Gold pick up is awesome.
Instanced loot is mostly awesome, though it also gave them the ability to automatically bind items to accounts.
Shared stash is also awesome, but technically the stash size dropped from infinite.
Self resurrecting followers would be awesome if followers were useful for more than an oculus circle and unity ring.
Stamina really wasn’t an issue past Normal act 3.
Reduced size of items - again, awesome.
Arrows stack infinitely - a minor improvement. 350 arrows last a long time, especially with how often they dropped.
Health globes… completely unnecessary. Potions in D2 had no cooldown. if you had it, you could use it.
An improved hotbar - emphatically no. sure, you can use skills now without having to select them first, but you can only use 6. this does not add diversity, it only removes complexity.
Indicator for items… how hard was it to see a unique or set item? They weren’t uncommon, but you almost always knew when and where to check if they dropped.
Adventure mode, etc… we had most of adventure mode from the start in d2. this just re-added a feature that was taken away for some reason (to put a spotlight on the awful story, perhaps?). sure, there weren’t bounties, but you target farmed the bosses or areas that corresponded in level to the items you wanted.
which brings me to the main point of my post… difficulty.
There is NO end difficulty to this game outside GR150
That is insane. You have the original campaign mode, bounty mode (which was initially where you farmed rift keys), and rifts (where you farmed gear/GR keys), which are all now relegated to speed 1shotting BORING farm mode, because the blizzard dev team decided in their infinite wisdom to put all of the most important rewards inside an “endless” dungeon.
- Having a reachable endgame goal is important.
Every ARPG aside from Diablo 3 has an endgame that is not only reachable, but also not insanely difficult to play. Torment 16 is not endgame, it is a required farm fest that has no actual value other than to lock GR keys behind. - Endless dungeons are awesome, when they are not required.
We wanted an endless dungeon for fun to see how strong our characters could be. There should never have been leaderboards or overinflated experience gain from them, and we have been seeing the resulting destruction ever since they became the meta. Now, it’s GRs or nothing. Balance means you’re locked into the flavor of the season if you want to be efficient, and they have to either nerf or buff builds as they go to add some kind of variety, which leads to the current insane power creep.
Diablo 2, Borderlands (any of them), Torchlight, etc all have one thing in common. There is a set endgame difficulty that is not impossible to surpass, and if you choose to min/max your gear, you can make it fairly easy. You can’t really do this at all in Diablo 3, and that’s the main cause of frustration for most ARPG players.