[Serisan]

I would like to further add to the positives from TQ:

-Better paced gameplay. Diablo 2 gameplay was frenetic at best. Ever play a Frenzy Barbarian? +150-200% run speed makes gameplay... difficult... at best. Many of the cooldowns on abilities seem better tuned than their Diablo 2 counterparts, which is nice, along with the possibility (inevitability?) of the cooldowns being reduced through gear. Lastly, leveling never feels like it ramps from instant to forever. Yes, leveling is slow at higher levels, but I've yet to feel that it wasn't built with a fair amount of consistency. You could level in 8 kills in Diablo 2 for the first level up. That's ridiculous.

-A more immersive storyline. How many Deckard Cain talks do you listen to? Sure, I don't listen to a lot of the chats now in TQ, but I at least didn't get so sick of their voices yet as to click and run, then look at the quest log on my first run through the game. The storyline is better wrought, which brings a much more heroic feel to the game. Consider your first trip through the underworld and the buildup to get to Elysium. What's the comparison? Getting to The Ancients? Which feels like a real accomplishment?

-Monster encounters. Ok, so in Diablo 2, we were looking at Blood Raven, The Countess, Andariel, Radamant, Duriel, The Council of the Zakarum, Mephisto, Izual, Diablo, The Ancients, and Baal as meaningful encounters. You can really scratch Izual right out of there, as it's only meaningful for the quest. There isn't really a whole lot of trickery to these encounters. In fact, if you just stacked the appropriate resists, even in normal, they couldn't do meaningful damage to you and, unlike many encounters in TQ, they had nothing to avoid, really. A level 20 could go toe to toe with Diablo in normal as long as they had 75 Fire and 75 Lightning resist and a belt full of potions. Compare this to, say, any single act and you have roughly as many meaningful encounters (especially on Legendary, with additions like Talus and Hydra in act 1). Remember: Blood Raven is completely optional after normal, not even giving a reward for completion. Let's, for example, look at act 3: Chimaera, Barmanu, Gargantuan Yeti, Bandiri, Yaoguai (or however you spell the bull boss name), and the Telkine. 6 major fights, which is equivalent to 2-3 acts of Diablo 2. Each one of them is significantly different.

-Boss difficulty: Going further with the monster thing, bosses actually require effort in TQ. They have multiple abilities, many of them unique to themselves. They require effort to kill (even on Hell and in bad gear, Baal was a pansy). You have to move and think to kill them if you don't have optimal gear. Again, you can't claim this about Diablo 2 bosses on any difficulty. In fact, I daresay that Andariel on normal was the hardest boss in Diablo 2.

Mechanically, TQ is more interesting. Multiclassing (as mentioned above) is a huge part of the replayability. TQ has worked its way into my collection as a game that won't get put down. It's simply great and, with the improvements made by the community since IL's disbanding, it's getting even better.