I never said it was less difficult.

I'm sorry if I offended your cavemen ideology by looking over the retarded "OMG DRM poop me in the back" attitude of people.

shouldn't they be somewhere that its snowing right now?!

But they could allow me to play the single player portion by myself offline at least.

And yes I know why its always online. Because Diablo 2 had a TERRIBLE case of botters and exploiters.

Hey I resent that! It's been snowing here for three strait days! :P

I think. I can't really see out the window.

I have no idea what any of that meant, or had to do with anything.

Thats because I superglued your eyelids shut.

Hehe. That is a funny way to put it. :-)

A) This is mostly a matter of opinion, and B) depends on what your measure is.

Personally I prefer TL, but there are a variety of reasons for that. And one of them is certainly 'bang for buck.'

I just don't see enough in D3 to pay the premium it costs. I did experiment with the free D3 trial (about 12 months ago - after the major fixes were implemented) and found it shiny on the surface but pretty shallow. The trial caps you at Level 11 or so, so sure, I understand you haven't unlocked a lot of abilities, but the whole thing felt pretty sterile to me.

Think I played 3 characters through the demo content, and each time I was more bored. For what it costs? Eh...just not that interested. Same/similar gameplay can be found any number of places.

If the game + expansion were $10 would I throw in? Eh....maybe. Probably not, but I'd at least think about it. But given my backlog (haven't even finished TL2 since I bought it to coop with friends and they bailed, did finish the main campaign in Path of Exile though), there's a pretty good chance I will never buy/lease it.

TL2 and Diablo 3 both can scratch the hack&slash itch in their own way, although they both have downsides as well. Both tend to fall down in the end-game, although you can still get a good 40 hours out of each before things start to wear thin. I also found the gearing in D3 to be a bit lack-luster, due to the limited pool of relevant stats and even among uniques only a very small number of items that stand out enough in changing certain mechanics to be considered build-enabling (and even with these the effects were fairly minor).

I'd personally recommend Path of Exile, although be warned it caters to a pretty hard-core fan base (best thing to do is check out the skill tree- it will either draw you in or send you running). Also, since the game is free to play (and no pay-to-win elements), if you don't like it then you're only out the time it took to download it.

Titan Quest, mentioned earlier in the thread, is another good choice. The character system makes for quite a bit of build diversity, although since the world itself is static sequential playthroughs can become stale quickly.

Divine Divinity, also mentioned in the thread, is a fine choice as well. The hack&slash action is quite a bit more shallow than the other games mentioned, although it makes up for this in greater depth of the game-world (more a traditional RPG with Diablo-like gameplay, rather than a straight up aRPG like the other games being mentioned here).

My opinion:
D1 - a fantastic game at the time, still has the atmosphere, and with The Hell mod sticks kicks but.
D2 - was good, but didn't grab me as much as the first. Use one of the big mods, MexianXl for instance.
Torchlight - was ok, nothing new.
Torchlight 2 - better, play it with Synergies mod as that adds a lot.
Path of exile - a lot of people rave about it, but its online online so not for me.
D3 - online store driven, drm fest. Have played it on the ps3, its nothing, boring story, nothing new.

There are a lot of good ones out there though, you can find a lot of threads on here detailing them, if I remember tomorrow I will dig them out but arpg is the term to search for.

Humble never sold any Torchlight games, both instances they where just part of a bundle. There are several games which have been part of a bundle, but never sold individually in the store. Humble Bundle and Humble Store are two different things

Interesting I've never realized that before. Yeah Runic definitely has a tight relationship with Valve. they're definitely in that Bethesda realm as far as that goes.

I was going to post my opinion on Torchlight and Diablo III, but it looks like you already did it for me ;)
My keyboard thanks you for that!