It's weird.  Most of the people I know who like it, didn't play Diablo 2.   However most everyone I know that played D2 dislikes it.  There's just something missing from it.

Torchlight looks so appetizing at that price but I have a backlog issue to avoid. lol. I'll have to play it eventually. My laptop has been neglected PC gaming wise and I'm in the mood for a good old fashioned dungeon crawler/hack n slash.

Yeah I played Diablo 2 (and still have my D2 & LoD boxes somewhere) but Titan Quest has some things I would of loved in D2 like an easy way to portal (portal spell, no scrolls needed), way more class combinations (primary & secondary skill set ; lots of possibilites within each tech tree), and a more balanced rune/artifact system. By being more visually impressive than Diablo 2, it has some pretty outstanding visuals and sound effects. Crossing the Great Wall of China gives you a feeling of scale not possible in Diablo 2. Every element of the enivronment (music, scenery, enemies..) comes to together to make something convincing. The world is linear but sprawling, with lots of possiblities for finding little nooks and places with new quest opportunities, vendors, and NPCs.  It's one of the few Diablo clones that makes looting great like actual Diablo. Picking up rare items remind you of how great it is to play a game with an addicting loot system that makes improvements and additions where needed.

Looking forward to trying Torchlight though.

I love the Diablo games and I'm still really getting into Titan Quest.  I just stumbled upon Titanquest.net and it has a lot of mods that improve the game (fan patch after Iron Lore went under), adds mods and my personal favorite, increase the zoom distance. 

Back on topic.  Torchlight went back to 9.99 so I picked it up, so far it's ok, but I didn't get too far into it.  It did feel a lot like World of Warcraft, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

Torchlight is so damn good. Everything in it reminds me of Diablo, and the best part is that it even has some better gameplay mecanics than Diablo 2!!

It has a lot of rough spots though.

Missing items from D2:

• Synergies
• Skill totals higher than 10

Annoyances:

• Half the pet transformations (spider, gel, etc) seem worthless.
• Spells don't go above 11 so really high offensive/defensive/charm masteries seem pointless.
• Many active abilities (Vanquisher) aren't worth using.
• Levels/floors are too long.  You can only watch the fish jump out of the sunken ships so many times before it gets bland.
• Waypoints are too infrequent.  In Diablo 2, they're maybe 5-10 minutes apart.  In Torchlight, they're 30+ minutes apart.
• Pet travel times to town are stupid (I have -160% travel time so it's instant for me but... meh).
• Set items can have any color silhouette including blue and green which means you can't just sell off all the green stuff without reading it.
• Certain set items like Gorgon Boots have totally random properties.
• Life total is comparatively small to the rest of the screen so it's easy to rack up damage without noticing.
• No auto-cast option (it'd be nice to have it auto-cast Haste on me every time it wore off)
• No item auto-pickup option (something to autopick up set/unique/consumable items only would be great)
• Really bad hover-text stacking when holding alt (hard to find the item I want when they're all stacked)
• I still haven't figured out what fame does beyond giving me a new little title every 15 minutes
• When the pet gets stuck, it takes too long for it to teleport to you.
• Pet arbitrarily picks things up.  If it only picked up crap that I could send it to town to sell then that would be swell but it just random picks up anything regardless of value.
• Game spontaneously closes after changing settings but doesn't restart

If anyone has any mods compatible with the latest version of the game that fix some of these issues then feel free to post them.

I tried Torchlight. It's a fun addictive dungeon crawler. I hate it that Diablo has been cartoonified (I'm nostalgic for Diablo 1's atmosphere) but for Torchlight, the cartoonish aesthetic fits.

I can dispell these two for you.

Your pet picks up things you shift click on. I guess you are fighting from a distance a lot, and use shift to not move and accidentally clicks the items. It's insanely useful most of the time, and I usually tell my pet to pick up the useless stuff. Your pet doesn't pick up stuff on its own.

When your fame increases, you get a skillpoint to spend. