targeting no matter if you want it or not and 2) only works for a small subset of items and affixes.
If you can craft specific items you take away from the random loot from monsters, similar to what trading does.
If the crafted items are random, then it just replaces items from monsters.
Nothing at all wrong with undesirable affixes. As you say, that is an important part of the design.
Something wrong with the game deciding to drop more of those undesired affixes “just because”. Let the player decide if they want more or less of certain affixes and items, than the default averages.
Let the player decide if they think the affix is useless or not. No affix should be 100% useless to a class.
There should never be such a thing as a free bow slot. Let people place the weapon (or shield) that they want in each of their weapon slots.
Having multiple weapon sets to switch between is fine. Like in D2 for example. But if a Rogue want to have melee weapons in both, let them.
Nor should they have rogue affixes. That doesnt mean a rogue might not want to use them regardless.
Not if you want to drop more (relatively) bows than all those other weapons?
If that is what you like to do. You do you.
You are more than welcome to do a poll if you want to.
Sure, I’ll bet 
Not that there is any math in D3 to despise. Just follow the Green Arrow after all.
Yep.
The lying part was clearly the issue then, not the math part. All relevant game information should be available in-game.
Speaking of information; add a combat log, and a personal dmg meter (never shared to the group). That way players can test out stuff, and directly see the results. No math needed at all.
Indeed.
Can we at least also agree that Breakpoints are not complex math. It is addition and subtraction. It doesnt get more basic than that. Even for a 10 year old.
But as for in-game information, the stat sheet could even tell you how far you are from the nearest breakpoint, and what it means.
Apparently math was not needed after all.
It is needed to understand the concept of the game. Random clicking on skills won’t hook you to the game as progressing through the quests isn’t the hook.
The claim that you only have a choice between “understanding math” or “click randomly” is laughable at best.
Not a single Diablo game, or A-RPG in general, has ever worked like that.
You either understand the rules/concept of the game or you click randomly. There isn’t anything in-between.
Related to Chess: It’s like moving figures intentionally at places or just randomly.
What a complex Math creates is a situation where the player wants to do something intentionally (improve his build in a way he wants), but fails due to not being able to comprehend the “game language” and interact with the game properly.
For example, if an aRPG was AI driven - with player skills evolving just by the way being played - you wouldn’t need any Math at all since there wouldn’t exist any barrier between the player and the game language.
True, but I kept it a simple example and did not add frame rates for attacks, block rates and another few nice things like desynchs between client/server that could lock you in a cooldown that could influence your damage taken and given even if everyone thought it was a bug, in a recent talk of dev D2R about design decisions they took he told it was actually a desynch that worked as intended, making it kinda hard for them to solve and took some creativity. You could more or less intuit those while playing and that was enough for beating the game on all levels, but if really wanted to min/max you needed to know a bit more or more exactly how it worked. 
This is complete nonsense.
Absolutely nobody knew the entire game when they started at first. Nor did they click randomly.
You can make decisions, without full knowledge.
You live in some weird black/white world.
Yeah, and just because you are not Carlsen, or a super computer, it doesn’t mean you are moving pieces randomly.
You are failing (on purpose I assume) to grasp the simplest concept of ‘easy to learn, hard to master’.
Any of them required anything beyond basic math?
Indeed. Wasn’t even just Easy to learn. Easy to play in its entirety pretty much (well, without the part about the game is lying to you, of course).
Tbh, one could play and do quite fine in D2, while ignoring even breakpoints, despite how central those were.
Just as you can do quite fine in D3 just following arrows and having the most fundamental understanding of math (such as: 800% > 10%).
D3 “lies” (or at least hides very basic information) about whether numbers scale additive or multiplicative. But no amount of math will help you without that information regardless.
True I did add a little edit though to my last post you might find interesting: P. It is not super complex math, but you do need the knowledge and time investment to find out though or go by intuition and be wrong once in a while. 
Nothing wrong with that, you learn from failing.
I am not talking about making optimal decisions. I am talking about understanding the concept of Diablo vs. clicking randomly.
To understand the concept with choosing items to enhance your character strengths you need to understand the Math.
For example, roll the dice on what to equip and click on level up when you play D2 and you’ll see the difference with knowing the game.
To me (and you it sounds like), that is a pretty big part of what makes something a game 
Learning by doing.
How boring would it be if you understood it all, the moment you loaded the game the first time.
Yeah, it is why I always agree with everyone saying going through a game for the first time blindly is the best experience of that game you will ever have, that you never get fully back later. It may not be your best run or most complete though.
It is also why I dislike it when games are released buggy as hell, your first experience suffers and you never can get that back as a player even with faultless plays later. You already know things then.
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ARNGs will offer that constantly one day. If you wonder what aRNG is - aRPG that has private meta depending on one’s account (for example - my fireball and your fireball deal different damage each Season, and that is for each item, skill etc, refreshed each Season).
You dont need to know ANY math in D3 to understand the concept of the game.
Which incomprehensible math problems is a lvl 1 player running into?
Why then do you keep talking about optimal decisions?
Someone can make non-random decisions on what to equip, and which skills to pick, without full knowledge about the game. Or even with less than 0.001% knowledge of the game.
And in D3, the pretty green arrow tells you what to do. Just in case you were having a breakdown over having to think for yourself for a second.
Neither D1, D2 or D3 required any substantial knowledge about the game before playing, allowing you to make meaningful decisions as you were playing. As well as progressing with those decisions.
You could definitely make an unviable character in the long run (although fairly impossible until Hell). But that is also part of what makes a game a game; you have win conditions (quite loose in an A-RPG), and lose conditions.
But you could also make completely playable characters, for Hell, without knowing much about the game. Knowing that monsters had immunities in Hell would probably be the most important piece of information in the entire game. And that is not math based.
And we are back to the real reason for your trolling.
Maybe, still the story and mechanics will be already known, it will help though making it fresher when they pull that off. In future who knows they will even give more story and immersion, exploration to a player like me as endgame and opposite for true lovers of endgame. You can take that concept way further if you wish.
To be fair, randomizers are as old as gaming pretty much. Or, at least quite old Dont need to wait for The Future™ for that.
Also pretty bad game design, outside of a small subset of players. Not that there is anything at all wrong with targeting a small subset of players.
Yeah but personalizing it takes it to another dimension, both in the nice to have options as the scary options. Done well you target the greatest amount of players with a good story and then personalize it based upon preferences, weaknesses and strengths. Games do it now with brands and franchises often turning bland since try to serve too many masters, but then you could do it in one game on one engine and one server.
If you don’t understand the Math you’ll brick your character at some point and your fun will end. For some that will happen sooner, for example in D2 (Andy, Duriel), for other later (Hell).
The point is that the aRPG Math is the aRPG Alphabet. Players learn the letters then how to write words and sentences. When the Math is complex, it would turn off some players to learn the letters even. When the Math isn’t that complex they’ll learn the words, but will have trouble constructing sentence. When the Math is simplified the players would write sentences without problems.
Simply not true.
That is quite the claim.
People might simply decide to start a new character and see if they can get further next time, learning from the mistakes they made.
Might have thought someone who has previously confessed his love for certain Rogue-lites/likes could understand such a concept.
Which the math isn’t…
Turning off anyone who wanted more than a dumbed down game where you are not allowed to learn and progress along the way.
Easy to Learn, Hard to Master is one of the best game design concepts around. Should stick to it. And I wish Blizzard would remember it too.
You can play these games just fine without learning either complex math, or the metaphorical alphabet.
You are creating some fictional story about the Diablo series, that never was.