Well, I had over 2k hours into Vanilla. In all that time, I found 1 item I could get more than $5 million gold for on the GAH, and that item I was able to get $20 mil. DH main and never, ever found a 2soc Manticore with dex, never found a tri ammy, list goes on.
Most my friends often laughed at how bad my char was DPS and always dieing. Only difference was they farmed gear and spent $250-$500 a month on RMAH, and I just farmed and try to grind for deals on the GAH.
As the RMAH was their secondary source of income for D3, they most definitely designed drop rates to push players to it.
I don’t know, while D2 grind is far more than D3 current, D3V was many, many times worse than D2. Through farming and trading, I could farm Hell on D2 comfortably in 12 hours or less of game play through farming and trading. Within a week or 2, I usually had all the end game pieces for my lightning Sorc. D3V, it was many, many weeks to get to comfortably farming and never really hit that all end game pieces.
Hell, you even say:
D2, you could kill Hell Baal a day or two into the season, even on HC.
As far as itemization, I do still feel D2 is far the best and smoothest. D3V was made lottery winning hard to push players to the RMAH. Post RMAH, they knee jerked and went far, far to the other side and made drops almost comical.
Agreed. There is always a wide spectrum of what people want. I hope you get what want. Doubt it will happen as the pool of people wanting this would be very, very small and player base would drop of fast and devolve into RMT bot spamfest.
Did the journey once and I am good, hope you get your chance on a return trip.