Yes, I know you can do stuff with shit gear. I finished nightmare with a skystrike and other junk on my amazon. Being able to complete objectives with shit gear does not make the shit gear good. Even (relatively) common uniques like homunculus take forever to farm if you're playing by yourself.
I played when bots weren't a thing and for a single decent-tier rune (like Mal, Um, Pul) or a couple Perfect Gems you could outfit a highly capable Player vs Monster character, with huge killing speed and a lot of shinies. Even items like Tal's Amulet were on the market.Bottom line is that Diablo 2's drop rates are atrociously bad and it it weren't for botters you couldn't even trade for lower grade end game equipment becuase nobody would want to trade it away.
When I played Diablo 2 I was ten years old and absolute shit at the game. Beat normal difficulty but never could beat Nightmare or Hell cause the builds I made sucked. So all this end game stuff you guys are talking about is just gibberish to me.
I'm kind of amazed Blizzard went the direction they did. They eliminated the need to create new characters for new builds, cause you get all the skills and can switch between them at no penalty. You can't mess up allocation of stat points because the stats you gain at level up are completely worthless due to the ridiculous number inflation this game has. Even if the numbers were valuable, the stat system is so shallow that the only allocation that can work is 3 points in a stat only useful for one class and two in vitality. This means anyone can reach max level and beat all the difficulties cause there is no need to think about any choices when developing your character. If you can't make bad choices then none of them have any value cause they don't matter. It's such a hollow system that there is no sense of accomplishment or reward for beating any of it.
And yeah that is completely fine. But only if you don't want people to play your game for more than just a few hours. Or have a memorable and fun experience. Which is why I am amazed they haven't changed this system yet. Seriously, they don't have to be original, just copy Grim Dawn or Path of Exile. Just do something that isn't this shit, cause you are just pissing all the work of your animators, programmers, and sound designers down the toilet.
Solo Self Found is not a terribly rare play style, and will be a recognized option if you play the new temp leagues (it won't change drop rates though). In the permanent leagues you get a full free respec every 3-4 months when the new temp league patch hits. You get some 20 respec points for just playing through the story, and there are also Orbs of Regret drops which give respec points so you can do quite significant changes to your character spec even without the complete resets.Honestly I'm not going to go to Path of Exile, since it is a multiplayer ARPG that allows trading. This means that in order to prevent super powerful legendaries from becoming common and flooding the trading economy they have to have lower drop rates then say something like Grim Dawn designed for single player.
Plus the lack of any kind of respect means I can't really experiment too much with character builds and have to rely on premade builds by other people which I tend to hate.
It's a shame cause Path of Exile looks so fucking cool.
Blizzard implemented monster corpses into the game just for the Necromancer class