I think Diablo 2 is superior to 1 in all ways. Diablo 2 is a fantastic game, while I find Diablo to be a very aggravating, unimpressive game. There are an array of problems with it. First, the directional movement and attacking is too simple. You can only point your character in eight directions (N, W, S, E, NW, SW, SE, NE), which makes hitting enemies with ranged weapons more of a pain than it should be and running and maneuvering away from enemies in tight spots infuriating. Diablo 2's system by contrast is so much more fluid and easy, with many different directions you can face, attack, and move in (I don't know how many, but more than double, I would think).
Making this worse is the fact that almost every time an enemy hits you, you get interrupted from whatever you're doing. If you're trying to run away from an enemy who can attack quickly, and they hit you in mid-transition to the next positional "block," your character does a little flinching sprite and gets put back at the first positional block. This idiotic design induces a feeling of rage during many intense areas of combat like I've never thought was possible in a game.
Alright, so you can't run away, but you can always swing back at them to get them off your back, right? Not exactly. When you flinch like this, you also have any attack you were about to perform interrupted. So if the enemy hits you continuously (and they will), you're just flinching, flinching, flinching, flinching, nearly helpless to do anything at all. Occasionally you'll get lucky and their attack won't make you flinch, letting you get a strike in (whether or not you flinch I guess depends on your stats [dexterity, or something], but I got pretty far into the game and raised all my stats really high, and I never seemed to flinch noticeably less, probably because the enemies got tougher and had higher stats as well). When this happens, if your stats are high enough (one of them also determines how often you can make the enemy flinch), you can turn the table and make them flinch over and over.
The big problem with this is that essentially, the faster-striking the weapon, the better. Never go for heavy weapons, they suck. They do lots of damage, but they're slow-striking and this means that you're giving the enemy a better chance to hit you first (and send you into a near endless flinching state), as well as the fact that the faster your weapon, the more repeatedly you can make them flinch when you're striking them repeatedly. The directional system and melee (and often ranged, thanks to the directional system) combat mechanics are just really bad and made the game a barely enjoyable experience for me.
I thought Diablo 2 was spectacular as a single player game, though I'm sure multiplayer would be equally fun (haven't tried it myself). The things I mentioned above about Diablo are utterly gone and actually made very pleasant in Diablo 2. The one and only thing that I give Diablo over Diablo 2 is that you can quit without saving. In Diablo, you can save it before a tough battle, die, quit, reload, try again. In Diablo 2, they for some inexplicable reason thought the better way to do this is force you to save it if you quit. Got killed by that nasty boss and want to start over and try again? Too bad, you have to live with the fact that you got your ass whipped and lost all your stuff and a ton of your money. There is no reloading your progress in-game, only reloading your character at the main menu, and since it automatically saves your character when you quit, you're screwed as far as re-doing any part if you want to. So basically, you now must go through the tormenting process of going all the way back to the area the boss is at from the beginning of the act, whittling down its health a little more, dying again (losing whatever makeshift weapons, armor, and items you slapped together, AGAIN), going all the way back to where the boss is at, whittling down its health a little more, dying again, etc.
This is the single greatest and most retarded flaw in Diablo 2, and easily marks it down a notch in my book. Other than that, though, it is FAR better than Diablo and just a really amazing game. Just... do yourself a favor and read a walkthrough from time to time to see when you're coming up on a boss. When you're near one... Train and grind the **** out of your character and get them as powerful as possible before you take the boss on.
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