You just don't get it.
PLEASE answer this, as you keep skipping around it...
HOW can characters in D3 be just as customizable as they are in D2 when you CANNOT make any adjustments to their base stats? You can adjust strength, vitality, dexterity, etc. Its not possible. This is extremely limiting.
Let's say you have a car and you can customize is by changing the paint colors of some of the different parts, but that most of the color combinations possible look like absolute crap so really almost everyone sticks with about four different arrangements that might have some slight variation.
Now imagine another car that doesn't let you change the colors at all, but lets you change the type of tires, adjust your gear ratios, and install different body kits if you want.
Would argue that the second card is somehow less customizable? There's more things to play around with to tweak the car and they generally lead to more meaningful results than any customization you do to the first car.
The parallel that I'm drawing here is that attribute allocation in Diablo 2 was essentially pointless. The first thing you did was determine how much strength you needed for the gear you wanted and put only that many points into strength. After that you could determine if you wanted max shield block or not (most builds don't) and put only that many points into dexterity. After that everything went into Vitality unless you used the one build that put points into Energy. That whole system could be reduced to a set of boxes to click. You can argue that you still want to have the choice to make some horrible mix of attributes, but unless the system is well balance it just leads to broken game design.
With Diablo 3's system the only customization would be a slider between Vitality and whichever attribute controls damage for that class, making it even more pointless to include such a system in favor of other changes that allow you to customize characters.
With Diablo 3 you get 6 skills that always scale with you, meaning that they're always useful. You also get to choose among five different runes for each of those skills, or none at all if you prefer. Not all of those skills are necessarily active either. For example, there are several Wizard skills that can be chosen more for their passive benefits (e.g. more damage or higher critical hit chance) rather than those which will actually be used. Furthermore, you also get 3 passive skills that can be used to further customize your character in multiple different directions. Considering that gems are still in the game, you're still able to customize your stats to a certain degree, and I imagine that a variety of different gear will exist that allows you to accomplish the same thing.
And another thing that annoys me about the game. How on earth do you see how much damage a given ability does? Yes it shows DMG when you hit 'i' to see your specs. But that is weapon DMG. And yes spells and such are based on weapon damage (which is absurd in itself, you need to have a wizard with a huge battle axe to get good SPELL DMG). But I see nowhere to see spell/ability damage. Say you unlock a rune for a given spell on a wizard, it just says "more damage". But it doesn't say how much. Hell you can't even see how much health a given monster has. So how are you supposed to figure out what is the best combo without any of the required information?!
I was looking for this too. Also, I think the damage that it lists isn't even damage, but is actually DPS. Also, they changed everything to scale based on weapon damage a while ago after it was obvious that it made balance easier and then they didn't need to constantly be adjusting the damage of different skills at each level.
Presumably, the easiest way to figure it out would be to look at your min/max weapon damage, multiply that by the amount of damage you get from your damage stat, and then by the skill multiplier. It's a pretty big pain though, so I don't know why Blizzard doesn't just add a field that lists min/max damage on whatever skill you have on your two mouse buttons.
There are still monster health bars so you can probably get a good idea of how hard you're hitting. Not sure if there's any way to see the raw number for life though.
And just how is the math going to be more complicated when all you do is select a box for a skill? You can't build your stats, which effected how well skills worked in D2. I don't see me needing to use an Excel spreadsheet to determine what the best combination is for a given build when there are literally no specs that are user changeable. Items can give you some yes, but thats nothing complicated to work out in your head.
With very few exceptions, attributes had little or no impact on skills. Most were just raw numbers that increased with more points into the skill. Strength made so little different in terms of actual damage dealt that it's only use was in hitting a minimal amount to use the gear you wanted. Dexterity was useful for shield block, which unless you were a Paladin, most classes and builds tended to ignore. Energy was useful for one build, that most people never used, otherwise utterly pointless.
Diablo 3 has a system that provides limited resources, meaning you can't just spam your best skill endlessly like you could in Diablo 2. This means you'll need to build some kind of rotation, which can be challenging to figure out. Also, several skills have cool downs that need to be accounted for as well. There are also trade offs between taking defensive skills or going for skills with some passive ability to improve damage. Critical hits are also present, and some classes have mechanics based around those.
Some of that can easily be fed into a spreadsheet, but a lot of it works better and gives more accurate results if simulated with a software program.
Did you even play Diablo 2 on an advanced level? Because as far as I can tell, you didn't. Because you clearly have no clue what you are talking about. In Diablo 2 you could adjust everything. In Diablo 3 you just click on a box, and every so many levels you unlock a "rune" which just gives an added ability. Zero customization.
Yes I did, but most of that customization was utterly meaningless. Most builds used one or two primary abilities. The others were chosen for synergy value, which was plainly spelled out. Similarly, attributes were generally allocated in a very narrow and set way. Diablo 2 may as well have been a series of boxes that you clicked.
I agree that the system in Diablo 3 is entirely too linear, though. I would greatly prefer being able to have some control over the order in which I unlock skills. I can understand if Blizzard won't allow me to instantly unlock the best, end-game abilities, but a pool of five or so skills that I could choose from would be better. Similarly, I would like to pick the runes that I want to unlock. It may make balancing the game more challenging, but considering that most people will spent most of their time playing the game at the higher levels, it probably doesn't matter which order they chose to unlock skills when in the end they all end up in the same place.
Still, though, I fail to see how you come away with zero customization. There's certainly less of it in some aspects than Diablo 2, but as I've said, Diablo 2's customization is really so shallow that it could just be reduced to a series of check boxes. If you want to argue that you should be free to make some utterly ridiculous character the evenly distributes points across all skills and dumps every attribute point into energy, go ahead, but most would agree it's somewhat pointless and probably not terribly friendly to more casual players.
I think that Diablo 3 is going to result in a lot more variety. There are still probably going to be a small handful of cookie-cutter builds that are popular, but I believe that the game design will be much more conducive towards strange and unique builds being more viable. I also think that it's going to be a lot more fun to play. Diablo 2 was about endlessly spamming one or two skills and occasionally using a skill with a long duration that you could forget about for the next few minutes. Diablo 3 felt about the same until I played the monk and leveled up enough to have 4 skills. At that point combat became ridiculously fun as I would dash between groups, blind the enemies so that I wouldn't take damage, build up spirit with my primary ability, and then unleash a roundhouse kick to knock the enemies back just after blind had worn off. The Barbarian could similarly use all 4 skills on a regular basis. I don't think the other classes had gotten to this point quite yet, but after looking at the different skills for each class I think that most of them will have builds that mix in at least 3 or 4 skills on a regular basis. A few builds could probably use 5 or even all 6. If giving up some generally meaningless customization allows for a game that's more fun to play and is more tightly balanced, I'm not going to miss clicking on attribute points.