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It's unfortunate, but the more I play, the more I think...
This game was very lazily designed post-Normal. Don't get me wrong, it's fun, but it feels like 90% the effort went into Normal difficulty.
**** NOTE: This is not a hate thread as I really like the game. Just starting some discussion about this. *****
It really does seem as you progress through the difficulties, that Blizzard just added in some higher numbers and better models for gear, then flipped a switch to add a bunch more damage and health for enemies, with like one new mechanic thrown in and just kinda hoped that all the skills remained viable.
I personally think they need to reduce the numbers and focus on the game mechanics. If the mechanics are fun and increasingly challenging, they wouldn't have to rely on the shock factor of a Barb being one shotted 'cause he doesn't have a shield or a certain build, or is just melee in general. Obviously some increased health and damage should be factored in to make the gear worth getting, but it shouldn't be the main deciding factor in the outcome of a fight.
Like, I feel, as you progress, sure, throw in some abilities on the enemies that can one hit you but can be avoided or something if you're not paying attention, but have it be something where you're like, "OHHH I screwed up, I get it, I'll do this instead."
As things are right now, all people do is just keep throwing themselves at the enemies and doing as much damage as possible before dying and see how much of a repair bill they can rack up before it's over. 
But whatever, I'm just gonna keep getting gear and hoping I can keep up with things to SOME degree as time goes on, and I know it's only a week in or so, so I'm sure things will calm down a bit. Btw, I would've posted this on the main Diablo 3 forums, but even though I bought the game, apparently I can't post on their forums without an active WoW subscription. 
Anyway, that's my 2 cents. What do you all think who have been playing?
Comments
Yes there are gear checks, but the challenge in inferno comes from having mobs that have 4 Affixes as well as the increased numbers. They are ridiculous sometimes. Adding an extra ability each difficulty ends up being pretty crazy by the end.
But gear is important. It's a loot driven game after all. Take away the loot and what are we left with?
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I enjoyed the game in Normal, and on into Nightmare.
I got to Hell and it dawned on me .... this is a bastardized Diablo with way to many Mmo influences.
Gear progression , Class nerfs, Exp nerfs, Chest/Gold nerfs, Rmah , Ah is down 50% of the time , and Lag ..... I wouldn't buy the game knowing what I do now. I simply won't be buying anything Blizzard produces again, what they did to Sc2 was bad .... but now Diablo, no more... they've joined EA. The sadest part of the whole fiasco is so many purchased the game ... regardless of the massive amounts of unsatisfied customers post-launch , this is still a win in Blizzards book.
Normal was OK, but I feel Blizzard didn't care too much about that, and poured most of the effort into the higher difficulties. Because Normal is just ridiculously easy, and caters too much to "non-gamers" for my liking. Once you get into Nightmare there's a hint of challenge, and it doesn't get really fun until Hell, where things actually become difficult from time to time.
I'm glad Blizzard went completely the opposite direction of World of WarCraft with Diablo 3. While in WoW every hint of difficulty gets nerfed into the ground to cater to extreme casuals, Diablo 3's higher difficulties have actually been made with real gamers in mind. This truly is the key to Diablo 3 being so replayable and really shows Blizzard can still make real games that don't just target players whose only gaming experience is WoW.
The mantra....in reality...is that people will or will not like a game. The fact is, most of these posts are just opinions. One negative opinion amongst MANY satisfied customers STILL means the game is good.
"a bastardized Diablo"....please. D2 was a "bastardized" D1. Play or don't. Buy it or don't. [mod edit] They all seem like opinions from people who have never played an action RPG. Let alone D1 or D2.
Edit: This isn't aimed at you Zym....but the whole post.
Isn't that the point of the higher difficulties? I do not recall how DII was any different. More affixes/immunities on mob, more hp, more damage, that's literally how DII worked.
This may solve your posting issues, you don't need a WoW account:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150758673
This game is similar to D2 in that respect. That's kind of what hack and slash ARPGs do. I wouldn't call it lazy really. Just my opinion of course.
