My beef with the previous version of Diabolo is that, as a newbie, unless you rigidly followed a formula given to you by someone else, you invariably created a not-very-viable character because you had no way of knowing where one should put one’s skill points.
Your algebraic interpretation works against itself. Adding points to make a skill better does not really create depth. The only gear really worth anything became +skills gear, since synergy bonuses and +skills ruined the chance anyone would ever take more than one rank in a non-optimal skill. In every competitive build, you would have maybe three skills you maxed and a variety of others you took one point in. That was it.
In D3 you improve skills by combining them with other skills in a creative and often interesting way. My hell solo build at the moment is Arcane Torrent (Distortion), Hydra (Arcane Hydra), Familiar (Sparkflint), Magic Weapon (Force Weapon), and Temporal Flux (and two other passives not particularly relevant). These synergize with each other beautifully. They provide additional massive % damage (Sparkflint and Force Weapon are basic boosters, Distortion increases damage from all Arcane sources by a whopping 15%, thereby affecting my Hydra and Arcane Torrent) and they proc knockbacks and slows (knockback from Force Weapon and slow from Temporal Flux).
You don’t just stack points to get effects, you do some alchemy to tease out ways skills can interact with each other to improve. This is a fun build, sure, but it’s no low Vit Force Armor (which just got nerfed) nor is it the now-dominant Critical Mass build that removes most cooldowns altogether. Now that is synergy.
This system is richer and deeper, and the gameplay itself has far more moving parts. Unfortunately, the player just has to think a bit in order to see this. Having a large set of possible alternatives is far less useful than having a large set of feasible alternatives.
Hmph, next thing you’ll be telling me I shouldn’t choose skills based on which animation I like the best. 
/proud to be a D3 noob
Yeah, but that’s not who you are or even what you do. That’s just what you happen to do right now.
Imagine a movie with a cast of highly-trained experts undertaking a difficult mission:
Ace: Expert in marksmanship, kung fu, computers, mechanics, languages, confidence schemes, or forgery, depending on his current mood.
Dahlia: Expert in marksmanship, kung fu, computers, mechanics, languages, confidence schemes, or forgery, depending on her current mood.
Cockney John: Expert in marksmanship, kung fu, computers, mechanics, languages, confidence schemes, or forgery, depending on his current mood.
Little Bobby: Expert in marksmanship, kung fu, computers, mechanics, languages, confidence schemes, or forgery, depending on his current mood.
It seems kind of ridiculous to call them “characters,” and the audience has no reason to expect anything in particular from any of the characters.
I don’t know how the D2 skill system works, so I may be wrong, but it sounds like the “depth” in this case is whether or not you want to add points to go from 3% fire resist to 5% fire resist. Stuff that incrementally increases the effectiveness of skills, but not how they work, is that right?
If so, the runes of D3 allow much more depth. They fundamentally modify how skills work and synergize and how you’d use them. Being able to use a rune that fundamentally alters how a skill works is more customization than going from 3% fire resist to 5% fire resist.
That’s not correct algebra. You don’t double your skill choices via runes, you quintuple them (I think), since there are (I think) 5 different runes for each skill.
And whereas D2 gives you 20 different configuration for each skill, D3 gives you millions for most skills, since most skills base their damage off your weapon damage. Didn’t D2 give you static amounts of damage for most skills? That’s far less rich than D3’s method of basing damage off weapon damage.
D2: Each class had three ‘trees’, each of which had about 10 different abilities in it. You got a point at each level up and some additional points for a few quests as you went through the game on each difficulty level, to the point where you eventually would have 110 points to spend. Each point that you put in an ability was permanently spent, at least at the beginning; later on, they added in a limited number of respec quests. You could put up to 20 point in each ability, and the abilities could be further boosted by item mods (so you would often have an item that gave +2 to all Amazon skills, or +3 to all skills in the Bow and Crossbow skill tree). Each point in an ability raises damage, effect radius, or something like that, but doesn’t radically change the basic function of the ability. Additionally, in the later patches of the game, they added synergies to the skills - so if you put extra points in the lower level lightning arrow that you never used once you hit level 30, those points might still give you +10% damage to the higher level lightning arrow.
This had a ton of advantages and disadvantages, most of which have already been covered ad nauseum. My take? The D2 system was almost certainly better for long term replayability, but I personally prefer the D3 system for short term combat awesomeness. They’re both great games, and if D3 is probably a little less great, there are a ton of other reasons for that than the skill system. YMMV.
There really is a whole lot of rose colored glassedness with regards to D2. D3 is clearly the far superior game, the biggest difference is that you are 12 years older.
Well, I don’t yet play D3, so I can’t be sure exactly what you’re seeing on the D3 side. But most skills in D2 gave you % damage that modified your weapon damage. So you’d get +120% damage from your Barb’s Sword mastery and +102% damage from his Whirlwind, and his 10-42 damage sword would then do (1+1.25+1.02)*(10 to 42) damage when Whirling with that particular sword, hence 33-137. You’d do more, or less, with a different sword.
Points Against D3, Exclusive of Skill Systems:
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D2 has already been through a full expansion and a bunch of other content heavy patches. It’s a much deeper game in that sense (more levels, more classes, an additional act, rune words, charms, etc etc). Pretty much a fact.
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D2 has a better aesthetic and ‘feel’ for the levels. D3, likely because of the transition to 3D, doesn’t feel as gothic/dark as D2 or (especially) D1. Opinion.
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D3 has a massive problem with its item economy. The legendary vs. rare issue (most of the best items have no unique character). The depth issue (ties into the skill system thing a little, but also generally about how few modifiers are genuinely useful in D3). The auction house issue (ruining a lot of the loot chase). Opinion, strictly speaking, but almost universally held.
