So just about everyone I know who had grown up playing the crap out of D2 is now playing their own long-anticipated copy of D3. And feelings are 50/50. I will write this without putting too many potential spoilers but if you are really worried I suggest not reading it. Just pretend you liked the post.
So, after years and years of waiting, D3 finally rolled out last week. Diablo 3 was supposed to fill in the dungeon crawler gap in many of our game collections, a constant source of dungeon crawling satisfaction at our fingertips for the next decade of our lives ('sup D2). My copy arrived that evening and I immediately created my favorite class from D2: the barbarian. Along with my companion, a wizard nostalgic for the powers of the sorceress from D2, we began our adventures. We finished the game on Normal difficulty in two nights. But, I didn't want to judge too early, least I make myself look like an ass. So we carried on, through nightmare, and into hell difficulty. And last night I threw in the towel in disgust.
1. The difficulty scaling
I still cannot believe we waltzed through normal difficulty in two nights. That included fiddling around with the gem and crafting systems, making tea, and ranting about the game along the way. It was so unbelievably easy that I can count on one hand how many times I died if I excluded all the cheap deaths from fighting Belial (who didn't even have a chance in Nightmare difficulty because he's such a gimmicky fight). I can understand having an easy difficulty setting for those why may be new to a game like Diablo. But I have not heard a single person so far tell me normal was challenging to them in any way. Everyone flew through it, along with the storyline. For me, this significantly diminished the story. We moved on to Nightmare mode and my death rate multiplied ten-fold. It baffles the mind how they could curve the difficulty like this. And no amount of gear in Normal difficulty was going to save me. Thanks to some helpful friends, I was actually slowly kitted up to sustain the large difference in difficulty. And then we went to hell. I died more times in one fight with mini-bosses than I did in the entire first difficulty! The problem, as always, is gear. No gear that I have looted on my travels to this point could save me. Auction house to the rescue! It's either that, or run Act 1 in Hell over and over and over in hopes of better gear. Why is it this way? How is it so hard, in a game that is apparently completely gear dependent, to loot a single good chest armor so a barbarian that can sustain at least a few hits before toppling over? I have not even stepped foot into Inferno. But from what I have heard and seen, Inferno difficulty will be nearly impossible solo and disgustingly over the top even in a team.
2. This is my barb. There are many, many, many like it. But this one is mine. I guess.
At the base (without gear) every single character out there is exactly the same. Don't give me that crap about how-you-play-it. That's not what I am talking about. I'm referring to the sad fact that Blizzard took away our stats and our skill trees. Attempting to usher in a new era in dungeon crawling (I suppose?), they created a glorified MOBA character building system. As you level, you unlock skills and runes. You can choose 6 skills to use in total. There is no "leveling" these skills. Instead, you unlock runes that alter their functions. Beyond your :individual: choice in skills, your gear is all you have. The only difference between your barb and that stranger's barb, is gear. The feeling that you can build a character that's somewhat tailored to your own play style is pretty much out the window.
3. Elective mode
Why does this even exist? I went through normal and half of nightmare without knowing this mode existed, which only mattered to me because it allowed me to pick two skills from a skill set instead of being forced to pick one out of each, even the shitty skill sets. Why would anyone ever NOT want this flexibility? What was the purpose?!
4. Blue is the new yellow
I'm glad I was not alone in noticing this. The topic has surfaced on D3 forums that apparently magical (blue) items are now better than rares. For a game that is so dependent on gear, this confuses me. There's nothing more disappointing than spending that few seconds charging up your identifying powers only to find the same item type of similar level is three times worse than your current blue gear. I can understand if some gear would be worse, but it seems that almost all dropped yellow gear will be outclassed by a blue and it makes no sense.
5. Frozen Waller Vortex Jailer
Holy shit, hold on a second. Now I understand that as we get higher up in difficulty, bosses need to be tougher. But it genuinely looks like Blizzard just allows bosses to grab modifiers out of a bag randomly with no thought to potentially extreme combinations. This leads to an unfortunate number of insta-deaths where kiting doesn't even play a part. In Nightmare difficulty 90% of my deaths were pretty much cheap instakills where I get stuck in that one situation where there is no escape from the punishing damage. In hell I'm just getting the shit kicked out of me regardless of what I'm fighting.
6. I shouldn't have to use the AH to win this damn game
But I have to. The gear that drops is so pathetic that you just have to go to the AH. And, with Blizzard's stunning AH uptime record, when the AH goes down there's pretty much no hope of progressing. In fact, that's where I am at RIGHT NOW. The AH finally shut down after the flood of complaints about gold and items being eaten up by an obviously broken AH system. And, disturbingly, somewhere on the forums (which is currently filled with misery, disappointment and anger), Blizzard "clarified" that "obviously" the existence of the auction house will impact item drops world wide. Essentially, what others loot will affect you, whether you like it or not. The same item isn't meant to exist 1000s of times. But what if I don't want to use the auction house to win this damn game!?
