The Diablo 2 Blueprint

PC General Discussion
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One thing that I haven’t been able to understand about Blizzard is their blatant disregard for utilizing the blueprint that was Diablo 2. Now, hear me out. Diablo 2 wasn’t perfect, but ask any or most Diablo fans, and they will tell you that those were our most fond days as Diablo players.

  1. Diablo 2’s lobby.

When Diablo 3 was announced and finally released, I was shocked to see that there was no lobby where you could see everyone’s characters, chat with one another, browse and create games with customized names, level restrictions, and descriptions, as well as leaderboards.

With Diablo 4, they had a chance to make this a reality but chose not to utilize this beloved tool. Why? Beats me.

  1. Itemization.

In my opinion (and this may be biased due to my knowledge of Diablo 2’s item catalog), Diablo 2 has one of, if not the best, itemization of any ARPG I’ve played. When an item drops in Diablo 2, not only are rares actually rare, but uniques and set items are VERY rare (good ones anyway). When an Occulus, Shako, Arreat’s Face, Grandfather, Windforce, Ring, Amulet, etc. would drop, you got excited because you knew what you were potentially getting and how much value this item would have in trade rooms to work for the gear you wanted.

  1. Trading.

Blizzard inherently has this notion that things are just bad and that you don’t want them. Says who? Where? Why did we not want trading? We do. Diablo 2 players are not unfamiliar with trading; we embrace it. The act of trading is actually kind of fun, involving communication, bargaining, negotiating, etc. You never knew what you might get from a trade, and it was kind of like a scavenger hunt (just like itemization).

  1. Bosses meant something.

When you fought a boss in Diablo 2, you might eventually get them on farm, and it may not be such a big deal. But soloing Duriel as a barbarian? Do you know how many times people have died to that chill effect? On top of him being a one speedy demon hitting like a truck. Those were the good old days. Hell, just about every boss was a nightmare for a barb, honestly. In Diablo 4, however, these bosses don’t feel like, well, bosses. This can be fixed, but they need to address it.

  1. INFINITE NUMBERS.

Logically, eventually you can identify any number as high or low, for example, hitting for 150million could be big, but so could hitting for 15k. Numbers essentially don’t matter, but eventually it becomes a bit ridiculous, or at least it feels that way for me. It’s easier to keep track of the true meaning behind how much you hit for. Right now, you can clear most content by hitting for around 300-500k. Anything above that for the majority of the game just feels like overkill. Just scale the numbers back. There’s nothing wrong with starting people out hitting for 1-4 damage, then 13-48, 300-700, 1,500-2,500, capping out at maybe 10-15k. Blizzard is trigger-happy with the big numbers, and it just becomes ridiculous to see these huge numbers where you can’t even keep track of them anymore and having no sense of what they really mean.

  1. Monster level scaling.

Everyone has already mentioned this, but I was looking forward to potentially going back to lower-level areas for revenge or fun while progressing through the Fractured Peaks. That was until I realized that level scaling was a thing and that it wouldn’t happen the way I was thinking. I can still go back to World Tier 1, sure, but it’s not quite the same as being in Nightmare at level 46 and going back to Normal to farm Mephisto, Diablo, or Baal a few times before continuing your Nightmare difficulty playthrough. I’m not sure how Blizzard could recreate the replay value of D2 difficulties in D4, but there has to be a way.

  1. Skill Tree and power progression.

Maxing out skills to 20 points felt good. When you finally maxed out an ability, you could feel the difference. Every point made you stronger, and that normally reflected in your gameplay as well as being able to see the exact amount of damage you did in the character stat menu. As people have stated, in Diablo 4, you just feel weaker as you progress, which does happen in Diablo 2 as well, but not until you reach Nightmare/Hell difficulties, where you obviously face a significant skill and gear check.