My post continued after that line, it included the things I thought were wrong. I think the game is a shell of what it should have been, a poor mmo built Diablo. The game is so far removed from what made the first two games fun. The serious discussion has already been had, ad nauseum on what exactly Diablo 3 does differently than Diablo 1 or 2. Those things can be a negative or a positive, for me they are a resounding negative. The game simply isn't fun , Diablo 1 and 2 was ... its as simple as that. Every time I see well constructed posts on what Diablo 3 failed to do in Diablo 2's shadow , the tired replies of " I played Diablo 2, you didn't ". I've yet to see one person who claims Diablo 3 is better than Diablo 2 actually list his/her reasons why. It's a subjective topic .... but atleast those on the Diablo 3 is a bastardized wow-clone have established a burdeon of proof/refrence.
BTW -- When I post in a thread with what I don't like in the game, its probably because I am venting. Currently farming Inferno act 2 .... and the games just not rewarding, the skills are boring, KITING is NOT what Diablo is about.
Interesting thread. Thanks for the honesty guys.
Fence sitting myself here. Ex D1 and D2 addict and played the D3 beta, didn't like it and postponed buying into it so far. Some of you perfectly echo some of the concerns I have and it seems I am not done postponing yet
Makes me think about Titan Quest and how it added new world bosses at higher difficulty levels with on par or sometimes better drop rates compared to some Act bosses. That helped a bit in keeping the difficulties more distinct.
My brand new bloggity blog.
It's 'unforgiving' rather than being challenging. The biggest challenge perhaps is if you get a little lag spike, these are not common (more so for some) but they are killers if/when they do occur. On higher difficulty it boils down to not being hit (or crittted) at all. (Barbarin/Monk might play different). Blizz also said (so I am told) they wanted wierd and wacky builds to be viable. As it is you need really strong synergy skills (on difficult levels) of which there only seem to be a few.
OP I essentially agree its really more 'unforgiving' than 'challenging'. The challenge pretty much is through things that you can't really mitigate. e.g. something crits you and skill x doesn't proc to mitigate the hit you die, 2 things hit you at the same time you die, stutter while assets are loading you die.....etc. etc. Kiting is the only stratergy (monks may be able to duke it out I dunno). tl;dr version it feels like it is mainly luck whether you die or survive to any particular encounter.
I find it a fun game too but it is rather too flawed in gameplay and technically to rate it higher than 'good'. I think nightmare is probablly my favourite difficulty, quite a few builds still work, while not as overly easy as normal. Arguably nightmare should be labeled 'normal' and normal labeled 'easy', would have saved Bliz a bit of flac.
I do not really agree with you about the MMO-ization of D3 in comparison to D2. There are only two things D3 has that are *really* different from D2: the AH/RMAH and the fact you have to play online. There is no open persistant world, there is no roleplay, there are no group mechanics like you get in MMOs, there are no social hubs, fluff items, etc. D3 is quite clearly a hack and slash dungeon crawler with a lobby, even if the lobby is not as apparent as it was in D2.
There are aspects to D3 I think make it better than D2 and vice-versa. I won't get into why here because I have mentioned this elsewhere on these boards. If I compare the two games, I like both pretty much equally. I think that with a couple of tweeks D3 could actually be better because though D2 has become the "classic game" to hold everything up to in this genre, it had a lot of faults.
It is true that one of the things I don't like about D3 is the itemization. The lack of really nice items just make it less rewarding to play than D2. The skills though are not necessarily boring, at least not on the classes I have played so far. I also disagree with you that kiting is not what Diablo is about. In D1 I kited all the time with my rogue. In D2, certain classes kited all the time too (assassins for example).
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
That is the problem with these games. Everyone bought into the difficulty stages. Blizzard relied on their fanboyz to buy into their laziness with making difficulty stages instead of actual content. Now we have a sequel optimizing the extreme laziness of phoning in an effort to make fast cash instead of making true video games for their fans.
Sure feels good to get a game like this and ponder where the hundreds of millions of dollars Blizzard made from their previous games went eh? As long as they make their next quarterly bonus then all is good I guess.
You stay sassy!
lol this anti-corporation trend of youth in America today is laughable. They're not out to get you man, take off the tinfoil hat
How can you say anything about Blizzard going with difficulties over "content". Have you ever even played a Diablo game?
