Diablo III/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Broken Base:
    • The announcement that the game would include an auction house that uses real money caused quite a controversy in the fandom.
    • And the "always online" nature of the game especially since this means the game is over for good once Blizzard decides to no longer support the Diablo 3 servers
  • Cliché Storm: Part of the charm of this series in general. This game is no different. The demon hunter trailer is a particularly well-crafted example of wall-to-wall clichés.
  • Complete Monster: Aside from Diablo and his minions, who embody this trope in all sense of the phrase. There's also Adria, who uses her daughter, Leah, as a vessel for Diablo. Even worse, she outlives the God of Evil she resurrected and isn't killed in the game itself, but rather saved as an X-Pack boss!
    • Zolton Kulle. This is a man who attempted to usurp his Horadrim brethern by using the Black Soulstone to control the Great Evils, even murdering and dismembering his own wife just to fuel his twisted experiments with the Soulstone. Is it any wonder the Horadrim went to such extremes to keep him down?
  • Contested Sequel
  • Critical Dissonance: The game has received universal acclaim from professional critics, with favorable reviews from a big majority of them. The playerbase, however, is divided by what could be the biggest schism caused by any game in Blizzard's history. Most of the driving force for this schism seems to be the bad launching day, the length of the game and features that tick the fans off. The argument is not as dramatic as what happened with Mass Effect 3, but it is still very noticeable.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny / Awesome: In response to complaints that Diablo 3 was "too colorful", Blizzard included, Secret Cow Level a la mode, Whimsyshire which is filled with things like prancing ponies, smiley face clouds, and large groups of teddy bears. Check it out.
  • Damsel Scrappy: Leah, at times. Her constant reminders that she doesn't believe her Uncle's stories don't help.
  • Demonic Spiders: In Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty, certain randomly-generated rare and unique monsters can be more dangerous and harder to kill than the end-of-act bosses if they happen to get a particularly deadly combination of powers.
    • Desert Wasps. At a point where most enemies will be doing single digit damage, their ranged attacks will be doing several times that damage, and can hit multiple times since they fire multiple shots at once. Plus they are quick, retreat, fly over terrain, and fire at you. And never attack alone.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: While Kormac the Templar has drawn criticism due to his World of Warcraft-like appearance and Eirena the Enchantress has drawn criticism due to her Stripperiffic outfits and ditzy personality, Lyndon the Scoundrel has met with near-unanimous approval from players due to his cool outfit, charming personality, and Badass Mustache.
  • Goddamned Bats: Plenty.
    • Leapers, sand worms, and dune threshers burrow under the ground and pop up randomly to say hello.
    • Various bird like enemies fly above your head, invulnerable, and divebomb you only when you engage the next enemy pack.
    • Shadow vermin come in tidal waves and will block you, allowing more powerful enemies to close in. And they're hard to see in the darker zones unless you turn on enemy health bars.
    • Enemy champions spawn with various randomized abilities, which sometimes negate the weaknesses of their type. For example, a slow and lumbering monster able to perform an One-Hit Kill which you're supposed to outrun may occasionally have a champion variant capable of teleporting.
  • Internet Backdraft: The release of the game didn't go smoothly, with tons of error messages, the impossibility to play, the servers being unable to hold the mass of players, and even cases of characters disappearing from the character list. Cue hordes of rightfully angry players complaining on the official forums, pointing out that the absence of an offline mode prevented them to enjoy the game at all. While trying to fix the servers issues, Blizzard ended up setting a queue line (like World of Warcraft), which pretty much was the icing on the cake. There were also a lot of people saying "You went to an online game within a minute of launch, what did you think was going to happen?", which only helped fan the flames some more.
    • And now that there seem to be hundreds of hackings in different regions and even authenticators have said they have been hacked. Naturally, Blizzard gives canned responses and blames the player with threats of banning if it happens twice.
    • And then the game goes offline for maintenance, forcing players who just wanted to play singleplayer to wait 8 hours.
    • It has become regular to see the servers not being able to hold during the week-end. Our little friend, error 37, is always there to comfort us when we try to log in during those times.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks: Actually zig-zagged... there have been some complaints about the shortness of it. (You can clear an act in a few hours.) However, this actually allows you to get started on Nightmare Mode and the harder difficulties earlier.
  • It Was His Sled: You fight Diablo.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Error 37. "Error37.com" was created within an hour of the game going live. Twitter is flooded with messages about it (#error37), and the "Diablo III Midnight Launch" Facebook event's page was wall-to-wall Error 37 Memes.
    • "Diablo III is not a single player game" is quickly gaining momentum as people keep arguing about how the online-only nature of the game is detrimental to their single player experience. It turns out a large chunk of the fanbase does like it as a single-player series and feels intentionally excluded.
  • Moral Event Horizon: You know Maghda and the Coven are bad news from the get-go, but they really seal the deal when they capture Cain while the hero is searching for the broken shards of Tyrael's sword, then torture and kill him right in front of Leah. And that was after their destruction of the town of Wortham.