I wrote this very abruptly on a work break, but these are just some quick thoughts I’ve had about the glory days of Diablo 2 compared to Diablo 4 today. I love the Diablo IP and want to see it do well, but it’s tough seeing not only all the criticism of the game, but the reality that a lot of it is true.

Also, these are just my opinions and I’m curious to see if people generally agree or think that some of these designs in Diablo 2 were crap and I’m insane.

29 Likes
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I didnt really read this beyond where you said, more or less, that Blizzard should have made this game like D2. Im glad this is D4 and not some far-gone rehash. Many of us wanted a new game and many of us got what we wanted.

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I think it’s more about the features they take away from the game and give nothing in return.
If they remove the inventory will you also say it’s a new game, unique because it doesn’t have this feature like the others?

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“WE” ?

like the one hundred + players that liked a post promoting “no trade” here or on reddit ?

Also, there is trading in D4 , simply not unique / legendary because just like the devs said “some items should only be earned through playing” (which in my opinion is a good way of thinking especially since seasons and hardcore are a thing)

you can go to WT1 and WT2 , once you get to over lv 50+ they won’t scale to you anymore and the more you progress the more you’ll get that feel.

blizzard just messed up a bit the scaling, scaling isn’t bad by any mean it allow every region to be farmable.
but you shouldn’t feel less powerful by gaining levels.

i don’t agree in the trading thing , outside of that im ok with the rest.
and i think too that D2 and D3 skill tree (D3 being the runes) were better , they felt more…personalized in my opinion : i did like quiet a bit the D3 runes making each skill personalized.
on D4 the passives of the skills don’t change them much.

but D4 try to do it’s own thing , just like D3 did it’s own thing who knows let’s way a few updates and seasons.

and both D2 and D3 had a pretty empty endgame at release.
it’ll get better overtime.
in my opinion they shouldn’t have left things from D3 etc… for later (end game etc…) they should have made it available from the start and come up with new things afterwards.

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:musical_note: Rose tints my world keep me safe from my trouble and pain :musical_note:

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What a bunch of nonsense.
Itemization was better because items are rare and very rare? you think that’s what itemization means?
Also you think the problem with the skill tree is that you can put only 5 points instead of 20? why not 30? wouldn’t that be better?

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And bring back teleport with no cd. Give us Enigma at level 2 for everyone so we can be done with the game faster.

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What features have they removed from the game?

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To go further beyond this, it was not just the lobby missing but the game creation and player limit. D3 introduce a less social game, and D4 continues that further into creating an almost anti-social game. I am sure a few who complain about the game being boring may directly or indirectly be connecting this with the current state of affairs. We see other players, but we no longer can interact with them.

YES! D3’s items were an insult, D4 has only slightly improved to 1/16 that of D2. I remember finding a BK or SOJ in D3 and just questioning whether to even pick it up to salvage it. Yes, salvage. Would anyone in their right mind have done that in D2? Found a Windforce in D3…never used it, but do remember how dramatically my game changed when I got one in D2.

D3 introduced the OMG lets just have crazy whacky random stats on every item which in reality meant OMG look at all the crap I have to pick up and junk. I have been asking this for years, was there every truly any item that someone wanted, or was it just a RNG of hey look, decent stat roll. D2’s item database was perfect, each item would have a small set of affixes that would be random but within a set range. Some better than others, some not. It also meant finding a good average Shako meant you were happy, but to see another one eventually drop meant you would want to quick ID it as that drop meant something too.

Finding some items meant something whether you wanted to use it or not, because even if not then it had trade value which leads to…

This I do miss so much because it was the removal in D3 that I believe destroyed some of the Diablo communities. I was a daily visitor of Incgamers Diablo site & a very active trader. For a while almost everyone I knew in game or played with were other players met at that forum and who I traded with. Trading was the perfect endgame, and it eventually made it so my characters just went out and played the game. Never forced to have to do countless MF runs, I just needed to pick up gems and misc stuff along the way. To think that a common 4 socket white had value!

