As both a scientist and avid Diablo 2 player, this blog post is laughable in its superficiality and its claims.

TL;DR: Diablo 3 was WoWified: broke itemization and skill builds, and thus replayability.

In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.

In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it".

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Background: thousands of hours manually farming and botting Diablo 2 since vanilla release, equivalent time spent trading/on d2jsp (most of this will refer to 1.09 since that is most fresh in my mind). Also lvl 60 demon hunter in Diablo 3 Inferno Act 3.

Please don't argue that D2 was just as broken on release. The D3 team had YEARS of experience to look back on.

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1) D2 was all about plowing through monsters. If you were underleveled or undergeared, bosses should be somewhat difficult. If you were reasonably prepared, bosses should be fairly easy. If you even had decent gear, bosses should be a joke.

D3, on the other hand, treats everything like a WoW raid. Hours of grinding to prepare for a fight, min-maxing forcing everyone into a single class or build (energy armor wizard or PMS demon hunter?), and even then, the fights are difficult( vs champions/elites).

Why is this important? Because D2 was so "easy", many many skill builds were viable. Wanted to roll a melee sorc? Go ahead. Fishymancer ( = pet wd in d3)? Works. Throwing barb? Surprisingly strong. Thorns + fire aura pally? Too good.

The proliferation of crazy builds is important, as it makes a MUCH larger proportion of items valuable. This will tie in with the next point.

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2) D3 itemization is broken. First, there are very, very few item stats that are important. Weapon DPS, main stat, vitality, resist all. Maybe atk speed, crit, crit dmg, move speed. Everything else is garbage. Health globe radius, seriously?

What made many D2 builds viable was the much larger variety of item effects, as well as lack of dependence on stats. Life tap wands made smiters useful, enigma was good for everyone, infinity runeward allowed lightning sorcs and javazons to fight lightning immune, etc.

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3) Rare items. The above 2 problems, when taken together, kill the D3 end-game. D2 was all about making a MF build, getting some money, then making a bunch of crazy characters, either min-maxing MF or PVP or Baal runs or something, but there was a ton of variety in what you could do. End game economy revolved around rare items.

In D3, finding a rare item is "ID, does it have those stats? Yes: keep, No: salvage". Brainless.

In D2, finding a rare item is "ID, weird combination of stats, but I don't think anyone wants this so I'll throw it away, go to d2jsp and find some absurdly rich player wanting that ridiculous combination and kicking yourself for vendoring it". This means that botting was difficult, because the really big $$ items are ones you wouldn't even recognize, and stash size was a limitation.

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Anyways, that's why I stopped playing D3. I really don't think they can fix these problems without very large patches, which seems unlikely coming from actiblizzard.