I don't remember gear hunted as being anywhere as near necessary in two. Compound that with them picking the crappiest loot system when three launched, and you have blah.
D3 ... seems to have been designed around multiplayer.
Untrue actually.
You can clear inferno with effort and learning all the ins and outs with the best gear you find (I did so prior to the paragon and MP additions).
What the AH truly changed was people seeing the best gear others were getting (and selling on AH). Thus their "good pieces" were actually crap. Which is like a hit on ones ego. Its upsetting or depressing.
In D2 you normally didn't have an easy time seeing top gear, or other people's gear. So what you found was usually good. And you didn't feel depressed about it in the end.
While Mechanically the AH did no changes, it really changed the psychological and gamer psyche standpoint to make one think they have to get the best gear to clear the inferno mode.
And for anyone who plays wow, you can think of gold in more of a Valor Points idea they put together. Except player run, and not NPC vendor. You play long enough and sell enough items you can afford the awesomest piece you wanted.
This is my main complaint about the game. Whereas you could easily play D1 and D2 as a single player game OR a multi-player game, D3 appears to have been designed to be heavily shifted towards the Multi-player. Not that you couldn't play it single player, but there was a much more obvious and heavier focus towards the online crowd than previous games in the series or in the genre (that was pretty much defined by D1).
Oh, and it would appear that it was designed with a console port in mind as well.
At the end of the day, give me Titan Quest or Torchlight or Borderlands or D2 over D3 any day of the week.
The game was easy as shit to begin with, I hated it, and then only after completing the game in normal could I play it at a higher difficulty. What a mess, beat it once and deleted it.
I think Blizzard felt / knew the multiplayer aspect is what made Diablo 1 and then 2 a huge success. So they used that as an excuse to impose online DRM, ignoring their single player base. Maybe they felt the extra buyers they would achieve by DRM outweighed those that only played single player.
It's funny though, D1 and D2 I mostly played with other random people. D3 has only been with friends / family, and probably 90%+ with just my wife. I would have been fine with offline + LAN most likely.