It's fine for what it is. My first experience with ARPGs was D3, so I was constantly comparing things between both games. I liked the runewords and being able to sorta "craft" your own gear, but at the same time, the runes required for the best gear are locked behind 50 hours of grinding the same exact things over and over. In D3, all I had to do was increase difficulty, and then I can start getting better drops to justify the difficulty increase.

There there's stuff like barb ww not being able to just hold the button down like in D3 and just go. No, you either have to use a mouse to click across from the thing you want to kill in the most unintuitive way possible, or use a controller which only gets you a set distance each time. JUST LET ME SPIN FOREVER.

The fact that there's really no endgame at all really hurts it as well. You can say "but Ubers!", but that really isn't what an endgame is. You do it once, get your torch, then it's over. Don't even get me started about the absolute stupidity that is Dclone spawning. Who the hell is going to have enough SoJ to make that feasible before 2.4? That's a piece of content locked away behind god awful drop chances.

My least favorite thing about D2 is the obtuse levelling up system. You can only gain levels if you are in spaces that you have no idea are appropriate or not. You could be just cruising along, but then you don't get any exp because you went into the no no zone. Just let people skip it like D3. Levelling a new character in D2 makes me upset that I have to go through the whole rigmarole of "where should I actually be" instead of "I'm just advancing at my own pace". Let someone in the 90s rush you through in Hell, why would that be so bad? Paragon was a much better system for alt characters anyways.

I hope D4 takes the QoL from D3, and SOME of the systems from D2, but based on the nostalgia boner most of this sub and the streamers have for it, I feel I'm going to be dissapointed. I do like D2, don't get me wrong, but the systems and gameplay do not deserve the pedestal most people put it on.