Diablo 2 Resurrected Vs Diablo 3 - What's The Difference Between Diablo 2 & Diablo 3

Diablo 2 Resurrected Vs Diablo 3 - What's The Difference Between Diablo 2 & Diablo 3

12/29/2021 10:42:59 AM

Tag: Beginner Guide Items Guide

Today we’ll talk about the differences between Diablo 2 Resurrected and Diablo 3. There's a lot of discussion throughout the years and why a lot of people like Diablo 2 Resurrected better and why they feel like Diablo 3 went wrong and a lot of that's being reflected in the way Diablo 4 is being developed in going back to some of the things. So in this guide, we talk about that and for those of you that are coming into Diablo 2 Resurrected for the first time.

Diablo 2 Resurrected Vs Diablo 3

Diablo 2 Resurrected Vs Diablo 3 - Which Is Better, Is D2R Worth To Play

What’s the difference between Diablo 2 Resurrected and Diablo 3? Is Diablo 3 better than Diablo 2? Is Diablo 2 Resurrected worth it? Should you play Diablo 2 in 2021? Should you play Diablo 3 in 2021? Let's read the article with these questions!

1. Loot System and Runes

This is probably one of the biggest differences between the two games. Diablo 2 has arguably one of the best loot systems in any of the arpg's ever made and that's because of things like runes and rune words and the way sockets work. In Diablo 2 Resurrected, you can get these things called runes which are essential drops that you can slot into sockets on equipment. They give you different bonuses depending on the runes that they might give you like poison damage increase your armor, increase your health, give you life steal. But when combined in certain orders with certain equipment, you also get what are called rune words that basically become uniques or their own specific item if you slot these in the right order. What this did was create an item economy that was centered around runes and in fact they became the currency that was used at endgame to trade equipment. Some of the more rare runes being very valuable and were hard to acquire that allowing to create of some very powerful items. But also what this did is it created scenarios where you'd have to check items that dropped constantly because for instance if you got a staff with two sockets, maybe you could do that with it. But if you had a staff with three sockets, you can't. So in this case, the staff with two sockets is actually better for what if you're trying to make that exact rune world over the one with three. So you're maybe looting things that you wouldn't normally loop because they have value to what you’re trying to create.

Unique Items vs Legendary Items and Sets

Diablo 2 Resurrected features unique items instead of legendary items. Unique items are sort of precursor legendaries, they basically are an item that has its own visual appearance that's different than the rest, has its own name and has its own set of stats that separate from other weapons in that same category. Both games also feature sets that show up green which allows you to get more and more bonuses as you equip more and more pieces. Diablo 3 was focused more on their builds around these items than Diablo 2 was. Diablo 2 seems to be built more around the combination of runes, rune words, uniques and your sets instead of rather just focusing on one set and then piling a couple legendaries on where you could.

Rarity Level

Rares in Diablo 3 don't feel rare at all. Rares in Diablo 2 are much rarer, at least early on in the game they become a lot more common later on as your magic find and whatnot goes up. Why this probably makes more sense in Diablo 2 than Diablo 3 is that the drop rates in Diablo 2 are drastically lower, meaning that you're probably not going to find all the items in Diablo 2 unless you grind for thousands and thousands of hours in the game without trading, whereas in Diablo 3 you can probably kit out one of your classes in a few dozen hours if you grind really well, or maybe a little bit longer if you need. But rares are actually rare in Diablo 2.

2. Character Progression Differences

In Diablo 3, you would essentially just gain some stats automatically when you leveled up, and you would unlock a new skill or skill runes for the skills that you had, so you could change them slightly. And if you wanted to change them you would just go change them and it was basically handled for you automatically. In Diablo 2, you gain attribute points that you need to designate how you want to spend them or save them for later as well as a skill point that you can spend in one of your three class skill trees.

