: Thoughts on Diablo III post-launch.

Warning: You might not want to read this post if you don't want to diminish your enjoyment of the game.

I've been playing the game for about a week now, and I've come across several issues that I want to talk about. Before I start I just want to say that I do enjoy the game, a lot. While the rest of this post might suggest otherwise, I don't dislike it, and I think it's real fun to play. But there are several things that consistently reduces my enjoyment of the game.

Simplicity

The absolute first thing that I have an issue with, is the class development system. I mentioned this in my "Thoughts on..."-post, and my fears have been realized. The leveling up of my character, while always giving me new stuff to play around with, really isn't fun. There's absolutely no choice in what skills or runes you get. You can choose what you use, but eventually you'll get everything, and in a very specific order. There's no feeling of customization, it's too linear. I'll admit, the skill trees of Diablo II, Titan Quest, Torchlight, etc, are far from perfect. But I feel that this is a big step in the wrong direction. And I really don't understand why they removed the ability to assign stats ourselves. That's just ridiculous.

Class-specific gear

There's lots of class-specific gear in this game, at least a couple of type for each class, but the problem is that they don't feel special enough. They don't give enough benefit compared to the other types of gear, particularly because the benefits they might give takes up one random enchantment slot. If you get a white class-specific item, there's absolutely no benefits to it at all. In Diablo II, the benefits of class-specific gear was built into the item itself, before any enchantments. I don't understand why they couldn't do it this way in Diablo III as well. 

Randomization

I am very disappointed with the random maps system. It's only really used properly in dungeons and underground ares, it seems. All the above ground areas are the same shape every time. Sure, there's some randomness to what events and bonus dungeons you come across within each area... But there's no real element of discovery to it, as it was in Diablo II. After your second run of the game, you can essentially just walk directly from one above ground area to the next without much thought. And that's not what I want, at least. 

Gems

First of all; There's too few of them. What happened to Sapphires and Diamonds? And what about Skulls? I guess they limited it to only four because there are only four different stats, or something. But I can easily think of more bonuses for the other gems, particularly if you re-introduce the elemental-damage part of the gems. I mean, the only really viable option for gemming a weapon right now is a Ruby, the other bonuses seem pointless to me.

Second; Sockets take up an enchantment slot? I don't understand that. That was one of the great things about gems and sockets in Diablo II; Any item could have sockets, even unique items that normally didn't, and could be enhanced further by adding stuff to those sockets! I mean... What? Why? What's the reason behind this? It's one more element of customization gone from the game, essentially.

Monk Combat

This is just a minor annoyance, but why doesn't the Monk use the weapons he has equipped? I created a Monk wanting to go for the bo-staff as my chosen weapon, hoping to see some epic staff-combat (as the bo-staff is my absolute favourite weapon), but he still punches everything. He walks around with the staff in his hand, but as soon as he attacks it's on his back and he's using his fists, no matter what skill I use. I'm guessing this is a result of them removing normal attacks from the game, another thing I cant quite understand. The only times you're able to use your weapon normally is on level 1, before you get your first Secondary skill, as the right mouse button is then set as a regular Attack, and when you run out of your resource and try to use a secondary skill. 

Battle.net

I will admit that there are a few benefits to always being connected to Battle.net, particularly the ability to join and leave games on the fly, without having to exit and set up a server, or, if you are the server, wait until everyone has left before you can leave without being lynched. But, with my current connection, if I try to do anything that uses just a little bit of bandwidth, things start to get laggy as hell. I refreshed my Tumblr dashboard on my other computer, a few gifs started loading, and the game just stopped completely. And then there's server down-time, and lack of a connection... This is not a fucking MMO. I want to be able to play this game whenever I want to. Having the Battle.net connection as an option would be fine, but not a requirement!