(I don’t know why I can only put the topic on console discussion…)
Diablo 3 vs Diablo 2
Improvements
You don’t need tome of town portal
you don’t need a belt of potions
Finding health globes on the way
Overall view: fights happening in the background
Dropped magic items stay visible on the ground
The pet that picks up your money
Interacting scenery (traps, trunks that fall down, chandeliers that can be dropped on enemies)
The goblin with all the goodies that you can kill from time to time.
Cursed chests are a fun challenge
When a named enemy arrives, it is announced by the character.
Deteriorations
Levelling
Diablo 2 it was quite difficult to level. It took a long time between levels. Lvl 15 after act 1 (with redoing some dungeons to get extra exp). In this way you used the skills available at the level quite a lot before getting a new/better one.
Diablo 3 levelling goes way too fast. Sometimes several times in the same dungeon. I reached Lvl 37 after act 1 (without redoing anything). That is 2,5 times faster. And at level 70 all skills are unlocked and no more improvements can be made to the character skills.
Difficulty
Diablo 2 with a necromancer to get 7 skeletons you would at least be level 7. These skeletons were slow, so rarely in a fight, and died after 2 or 3 blows. With skeleton mastery you could improve their life and damage but that would need maybe 5 more levels. But even then they were never as strong as the ones at level 9 in Diablo 3.
Corpse explosion exploded just one corpse with a small blast radius doing not enough damage to kill an enemy (at first).
Bone prison was a level 24 spell that you had to invest skill points in.
Diablo 3 It is too easy: e.g. gargantuan or zombie dogs of witch doctor didn’t even die once or necromancer gets directly an ARMY of skeletons (7) in lvl 9 that stay permanent, are as fast the necromancer itself, hack everything together and don’t die neither.
The flesh golem can drop a pack of corpses that can be exploded again. That is really overpowered as you see what corpse explosion does exactly:
Corpse explosion explodes ALL available corpses killing everything in its blast radius.
Bone prison comes with your PRIMARY attack as an extra feature so it costs no mana, making the primary attack again: overpowered.
Even on higher difficulty it is a walk in the park except some bosses that are insanely difficult. So the game is not really balanced.
Skill tree
Diablo 2 skill tree was perfect. You could see what skills were coming and what to aim for.
All skills were different from each other. You could use as many skills as you wanted together.
Only thing that could have been better is if some time it would be possible to respec at least some points but on the other hand, not being able to respec makes you want to start a new character and see if you can play it differently.
Diablo 3 skill tree There are a lot less skills. The skills are grouped together and therefore not usable side by side. e.g. No corpse explosiion and revived together.
The extra features on the skills don’t always improve with higher levels. The skills can’t be improved by putting extra points in them, they already are at their strongest when you get them.
Magic items
Diablo 2 normal/magic items: every magic item was worth checking.
Every item that dropped made a specific sound and had an animation letting you know what item was there.
You had to take care of your stats to be able to wear some of the items.
Stats were more clear: damage 100 not 15000.
You could find items that you could use for very long time before finding a better one, making it worth investing in it with gems or runes
Diablo3 normal/magic items: after a while, even rare items are not worth checking anymore
You can find 2 rare items with exactly the same stats (one even a little better than the other) just a few dungeons apart. What is ‘rare’ about these items?
Sounds for dropped items is less profound. I have no clue what I am picking up. And who cares anyway because you will find exactly the same item but with better stats a couple of dungeons further.
Your inventory is so big and the pictures of the items are so small and look all similar that you loose touch with the items you picked up. Most are to sell anyway.
You can wear everything that is for your class without stats limitation. The only limit is level.
You mostly find items for your class.
Every 5 mins you find new items that are very similar to the ones you have but better, so it is not worth investing in it.
Items that were very sought after in D2: the ones with skill points make no sense anymore in D3.
Health and mana
Diablo 2 you needed potions for health and definitely for mana. If you got damage, it was clearly heard so you knew that you had to look out. Having not enough mana happened all the time. That is why you knew you had to improve your stats to get a larger mana pool.
Diablo 3 you don’t need potions. You rarely get damage. You don’t hear well when you get damage. You only see that your health pool goes down a little. Using normal attack regenerates mana so you never have troubles with not having any mana. Dying only happens when enemies can kill you in one shot.
Map
Diablo 2 every time you played the same map, it was slightly different. In this way it felt a little like a new adventure and made it less boring to play the same map several times.
Diablo 3 you are not able to move with the large map open.
All maps stay exactly the same so it gets boring fast to replay the same map.
Fighting
Diablo 2 every specific enemy needed a different tactic to kill. Mostly there were less enemies but much harder. Every enemy was capable of killing you if not taking care of properly. Primary attack was always with the weapon equipped. Only magic attacks deviated from that.
Diablo 3 it is often not clear who you are fighting. It is mostly too messy. You just hack and slash trough everything without having a good view of what it was. As everything is so easy to kill, the specific features of the enemies are not pronounced and there is no different tactic needed to kill them.
With some characters you don’t fight with the weapon you have equipped. It is quite stupid to get them only for stats. Having a melee weapon equipped and still doing ranged damage makes no sense.
Some characters have so many minions that their own role is minimized. Just standing there gets the job done as well.
The primary attack is as powerful as the magic attack and it generates mana so there is always enough mana and you actually don’t need it much as the primary attack does the job as good.
Overall experience
Diablo 3 due to the loss of the search for the best magic items, the ease to play without dying (so there is not really a need to improve), the not improvable skill tree and the speed of unlocking all possible skills, it is not a game to play over and over again. It gets boring quite fast.