Very, very bad excuse. Now I'm not saying that DIII is not a solid game, I actually see why people enjoy it. However, many people have played DI and II offline, as a singleplayer game, and DIII can be played solo as well. There is no good reason, aside from it being DRM, to not allow offline characters. No good reason at all. Well, aside from laziness I guess.

There is a reason for only supporting online. All character storage methods have weaknesses.

Only offline: Trivial to hack your stats and give yourself better items. Deleted on uninstall.
Only online: Need Internet connection to retrieve and play
Online and offline: Either you don't let them swap online and offline (which prevents people from playing their existing characters with their friends) or you open yourself to people easily being able to hack.

In Blizzard's eyes, offline is untenable (just look at Diablo 1). A mixture gives them people complaining about not being able to play with their friends (and their characters being deleted when they uninstall). Online only has the downside (online only) but it has something very convenient for Blizzard (online only). It's not really a surprise for them to choose it, especially since it seems that the game still hasn't been cracked.

Or ... You know ... You could add LAN (which ain't all that hard to do once you have network part of the game,) and people can play their offline characters with their friends via hamachi or similar service, and if someone is interested in online play, he'll have an online char. EVERYBODY WINS! I for one want to be free to do what I will with my solo characters, including trainers, and more imporatantly, mods. The 'people complaining' argument is totally invalid, it would make far more people happy than those that would be unhappy. Uploading offline characters to the net and linking them with your account wouldn't actually be that much of a problem, either. There's just no excuse. None at all. So don't try to manufacture one.

I believe that solely would turn out to be terrible for online play, with lots of people making hacked "uber" characters.

Yes, that would be the reason they're called 'offline' characters, only playable in solo or via LAN. I just don't see a reason why they couldn't get uploaded to the net, so you can access them from anywhere.

So instead of having people connect through their network, they should allow people to use buggy third party networking software to play together over the Internet? The closed/open bnet issue was a pain in the ass for playing with technologically illiterate people. You may not have encountered it, but it was there.

D3 just went the route that GW went and, ironically, where people praised GW for it, they're damning Blizzard.

Well, since you're arguments are getting borderline riddiculous, I'm just going to stop right here.

That would be for the best.

Well it depends on your point of view, if you grew up with games like D2 or WoW. I'm guessing the latter.

First off respecing made it easy, you still had to stick to your third choice, but my opinion is that it added nothing. Maybe just made it more accessible before D3 came out.

Itemization - Well you could have had an alright Necromancer putting all your points in Bone disciplines with equipment as a bonus (+2 Bone Spear, +3 Bone Spirit wand for example).
You can't do that in D3, because your missile/orb damage is determined by items ONLY.
You can't beef it up by sinking a few point in skills or attributes, your only hope is to hit the AH.

For my part I spent hundreds of hours playing D1/D2 and finishing D3 with a Barbarian and getting to the third act with the Wizard, stopped there without any intent on finishing.
While you are overjoyed with the game, even running your own topic about it, you have to understand that other people did play the game and actually did not like it.

Well, beleive it or not there is an achievement for finishing Act 1-4 in one hour or less. Yes my primary character is a monk aptly named 'Bruce' he is a level 43 monk. I am currently in the of Act 2 (Nightmare). My total time with this toon is over 47 hours, the time is padded because wanting to look for items for a certain secret level.

As for the first two in the series I only beat the original last year. Asfar of D2 is concerned i beat the game with barbarian, sorceress, paladin and assassin. Futhermore I actually beat the game on Nightmare with my Paladin, which i was really proud of.

My main frustration with the game is when i went from a 68.8 dps two hander monk staff to a 119.0 and i still getting my ass handed to me on a plate, i mean, i feel like a hamster in a food processor. Act 1 on Nightmare was difficult but act 2 is (at my skill level) almost unplayable. I cannot even imagine Hell or Inferno. Look, I didn't enjoy knocking one of the best games in PC history. I guess i expected way too much.

I guess my point is all acts can be beat in one hour or less on Normal with a high level toon here's how.

1. skip all conversations
2. Most scripted events can just be bypassed by just leaving the area (yes, i know the absurd, but it's true). the only thing from my experience that cannot be bypassed is the actual mini bosses and end boss.
3. Avoid wasting precious time by not searching every nook in the game.
4. At level 43 you can litterally steamroll most mobs, what a difference a level makes right.

Lol, very funny, thanks for the real life laugh +1 to you sir!

Sorry, should have made it clearer - only the first sentence was aimed at you.
The rest were at Oldschool (the OP). My bad.

By the way, the latest patch added pretty much respecing at will to D2. There is no more 3x limit. Guess why? Due to overwhelming demand from the player base.

As I said, the other comments were aimed at Oldschool, but here we go:
Diablo II was far, far, far more gear dependent than D3.
Yes, you could simply put all of your skill points say into Bone Spear and Bone Spirit synergies, but the issue was that the lower skills provided less synergy than the higher ones. So either you put all of your points into the lower skills and were weaker in the late game where it really mattered, or you saved them up - clearly far from ideal as far as design goes. In any case, this was unlikely to get you far in Hell without gear, especially due to the draconian -resistances in NM and Hell. And stat points. Either you allocate your stats along the way and play the endgame like a gimp, or you save them all up until you get your gear. Basically meant that whenever you wanted to make a new char, you'd get a Hellrush and level to 80 with no skills and stats, sitting in the corner in Baalruns or corpserunning CS runs. Not ideal. Respecing obviously remedied this, but players had to wait for a decade.
The D3 system is far superior. I played the game solo all the way from Normal to Inferno. I only had to visit the AH once and that's because I had misunderstood a core game mechanic. Replacing gear and changing skills on the run makes for a far smoother and satisfying game experience, as opposed to having to gimp yourself until your end destination.

As for further itemisation and stats, it's essentially the same shit that it was in D2.
In D2 your stat allocation was basically 0-0-all-0, unless you had poor gear or played an ES sorc (in which case it was 0-0-0-all). Now the game does that for you.

As for gear, it was always the same shit. For example, there were two viable Hammerdin gear builds (pretty much the rich and not so rich one) with about 10% deviation possibility. This has changed drastically in D3. There are no must-have overpowered runewords, no overly OP uniques (as far as I know), etc, etc. Rares and magical items are the way to go, allowing for on-the-run customisation, as well as infinite end-game possibilities. Not everyone will be wearing the same gear. That makes me happy.

And ultimately, what did everyone do in D2? If you were a caster, it was all about +skills. Even worse, if you were a melee, it was all about having specific gear. Customisation became moot because all you did by deviating was gimp yourself.
It's the same thing in D3. If you're Wizard or WD, it's all about INT (and VIT this time around), DEX for Monks and DHs, STR for Barbs. So no real change there.
There are far fewer stats in D3, but that's because many of the arbitrary ones have been removed, essentially due to the different engine (FCR, FHR, FBR, etc).


And yes, I am clearly enjoying this game and I understand that not everyone is. That's cool, but just don't talk nonsense about the game. Try to be remotely objective. Anyway, last time that I post on this topic outside of my own one man topic. Enjoy the bashing - I understand that it's the new cool thing to do.

Hmm, I got a whole list of very bad games here:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/gamelist/FullList.html

Super Mario can be beaten in 9 minutes? Horrible game.
Diablo 1? 3 min and 12 second...

I played it few months ago, and was able to respec only once or twice.