Diablo 3 - Fourth Anniversary; Then and Now

Has it been four years already? Blizzard is celebrating Diablo III's fourth anniversary this week and muses aloud about how the game has changed in that time.

A post on the Battle.net website alerts us to the fact that Diablo III is celebrating its fourth anniversary this week, while a subsequent post provides a quick look at how the item comparison mechanics have evolved over that course of time, given the release of the Reaper of Souls expansion pack and the game's transition to consoles. An excerpt from the latter:

Patch 2.0.1 launched just prior to the release of Reaper of Souls, introducing many new systems to the game in preparation for the expansion. One change was replacing the Life and Protection stats with new and better-defined stats.

Enter Healing and Toughness. Toughness was intended to be an overall calculation of your Effective Health Pool, or EHP. This is a simplified summary of your hero’s survivability based on stats like maximum Life, Armor, Resistances, Dodge, and other types of damage reduction. Similarly, healing was meant to be an average of how quickly you could regain health. This first pass got the basic messages across, but some of the more variable stats (like Life Per Kill) caused confusing inflations and muddled the information given to the player. So in Patch 2.1.2, we made another change.

“Healing” was replaced with “Recovery,” and the name was changed to not only better encompass its purpose, but to clearly highlight that change had occurred. The new stat estimated how much Toughness you would expect to recover in an average encounter, and we changed the weighting of certain healing stats to provide a more accurate picture.

In our current iteration, these stat summaries provide enough information to be useful to the average player and helps shine a light on how each stat contributes to your character’s overall power. This feature was so useful that we received a lot of community requests for a similar overview of follower equipment. In Patch 2.4.0, we fulfilled this request!

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Still a terribly boring game with a gutted completely uninteresting skill system. Just a very boring game. Grim Dawn, Tl2, and POE are all significantly better games. D3 has the best graphics and animations, but the game systems are so brain dead it renders the game almost useless.

I disagree. It does what it sets out to do better than those other 3. It sets out to be a "loot game" and not really an ARPG. As a "loot game" it excels.

Damian said:

I disagree. It does what it sets out to do better than those other 3. It sets out to be a "loot game" and not really an ARPG. As a "loot game" it excels.

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unfortunately, that concept is boring af. Which isn't surprising, as skills are active but loot just sits there.

I actually like D3 well enough playing through once with my gf on PS3, but we tried to get into it again with the expansion on PS4, and it was just too boring.

Yeah playing through the story is pointless atm, It is all about the "adventure mode" and "grifts". Climbing to t10 is challenging but completing grift 75 is much more so.

The regular game (campaign) is definitely very boring. When I played through all five acts on normal difficulty (which is recommended by the game... for hard you need to have some equipment from a normal run), I never even came close to a death after version 2.x (the original game when it was first released was actually slightly harder).
IIRC, I had to use exactly one potion throughout the entire game (on the final boss of the expansion).
Other than that: No tactics, no strategies, no thinking, no nothing, just clickityclickityclick from start to finish. Perfect game for extremely casual console peasants .

Anyway, the single player campaign mode certainly did not leave a lasting positive impression on me. The presentation was nice and the game had its (rare) moments but overall... meh.
And I'm just not into the whole season thing which is effectively just a very repetitive mind-numbing loot treadmill.

Compared to the original release, however, it was less challenging but still definitely way more fun after v2.x because -again IIRC- I got one single orange (I think?) drop from the original game w/o the expansion pre-v2.x and everything else was just blues and yellows throughout the entire campaign playthrough on normal.
On my replay after v2.x and with the expansion included there was at least proper loot with lots of orange items.

You definitely don't need to gear up before playing on higher difficulties in the campaign. If you play the whole thing on normal there will definitely be no challenge, it's the equivelent to playing on easy. But there can be a decent challenge if you up the difficulty by a few notches. Overall I think it was kind of a clunky and unintuitive system, it was hard to find a good sweet spot in terms of not being too hard or too easy. It seemed geared more for someone playing through the end game than soemeone who was just playing through the campaigns.

Well, the official description of 'hard' explicitly says that you need equipment from a normal run so back then it never crossed my mind to try it on hard for a first playthrough

I did, however, recently try it out just for fun with a new character and it was kind of harsh. Trash mobs were no problem but yellow bosses, even in the starter area, mopped the floor with me.
I'm sure it can be done by grinding on trash mobs, gaining some levels and always being a bit over-leveled.
Either way... the balance is way off and messed up because normal is super-casual extra easy and hard is, yes, ... hard .
I'll admit that I did not really give it a serious effort but just started a new game for 15 minutes out of pure curiosity, then uninstalled the game as I'm slowly cleaning up my HD for the inevitable Windows 10 upgrade before 7/29.
It was probably the last time I had D3 installed. I do not plan on reinstalling it on Windows 10.

This thing has been out for four years now?? Still haven't played it, still no desire to do so.

After they got rid of the auction house along with the expansion, the game was a lot better. But as others have already stated, playing over and over again just for better gear seems boring and I guess it's not just me that got bored with it.

Playing hard right from the start can be a little tricky, although it is quite doable with a little strategy and caution. If you mindlessly click you will probably die. After you find a few drops though, it becomes much easier, and you'll probably even need to up the difficulty one or two more times to maintain any challenge. As I said, it's kind of an awkward system for a new player.

Moriendor said:

I did, however, recently try it out just for fun with a new character and it was kind of harsh. Trash mobs were no problem but yellow bosses, even in the starter area, mopped the floor with me.

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Moriendor said:

Well, the official description of 'hard' explicitly says that you need equipment from a normal run so back then it never crossed my mind to try it on hard for a first playthrough

I did, however, recently try it out just for fun with a new character and it was kind of harsh. Trash mobs were no problem but yellow bosses, even in the starter area, mopped the floor with me.
I'm sure it can be done by grinding on trash mobs, gaining some levels and always being a bit over-leveled.
Either way… the balance is way off and messed up because normal is super-casual extra easy and hard is, yes, … hard .
I'll admit that I did not really give it a serious effort but just started a new game for 15 minutes out of pure curiosity, then uninstalled the game as I'm slowly cleaning up my HD for the inevitable Windows 10 upgrade before 7/29.
It was probably the last time I had D3 installed. I do not plan on reinstalling it on Windows 10.

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You can beat the game rather comfortably in expert from the first playthrough. However you need to know hwo to exploit the crafting system first. And no killing is not actually the way to go. You are actually better off fighting the yellow and blue mobs most of the time in the normal hard mode. Because you need blue, yellow and white mats so you can get your upgrade for the weapon as you level up.

Eh, I've been meaning to pick this one up for years, but Grim Dawn seems way more interesting.
Plus they ditched my favorite classes from the game.