Originally Posted by DArtagnan
In my opinion, the biggest problem always was the skill system. There's ZERO incentive to replay the game with the same class. A fundamental flaw that's so painfully obvious to anyone with the slightest understanding of the genre.

Conclusively, the designers of Diablo 3 did NOT understand the genre.

I completely agree with you on the skill system. Gutting skill trees, and removing choice-heavy character builds makes it a game I am not even able to consider playing.

Does anyone know if gutting the skill trees in WoW, and making glyph choices insignificant, has hurt it? I know I skipped cataclysm (when they locked skill trees), and didn’t even look twice at the new panda expansion when they removed skill trees totally, and made glyphs useless. You now have a total of seven somewhat significant choices (class specialization at ten, and then 6 more somewhat but not really significant choices of “talents”). They started down this road for so called balancing reasons, but my brother-in-law tells me the classes are not balanced at all even with the almost negative player choices they have now. Also, I don’t pay money because I want the developer’s job to be easier.

There was an article before cataclysm stating another reason to take choices away from players was that returning players had a hard time learning what the optimal build was. But, 10 years in and they still have one of the worst UIs of any game ever, and installing 5 billion mods needed to make the game playable is far more of a hassle than making common sense talent choices. My carrot on the stick in WoW was refining my character build throughout an arena season, and the 2v2 arena. I was told the arena is being kicked aside to make room for the highly exploitable RBG system (attempting to make the clean arena system more raid oriented).