A casual review of ROTW

TLDR: Pretty cool. Needs some tweaks. I'm leery of the direction Blizzard goes.

TLR:
Big meandering rant incoming. Caveat: I'm not a "gamer" and all of this is purely opinion.
I'm playing two warlocks right now. One in SSF players 8 and one online using my second account to stay in players 2. I just finished Normal online and am partially through Act 2 Nightmare. With this character I twinked in full Sigon's,

Razortine, Angel's amulet and 2X rings, and a nearly anti-perfect Insight

Halberd. I avoided build guides and just played through, clearing everything, while putting one point in each skill to try them out. My SSF character is still in Normal Act 1.

The QoL stuff is all obviously great. There is even a dedicated slot for big and small purple potions so now I don't have to have 20 spaces on each character dedicated to purples. Five shared stash tabs? Awesome. I can Ctrl+click everything in my inventory and it automatically goes where it should without me needing to go to the right stash page? Phenomenal. Chronicle seems like a good idea, but I'm not restarting my grail. I'll finish in LOD before worrying about the new stuff.

Warlock as a character is actually well made (if overtuned). Every skill seems to have a real use. A thing that has been common in RPG's and RPG-adjacent games is useless or quickly obsolete junk. In some games like the Elder Scrolls or Amalur: Reckoning (check it out, it's worth it), there is a clear upgrade path. Rusty is worse than iron which is worse than Steel which is worse than elven or whatever other nomenclature they use. Each one is a clear upgrade from the last. In games like Dark souls there is a clear best in every weapon category. There is one greatsword that is the clear best, one that can be used in special niche cases, and 37 that are just worse. Likewise with other weapon classes.

Diablo 2 actually did this well with weapons in that in each class there are variations. Some that are faster but less damage, or slower with more damage. Or higher top damage but lower bottom damage versus a weapon that has a lower top damage but is more consistent. Then you throw in ethereal and exceptional and elite (and random drops) and it increases the variability. It's true that we have eventually figured out which of each is the absolute best optimal weapon when making BiS builds, but a

Partizan is still viable vs a

Thresher and there are cases where

Giant Thresher is max dps but other cases where

Thresher is max dps, depending upon other available gear.

Where Diablo 2 does not do this well is skills. In a number of classes, the skills are only placeholders until you have access to the next skill.

Fire Bolt is replaced by fire ball and never used again.

Bash is replaced by

Stun is replaced by

Concentrate is replaced by

Berserk.

Sacrifice is pretty much only used as a synergy for

Zeal, etc. Yes, niche builds do exist, but for the most part a lot of skills are just not used. Synergies did help with this, but that's a debate for another novel.

Warlock does not seem to have this problem. Every skill seems to be one that can be used or even build around. For example

Ring of Fire has knockback. You can build it for damage, or just use it for the knockback as a 1 point skill. Sorc's

Nova has no purpose other than damage, either you use it as you main damage skill or you avoid it.

Frost Nova can slow enemies, but the duration is so short that it's not actually worth the cast. Easier to just kill them with your main skill, and

Frost Nova's damage is pitiful. All Warlock sigils have a purpose. Necro ignores most of his curses. Even the lowly

Miasma Bolt is a level 1 skill with an AOE, immediate damage, and damage over time for kiting. What other class gets something like that at level 1? Similarly with the other trees, but I don't want to waste too much time.

Something specific I like is that each of the weapon buffs has the same AR boost and duration. You get to pick which one you want to use based upon the hex effects instead of using the one with the best AR boost (because melee needs it) and skipping the hex effect that you want. The demon tree is also good. It seems like just about any build is still going to use demons in some way which leans in to the ethos of the class. As opposed to Necro, where summoning is it's own distinct build except for

Iron Golem which is only used as another aura generator.

So the skills are well-thought, but they are also too good. I finished Normal at level 34 without any grinding. It was the smoothest run I ever had. Granted, I was twinked with good starting gear, and it was only Normal, but I've run other classes with twinked gear and none of them cleared Normal that easily. I didn't put a single point into vitality and I'm in Act 2 nightmare and haven't died once. A new player who starts this game with Warlock and cruises through then tries a different class is going to be in for a shock. Every skill smashes the game when it's available. Fire

Nova clears entire rooms with two or three casts.

Miasma Bolt one-shots everything in the first half of Act 1. Gharbad is not so weak. Yes, some of the skills fall off a little by Act 3, but they still retain usefulness, see above and fire

Nova. My demons are tanks and rarely get to red health and if I want, I just resummon them. I don't even have to kill anything first. Necro summons are slow and weak and I have to find or make corpses first. Except for the golems, and IG is just an aura generator, clay is only used for slow, and the others are never used at all. It is definitely cool that I can keep my demon over multiple play throughs, but grabbing Hephastos then changing difficulty or doing multiple runs to dogwalk the game is just way too powerful.

Two-handed weapons in one hand with a shield is broken. It's that simple. Especially when your mastery skill makes it easier to equip weapons. Barb is the "weapons master" and his masteries only each work with one weapon type and don't decrease requirements to wield and he can only use certain two-handed weapons as one-handed. Warlock even gets nearly the same critical chance, AR, and damage boosts as barb can one-hand any weapon and do it with less stat points than barb. Broken. And just for kicks, Warlock's plain attack skill even has range.

While playing I used "attack" with a hex buff as my main damage. I used

Cleave for small groups and that killed pretty much everything in two hits. Add in

Sigil Death and groups just fell down with no effort. Speaking of overtuned. Now warlock has

Corpse Explosion. Cast once and it immediately works on every monster in range. And you don't even have to kill them. It auto-kills everything except bosses once they get to 13% health. Drop a power word Death, one or two cleaves and the entire group is gone.

Then I got Insight and switched to

Echoing Strike and this skill is bonkers. I just dumped all my excess points into mirror blades and now I just stand still and point at what I want to die while Lister keeps them occupied. Once I cleared normal I checked out Maxroll to see what they came up with and the

Echoing Strike build they have listed does over a million DPS. True, that's with BiS gear, but that's twice as much as the next highest (

Hydra sorc last I checked pre ROTW) and it faces much less immunities. And it's less cumbersome than throwing down hydras and waiting. Everyone says hammerdin is broken and Maxroll lists it as 56,000 dps with the new ROTW gear. A

Zeal paladin is 122,000 and a Fury druid is 103,000. Warlock has about ten times the damage potential. Either Warlock gets nerfed, or everything else gets buffed to match and if we do that we are going it D3 and D4 territory.

That right there is my concern. I agree that everything about ROTW is cool, but if Blizzard continues down this path we won't have a D2 anymore. I know "the future is now, old man" but the reason D2 has been kept alive for 20+ years is because the playerbase wants D2. If it morphs into WoW or LoL but slightly darker motif, then a lot of us are going to drop it. With the implementation of D2R the way it was done, are we going to keep D2R Classic and D2R LOD or will these just morph a little less? You already cannot play pre-1.10 LOD unless you have the physical discs. Playing release D2 is almost a completely different game than 1.10 and these changes only keep moving D2 away from the core that made it one of the most influential games made.

So, rant over, I didn't intend to write a novel, and I certainly could write more about each of the pros and cons, but for now, TLDR: Pretty cool. Needs some tweaks. I'm leery of the direction Blizzard goes.