    • Adria is revealed in her betrayal to have crossed this long ago when it is revealed that she created Leah to be a host for Diablo and the other six Evils long ago by letting the human-bound Diablo impregnate her! To take it even further, due to how disoriented his host was this is implied to not be entirely consensual. In other words, Adria date raped Satan.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: You could probably count on one hand how many people were playing Diablo III for its story. Blizzard's actually more Genre Savvy than we give them credit for - Not only does the Scoundrel not even seem to give two craps about saving the world from evil but is more concerned about getting loot (see Ensemble Darkhorse), but the Barbarian even says "Get on with it" early on, causing Deckard Cain to say, "Nobody ever listens." As one player put it, "They could resurrect Chaucer from the dead and players would still ignore the story."
  • Ruined FOREVER:
    • Some people had this reaction when it was learned that you can only play the game while connected to the internet. Blizzard evidently forgot that a lot of people played Diablo II off of Battle.net, or in places where they couldn't get a connection. While the reason that has been given for the online-only bit (That it is an attempt to interdict bootlegging and prevent account hacking and item duplication) is a noble one, there are those who counter this by saying that there were much better ways of doing so.
    • Many hardcore fans have accused the developers of "dumbing down" the gameplay by removing skill points and manual attribute distribution, alleging that it sacrifices a lot of character customization in favor of 'saving people time'. Others point that removing the ability to level up desired stats isn't a big loss since most players in previous games focused only on Vitality and upped the others just when the new, better equipment they found required it.
    • The Real Money Auction House smells like fairly noticeable Bribing Your Way to Victory and Revenue Enhancing Devices in the noses of some fans. Together with the "dumbing down" accusations above, people are fearing that Diablo III is going the way of World of Warcraft by focusing too much on bling and not enough on a real gaming experience. This is definitely not helped by some people's counter-reactions to many of these reactions, which can be summarized to "deal with it".
    • The artstyle. Many people feared that the game would be Lighter and Softer, despite that one of the earliest gameplay trailers features a barbarian being bitten in half by a monster and Let's not get started on what happens to Deckard Cain, Leah, and what your followers went through.
    • While the unprecedented server failure from the launch day has been, for many, a one-time occurrence, there are some who insist that their connectivity, and therefore their ability to play and enjoy the game, is still suffering even after the diligent server maintenance done by Blizzard. Complaints tend to range between random disconnects that result in loss of progress and high, randomly spiking latency which translates itself into Fake Difficulty due to the server's delayed response to player actions. This seems to be happening even to those with good computers and fast Internet connections.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Like The Bible, there is a divine entity who willingly and intentionally abjures everything about him that makes him better than mortal, in order to be able to save humanity from the ancient machinations of a primal evil whose primary form was a seven-headed dragon. [1]
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Only 10 auctions per account on the gold auction house, if you have alts or play AT ALL you will quickly exceed that limit, combined with limited on character and joint character inventory it can be a pain.
    • On the other hand, such mechanic may be implemented to keep the Auction House prices stable. With no limit of auction, everyone will post their tens of stacks of commodities or gears, thus flooding the market and reducing the overall price.
  • Ship Tease: Between Kormac and Eirena.
  • Take That: Blizzard included a level called "The Land of Whimsyshire" to mock the fans that had attacked the game (and its predecessor Diablo II) for being too colorful.
  • That One Boss: Izual has gone from a textbook Damage Sponge Boss to a legitimate challenge.
    • In the harder difficulty modes, some of the randomly generated minibosses can be harder to fight than the actual bosses, especially if they get a nasty combo of abilities.
    • Also: Belial. Up until his fight most players really get around with just punching stuff until it falls over. And for the first half of the fight, it seems to be applicable. But then Belial goes One-Winged Angel... and becomes the first real enemy where that doesn't really work, as he has a phase where you are required to keep moving to avoid being instagibbed by his meteor spam. This comes without a warning and with absolutely no hint on how to counter it. Most people who steamrolled the game up to this point experience their first group wipeout exactly at this point.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
  • The Untwist: Belial's identity. Much of act 2 revolves around his deceptions and illusions, but its obvious who it is. Your character even lampshades this in the cut scene before the boss battle, basically saying "Stop screwing around, we know it's you."
  • Wham! Episode: Deckard Cain's death. It didn't help that the intro featured a Red Herring where Cain was hit by a meteor...and lives.
      1. Adria and the person who may or may not at the time have been possessed by Diablo had a child.
      2. It appears she knowingly had a child with Diablo.
      3. The other player characters of the first game have turned evil.
      4. You're Properly Paranoid.
  • The Woobie: Haedrig Eamon. First, his grandfather is forced to kill his own king when he went mad, and was cursed forever as a result. Then, he witnesses the murder of his father in front of his very eyes. Afterwards, he meets and marries his wife and moves to New Tristram, where she gets infected by the zombie plague and he's forced to put her down. Now his only reason for existence is to make sure he can provide the heroes with some decent weapons and armor.
    • Also Leah.
    • King Leoric, at least before he was the Skeleton King. The last of his journal entries before becoming the Skeleton King reveals that his corruption was not one he did willingly. Rather, he confides in the journal that dark thoughts invade his mind but most significantly, he often finds that he can't control his own body and actions. Only a select handful of people know this; to the outside world, King Leoric is a Complete Monster.
  1. ↑ Even better, the most even way to distribute the ten horns among the seven heads would result in four one-horned heads and three two-horned heads. Three of the seven archdemons that Tathamet splintered into had power over the other four...
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