You're ignoring too many factors. Things like Sustainability, variance, and safety are all subjective judgments and don't go into "what is the best."

Actually the biggest thing that differentiates characters is the skills they decide to use, not the items.

I think you don't understand fundamentally something about the Diablo 3 skill system. Skills are all based on weapon damage with different effects, and different uses.

Only funny because it's true.

But it's not ok to make incorrect assumptions about things you don't understand and pass them off as fact, or relating to reality in some way.

Another important reason why stat allocation was removed (and it was stated, somewhere) is in terms of balance. From the baseline, stats are sort of what define's a character's power. Diablo 2 ran into this problem in a pretty significant way. If you wanted to play the game at its higher levels, you basically had…

Well, Dex was also pretty popular for block. Very common build was:

Yes, I too wish you could change the order you obtained skills. This was a pretty big issue on the forums, but ultimately it meant that blizzard would have to implement a UI and game system option that they simply didn't think they had time to implement! Sad, but somewhat understandable.

There was less thought in Diablo 2 skill builds in 1.10 and beyond than in 1.09, And there is more thought in Diablo 3 skill builds than any version Diablo 2 had.

5 playthroughs to max level = 5 playthroughs of Normal, Nightmare and Hell.

There are two things with stat builds:

It is going to be different. Having skills based on weapon damage, for example, allows blizzard to much more easily balance skills in terms of DPS, and make a large variety of skills viable at endgame.

Not even close to the truth. They've made an incredibly secure game to avoid the pitfalls of Diablo 2, which is something almost everyone who played Diablo 2 on [battle.net] appreciates. Just because they've shifted the focus to an online game experience, and prioritized that, doesn't mean they're just out to shaft…

You weren't a huge fan of D2 if you didn't ever use d2jsp for trading, imo. And if you did, you would realize that the RMAH is the exact same thing.

You can use a demon hunter that uses only hatred... Just don't pick any discipline spenders, and make sure to pick the passive that gives you 15% more move speed when hatred is at max.

There's more than enough math in Diablo 3. The only difference is if you make a mistake you're not stuck with it.

This was gone over, over and over in the official forums. While the sense of permanence, and meaningful decisions (i.e. Decisions with consequences) is all but removed from the game, there is still more customizeability in Diablo 3 than there was in Diablo 2, with the way the skill system works. Just because it's…

Shepard, Raynor, Isaac, Samus, Lighning, Masterchief, and that guy from vanquish.

To all the naysayers about Diablo 3's soundtrack, seriously give it a chance before you write it off. They've got some serious fucking talent behind it. Destructoid just had a piece with the sound design team including samples. They're all fantastic.

You shouldn't knock it just because he's not part of the team. IMO the Diablo 3 sound track is awesome. I prefer it over the Diablo 2 soundtrack.