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On this particular note, I think it's fair to say that Diablo 2 suffers more than most from item schizophrenia, with many pre-determined items just having odd combinations of stats, such that well-designed items end up being even more popular. Frankly, I'm not even all that opposed to it, especially given how bland WoW's item design has gotten. It does leave some equipment types a little bit lacking (for example, the barbarians looking for a polearm), and thus relying maybe overly much on runewords. Not a really big deal.
But there are some very questionable designs in terms of the nature of the stats as they effect various classes. +Skills items end up being more desirable for casters because they're effectively the primary method for increasing damage, which is probably a failing on Blizzard's part to include a basic stat type that increases caster damage (contrarily, melee classes have both Strength and Dexterity). In fact, because stats end up being so useless for casters, stats degenerate into an odd game of allocating just enough to be able to equip the items you hope to someday acquire, because they really don't do anything else. And oftentimes it's not even clear what a stat really does; while an item may say that it increases cast rate, it's usually the case that sums within a certain range have the exact same effect, since it's really just clamping to internal game values. For example, I seem to recall that a caster with 35% overall improved cast time may not see any actual further improvement until they acquire a sum of 85% (or some values in that neighborhood).
So stats are peculiar and a little bit difficult to figure out sometimes. But there's one that stands out for different reasons: Magic Find. Given that loot is essentially the entire end game in D2, it's no surprise that Magic Find is an enormous priority for players, and often completely contradicts their desire to have a more powerful character. The game is asking, quite simply, whether you'd like to be more deadly, or get more stuff. And I think that's a silly decision to have to make. Moreover, it creates uncomfortable multiplayer scenarios where the only Magic Find value that's considered is for the player who gets the kill, so you're probably not welcome if you've chosen to have a powerful character over one that's loaded with Magic Find. And it's essentially impossible to carry two sets of gear around in D2, because the inventory is miniscule. Solution: Nuke Magic Find from orbit. The slightly interesting game of maximizing your loot generation isn't worth the consequences.
But the inventory situation touches on another problem: There's no loot distribution system to speak of. The monster explodes into a shower of loot, and whoever clicks the fastest gets items. God forbid you had too much other stuff in your inventory (which is strongly encouraged by virtue of charms), or for whatever other reason somebody else picks up an item that you happen to want. The game desperately needs a Need/Greed rolling mechanism as found in WoW.
I just want to touch briefly on some of the other things that annoyed me a little bit but don't necessarily fit in anywhere else, so... I'll just stick it in here.
There's just way too much garbage on the ground to easily sort through most of it, especially in multiplayer. Even trying to pick up potions turns out to be a time-consuming hassle. As far as I know they're making the game pick up things like gold automatically; hopefully this will be extended to automatically fill your potion belt and scroll books, if those things make it into D3. It's also a bit of a hassle to run around holding down ALT, so with any luck they'll have better options for filtering out what items you look for (i.e. always show rare/unique/set items, show everything else on command). I'm not sure what the mod support is going to be for Diablo 3, if anything, but this kind of thing seems like it would be a good candidate for mods for advanced players.
The map tends to make it easy to miss importand landmarks, since it really only shows walls. I don't know what they're doing in the way of a map for Diablo 3, but I imagine it'll be a far cry from the one in Diablo 2, so I have a hard time imagining that this will be an issue. To that end, maps in Diablo 2 are admittedly a little bit repetitive, at least in terms of structure; unique patches are very obvious compared to the rest of the sprawl. I imagine they've done great things with the random map generation scheme, and the environments so far look amazing, so we'll see.
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