I got Diablo 3 as part of the annual pass offer for World of Warcraft. Stay subscribed for a year, and they gave you D3, a cool, Tyrael-themed mount, and guaranteed that you could get into the Mists Beta (though a lot of people interpreted that to mean that they would be in the first round of Beta invites, which was of course pretty unrealistic, given how hard that would be on the Beta servers.)
Diablo 3 was pretty fun, but it has some glaring problems. The biggest was loot. Unlike in WoW (mostly,) loot in Diablo has randomized stats, and loot drops are not guaranteed from particular bosses.
In Diablo 3, most of your loot was utter crap. You'd be on your wizard and get a sword with strength and dexterity on it, or you'd get a ton of Barbarian-specific Mighty Belts. Even when you did get a Wizard-specific piece, it might have awful stats.
One solution to this was the auction house, allowing players to trade their items around and see if others had better stuff. Infamously, there was an option in the auction house to buy and sell things with real money. The problem, however, was that getting an item off the auction house felt pretty lame. You would be very powerful for a while, but then you'd eventually out-level that gear and feel the need to go back.
It didn't really fit with the idea of an RPG.
In WoW, this isn't as much of a problem. For one thing, it's rare that you can buy truly powerful items from other players, or for in-game gold. This admittedly causes a bit of gold-inflation, but most powerful items must be attained through effort in challenging content - either as boss-drops, or as rewards bought with a special non-gold currency that is earned by doing that same challenging content.
Diablo 3 has been vastly improved by changing this system. First off, the auction house is completely gone. I believe you can still trade gear with other players online, but only if you are in a party with them (I don't know this for a fact, though, as I have not tried it.) Legendary items (which are not as unusual as they are in WoW) are account-bound, meaning that while you can hand them off to your alts, you're only going to be able to get a hold of them on your own.
This would seem to make the game more difficult if it were not for the fact that the game is now much better at assigning loot. First of all, the overall quality has improved, but you're also far more likely to get loot you can actually use (though it's not always an upgrade, of course.) On occasion I will see a Dexterity piece on my Wizard, but this happens so infrequently that it's not really a problem, and is only frustrating when that happens on a Legendary item.
Legendaries were also made cooler. Most of them seem to have unique effects. For example, I have a one-handed axe that summons a demon ghost to attack my enemies, or a ring that causes a little treasure goblin to follow me around, picking up common gear and spitting out a rare, or even legendary item for every 16 common pieces he picks up.
Overall, the game just feel a lot better, and gives more of the impression that you can actually gear yourself up well by playing it.
On a bit of an impulse, I preordered the expansion, Reaper of Souls, which comes out on tuesday (true to the title of this blog, I did it mainly because of the new Crusader class - Paladins represent!)
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