7. The story is juvenile
The story felt uninteresting and overly dramatic when truly not a whole lot was going on. At many points I felt like I was playing D2 with some new graphics and names overlaid on top. It felt stale, they took way too many things from D2 and adopted them unimaginatively for D3. There was a ton of fluff content to buffer between the three bosses you actually get to fight. I felt nothing for any of the characters. Even what little love I might have felt in some remote corner of my heart for Cain wasn't enough to make me care about the story. The mini bosses were uninteresting and not intimidating at all. There was too much whining and not enough oh-shit. The story is very much PG and a lot of old faces resurface but never in any ways that drew much of a reaction for me. Bosses just felt like annoyances that stalked you through your adventures only to meet you at the end, get trampled faster than any other group of mini bosses that came before it, and never to be seen again because...
8. Bosses don't drop shit
Blizzard took away the one thing that got tons of people playing D2 over and over and over. They killed boss runs. From Blizzards mouth, boss runs are not meant to be repeated. They want us to "explore the world" and kill the mini bosses and unique mobs along the way for our gear. Instead, after your first run through killing bosses on Normal difficulty, they never drop well ever again. I have not looted a single rare from a boss since finishing Normal difficulty. Instead, to farm gear, I will be required to randomly pick acts to replay and hope for good drops from mini bosses that may or may not be there.
9. Melee take it up the ass
The entire point about me playing the barbarian class is that I have historically gone for tanky, up close and personal characters in almost every game I play. It is my preferred role. Yet, here I am, running away like a huge sissy because there is no gear out there that I have looted or seen on auction that will allow me to properly balance my vitality, resistances, and damage. The current damage level I deal (which I feel is reasonable and to lose more of it would be absurd, I'm a barbarian ffs) with my current gear doesn't come with any vitality or resistances. As a result, I take a brave barbaric leap into instant death.
10. Falling asleep while playing
With loot drops (one of my biggest reasons to even own D3) being generally atrocious and Hell mode taking one night per act instead of normal's one night for two acts, I'm actually falling asleep trying to hack my way into Inferno. The only thing holding me back is my gear. If I could just buy my gear, I could just skip over Hell and go into Inferno. I find that to be a huge issue and that going through anything between Normal to Inferno is just a cushion to pad the playable hours of the game without any real necessity according to D3 game mechanics. Sure, I need to level up to unlock the same skills every single barb unlocks, but I can do that farming any level.
11. Act 4 isn't an act, its a finale
Not much explanation needed there. The entire storyline already feels like a thrown together idea. Act 4 felt like the act they needed to add in, but they ran out of content and ideas so they just threw some random meaningless quests at you that almost resemble a some very sub par mmo quests, in order to pad the act so it could possibly pass as a full act before the final boss fights.
12. Game is insecure, AH is unstable, exploits aren't addressed
Blizzard is fighting pirating the good old fashioned way. Force players to log in to play. For a game that forces you to rely on their servers constantly, they are not handling the load well. Let's not go into the launch day fiasco. But even now, the lag is terrible, I'm rubber banding at the worst times and the amount of complaints piling up about AH failures, hacked accounts and game destroying exploits is just embarrassing for a company of Blizzards age, experience, and fan base.
13. Glorified gambling and an extremely expensive Horadric Cube
D3 introduced a crafting system which essentially acts like a sick money sink in order for players to loot items without having to get carpal tunnel. The money sink aspect is great. But the unclear value of crafting over looting isn't. To make it worse, the game introduced an auction house. The items crafted would need to be of such high quality in order to compete on the market that it simply isn't viable.
The gem crunching is extraordinarily expensive. But, since gems are the only remaining socket-able items in D3, if you wanted higher gems, you had to do it. Every level costs more and more, and requires some level of jewel crafting commodities. To turn three level 13 gems into one level 14 gem will cost you a cool 400,000 gold. This excludes all costs from level 1-13. The thing Blizzard did do to save us all, though, was allow players to pay to remove their gems from items. Just remember, if you're going to crunch the item anyway, don't pay to remove the gems, they pop out anyway.
I'm sure there are other points I have brought up over the week. But the tl:dr is this. We're still only a week and a half after lunch date and I am already disenchanted with the game and back to playing LoL. I'm heartbroken, to be honest. I looked forward to D3 to be a big brother to D2 but I find myself missing the days of D2, attributes, skill trees, rares, uniques and sets that actually made me jump for joy when they dropped.
So sometime last month this game called Pokémon Go was released into the wild and app stores blew up and Niantic managed to bring the global gaming community together to support each other while waiting for servers to stop burning.
The one advantage of being in a rather ill-tempered area like the middle of DC is that you don't get as many people who stop or meander in the streets as they catch Pokémon. Folks familiar with the city know to step aside or risk getting to know what the wrong side of someone else's bed looks like.
