Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In most games like Diablo, no amount of gear will allow you to defeat an encounter if you don't know what you are doing. Skill is mandatory, gear is merely helpful. Diablo 3 is the opposite. Neither are required until you hit Hell difficulty, but after that no amount of skill will allow you to defeat a mob or encounter if you are not geared for it. Gear is mandatory, skill is merely (slightly) helpful. The overwhelming majority of your deaths are unavoidable. Mobs teleport to you from off the screen and kill you in one shot. They chain you, wall you, spawn under you, jump at you with no warning, surround themselves with invincible minions, and otherwise kill you in ways you absolutely CAN NOT avoid. Unless, of course, you have the necessary gear. And if you think you can work around this by kiting or taking down mobs slowly and patiently, think again. If you don't kill difficult mobs quickly, you are punished by an unavoidable death (enrage/kill timers). That's right, you are killed for hit/run tactics, kiting, being patient, or otherwise trying to use skill instead of rushing headlong. They aren't exactly subtle with their cues to go buy gear. So how do you get gear? Not by farming, that's for sure. The chances of getting drops that are useful are exceedingly low, and Blizzard has been quick to remove any farming spots players have found. The only option which doesn't involve months (literally) of farming is the Auction House. You are not going to farm your own gear, you are not going to progress without gear - you have to buy it. And the best items are naturally either on the RMAH or up for ridiculous sums of gold that you have to buy on the RMAH. This led to another problem, of course: ridiculously-oversimplified skills, runes, mob mechanics etc. This is due to the one-hit mechanics mentioned above. If mobs could be countered with skill or cast spells/abilities which could be avoided with skill, then gear wouldn't be mandatory. Mobs only use gear-check abilities which can *not* be avoided or countered with skill. Naturally, once you have the necessary gear those unavoidable attacks no longer kill you instantly and you can progress so long as you know how to click your mouse. There is essentially no skill involved in any aspect of the game. There is no reward system, either - you don't get any usable gear or special items or even extra gold for taking down a difficult mob/boss. Instead, you have one big frustration loop. You progress until you run into a brick wall, Blizzard's cue that you need to make purchases on the AH. You die until you get sick of it, go buy gear, and then progress with relative ease until you run into another brick wall. And since gear-check mechanics are all that you ever see, your skills are all pointless. It really doesn't matter which you use, how well you use them, how you choose to play - none of those things has any real impact on your game. It's all about gear, which means the Auction House. Like many people, I had assumed the RMAH would simply be a distraction, an optional feature some would make use of and the rest could ignore. That's just not the case. Every aspect of the game is designed to funnel players into the auction house, and the changes made to the game because of that fact completely ruined it. Nearly every complaint about the game can be traced back to the RMAH (even online-only play, as dupes/cheating/hacks/etc. are all just as prevalent - it only serves to promote use of the AH). They'd already destroyed the WoW franchise. Now they've destroyed the Diablo franchise. Starcraft 2 is all that's which has any hope left for it, though it's currently also riddled with oversimplified mechanics. And since they can't turn that into a cash cow, it's been largely ignored since its release and the expansion is likely still a year away. It's sad how this company has fallen from one of the most beloved game companies of all time to this pathetic greed-on-steroids shell.