Sad you can't see it. It isn't a youth movement. It is educated opinion. I am 40. I am no spring chicken. I have a life time of video game playing starting from 1st gen consoles and early pc's. Educate yourself and see why game developement is stunted. People who haven't bothered to research trends and markets are like voters who vote without knowing the candidates they elect.
Sad state of affairs and you prove it.
You stay sassy!
There's more item and monster types when you get further in the game, and the difficulty of course increases as well. But if you don't like the basic gameplay of Diablo 3's beta don't buy the game. You'll never like it.
You are a 40 year old young man then
I am surprised you say that it is just lazy development when both D1 and D2 are exactly the same. Or I suppose you could say that it is lazy development with precedence... I would be more shocked if Blizzard had released D3 with 4 difficulty levels you could choose at character creation like TL1/TL2. I am not saying it would be bad of them to do that, just surprising because in that case there is no precedence as far as the Diablo series is concerned.
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
I've been trying to figure out some of the logic that went behind the design of this game, especially in regards to the difficulty and skill sets/runes. And I'm starting to think that you are correct OP. They did not put much, if any, time and thought into the game beyond normal.
For example, I was trying out a different rune for Fan of Knives (short range PBAoE Snare + damage) this time. I normally run with the increasing radius rune, but I decided to try out the stun rune. I was under the impression that it was a 100% stun chance. Much to my surprise, its only 60%. That rather baffled me. Why would I want a CHANCE at stunning a mob that can 1 shot me as opposed to being able to hurt him from much further away? In the later difficulties, if I'm getting surrounded there's a damn good chance one of those mobs won't get stunned, and at the naturally close range required for Fan of Knives, I'm going to get hit...and killed. It just makes that rune entirely worthless to me. Its detrimental for me to use it over the radius increasing rune.
After that I started thinking about skills, and began wondering why they felt the necessity to add only a chance for skills to go off, especially on skills with cool down timers? Why did they make some buff skills (like magic weapon) that can be kept up indefinately have to be recast instead of a persistant buff with a minor arcane power drain or something? It just seems unnecessary and way too randomized.
I fear that I'm starting to believe that developers truely think playing the RNG game is the definition of challenge/difficulty.
None of you who claim that Diablo is a "bastardised WoW-clone" (talk about fancy words, bastardised really?) give any reasons.
Let me explain. Let me list what I like better in Diablo 3:
1. The new skill system. I've made prolly a thousand characters in D2 only to try different builds. While for some reason I found that fun at the time, I definitely don't think that screwing up your character over and over again is fun. The skill tree approach with no respecs would have not worked in D3 because it takes too long to get through all 3-4 difficulties to justify making a new character to redistribute my skills. Sure I will do it once, twice but by the time I get to ten times per character class I would want to cut my wrists. In D2 you can get to hell in couple of hours.
In D2 you used a lot less skills and most of the time people had only 1-2 skills they used. E.g. Blizzard sorceress woud only use BLizzard and Ice blast, Fire Sorceress would only use Meteor and Fireball etc. Also D3 has passives which make a huge difference to your playstyle.
2. Teleport has a 14-16 sec cooldown. I can't stress how much this ruined Diablo 2. Skipping through all the hard encounters was super easy. People just farmed the "must have" monsters because they could skip through everything. This also meant that every single time people started a new character it would be a sorceress. It's that simple. As soon as you get the Teleport you can skip shitloads even on a new character. Also in the end every class ended up having teleport (aka Enigma), it was this needed.
3. D3 encourages to play through all the zones and not just farm bosses. Do I need to tell you what Diablo 2 looked like. Pre-1.10 => get a free ride through normal, nightmare and hell => farm the cow level => level 99!
Post-1.10 => 1-12 (den of evil, tristram), 12-18 (sewers), 18-25 (arcane sanctuary, tombs, councils), 25-40 (baal runs normal) => 40-60 (Baal runs nightmare) => 60-90+ (baal runs hell). All you did was baal runs and that was skipping everything in worldstone keep and farming Baal's minions and Baal himself.
4. Farming for items was farming bosses only. How fun. It's not like you care about the rest of the game.
5. You have 1 try at quest and act bosses. If you die, the encouter resets and they are back to full life. D2 had no such thing. You will kill the boss in the end because their life never went up.
