My review: Playing d2 from 2000 to 2011 off and on, addicted at some points etc.
After playing the game for a bit and talking to a bunch of people who have also completed the game I have a few hard feelings with the game.
Inferno is “hard” but menial, repetitive and boring. You are screwed if you solo and run into specific types of champion mobs such as molten for melee which require extensive farming for resist gear to actually be able to do your job correctly. If you are a caster every single fight is kite to survive including boss fights.
Item scaling and randomization is made purely for the point of profit for blizzard. There are FAR too little stats and far too much randomization of the values of these stats on items, you can only do so much. Legendary items are out-classed completely by even magic items from inferno (minus a few), and there are rings that drop in normal difficulty that are better than any legendary ring in the game. These items need to be re-named “attempts at nostalgia” because for the most part the good ones have nostalgic names but are STILL out-classed.
Boss fights suffer the same sort of fate as WoW’s boss fights do. Don’t stand in fire, don’t get hit by tracking missiles and don’t tank and spank in every phase. The bosses in this game are basically WoW bosses with a diablo atmosphere and lore behind them, azmodan’s fight is no different than two of the bosses in WoW but together, belial? same thing.
Bosses in general are scripted and actually easier to do than many of the champion/rare mobs that can spawn while going through the acts later in the game.
Demon hunter is the easiest class to solo with because when played right you simply don’t get hit let alone die, monks and barbs come in at a close second with wizards and witch doctors being the bottom of the barrel (from my experiences playing with friends as well as others i know of).
The reason there is no PVP in this game is because simply put one attack can do up to 40,000 damage or more and people just don’t have that much life yet and won’t till they have tons of vitality from act 4 inferno items due to the scaling, also magda’s fight takes place in one of the pvp arenas they advertised which makes me go to think that without some HEAVY changes like things doing 5-10% of their actual damage it will be extremely hard to actually PVP and have fun due to some of the abilities and how they work (archon, monk dodging/heal bubble, barbarian multiple stuns etc).
The game is the definition of a dungeon crawler and blizzard knows that people want the best items in the game and they get 30% for people who want to sell items and get the cash to use elsewhere, it is also taxable income. This is the main point of the game, slight difficulty to make it have some replay value and a plethora of farming to max out your character’s soloing ability to get more items to sell. In my opinion the game is good for what it is, but not something you should look to dump all your time into unless more grinding than Aion/WoW/Everquest is what you want to do with your time only to HOPE you get something good rather than be guaranteed to eventually get what you want like in those games.
Lots of people might disagree with me, but I think that unless you read the books and really enjoyed the lore of the series as well as loving the purity of this sort of dungeon crawler it isn’t the game for you. The lore is what kept me interested in normal, the rest of the game i would not have continued if it wasn’t for friends playing and now I might not even bother with that since it is even more repetitive than any MMO I’ve played (yes I know it isn’t an MMO).
