The part of my post you quoted was just a nice way of saying: shut the fuck up, you're not talking to a bottom-feeder like DraQ here.
Damn, you totally got me, this wasn't at all about you needlessly acting all defensive and attacking everyone who even dares to disagree with you, it was a hidden slight against DraQ, the lowest of all bottom-feeders.
Oh look, another hollow poster who ran out of arguments long ago, and so is now reduced to posting irrelevant nonsense in point-form because that's what people who lack complete thoughts tend to do.
Replace every integer by "then". There, problem solved? And you do realize this wasn't a list of arguments?
And no "rebuttal" forthcoming on my last post to you, lol? I guess you learned something then? And finally realized that bullshitting your way only takes you so far against those with genuine knowledge on a subject.
Do you mean the one from Wednesday 6:01pm? No, you answered my questions. And your answers confirmed your Sawyer/Tim Schafer attitude that if people aren't having fun with D2, they're not playing it the right way.
You had previously before this strongly implied or borderline explicitly stated that D2 had to be meta-gamed "the fuck out of" to beat it without plodding.
Reading skills fail. My claim was about having
fun in D2 without meta-gaming.
You even pushed harder by "challenging" me on having beat it like a boss without meta-gaming.
The point wasn't to challenge you. Nor was it about meta-gaming as such. It was a genuine question about how often you play vanilla D2 SP the way it was designed to be played because your replies made you appear utterly oblivious to that play style in your evaluation of D2.
You also strongly implied, by falsely citing me, that 20hours of sub-par shit had to be waded through before Hell difficulty.
Oh yes, god forbid somebody poke fun at you. After you were such a sport and prudently refrained from using strawman arguments like nostalgia. Just two things. First, you're falsely citing me, I didn't say sub-par shit, I said not as good as what comes after 20h --- which is exactly what you said. Second, since you complain about missing replies: no reply to the release dates part of that post? By modus Lilurae, then, you concede the point. So no more writing off bottom-feeder DraQ as a nostalgia fag.
As for non-MXL mods, I've answered a few queries and even gone out of my way to provide links to people. What more do you fucking want?
I want to have a more substantive discussion about what makes MXL superior to those other mods, the base game, and also other hack-n-slashes. Partly because I'm genuinely curious. But also because you apparently felt that this is the one and only mod that deserves a thread, the one that codexers should play to have a fun Diablo experience (TM). And that's what all the arguments are about: what makes a game like Diablo fun. That's also why the D1/D2 comparison is important: these games are very similar but also have huge differences in gameplay, and it is not a given that somebody who likes one will also like the other.
Well, enough with the pointless bickering, here's how I see things in this respect.
Warning: Giant wall of text incoming (I would structure it with bullet points, but Lilura disapproves).
D1 has gameplay that's a lot more action packed compared to D2 (1-player mode). Levels are smaller but have more things to do (book shelves, shrines, secret door ways if I remember correctly), enemies come in bigger packs, some mini-bosses have actual personality (Butcher, Snotspill, Garbage the Weak, King Leoric). Although the dungeons are randomly generated, they can look very different with every new game --- some have winding corridors with surrealist door placement, others chain many big rooms together, and so on. The set-piece mini-dungeons are sufficiently different and often involve minor puzzles (lever pulling in Leoric's tomb and to get Arkane's valor, reading a book to get access to the hall of the blind). All these qualities are lost to some extent after the catacboms, with the caves being the weakest area. However, they still make for a good contrast to the extremely gloomy catacombs, and the game is short enough that even a "degenerate plodder" will quickly reach the hell levels. Overall, the areas are varied and complement each other well, have plenty of stuff to do, and do not overstay their welcome. They are also incredibly atmospheric, thanks to consistent art direction with creative creature design, a kickass soundtrack, and memorable voice acting. The Hellfire expansion shows how hard this is to pull off: even though the nest and the crypt are closely modeled after other areas, something is off about them, they feel like from a different game. Personally, I blame the color palette.
D2 does all these things worse. The overworlds are very sparse in several respects. They are bigger, but enemy density is low in many areas, and there's few things to interact with. Most of the time they're just plain fields with little use of the z-axis, which would have made things more interesting (as DraQ mentioned, I think). Act 2 and 3 at least have a more organic design that sometimes creates natural bottlenecks through the use of rivers, trees, and rock formations, but it's still very little compared to D1, even if we only look at the caves. Dungeons are not randomly generated and differ little within one act, e.g. several caves in Act 1 that look exactly the same and the tombs in Act 2. Atmosphere suffers, among other things because bosses are underdeveloped. For instance, Andariel and Duriel just pop up out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing. Lazarus in D1 at least was mentioned a few times and got a cut scene to set the mood, plus a scary red town portal. it would have been nice to see something similar in D2, in particular because its cut scenes are easily one of the most memorable parts. Another issue is that the acts don't complement each other all that well, although I'm not sure why that is the case. The art style's are hugely different, the enemies are different, the set pieces are different. Yet going from one act to the other never feels as different as going from the catacombs to the caves, for instance.
