Is Diablo 3 worth it?


Video Games

Scarab Sages

I enjoyed Diablo II plenty, and only played single-player. I am interested in Diablo III, and again, only for private play. I don't want to get involved with other people in it. Is that even doable? The Wikipedia blurb makes it sound a bit like it forces you into MMO mode whether you like it or not - I think I've had my fill of MMOs, and if I should ever get involved with one again, it won't be one of Blizzard's (though I'll still play their single-player stuff).


Having played D3 single-player a bit, I would say this: The graphics are far better than D2, of course. They bloody well should be. The story has its ups and downs, but that has always been true. The bosses are... well, losers. The gameplay is decent, but never reaches the level of D2. The characters are okay, but lack the complete customization of D2. The random rewards are not where they should be, I felt. All in all, it feels like a glitzed-up sequel that Doesn't Quite Get It, but is sort of competently done, if that makes sense.

You do not, though, HAVE to play with others, use the auction houses (if they have them at all nowadays), or delve into the MMO:ness, if you don't want to.


The main story path is fun and challenging. I would say yes, it is very playable with just yourself. And it is pretty easy to join with others later if you decide to. Or even join our PFS guild.

Scarab Sages

Good enough, with one exception I'd like to hear a bit more about: What do you mean they "lack the complete customization?"


Sissyl wrote:

Having played D3 single-player a bit, I would say this: The graphics are far better than D2, of course. They bloody well should be. The story has its ups and downs, but that has always been true. The bosses are... well, losers. The gameplay is decent, but never reaches the level of D2. The characters are okay, but lack the complete customization of D2. The random rewards are not where they should be, I felt. All in all, it feels like a glitzed-up sequel that Doesn't Quite Get It, but is sort of competently done, if that makes sense.

You do not, though, HAVE to play with others, use the auction houses (if they have them at all nowadays), or delve into the MMO:ness, if you don't want to.

Oh my, the game has changed a lot since you last played. The auction houses are gone, but they are replaced with a FAR more generous loot system that now favors your class rather than the crazy system D2 and the old D3 system used that favored other classes. I LOVE the far better customization offered by D3 over D2; you can completely respec your skill choices at will allowing you to completely alter your build to match that cool new piece of gear you found.


While it's true that you can change your active skills more than the set ones in D2, the differences were not that big between the different ones available. In D2, you could build very different characters through your skill choices. *shrugs*

The new loot system sounds good. I do think, however, that there is too much single-class loot around in D3.


I enjoyed it greatly, though mostly only in co-op with a friend.

I found that the game rewards using differents skills...but only in waves. You might use the same one for 20 levels before you get the stats to make another Rune or something godly.

Disintegrate is basically the be all, end all of the Wizard though, no matter the level.


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Diablo 3 is undergoing transition to a new patch. They just started Season 2 (a version of ladders). The gameplay of D3 greatly differs from D2 and D1. Now you're expected to find uniques to play content. High rolled rares are only good until you find high rolled uniques.

Difficulty is something that's undergone massive changes since the beginning of the game as well. It used to be that they had four difficulties, which was really levels 1-30 (Normal), levels 31-50 (Nightmare), levels 50-60 (Hell), and Inferno was what you jumped into once you hit 60. NOW all monsters scale to your level. Once you hit the max level, you start gaining Paragon levels, which is another way to extend the life of the game.

All gear can also drop for your level. Once it starts dropping at its appropriate level, it becomes available to drop at any time from then on, dropping with stats appropriate to the level of the character when it dropped. I know it doesn't start dropping at 31, but let's say Malad Heal starts dropping at 31, just for reference. If you find it at level 31, it'll have stats appropriate for a level 31 character. From then on, it always has a chance to drop, though uniques don't drop as much as rares of magics. A level 70 Manald Heal has stats appropriate to a level 70 character.

You can swap your skills out at-will, as long as you're not in-combat at the time. You wish to try out Hydra but you like your setup? You could trade out Meteor and see if that works for you.

Skills come in elemental flavors. They updated everything for Reaper of Souls to now make elemental damage matter. Each class has access to 4 elemental damage types. Blizzard is weeding out the 5th element for specific classes that still have those.

Blacksmithing is worthwhile while leveling, but you will replace your gear quickly.

Low level gems are useful until you find higher level gems.

Always socket an emerald into your weapon. This is by-and-large the best DPS gain in the game, because crit is king.

Every character gears the same. Every character.
Crit chance / crit damage, main stat, socket your main stat gems into your chest and pants, and then you have room to play around with the socket in the helm.

Rings and amulets are always crit chance, crit damage. No exceptions. If you don't have those affixes on your gear, you're doing it wrong. With the introduction of Legendary Gems, you now have to decide if you want main stat, socket, cooldown reduction, increased attack speed (very rarely do people use this after the near immediate nerf to it shortly after release, with an obscured reference you'll see pop up on the forums every now and again about Bashiok's "Aren't you thankful?").