This was an immature response introduced by D3 devs. They appealed to a low common denominator for children. Nevermind that your toon who did a whopping 5 BILLION damage still was not killing anything, that number was big and looked cool! Meanwhile my Zealer Pally did something like 20k and would slice through an Uber in seconds.

This may be where Blizzard messed up the most in D3, and again in D4. Skills meant something, finding items with skill points meant something. Even low quality early drops meant something if it had that +1 to skill. It was the single most important feature of your character whether it was a Pally, a Necro, or a Sorc. That +1 meant something, give it a few levels and now +3 and your character has changed. Get to high level, max out skill points and see how things dramatically change when you find that item that now has +2 or +3.

All in all Ydoc you really did hit the nail on the head multiple times here, and I am in 100% agreement with almost everything you wrote. You and I should have been the target audience for D3, but instead the devs were arrogant and wanted to create their own game and ignore us. What did they create but a *****show of a game. D4 devs I fear followed the same path, they simply did not care to understand WHAT made D2 such a classic game.

The ONLY thing D2 players wanted back in the day was a D3 with simply more content and better graphics, but not a reinvention of the wheel. And what they gave us was a square wheel. We had hopes for D4, promised to be the true successor and that we could just ignore D3 ever existed. Sadly we are finding out that this is not the case. It is an OK game that I see getting bored with quickly, and will simply never be that same game as D2 that I will login for years after and be an active player.

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true still one of the best if not the best in genre

i’m fully support open trading. But if you don’t want it - it just make 2 leagues: SSF and trading.

not actually

yeah and infinite nubmers always hard to balance. Pvp is literally none-existent in those type of games.

here we have only lazy developers, so ofc scaling is bad but i doubt that we’ll se anything w/o it. They even add scaling to D2 as TZm tho i found that this was actually good.

unfortunatelly this game balanced around D3 skills and passives. So now we have only pseudo-tree skill. Maybe somehow they’ll changed it.

And i actually add that D3/D4 combat system is not suitable for ARPG.

Cooldowns are bad. Resourse generator system is bad too, mana was better, still D2 system was not perfect too.

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I mean the features that other games have. Chat, interface customization, option to filter items to pick up, LFG, more events etc.

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What evidence do you have to support this assertion?

D2 has a large number of fans but is it really the largest iin the diablo franchise?

Trading is problematic as it opens up RMT and results in lower drop rates. I much prefer finding my own gear.

D4 has a serious public party matchmaking problem. D3 is far superior and D2 is even better.

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:thinking:

I feel too strong. I can basically hold down left click and clear an entire dungeon while eating a sandwich in my other hand. The open world feels too easy to the point I want a world tier 5. I can face tank a Butcher 10+ levels higher than me on a Sorc (a not-tanky class).

This complaint is very odd to me. My sorc is level 70 and can clear level 100 mobs. What are you doing that you feel you are weaker?

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Many of you are talking about the bad itemization of d4, essentially the same as d3.

However, it seems to me that many of you overlook the fact that it is impossible to build a good itemization on combat mechanics of D3, no matter how hard you try. Why?

Because for the functioning of your builds you always need a cdr, resource generation, crit chance, etc. You will never have, for example, LL, because you have 10k hp and 1 million damage from crit, the same applies to FCR(none existent stat here) and etc. I am sure that the itemization that is now in D4 is perhaps the best that can be built on the D3 mechanics.

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I concur… I am so glad this is not D2 remake… They took the best part of D2 which is the atmosphere… and left all the other D2 crap in the trash where it belongs

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You’re just blinded by nostalgia. D2 at release had no endgame and was full of cheaters, botters and goldsellers.

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Nothing changed 23 years later.

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Then you missed a lot. I would read it.

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Except d2r rereleased and scores MUCH higher than this game.

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This game tries to be D2 much more than D3. You D2 super fans should be happy in general. The game does have a huge lack of content problem, but welcome to AAA gaming in 2023…

1 Like