What keeps you playing Diablo 2?

With the release of the Diablo 4 expansion tomorrow and it's many changes that are coming to it - what keeps you playing Diablo 2?

I played some of D2 when I was younger, played a lot of D3, and purchased D4 (w/ the new DLC) a little over a month ago. But, I was bothered by just how easy the game was, my character would completely annihilate every little thing with just the slightest effort of gear/skill coordination.

I got sucked back into the Diablo Lore and decided to play through D2 again and I've really enjoyed it. It feels challenging, and rewarding, the constant anticipation of what drop there might be from the next lever pull!

One of the things I enjoy is that I feel end game happens in the game, and is not a separate section made to keep people looping for years.

I'm often turned off by other games where the end game is map systems and infinite tower grinds, where none of endgame happens in the game you explored along the way. To some degree, I feel there is no real endgame in D2 other than the one you choose yourself, which makes the game a choice, and not a chore.

My end game is doing rushes,

Key and torch farming. Even with this as my end game, I still fight monsters and bosses in the usual farming areas, and I can still take part in the same game as people with other end game goals. I feel that I'm taking part in the game, even when I choose to not "play optimally".

I come back to D2, because it let's me play at my own phase, without making me feel I'm missing out because I can't reach lvl 500 in the end game dungeon.
(Bla bla,

Herald farming is making this tougher as I want to have a life outside farming for sunder charms, but that's a different discussion)

Nostalgia and the grind. I feel I don't HAVE to do anything, so I'm free to pursue whatever

Another big thing for me is all the knowledge I've accumulated along the years I've played the game. The more I learn, the more I feel I'm playing with hacks on.
Knowing what levels to shop/gamble important items, handy cube recipes, some runeword, FCR breakpoints, the direction of most maps; It's all adding up to me feeling in control, even when enemies and maps change.

It's random enough to feel somewhat fresh, but predictable enough where my time and effort gives me an advantage.

I played original and a bit into LOD. Now I'm about a month and a half into ROTW and loving it. So much more fun for me than D3 or D Immortal--the latter really disappointed me with micro transactions, so much so I didn't even want to think about D4 (I don't even know if they have a $$ market).

D2 is just fun, whether it's killing cows, bosses or farming mats for interesting events--gotta say, the

Terror zones breath fresh life into the more tedious parts of the map that we usually ignore afterwards.

Overall, quite pleased, and coming back 20 years later to have my own Lister going "What did the 20 fingers say to the face? SLAP-AP-AP-AP!" Is a true joy!

Atma.

If you know, you know.

I've been on and off for years and couldn't really tell you exactly why.

But what I can tell you is when and if I quit it won't be for D4

Mephisto, could say same words as 2 posts up from here but yeah it seems that the mastermind is more intruiging that one could ever imagine.

One day he will drop CoA and I will be a happy camper to get my grail done.

• Nostalgia - I won't lie it's not a reason.
• Lack of good alternatives - most new games are an infinite treadmill, P2W, or most likely both. Or just won't work on my old 2010s laptop.
• Multiple viable builds, so the game is not repetitive (sort of).
• Multiple game modes:
  • SC as a training ground and HC as a real challenge.
  • LoD (now RotW) as a "default" mode, and SC as a challenge if i'm tired of zooming in Enigma and obliterating everything.
  • If D2R is not enough (read: again, I'm tired of everyone zooming in botted/bought Enigmas), there are D2 multiplayer mods, such as PD2 or PoD. And if that's not enough, there is MXL. And they receive regular or semi-regular updates.
• New: Chronicle.
• Social aspect - this is an exaggeration, since most of my old friends are dead now (at least Diablo-wise), but every now and then I play together with one of them, just not as a long-term commitment anymore.

Nostalgia

Gambling addiction fix

Moving up the power curve- I love how you can get orders of magnitude more powerful than a level 70ish toon that can beat Hell difficulty.

Once I get to that plateau where a lot of extra effort is requires to get incrementally better, I lose interest- e.g. getting lifer charms or better rolled items...

Ladder is fun for me for a bit until the "next step" is Infinity/ Enigma or something. Then I lose interest a bit.

It simply is and remains a fun game.
With an emphasis on "game".

Even decades in, you can still get stuff you never got so you never really run out of "could improve" or "goals" (extreme traders aside I guess).
At the same time, you can reasonably get more than close enough to consider it a "done" state so you're not forced into a never-ending grind just to play.

In a world where more and more games stop being games and are instead actively turned into half-assed jobs, reliant solely on getting you addicted to an endless grind, no matter how unfun it may be, that's a major (MAJOR!) driver. That's why I'm so glad to see Blizz actually for once uturn on the endless fomo addiction/"forced play" cycle and dial back the shard-lock/tz-statue/... stuff. At least on the PTR..we'll see if they follow through with it.
That appreciation for "game is still a game" is emphasized even more for me atm as Star Citizen for example (yeah, I naively held up hope for way too long..) has now officially scrapped any and all "game, sandbox, play as you'd like" plans and is instead also becoming a never-ending, forced, endless-loop, repetitive fomo addiction grind as well. F that.

Beyond that, simple as it may be on the surface, D2 continues to offer a ton of room for theorycrafting, spreadsheeting things out, optimizing well beyond the obvious and all that jazz which is quite satisfying to my inner hardcore nerd.

And ultimately, annoying bugs and certain balance issues aside, it is simply a well made game.

Though I will say, if it weren't for D2:R, I likely wouldn't be playing D2 anymore as at some point, graphics just become too dated to still be acceptable to me these days. Thankfully, the resurrected version holds up. Even more so at HDR 5k2k.

