Every person I've talked to who got this game said they got bored with it after the first or second playthrough. I haven't played it, but the storyline looks half-assed, almost as if they quickly rushed through it just to get their product out (like CoD's single-player). Auto-leveling stats for players is incredibly stupid and casual (lol casual); I don't see why they couldn't just leave it completely up to the player. That's how it was 12 years ago; that's how they should have kept it. D3, in my eyes, looks like another Battle.net 2. It's shiny and refined, but once you look past all the updated (but still shitty) graphics, you'll see that there's no depth at all.

When I bought D3, I was completely new to the series and after playing it once, I was like woot I'm finally done....then I found out you had to play it again 3 more times to actually beat it, I was a bit disappointed after that because it's same campaign, graphics, storyline all over again but higher difficulty.

What made D2 not-so boring/repetitive when it came to Hell and Nightmare difficulties?

Honestly I never played D2 past normal, D3 I actually did play to lvl60 (but only after a several month break after finishing normal).

Some people like to grind and just get the max level and the best items. What they are looking for in a game is, I dunno, something to keep them occupied and make the grinding fun? It is almost like WoW player appeal, where you just grind and grind and grind to get the best gear so you can grind more effectively to get better gear to grind even more effectively etc. The only difference is in D3 your grinding on the same content whereas WoW has different content for each level.

But I think most casual gamers like myself I don't see why we would complain about the gameplay I found normal fun and generally had no qualms outside the subpar story. I think anyone trying to argue that D2 is better is just suffering from nostalgia.

I remember reading Blizz's defence for removing the custom skill points and from what I could remember it was pretty convincing. Something about there usually being the 'best' skill layout and if you build a character with the wrong layout then you were screwed. The argument against it back then was it would 'make all classes the same except for items and skill layout'.

I still like Diablo 1 the best out of what I've played
It has certain weaknesses when it comes to gameplay (like not being able to show all the items on the ground, making it really hard to find some of them and no running), but the story and atmosphere is just so much better than at least D2 and the very beginning of D3.

Yeah, that's not convincing at all. There's no good reason for removing player choice. Choosing a functional yet not the most optimal build doesn't mean you're "screwed", and if you feel so strongly about following the metagame, you can make a new character to level whatever people have decided is the best build for the time being. That's unnecessary to do though.

If they were really so concerned about one build being the best, they should have devoted a little more time to game balance, rather than strip away a large portion of content which nearly everyone enjoyed. I would have never become a Diablo fan if D2 had been anything like D3, and it's safe to say the same for a lot of other people.

Diablo 3 was a colossal disappointment in every aspect.

Path of Exile is a pretty good sequel to Diablo 2, though.

I'm just really looking forward to Sacred 3

Automatic skill distribution is a gimmick. It's so they can cover up expanding game content and worrying about a range of player skill-sets. Basically something to cover up for the lack of content and contributes to the shallow feel of the game. "Oh you would rather X? Too bad you're going to Y because we didn't feel like making the game capable of being suited to X."