It seemed about right to me.
The sorcerer and druid took a while with some bosses, my necro downed them a lot faster. I only really struggled when my build/strategy needed work. In particular my werebear spec druid couldn’t handle any bosses well at all but frankly that whole set of skills is just awful.
I pre-ordered, played the closed beta a couple weeks back, got a sorcerer to 20 and then canceled my pre-order. Didn’t like the MMO aspects (too much running around an empty world, boring fetch quests, slow and limited skill progression, grindy world bosses). It felt like a cheap knockoff of Guild Wars rather than a proper Diablo successor. I find Path of Exile and Grim Dawn to be the better D2 sequels, and something like Torchlight 1/2 to be better D3 alternatives. Last Epoch is worth watching too.
D4 was just bland and slow by comparison. I went into knowing nothing about it, then left the beta severely disappointed. I loved all the previous Diablos and expansions and have played pretty much every ARPG that came out on PC. D4 was one of the worst I’ve ever tried, sadly.
That said, D3 was a shit show at launch but Blizzard pretty much redid the whole game after a few months and then honed it into one of the best ARPGs ever. Maybe they can do the same with D4. Or maybe modern gamers just want something different these days and D4 is following their fashion instead of chasing the few old timers like me…
I’m playing through Grim Dawn as I wait for D4 to release.
Different strokes guess.
After playing the D4 free weekend I re-downloaded D3 and started playing it again and found it so much worse than D4.
I’m not sure what it was but it just felt so, so much worse to me.
YMMV
The necromancer minions are amazing at getting through early content but even by level 25 they were already falling behind due to their minimal gear scaling, by end game I would not be surprised if most necros didn’t just go for the passive bonuses instead.
Bingo. When I finally dropped the minions, it was such a relief because they were dropping like flies to bosses.
I didn’t really mess with the golem much. It might have fared better.
Note the necromancer minion issue has been a known issue as it were since Diablo 2. A friend and I played multiplayer, with a lot of fun class combos, and were very successful in our Paladin / Necromancer run (high level of thorns plus high levels of minions meant that every time a minion was defeated the killer died as well).
And then you got to end game. And one aoe killed all the minions with minimal effect on diablo.
We ended up doing a dual town portal back and forth with my Necromancer friend buying something, Anything off vendors to make crappy golems. It was a craptastic grind.
And D2 didn’t allow for respecs which made it face-smashingly unfun with some builds.
The unlimited respecs were one of the things that I thought made D3 a lot less fun. Designing a build used to be one of the key aspects of the game, and it was one that I enjoyed. Do I take this skill that’ll only be useful at low levels, or save the skill point for something more useful later? It was an interesting decision, and if you did save it for later, it heightened the feeling of becoming more powerful when it happened.
Though, for the record, D2 did include a limited number of respecs in later versions (one per difficulty level from the Den of Evil quest, and a way to craft more). That, I thought, was a good happy medium: If you really screwed something up, you had a chance to fix it, and you could do one build for leveling up and then switch to a different one for high-level stuff, but it wasn’t willy-nilly whenever you felt like it.
Those sorts of choices are always hard. I generally agree, in that making respec consequential makes the choices more significant. In Vanilla / Classic WoW for example, paying an increasing cost to respec each time worked (you could do it, and easily the first few times, but it hurt if you did it frequently), was pretty good.
In City of Heroes, where you had to do a RAID to respec, was way too much. Diablo 2 (at the time we were playing it) didn’t have it as an option, and IMHO having builds that are largely incapable of finishing the game is a different sort of balance issue, unless you presuppose (as most modern games seem to do) that you’ll be working from a guide to build and play.
But fun builds that are non-viable for end game content are hardly unique to Diablo 
In the current version, in addition to those, you get a free one every ten levels, and even if you use all of those, you can buy another one off of the auction house for about a million (for context, high-end items cost ten or twenty times that). In practice, the main limiting factor on respecs in CoH is that it’s so annoying to do one: In addition to having to re-choose all of your powers and slotting, you have to put everything back where you want it on your power trays.
D3 and now D4 have made it so your items are your build and you can always switch those at will, so making your skill points a big deal is counter intuitive to their design choices.
Well, then, that’s the bad design decision. Make the build about the character, not about their stuff.
Actually, that’s another thing that’s different about CoH: Enhancements (the game’s equivalent to items, though they may or may not be fluffed as such) are more-or-less permanent: You can equip a new one by deleting the old one in that slot, or you can spend a bunch of money on an unslotter to remove the old one, or you can respec to remove them all, but other than that, you’re stuck with what you have.
Agreed, but that is what they’ve gone with.
To be fair, if you remember the original Diablo, it was 100% about gear. They had different classes with unique utility skills that got more powerful over time, but otherwise you improved with the gear you found and spells you added to a spellbook (which were looted). This was all consistent with Diablo’s inspiration from the ASCII game Rogue and its many descendants (the “Roguelikes”) where you descended level by level through a random maze, fighting monsters and getting loot.
It wasn’t until Diablo II that you started to get things like skill trees that had character development outside of the loot system. But from the beginning, the series has always been about the loot. That’s in its DNA. Criticizing it as a design decision is like criticizing the Mario series for making you jump so much.
That’s all true but D2 is the most popular title in the franchise and the one most people want to emulate. It 's like bringing back donkey kong as the bad guy in Mario just because that’s how it was in the first game.
Cite? Because, as near as I can tell, Diablo III beat the hell out of Diablo II in sales (and continues to do so- 65 million copies to 16 million copies).
D2 released in 2000 and D3 in 2012, you can’t go by sales numbers alone in that long a span. The fact that the franchise was even still relevant at that point is entirely due to how much staying power D2 had, it was still being played 12 years later, it is still being played TODAY. It is still popular enough to receive an upgrade and a re-release 23 years later. D2 is the game that made the franchise.
Yes, you can’t deny that the game has staying power.
So from feedback they got during the open beta they decided to… make the necromancer minions die easier and make the buffs for not having them better. Kind of a bummer they killing are that playstyle right in the cradle, I assume they want players to be a little more active. They also nerfed the damage of corpse explosion…
That was necessary. It was ridiculous. Ridiculously awesome, and I cackled like a maniac while corpses blew up and decimated enemies, but still. It needed to be toned down a bit.