At this point Project Diablo 2 primarily. They bumped up the difficulty in some places (really important, they keep the challenge up, and things are balanced at the same time), rebalanced classes, rebalanced useless uniques, added some fun stuff, mapping, more crafting, they figured out how to make Enigma NOT essential etc, lot's of people playing it. They did shards better than D2R did (D2R feels like a Project Diablo 2 ripoff at this point in places). They did

Terror zones better (capped at lvl ~85, so it still makes sense to farm specific areas, or do mapping; they are just a nice addon for the variety, not something you need to chase for optimal play with a tracker).

In D2R sunder charms are a band-aid; you just slap one and you are done, in PD2 you need to stack

Pierce from various sources, also

Pierce skills like Amp damage etc are nerfed to make it reasonable. Love it; sunder charms feel like crap compared to PD2 mechanics

They are getting the game in a better direction than RoTW/D2R; would recommend. I got sucked in so much I stopped caring about D2R almost entirely.

Graphics do not make up for how they gradually mess up the gameplay in D2R over time.

Warlock is still an OP mess (which also pulls me away from D2R), and I don't see them fixing it any time soon. They tried to pack every good feature from all the other classes:
- it made hammerdin obsolete (bc it has source of magic/physical damage) - you can put 40 points and have almost full dmg potential, while equivalent paladin (foh + hammer) will need to make compromises
- barb with

Berserk looks like a neglected child now compared to that, because it has less damage and defense PENALTIES for using magic damage, while warlock has ranged + area damage ADVANTAGES (barbarian: "A powerful but reckless attack that increases damage and attack rating but decreases defense rating." warlock: who cares just give it insane damage, AOE, range and 100%

Pierce XDDDD)
- Warlock has 100%

Pierce by default, while bowazon needs to stack

Pierce with items
- it has a fire

Nova that pushes enemies away for some reason (really op compared to

Frost Nova, or even regular lightning

Nova bc it doesn't need mana shield to work)
- it has much better summons than druids, can compete with necro easily
- add

Leap Attack/semi-

Teleport on top of all that as a cherry on top
- if that's not enough you also have a miasma tree that pulls enemies away from you and deals tons of magic damage that can be pierced on top (with a sunder charm that gives you LEAST penalties compared to other charms, bc of how little monsters do magic damage)
- genuinely Mary Sue character

etc etc, just not fun, even after the "nerfs" (if you can easily get ~18-20k attack rating while melee classes struggle with this - that's not really a "rebalance") I recommend switching to Project Diablo 2, they do things right, while D2R desperately tries to rip off their ideas (and makes some convoluted mess out of them). D2R had a really good start, but each new feature feels like committee work that makes the game gradually worse/boring, and too easy, instead of this being an any semblance of a Passion project

I planning to play both, D4 New Exp and D2R ROTW.

They are two different games for sure, D2 is better (in my opinion ofc).

D4 now for me, is all about the story, i wanna know how everything evolve and try to figure it out what come next.

In the end...always come back to the beginning. D1 and D2 for life!

Schnorki wrote: 9 hours ago

In a world where more and more games stop being games and are instead actively turned into half-assed jobs, reliant solely on getting you addicted to an endless grind, no matter how unfun it may be, that's a major (MAJOR!) driver.

This. And i have to add:
because having a good drop at d2(r) realy feels like being lucky and not like some manipulation scheme with the intention of keeping you in the game and spend more money aka lootboxes, whine counter and pay2win bullcrap

I will try to complete my Set Holy Grail (9 items missing - thanks RotW for doubling my missing items...) before thinking in pause for a while again
(paused for a few moths and came back recently with the RotW)

One of the great things about D2 is you can jump in and play for 15 minutes, or several hours depending on how much time you have, and still have a good outcome.

Nostalgia is a big part. But nostalgia doesn't form around nothing. D2 has a really good itemization system. Magic items can be useful because they can roll the highest mods. Rare items can be BiS for certain slots and builds. Uniques are of course "iconic" and runewords open up really fun build options, as well as making White and ethereal items exciting to find. Every next enemy could hold that fabled

Ber /

Jah /

Zod rune. So basically every rarity is potentially interesting and any trip out of the town can bear the highest of treasures.

There is also quite a lot of build variety between classes, though, granted, not all of them are "competitive". The vibe of the game, sound design, enemy design and music are also really special.

It's only unfortunate that Blizzard aren't taking better care of the game. There are quite a few bugs and annoying UI issues that have obvious improvements. For instance, any

Key combination to easily transfer items into a trade window. Or the ability to whisper players without having to put them on a friendlist. But bots seem to be able to for some reason. There is also a very frequent bug that hides your characters, forcing you to reopen the game in order to view them. The friendlist is regularly displayed as offline for me. The ability to join via invitation also only works half the time. Well, you get the point. I wish the Blizzard of old was around

D2 keeps me coming back because it's a solid game, lots of fun, RNG provides that dopamine shot...

(I played like at least 600 hours of D3, but after a while it got me really bored, and I never went back to it)

and I'm just not interested in D4. I have no idea if it's good or not, I just don't want to try it. Same with PoE, I heard it's great but I don't care

Another thing that makes me want to play D2 is that my brother and a couple friends are also playing so we can co-op TZs, ubers, ancients etc

RNG

It scratches my childhood itch of getting good stuff in the game. I remember duping stuff in D1, trying to get the best items. Now I do the same in D2, but on a whole other level - the grind is eternal, sometimes very frustrating, but when it hits - it hits you like a truck.