“Let’s see, these guys seem to have made valid points that are too long to read. I know!! I’ll call them “butthurt fanboys” and win the argument!”
I liked neither and did not see any relevant change. Itemization is still crap, still cannot invest in skills and still was not caring about anything, it just was all a chore. So no, to me RoS was just more of the same.
Don’t get me wrong, drops were better, difficulty was adjusted and AH was gone, all good things. But it was still too little to make a meaningful difference to me.
I found D3 with RoS quite enjoyable for a while. Eventually I ran out of steam because I had experienced most things and wasn’t interested in pushing for ever higher greater rifts. The new event is pathetic and shows that the current “team” is really out of touch with the community and the game itself as a whole.
Sometimes I wonder how many people who played D3 played Guild Wars, it has a similar skill system and that worked out just fine. Investing points in skills isn’t necessarily deep or interesting, so I like that they went with a limited skill selection instead to try something different.
These are both worth highlighting, and I agree. I don’t dislike D3 because it isn’t D2 with better graphics, I dislike it because the dev team HAS to be aware of what the community wants - and it’s easily within their power to fix it, however they don’t. And not only do they never acknowledge that fact, but they just smash in some crap that nobody wanted or asked for. Like… instead of spending who knows how many hours creating this new content, you spend 3 or 4 hours tweaking some numbers for group vs solo XP, class balance, class set balance, etc.
Necromancer is cool… but there are just so many glaring issues in balance and game design (end game leader board with nothing even close to balanced across multiple categories), that the new class is gonna get old after a few days.
I had 600+ hours in D3 (it was a reasonable game, but that’s all), the PTR for RoS convinced me that I wouldn’t waste my money on the expansion and I still haven’t.
I don’t think it is. D3 is fundamentally broken as an ARPG:
Take away the Legendaries and the loot system is very simple and, well…boring as hell. Think about it, all blues and yellows…
Really limited customisation: i.e. single attribute point, no unique class combinations, unlimited respec. No incentive to re-roll at all (hence unlimited paragon grind).
All skills are based off weapon damage.
The story mode is pretty boring with a poor story.
Not to mention:
No trade
No PvP
That stuff can’t be fixed (and hasn’t been). It can only be improved as an action combat game (which it has).
D3 made Blizzard a lot of money.
That’s all they care about.
You are correct, the game is pretty shallow. I’m okay with that part, to be honest. Like I’ve said before in the thread, I enjoy playing D3 with my wife for fun occasionally because she likes how easy it is to gear. Grim Dawn is a nightmare of complexity for her.
I would love for my wife and I to be able to compete on two player leaderboards, but we would both be forced into playing classes we might have no interest in - or a build we don’t have fun playing. Yeah, there will always be a best - however the best shouldn’t be along the lines of double to quadruple the effectiveness of the next best. What really grinds my gears is that Blizzard obviously decided to turn the end-game of D3 into a leaderboard competition, and then for some reason never balanced almost any aspect of the game for leaderboards.
It would be like… if Crate decided to remove devotions, all the MIs in the game, and damage conversion; things that encourage you to come up with fun and interesting builds - which is the heart and soul of Grim Dawn.
D3 might have more shallow character building than GD or PoE, but the point is that it fails to even achieve what the game has been designed to do - be competitive. You CAN compete - but only if you play the way they want you to using the builds they want you to. This problem could be easily fixed with number balances. It wouldn’t fix the shallowness of the game, but at least it wouldn’t be a total design failure since the game is obviously designed to be pretty simple to begin with.
And they’re about to make some more with Necromancers on the horizon, which is just sad. Not only that, but people are gonna be bored in a few days since there’s nothing really to unless you want to compete on the leaderboards - which are a complete joke.
But yeah, they’ll make their money regardless.
That’s because, fundamentally, the game hasn’t changed since RoS was released. What it was then, it still is now, more or less. And while RoS was an improvement from the base game, it’s nowhere as much change as the game needed and STILL needs (particularly as the game digs itself deeper and deeper into another crap-hole with progressively bloating set bonuses).
They need stop destroying this well respected franchise and continue milking Candy Crush 