It's obviously hard to play Torchlight 2 without comparing it to Diablo 3. It's not so much as Torchlight 2 is great but that Diablo 3 is a bad game. Torchlight 2 really just takes the standard Diablo 2 format plus a few things that made Torchlight unique, while Diablo 3 inexplicably decided to reinvent the wheel for no apparent reason (well, actually for RMAH). On the Elite level setting the game's about as hard as Inferno on Diablo 3 if you were actually able to get loot, though then again the bosses don't regen to 100% the moment you die so that makes them a bit easier though I'd say that's just because Diablo 3 is poorly designed in general. The game's combat reminds me of Metal Gear in that the regular enemies hit extremely hard relative to your HPs and yet you can get stomped by a Metal Gear and only lose a third of your health. The regular enemies hit very hard, perhaps unreasonably hard, but they're also easily killed for the most part. For the bosses themselves you can actually tank their main attack pretty well (usually will lose 1/3 of your health but it's not a huge deal with the potions). You have to dodge the telegraphed attacks, and pretty much every boss has unlimited amount of minions they will constantly summon so you can't just stand still the whole time. There's really not much strategy to the boss battles but then the Diablo series probably was never meant to be have strategic boss battles. You basically run around in a circle like crazy trying to do as much damage as you can before you eventually die and then you run back in and keep doing it and eventually the boss's health will go to 0. Hopefully you bought a lot of potions with you, though, because some of them takes a long time to kill (at lesat on Elite).
The skill tree system is fairly standard stuff. You can take back the last 3 points you spent so at least you can see how a new skill works and of course 75% of them are pretty much useless with your starting equipment on Elite mode but then that's what new characters are for. Given that equipment can be worn with either a level or a stat rating (i.e. level 10 or strength 50 + dex 25) this means once you have collected your awesome gear you can generally wear it a lot earlier than the level requirements would allow since you can assign your stats exactly, and so far I've yet to see anything with only a stat requirement so obviously you can eventually wear anything no matter how you allocated your stats. Similar to Diablo 3, Torchlight 2 tries to make all the stats at least somewhat useful (focus = int but adds dual wield chance and elemental damage, strength is melee DPS but also crit damage modifier) though you still won't be going all strength/dex as an Embermage, but it means the points you got to put into str/dex to wear certain gear at least isn't completely wasted.
One thing I noticed is that people who are on Diablo 3's side will always talk about graphics or polish or UI or whatever even though it's either subjective or, in the case of graphics, it's really hard to see tell why Diablo 3 has better graphics. I mean yeah you paid $60 for it but I don't think the game looks better than Shining Force Neo on the PS2.
At first I thought the lack of respec was going to be a big deal but since you can try a boss as many times as you want, you can probably beat the game with only level 1 Magma bolt and nothing else spent on your tree (but you'll definitely die, a lot). I'm sure someone can find out a way to completely gimp your characters but it seems like you could have 1 point in an active skill and everything in passives, or vice versa, and it'd still be pretty hard to come up with a useless character.
The skill tree system is fairly standard stuff. You can take back the last 3 points you spent so at least you can see how a new skill works and of course 75% of them are pretty much useless with your starting equipment on Elite mode but then that's what new characters are for. Given that equipment can be worn with either a level or a stat rating (i.e. level 10 or strength 50 + dex 25) this means once you have collected your awesome gear you can generally wear it a lot earlier than the level requirements would allow since you can assign your stats exactly, and so far I've yet to see anything with only a stat requirement so obviously you can eventually wear anything no matter how you allocated your stats. Similar to Diablo 3, Torchlight 2 tries to make all the stats at least somewhat useful (focus = int but adds dual wield chance and elemental damage, strength is melee DPS but also crit damage modifier) though you still won't be going all strength/dex as an Embermage, but it means the points you got to put into str/dex to wear certain gear at least isn't completely wasted.
One thing I noticed is that people who are on Diablo 3's side will always talk about graphics or polish or UI or whatever even though it's either subjective or, in the case of graphics, it's really hard to see tell why Diablo 3 has better graphics. I mean yeah you paid $60 for it but I don't think the game looks better than Shining Force Neo on the PS2.
At first I thought the lack of respec was going to be a big deal but since you can try a boss as many times as you want, you can probably beat the game with only level 1 Magma bolt and nothing else spent on your tree (but you'll definitely die, a lot). I'm sure someone can find out a way to completely gimp your characters but it seems like you could have 1 point in an active skill and everything in passives, or vice versa, and it'd still be pretty hard to come up with a useless character.