Alright, enough about level design and atmosphere, on to combat mechanics and character builds. This is where D2 should be superior to D1 because its system has a lot more complexity. In D1, every encounter past level 8 can be boiled down "weed out the cannon fodder with fireball or chainlightning, use primary attack on the rest, heal if necessary". Before that, it is mostly an exercise in kiting (which you can do even with the reduced movement speed) and abusing bottlenecks if a mob is too big. That's not to say that there aren't cool fights, in particular if monsters have high resists or you have to dodge projectiles while luring a melee mob into a more advantageous position. But the two formulas I cited still work most of the time, and since classes only differ in casting speed, but not in which spells they can learn, fireball and chainlightning are must-haves for every class. And even a fighter profits from casting mana shield. All this is exacerbated by the fact that books can be purchased and gold is not in short supply, you can find enough magic raising items to push your character to 255 for learning spells, and past the caves there's no downside to spending attribute points on magic since you can max out your stats with elixiers anyways (the expansion's secret berserker class is the interesting exception from the rule). Towards the end of a run, the three classes thus tend to show some major similarities in play style, but the differences in attack and casting speed as well as max attributes still differentiates them enough that they don't play exactly the same. That's not necessarily a bad thing: when you finish Diablo on normal, it doesn't feel like you've just scratched the surface, you've actually maxed out your character, got decent loot, and overall there is a sense of closure. And if you want better loot, you can try nightmare and hell (although the improvements often aren't that big, from a lord's sword of speed to a king's sword of haste, and from a ring of the heavens to a ring of the zodiac). That's in fact your only option because there are no respawns, which encourages thorough exploration rather than harvesting the same area over and over again --- which is what I would consider degenerate playstyle.
D2's skill tree differentiates the classes a lot. And every class has its subtypes, like Zealot, Hammerdin and Flashadin for the Paladin. But the system also encourages creating one-trick ponies. It's not that just that you want to pick a few skills and spend all points on those, it's that you have to deliberately stall character progression until you get access to good skills. If you spread yourself out, or spend your skill points the moment you get them, you gimp yourself. And even if you just play normal SP the first time around you notice that because the cool Lvl 30 skills you finally got access to aren't any better than the level 1 skills you've put six or seven points in. And unless you move on to nightmare, you'll never see what they can actually do. In the case of the paladin, for instance, an SP run in normal is much easier if you just put points in low-level skills like might, sacrifice and zeal. But what you really want to do is try all those different skills like smite and charge to see what they do and how great they might be at higher levels. And you want to be able to dick around with different skills, just like you could try all the different spells in D1 if you got bored. D2 doesn't give you that option. So the system is complex enough to make tinkering with character builds fun, but the slow level progression makes the whole process incredibly tedious unless you use a trainer or can join a group on Battlenet to quickly go from level 1 to 50. You might count this as C&C, I see it as a deliberate stalling tactic similar to mining in Dungeon Keeper. Mobile (or whatever it's called). Personally, I don't understand why they couldn't just include the option to respec your characters at certain points in SP, e.g. as part of a quest or before you start a new difficulty level. As it is, a SP run has to save up skill points, which creates bumpy character progression where you are a push-over for many levels until you suddenly become a killing machine within one level-up. That was no fun in Gothic 2, where the cost explosion encouraged you to save up tablets, and it's not fun in D2 either.
Great, so now that we have a full treatise on where I'm coming from, you'll hopefully understand why I originally said that MXL sounds interesting after you mentioned that it speeds up character progression and increases enemy density. But that still leaves certain issues open, like atmosphere and the fact that D2's overworlds can't compare to D1's dungeons, and it doesn't look like MXL fixes that. The Back2Hellfire mod brings some of that back and keeps the skill system around, but ties it to non-purchasable books, which I like because it removes the character build OCD and forces you to make the best out of what you get. It pushes D2 a bit towards its rogue-like roots, and that's a clear improvement imho. But at the same time drops are rare (both for equipment and books), some areas that are recycled from D2 don't gel at all with the D1 atmosphere (replacing D1 caves by D2 Act 1 caves), and the teleporters are spread out so far that you can't just have a quick 1h session because of D2's stupid save system. So I'm not that happy with B2H either. It seems that no mod can completely remove the suck from D2 SP.
tl;dr: D1 is smaller, shorter, and less complex than D2 , but all of that works to its advantage.
fix - make magical and even high-end non-magical items rare enough to be highly valuable (like in D1, where "mere" blue items were rare enough to keep being interesting).