You feel more involved with your character, you get to choose where to spend your attribute points, you get to choose where to spend your skill tree points, you can save them for later if you don't know and then make decisions later on as well. So it feels like you're more involved and you get to decide what's happening with your character rather than it happening automatically and then you just tweaking your character around. Probably what makes this more involved is the limited respects that you have in Diablo 2 Resurrected, you have one per difficulty and then there's an item at endgame that you can farm that allows you to respect but it’s very rare. So you're not going to be able to respec at will at least not immediately unless you get some of these items or trade for later on. So your decisions are going to be very important what you make with your character. This was one of the things that made Diablo 2 better the fact that it had a lack of respect, because at launch you couldn't even respect and it made it, so your decisions were permanent was very important.

3. Combat and Gameplay

Diablo 2 is a much slower arpg when it comes to combat than Diablo 3. In Diablo 3, usually, a lot of classes jump into combat get in the middle of a pack of enemies aoe everything down, things look grim, jump out, heal up jump and this sort of repeats over and over. That's just not the case in Diablo 2. Usually in Diablo 2, you're either getting into a pack of enemies and trying to stay alive in the middle of them or you're just hanging out on the fringes and trying to nuke them down before you go into the middle of the mall. There are a couple reasons for this, first the elite packs in Diablo 3 have much more dangerous revolving around using your mobility to get out of the way so you don't take damage because the harder difficulties, you can't just stand there and tank it most cases, you actually have to move out of the way. Diablo 2 is kind of the opposite in that where it doesn't have as many advanced effects but it's relying on your gear and the way you set up your gear in order to avoid or negate damage. So you can sit there and tank that damage in a lot of cases.

4. End Game

In Diablo 3 currently at the end of the game, you're going to run riffs and greater riffs or do bounties, which is going to provide you with unique loot and ways to further increase your character level with paragon, etc. So that's what you kind of do right now with Diablo 3 at end game. Diablo 2 doesn't have an end game in the modern sense meaning it doesn't have content after you finish the game that unlocks for you to play once you’ve finished. If you've played outriders at all recently that there's like expeditions you can do once you reach the end of the game. Diablo 3 has riffs, Diablo 2 doesn't have anything like that. In fact, what you do usually after you finish Diablo 2 is you farm specific bosses for specific items. In Diablo 3, the end game is farming bosses that you've already defeated until you get the items to farm them even faster. So in that sense, it doesn't have an end game like those games do and you might be disappointed.

5. Aesthetics

Diablo 2 and even Diablo 1 had a much darker and horrific aesthetic than Diablo 3. Diablo 3 went in a bit of a different direction with the art style that they wanted to use. And whereas in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 everything felt very horrifying, scary, very dreadful, it was borderline horror in the genre because of the amount of gore and blood in the dungeons. It felt terrifying to open doors and go in certain places. So in the Resurrected version of the game in Diablo 2, they really nailed this element. But in Diablo 3, they sacrificed some of that horror to increase some of the fantasy elements of the game. Fantasy and arpg's has been done a lot but fantasy is not something that’s hard to do, capturing that really dark horror is something that made Diablo really unique.

6. Persistent Online Connection

In Diablo 2, you didn't have to have a persistent online connection meaning you could play Diablo 2 anywhere once you had the game downloaded if you're playing single player. Obviously, if you wanted to play online you had to have an online connection. With Diablo 3 for some reason, Blizzard decided to add persistent online connection to prevent cheating or something of that nature. But it basically requires you to be active online all the time in order to play at the launch of the game. Almost everyone couldn't get into the game because of server issues and overload which created problems and obviously animosity towards Blizzard. It's not as much of an issue but you still have to have a persistent online connection even if you're playing single-player which means that you can't play anywhere you want and anytime you want.

7. Auction House

They actually had a real-money auction hall at one point where you could sell items. But it effectively ruined Diablo 3. Basically, you couldn't progress past a certain point of the game without getting better items. And the best way to do that was to just buy them off the auction hall, a bunch of people made money on that. It basically created an economy based around spending real dollars to progress the game. Which is not what gaming should be about, if you're playing a free-to-play game and you spend real money to win, it's one thing. But if you buy a game and then you have to spend money to progress it, that's a whole another thing entirely. That's since been removed from the game and that is not a feature in Diablo 2 Resurrected. So you don't have to worry about that although there are plenty of sites out there where you can buy Diablo 2 items for money, so that is a thing, it’s up to you.