First Hardcore Inferno Belial Kill (by a Barbarian, too)

[MMAgCh]

All classes require gear. All classes need to farm. The choice is to farm the AH or to farm the game (like the gobo farming).

...

Plenty of people grinded the shit out of Diablo / Baal after they beat Diablo II / LOD. Even when they could RUN all the way there and kill with little to no concern of defense or death. Some did this for weeks, some months, and some even years.

Okay, so you can still do this in Diablo III if that's your thing, you just aren't doing it at the "end of the game". Instead, this kind of thing becomes necessary for the inferno difficulty level.... okay, sure, but umptweeen thousand people did just that in Diablo II... so what's the issue?

It's kind of OT-ish, but here's my response anyway!

The difference, in my mind, is that the results of item runs in D2 were more fun and varied than anything D3 has to offer. With set/legendary items being rarer than rare (and, for the most part, something to get excited over purely in a "hey, this might be worth a reasonable amount of gold on the AH" sense), you're left with only blues and yellows. These really are nothing more than utterly soulless and virtually indistinguishable affix containers for whose acquisition I, at any rate, find it just about impossible to muster any kind of enthusiasm – a bland mess of bonuses to attributes and resistances whose impact on my character's performance is so absolute, and strangely sterile in a way, that all but the godliest of upgrades will be met with a matter-of-factly "uh huh" and nothing more. In D3, items are far more important than they ever were in either of its predecessors, but at the same time this has rendered them transitory and their acquisition curiously unalluring, as far as I am concerned.

Diablo 2 may not have featured an overall greater amount of usable loot (though I'd disagree on that count as well), but farming Mephisto, say, or Pindleskin, still was far more engrossing simply because there were outcomes other than "bunch of crappy blues", "bunch of crappy blues and yellows", and "bunch of crappy blues and one yellow that's a little better than what I'm using", even if those additional outcomes were just as superficial and of equally little benefit for the most part. In D3, though? Once in a great while, your farming efforts will pay off (increasingly more rarely so as you near the threshold of Inferno-level gear), but other than that all you're finding is gold, either directly or through vendor trash, to be blown on the AH. I can see how some people might enjoy that kind of thing (I always liked the market/escrow/contracts aspect of EVE Online), but I can just as easily see how people would not enjoy it, because it isn't generally the reason you play a loot-based hack'n'slash game like Diablo.

(And if you find my line of argument to be without merit, consider Blizzard's reasoning for retaining the functionally superfluous act of IDing rares/sets/legendaries in the first place. It's clear the greater idea behind it wasn't entirely foreign to them; they just didn't expand on it nearly enough for my tastes.)