Your character is your gear. Without gear your character is worthless. Unlike D1 and D2 where you allocate skill points, you now have to carefully build your character by finding the right gear. Good luck.

I do enjoy D3. Millions of others agree with me. No, it's not perfect. It's nowhere near perfect. It's also nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be. I've never quit D3, I've always taken a break after several weeks and come back for new patches, again for several weeks. It's one of those ones where it's really fun to come back to and rediscover playing the game.

The one big negative that D3 absolutely deserves is that it's an always online game. There is no offline mode. You can play solo, but you're always going to be connected to Blizzard servers. If you aren't online to play, you aren't playing.

There is a free to try version of the game to see if you're interested. It's even better on console than it is on PC due massively to the layout of the controller versus mouse and keyboard. Plus couch co-op is just awesome. And the game can be played on your console without having to connect to Blizzard servers or indeed be online at all. You can play it offline.


Sissyl wrote:

While it's true that you can change your active skills more than the set ones in D2, the differences were not that big between the different ones available. In D2, you could build very different characters through your skill choices. *shrugs*

The new loot system sounds good. I do think, however, that there is too much single-class loot around in D3.

I am not sure what you mean by the differences were not that big? Just look at Rynjin's disintegrate wizard vs mine which used fire spells and arcane torrent; very very different paths. BUT if either of us want to try something else, we just respec at our convenience. In D2 you needed to start a whole new character.


I just like Disintegrate because looking at those poor mooks run into my red beam of death and disappear near-instantaneously is so satisfying to watch. I need to play D3 again now.

Plus playing co-op, coming across a boss, and activating "Big Middle Finger" mode (Archon, I think?) and watching the poor bastard wither away in about 10 seconds flat makes me happy when my teammates look on in wonder.

Sovereign Court

I would say its fine for solo play. However, I found it very boring and gave my copy away shortly after playing.

Sovereign Court

yes


I got it for free because I was a WoW player.

I wasn't a fan of it. Frankly, I was more impressed by the special horse I got in WoW than with D3. Although now I don't play either anymore.


it's a waste of time, unless you have nothing else to do


There's a Pathfinder Diablo Clan! Come join us!


It's a fun game. The 2.0 patch was a huge improvement to it.

Depending on your class, swapping around a few skills can result in a character who plays radically differently (wizard or crusader); other classes, less so (monk, barbarian).

Also, <3 wizard. Wizard is great.

Scarab Sages

It is worth it, but imho it isn't the best choice. Taking a look at the Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing or even better at Grim Dawn (still early access, updated frequently and already huge and stable) might be worth your time and money.


You should try Path of Exile. It's basically what Diablo III should have been. There is some MMOishness but it's on the periphery and you don't have to participate at all.
Oh and it's free.


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Aranna wrote:
Sissyl wrote:

While it's true that you can change your active skills more than the set ones in D2, the differences were not that big between the different ones available. In D2, you could build very different characters through your skill choices. *shrugs*

The new loot system sounds good. I do think, however, that there is too much single-class loot around in D3.

I am not sure what you mean by the differences were not that big? Just look at Rynjin's disintegrate wizard vs mine which used fire spells and arcane torrent; very very different paths. BUT if either of us want to try something else, we just respec at our convenience. In D2 you needed to start a whole new character.

I could rant about Diablo III's plot, atmosphere, and visuals for hours, but frankly this guy does a very good job at explaining my issues with the fluffy aspects of the game. I loved the first two Diablo games, and I can't stand Diablo III on those standards alone.

That said, mechanically, Diablo III is a huge failure for me as well, because like Sissyl, I thought the flexibility and character optimization choices weren't really available on the game. Laying aside that you had no choice in how you set out your stats at release (you got some of this back in later patches) and laying aside that any character can respec at any time to create a whole new character with no other changes (that is to say there is no meaningful specialization), the issue is that as is noted above, certain itemization decisions are flat out the best way to build.

There are no options that exist as in Diablo II that allow you to borrow skills from other classes or create unforeseen synergies as a result (for example, Dreaming Sorceress). There are (or at least were) few trade offs between classes in terms of aptitude. The characters just felt dull in comparison, and in particular the relative lack of growth in many resource mechanics (hatred, wizard energy, ect) was extremely frustrating for someone accustomed to Diablo II where characters grew rapidly in both energy types if they so desired.

This in part speaks to the difference in capabilities between a high and low level character between the games. At level 30 in Diablo III you can more or less do anything in the game. You will get some items that increase certain numbers, but fundamentally everything is online, because most resources and skills are capped out where they start. That’s not really the case in Diablo II, where it isn’t until high levels that you can make use of many tricks and thus see power surges.

