WoW has pampered me

The other day I decided to revisit good ol' Diablo II. This was due to a lot of reasons; I hadn't played it for a long time, I remembered how much I used to play it, I needed something to kill a little time now and then that wasn't WoW to help prevent getting burned out on the game, it's still free to play, and the ladder was getting ready to reset.

For those of you that never really played Diablo II for one reason or another I'll surmise that it's a lot like WoW and not a lot like WoW at the same time.

Similarities
You play with other people online as a specific class (no race options) that often resembles a class in WoW. A quick rundown of class translation is something like:

Diablo II -> Wow
Barbarian -> Warrior (Fury/Arms/Prot they can do it all)
Necromancer -> Warlock (Minions, curses, spells for killing stuff)
Amazon -> Hunters (Although amazons sometimes use javelins and don't have pets)
Paladin -> Paladin (Auras a much bigger portion of their utility)
Sorcerer -> Mage
Assassin -> Rogue (With traps)
Druid -> Druid (But with wolf and bear forms; no tree form)

I could go into how all of them relate, but I'll leave that to another post.

You still kill bosses and monsters(mobs) get shiny drops (common, rare, unique, set, legendary items). You also have talent trees (3) to customize your character, a bank for storage, money for buying gear and repairing, and quests.

Differences
First off you get stat points in addition to skill tree points. This allows you to increase one of 4 stats: strength, dexterity, stamina, energy. Strength allows you to use heavier items, Dexterity allows you to use more complex weapons as well as increase hit and block rating, Stamina increases your health pool, and energy increases your mana pool. Yes even barbarians use mana.

There are 5 acts to the storyline with 6 quests per act (except 3 in act 4) which most can be completed or not. There are a few quests you have to do in order to be allowed to kill certain bosses since you have to open specific doors to dungeons and such.

The entire game is run around on foot, BUT there are things called Waypoints. They are basically like teleportation devices with one in each starting town for all the acts and a few in specific locations throughout the act. By specific i mean somewhere in a certain zone since the maps are randomly generated for each game. Basically if you find a waypoint you can use it to jump to any other waypoint you have ever found. The other mode of transportation is Town Portals. It's a spell that is cast with a scroll that creates a portal to town, allowing you to go to town from any location. The TP is closed when you go through the portal from the town side, or hostile another person in the game.

Speaking of being hostile, there aren't any factions, but you can flag yourself for pvp by going hostile to other players. This allows you to attack each other in the open field and if someone dies in this way they drop an ear. I still remember walking into games that were just for dueling and seeing the area outside of town filled with ears.

Gear
There are a lot of other little differences but one major one I really want to talk about it gear, and why WoW has pampered me so much. Gear in Diablo II can be a touchy subject for me. I've been known to log off for days due to bad situations with gear, wheras in WoW I just keep chugging right along.

First of different pieces of gear take up different amounts of space in your inventory. Everything has a specific size. SOme things take up 1 spot, some are 2x2, some are 2x3, 2x4, 1x3, etc. Rings, amulets, ears, small charms, gems, jewels, potions all take up one spot in your inventory. Headgear, some shields, gloves, boots all take up a 2x2 area. Chest pieces are 2x3, belts 2x1. Weapons mostly range from 1x3 to 2x3 to 2x4. And the inventory is 9x5 which basically means you can 't hold as much as you would like. The bank is decent but will quickly fill up as well. WoW is really generous in the fact that everything is only one bag slot so I can carry so much more(and for a while my mounts which were bigger than me!)

Now onto the main reason I have been papered by loot in WoW compared to Diablo II and the source of most of my frustration. Diablo II drops all the loot on the ground. You kill a mob and the gear is dropped on the ground allowing anyone else in the game to pick it up for themselves. If you don't have the right slot of space available for the item it simply flips in the air and drops back to the ground, unless you happen to have your inventory open and you can indefinitely hold the item until you swap it with something in your inventory or do some rearranging. Luckily there is a maximum of 8 people per game, but with only a couple rare pieces dropping off a boss one could essentially get everything that dropped if they can click fast enough. People are really greedy when it comes to gear in Diablo II. I admit I was one of those people. I figured out ways to cram as much stuff into my inventory and then some if I had help. One of the biggest reasons for this is gear is never soulbound. That means if you pick something up, put gems in it, put a socket in it, you can still give it to someone else or send it to an alt*. So basically you just grab everything you can and sort it out later. My recently made character hasn't gotten fast enough at clicking just yet and missed a couple things that would have been nice.

In WoW I run raids with my guild, most of whom I know in real life. We are a fun loving bunch and we make sure loot goes to the people it needs to go to. So I've been pampered and now have more of an appreciation of the loot system in WoW now that I have revisited the Diablo II version. If WoW just dropped gear on the ground, I would never roll anything but a melee class ever again. Cus we are closer to where the loot drops.

*Clarification on sending to an alt. There is no mail system in Diablo II. Transferring gear to alts consisted of trading an item to someone you knew IRL while you changed characters and logged back into the game you were just in to get the item traded back to you (or create a password protected game and just drop on the ground with your friend in the game to prevent it from being garbage collected) or take the risk of joining a game and finding a good hiding spot for it in town or outside that your alt can run to and grab the item before anyone notices and snatches your loot. My friend and I often had many occasions during our own games where we noticed people that looked like they might be in the process of transferring gear and on one occasion ended up with 8 sojs to share between our characters. I still remember that conversation.

"Give me back my sojs!"
"What's an SOJ?"
"The stuff you just grabbed. It's mine! SO give them back!"
"Oh you mean the stuff we just found lying on the ground?"
"Yeah. Give them back!"
"Finders Keepers man."