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D3 has always-online issues. If you are playing near or during peak times, you are getting 300ms or higher ping times regardless of your connection. The game is still new enough that a non-trivial percentage of its existence has been marked by downtime (whether of the entire game, achievements, or auction house). If you don’t have internet for any reason, you cannot play the game at all. Fact.
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The story in D3 is bad, verging on painful. Okay, D2 wasn’t exactly literature either, but it was better than this. Opinion.
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There are a ton of difficulty balance issues in D3, both between areas and between classes. Blizzard has a good record of working this stuff out over time, but right now there are a lot of things that are kind of a mess. Again, opinion strictly speaking, but widely held and agreed with.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have played something like 60 hours of D3 over the last week and a half. I love the game. However, there are a lot of issues with the game, and if you are comparing D3 to D2 in its current state, you can legitimately say that D2 has some advantages, enough that frankly I think it’s a better game once you get rid of that New Game Scent. This particularly holds for the solo player, as the higher difficulty levels are massively better balanced between classes in D2 at this time. I say this as someone who spent several hours in D2 about two weeks ago to get ‘in the mood’ for D3; it absolutely still holds up. I wouldn’t blame anyone who liked D3 more either, as there have been a lot of positive changes as well. It can go either way.
This is after years and years of tweaking, though. I’m sure D3 will get that sort of love from Blizzard, and until proven otherwise, I have faith that most of these issues will get worked out.
The biggest difference is for the casters; sorc damage in particular had very little to do with the equipment you were wearing, other than the +skill bonuses that were oh-so-crucial. I don’t know if basing your spell damage directly off of your wand/staff DPS is better, but it’s certainly different. I’d have preferred the sort of hybrid approach that is more common in these games, where a staff can give you +% to spell damage, but that’s really just an abstraction of what D3 ended up doing, anyways. It just feels sort of clunky for the casters at times.
The graphics and gameplay are superior, but the story and dialog… not so much. Especially when you consider the time and resources Blizzard had available for Diablo 3. The writing, to be frank, sucks. It’s childish, incoherent, and cliché-ridden. It’s bad even for a video game, which is really saying something.
FWIW, I only played through D2 once, when it first came out, so I have no attachments in this fight. I remember the original diablo games did better in terms of atmosphere - the world was seemed detailed and interesting, the music was much better (d3’s music is unobtrusive and forgettable), and just a lot of little atmospheric touches, The worlds had more personality and character. I don’t remember enough to compare the gameplay.
I’m wondering if maybe all the writers left Blizzard. The same thing happened in Starcraft. The same flaws in the dialogue and plotting can be seen in Starcraft 2.
I’m not saying Diablo 1/2, Starcraft 1, or WC1/WC2 were epic tomes to be revered forever, but they seemed to be reasonably well plotted and written.
The additional act is a big component, especially since A5 was so very good. But Runewords were an utter abomination and damn near destroyed the game. The concept was fantastic but the execution was so clumsy, it is a miracle D2 survived at all.
This is absolutely not a universally held opinion. I think that itemization has taken a great leap in the right direction. The AH has also been a lifesaver.
Not all mods will ever be optimal for simple builds. This is needed to sustain the treasure explosion. It is also a much better thing that blues are so serviceable. There are no Burizons in D3, and god willing, there won’t be. With the advent of the AH and such flexible gear, people can run a huge number of non-canonical builds supported by cheap gear they purchase at the AH. When the game starts to feel a little more challenging, spend some money and fill in your gaps. This can only be a good thing. It also means people don’t have to waste a lot of time with pointless and unrewarding farming on Normal or Nightmare. They can try out whatever builds they want for cheap. No build at the lower levels is off-limits to anyone, no matter how casual a player.
There are some pretty serious issues with Inferno at the moment. No surprise, since it was never tested. But this has got to be a high priority for Blizzard given the RMAH, so I suspect they are gathering a lot of data and will be tinkering with it soon.
I think this is a great articulation and is absolutely true. D3 does need plenty of tinkering, and the economy needs a chance to equilibrate. But the game is built on a very solid and enjoyable foundation of gameplay and incentives, and I think it will get progressively better.
I sure needed all of those examples to understand your point.
Suppose you made a movie about Cockney John. Let’s say the movie showed him training hard at kung fu. For three solid hours the audience emphasizes with John and desperately wants him to succeed in mastering the Leaping Dragon Murderizing Strike. Awash in triumphal music, John throws off the training wheels and bursts forth from the Rogue Encampment. He tries the strike out for the first time on a real opponent in Hell. He promptly dies. The film ends.
That would be the summary of a film of most D2 characters. And these movies would suck. Fortunately, this is a video game so we don’t have to subject the agony of failed D2 builds on anyone else. The fact that my failed builds have “character” does not comfort me. I don’t want to make a movie; I want to play a video game effectively.
Am I the only one who thinks that the visual atmosphere for D3 is far superior to D2, and does a good job of recapturing the original? Or that the storylines for all three are about equally trite?
Nope. I think the writing and the story quality is about the same. For me, D2 is the most generally memorable. But that’s just because I have played it literally thousands of times. The first few hundred times, I probably thought “not even death can save you from ME!!!” was pretty retarded before its light-heartedness grew on me. The visuals in D3 are crisper and higher quality. I don’t think anything was lost atmospherically. I am perhaps somewhat less prone to being affected than I was when I played the original for the first time. But I must have been 18 or something when that occurred.
I disagree with your implicit characterization of D2’s skill system, and the assertion that D3’s is deeper, and I think my illustration will back me up on that point. But you’re not convinced, and I really don’t care. Godspeed.
You’re not the only one.