6. Hardcore - much better than in D3. D2 was too gimmicky. You could teleport instantly to safety, you could leave the game instantly. When playing hc you had your left hand on the ESC key all the time. D3 - teleport is an instantly interruptable 10 sec cast and you have to wait 10 sec before you leave the game. SO if you get stuck in a bad situation you have to run for it (which can be very difficult in D3) or you die. No instant gimmicks to save you or chicken hacks.
7.D3 has a much better resource system. Every class has a unique resource system which is specifically tailored to them.
8. D3 got rid of the need to buy town portals and scrolls of ID. YOu can easily rejoin your friends much more fun.
9. Inferno difficulty which trumps anything you could find in D2. Any boss instantly goes back to full life if you die ensuring no suicides just to chip away a fraction of the monsters' health. Hell in D3 is more difficult than Hell in D2 especially as in D2 you could skip most of difficult monsters if you wanted.
There's probably more but that's off the top of my head.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
So that is why you keep repeating it yourself? Thanks for the self fullfilling prophecy
only problems i have with the game is it was not launched with pvp and how baddly tested the classes are anyone in inferno can tell you its stupidly obvious that melees are stupidly under powered and dont get me started on the range classes which were left retardly broken for too long letting those players farm inferno lolz style while all melee players got screwd and are still getting screwd since last time i checked the site for updates which was yester day no offence but the game was not ready and blizzard/activ can go suck a donkey penis
monk player btw and yes i still like the game and play it so no im not an anti d3 hater wannabe internet cool nerd
just a regular nerd who is angry about the extreme unfair'ness towards melees and d3's development team unwillingess to act
why would a non gamer be playing games? that makes no sense.
Not to be a jerk, but the OP is just mad that the game got harder after Normal. Contrary to popular belief, dying in a video game doesn't mean the game is too hard. It simply means that the gamer is faced with a challenge that he needs to overcome.
Had there been sites like this up in 1980 I'm sure we would have seen hordes of posts saying, "WTF Namco, the Red ghost is too fast at higher levels."
We just saw that it was hard and tried to get better at playing.
Um...
See, the problem is not that the game became harder. The problem is that for the most part you have to be ranged and be able to kite well (which doesn't work all of the time, either, with affixes like Vortex that sucks you in for a one shot kill, or Waller that just blocks all escape routes at times), and all classes are pretty much pigeon-holed into using the same skills just to have a chance at survival.
The game should be tough, but it shouldn't be so tough that you can only come close to completing it with a certain playstyle. Blizzard seems to have tunnel vision when it comes to difficulty.
They repeatedly stated that they were trying to keep the majority of skills viable, but currently that is not the case. Up to and including Hell (where the issues really start to come into play) is pretty damn fun.
So in the end, why give people any customization at all? Blizzard either just ramped the difficulty up with no fucks given to the consequences, or they expected people to play in one specific way from the beginning and still have it be near impossible to beat if not rushing passed everything overly hard and playing as intended, or maybe a bit of both.
Thus the design feels lazy and rushed.
[mod edit] I played D1 and D2, they were my first RPGs and I have very fond memories of them. I'm NOT so crazy about D3. I agree with the poster that called it "bastardized," although that's not the word I would use. I think much of the ORIGINAL series has been stripped from D3 leaving it impotent, in my opinion, in comparison to the originals.
But you guys go right ahead and LOVE D3. Your opinion is just an opinion, just like ours. And we're all allowed to HAVE opinions that don't necessarily agree with each other, so.....deal with it. Not everyone that played the original games thinks THIS Diablo is flawless, sorry.
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A - freaking - men.
Well start acting your age then good sir. You say completely ignorant things like "fanboys bought into the difficulty system instead of real content". Have you ever even played a Diablo game? That's exactly what these kinds of games are about.
I've been gaming just as long as you and I don't have these delusions of the video game industry falling apart. You're not going to be wowed by video games like you were back then. Why not just accept that and enjoy the video games.
You sound like a crack addict that's searching for his first high again, blaming everyone else in the process.
Every time I see something like "true video games for their fans" I know there's some highly misplaced delusion behind what makes a perfect video game, FOR THEM. Because despite millions and millions of people enjoying Diablo 3, because you don't like it - It's not a true video game.