The decision to unify everything behind weapon damage was, in my opinion, absolutely inexcusable. It sucked the life out of a game that had previously allowed for varied and dynamic choices. The dynamic between focusing on weapon damage skills and focusing on increasing skill levels (or balancing the two) meant there were tons of ways to build characters based on itemization – and here we are back to the fact that there was no ideal build. There was no perfect weapon or helmet or piece of armor for everyone, because characters were built in such massively different ways. Instead of always seeking the next upgrade, you could be seeking a specific item that might have little value to someone else building into something completely different. It created a much greater reason to be active in trading, as opposed to the constant Diablo III imperative that killed AUs, where it was always a search for a generic flat upgrade. Unification of statistics makes the game easier to ‘balance’ but not inherently better.

Anyway, TL:DR, I won't spend money on it.


Diablo III is NOT Diablo II, the gameplay is different. If you go in expecting to play a Diablo II type game in Diablo III, be prepared to be disappointed.

Skills are swappable at will. It's not a Respec (Respecs are when you reallocate skill points, skill points are automatically speced in D3, you just assign which ones you want to use to what buttons...everyone has the same skills, players just use different ones than others).

If you want more Diablo II like fun, choose Torchlight I or II instead.

That said, Diablo III is a fun game and I don't find it really like an MMO. It has similarities to any other Western Action Top down RPG game, but perhaps smoothed out to run the most elegantly of any of the more recent generation of Action RPGs.

If you don't want to deal with the hassle of always online that people deal with on the PC, you can also play it on the Xbox or Playstation.


Ok I watched the silly video Peter...

I understand the maker was against spending money hence his favoring of Path of Exile (I have also played that game). But his only argument against Diablo 3 was story?! In Diablo 1 you get feed some story in books or dialog... hmmm the same as Diablo 2 or even 3, except 3 allowed you to keep playing while the tragic story is read to you. I may not have played 1 (it is before my time) but I have played 2 and it didn't have a better or more scary story than 3 did. I would clearly say 3 has a better one if you care to listen to it and not skip past. I mean in 2 your only motivation seems to be killing demons; In 3 you are fighting for the friends you meet. He does say Diablo 3 was a very well made game with addictive gameplay in his own words, and it is. And if he prefers the sort of non-story of 2 over the tragic story of 3, then that IS his opinion and he has a right to it. In his defense he seems hung up on the story of Diablo 1 which might be the REAL reason he doesn't like the newer stuff. Back then that story probably was scary and edgy. He may just be stuck in the past. He features the Butcher in his argument but The only story you get is "He tricked us into fighting a demon! Avenge us"... yep that is all of it... not much right? Ok so 3 didn't give you much more than that (Magda tricks you into fighting the demon in order to rescue your new friend), but at least the fight is far more exciting now.

Scarab Sages

OP wrote:
I am interested in Diablo III, and again, only for private play. I don't want to get involved with other people in it. Is that even doable?

Yes, it is very doable. At no point does the game require you to do anything with a single other individual. You earn 3 hirelings in acts 1 and 2 that you can employ to help you out a bit (though they do about 10% the damage you do). I have played the vast majority of my time in Diablo 3 alone, bringing four or so characters to 60 (then 70) without any multiplayer gaming at all. The auction house is gone now, so that other "MMO aspect" is gone as well.

For me, D3 now plays very *very* close to D2X in the later years in multiplayer. Almost every MP game I enter on Torment difficulty is doing A1 bounties, hearkening back to the much less satisfying "Iteleu2baal01" runs that dominated the D2 bnet games. Once you get 70 and have unlocked all your skills, it is the exact same, except in D3 you can continue to advance your base abilities with paragon levels, versus just doing baal run after baal run after baal run after baal run, hoping you can click that tal's helm that drops faster than anybody else.

As for the story? Who seriously plays any diablo-like ARPG for the story? Diablo 1's story was paper thin, and D2 only had act ending cinematics that gave maybe a dozen minutes of world building lore. The few actual bits of game lore in-game came from the five or six fixed tomes throughout. D3 may not have an Oscar worthy story, but it has magnitudes *more* than the actual games of Diablo and D2. FATE has less story than Diablo, and PoE might have a story somewhere behind its convolution, meh gameplay, and ugly visuals. Torchlight is held on such a pedestal for a reason, it actually had a good story (not so much TL2). Rose-colored glasses seem to push that memory off onto other games of the genre that it just wasn't true for.

NOTE: The manual for D2 did have a pretty good bit of lore, but those few pages are pretty well summed up by the 'Evils' drops in the first half of A2 from Cains Satchels'.

I really enjoy Diablo 3, my problematic internet aside. It has fun twitchy gameplay with everything I liked about diablo 2 and nothing i didn't.


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The unlimited skill respec is probably my favourite thing about D3. It means I can try out all sorts of different combinations. In games without respec, I often find myself reaching a certain point, realising I spent a few of my points in the wrong place, then looking for a mod or cheat that lets me redo without having to start from the very beginning again.

It's also great when finding legendary items that drastically alter skills. I'll find something cool, then change my build to make use of the neat item effectively.


I enjoyed it. Having said that, my wife LOVES Diablo 3.

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