The Top 5 Flaws of Diablo II

It's no secret that Diablo II is my favorite game ever. That I could go on ranting for eternity why I think it's the best game ever made. However, even the best game ever made isn't flawless. So instead of extolling the magnificence of this game, I'm going to talk about what I think are Diablo II's biggest flaws. 

1. Gold and NPC items lose relevance 

Earlier in the game (Namely normal difficulty), gold is a particularly important resource that you feel like you can never have enough of. NPC's offer items that are good upgrades too. 

However, once you reach hell difficulty, the price-rates may have increased a bit, but the sheer amount of gold value that drops from monsters has gone up far more. All of the elite armors sell for the maximum 35,000. Many skill-stapled items such as wands, scepters, and staves can easily sell for 35,000 as well. It isn't hard at all to amass a million gold in a somewhat short time. 

This overflow of gold compounds into an issue with the fact that there's less that is worth buying in the first place. This is because the end-game gear you can get or make by then far surpasses anything the NPC's offer. By the time you get to hell difficulty, you're typically only going to use gold for resurrecting your mercenary and buying potions & town portal scrolls. The only real option you have to blow all of the excess gold on is gambling, which is very stingy and unrewarding. You can blow ten million gold gambling and come out with little or nothing to show for it. 

It would be difficult to fix this without simply making the game easier and not everyone likes that idea. So I would err on the side of something more conservative like making gambling more enticing and giving NPC's the ability to offer rare (yellow) items. The probability of them having one should be very low and the price more exorbitant. 

One of my less conservative ideas is that maybe you could gamble runes from a pool of El through Lem at 200,000 gold a piece. 

2. Set items are a bit TOO bad 

I think set items not being best-in-slot is a good thing, but even a low level single-player/offline character has little use for the vast majority of set items you find. You could spend all of this effort collecting a Civerb set when a Flail socketed with Tir & El outclasses the whole set. Even a Warhammer shopped from Act IV with 30%+ enhanced damage is more enticing. 

By the end-game, the only sets worth chasing are Immortal King's & Tal Rasha's. I say Immortal King's with reluctance too, because its viability for completing hell difficulty is just barely there. All of the other sets? Unless the idea of cluttering mules with collections of them excites you, the vast majority of them aren't worth the gold they'd sell for. 

Of course there are partial outliers as well, like Trang Oul gloves and Sigon & Angelic pieces at low levels. You will eventually consider Magefists over Trang gloves or trade up those Angelics for Highlord's & Ravenfrost, but for now they get the job done. I think more set items should be at this level. Instead, Infernal Torch drops, I look at the wand I bought in Act I normal difficulty for 28,000 gold, go "Nah", and don't even bother picking it up. 

While every set shouldn't be Tal Rasha's, because this isn't Diablo III, I think a portion if them should at least be buffed to compete with other mid-tier options. The measuring stick should be that they should be slightly better than common items and easily acquired options at whatever point of the game they can drop. 

3. Elemental builds get stonewalled in hell difficulty 

Blessed Hammer paladins, necromancers, and melee builds have a fairly linear difficulty curve from beginning to end. Near the end, melee characters tend to be held up until they acquire a strong enough weapon, but nothing like how elemental builds are hung up by the sheer magnitude of monsters with immunity's. 

The new (New to me, anyway) sundering charms do something to alleviate this, but in my opinion, not enough. You go from not being able to scratch them to just being able to scratch them. You sit there orbing a group of 4 zombies in the Blood Moore 25 times in a row and think "I'm not doing this". 

Your only real "feasible" option is still an Infinity on your mercenary. Yes, you're pretty much stuck until you get two Ber runes and a worthy four-socket polearm base for them. 

The real issue here is that you can't just try to get around all of these immune monsters like a running-back into a defensive line, because some of them are the ones you need to progress, namely the Council in Act III and the seal bosses in Act IV. 

The solution isn't really that simple, though. This hang-up is part of what balances the Sorceress' ability to teleport in the first place. It just sucks that trap assassins and lightning javelin amazons also have to suffer for it. Tornado/hurricane druids get by because half the damage is physical and Fist of the Heavens paladins get by with conviction aura. 

That said, I think the real focus should be on alleviating this for trapsins and javazons. Maybe a new runeword made of mid-runes like Pul, Um, & Mal that breaks immunity and can only be made in amazon spears or claws. 

4. Many skills have little or no viability 

Poison dagger, the sorceress' inferno, half of the necromancer curses, half of the barbarian war cries, the poison-based amazon javelin & spear skills, and the druids' fire-based skills off the top of my head. These are all skills that need looked at and reworked or given hefty buffs. 

It's just silly that no matter what kind of barbarian you are building (Unless it's literally a Battlecry barbarian) the optimal war cry build is always shout, battle orders, and 1 into battle command. The other war cries might as well not even exist. 

I am opposed to ever nerfing anything at all, but I am all for buffing skills that are so bad, most players forget they exist. 

Poison dagger could have scaling bleed & crushing blow, but even then, poison dagger is bad for the same reason that the paladin's charge skill is bad as an attack (It has good utility for mobility, though). The hit-rate is just too slow. Zeal, double swing, whirlwind, etc all hit multiple times in short bursts. Smite only works out because it ignores defense and deals fatal damage instantly. 

Thus, the only real solution I can think of is to rework poison dagger to proc a poison cloud akin to plague javelin. 

5. Some runes are a bit TOO scarce 

Calm down, I'm not about to suggest increasing the drop rate of Ber or lower or in general, for that matter. I'm talking about Jah, Cham, and Zod. 

After doing thousands of Lower Kurast runs, I HAVE gotten a few Ber runes on single-player/offline. However, I have accepted the reality that no matter how many thousands of times I clear The Pit or Chaos Sanctuary or Terror Zones, I might not ever be graced by Jah, Cham, or Zod. 

Sure, I could cube two Ber for Jah, but I need those for Infinity and an extra if I'm making Enigma. Getting two Ber runes by itself is quite a feat, but getting three more on top of that is something I might spend the next five years trying to pull off. Zod, on the other hand? Forget it. Breath of the Dying and Last Wish might as well be online-only. (That's okay though, I'm a Grief guy anyway). 

When I discovered Lower Kurast runs, it re-invigorated my desire to play single-player/offline. Items I never thought were feasible to make offline like Infinity, Heart of the Oak, Fortitude, Call to Arms, Grief, and Delirium became accessible. 

I just wish Jah and Zod had a similar method to acquire them easier. 

The solution is simple here: Edit the "super chest" drop tables to include a couple patterns (At each difficulty tier) that drop each of Jah, Cham, and Zod. That would make them a bit more rare than Ber, but still feasible to get within 10,000 runs. 

10,000 runs is nothing to scoff at either. At an average rate of 30 seconds per run, it takes roughly 85 hours to do that many Lower Kurast runs. Anyone willing to put in 85+ hours to the most boring runs in the game have earned the "street cred" of making Enigma, don't you think? 

Look, even if none of these five issues are ever resolved, Diablo II is still an unrivaled masterpiece that I will continue to play until I die. I'll continue gambling my extra gold for nothing, leaving set items on the ground, holding out for two Ber runes to make Infinity, treating Arctic Blast as though it doesn't exist, and accepting that I may never get to make Enigma offline. It's cool if they don't fix those things, but it would be a lot cooler they did.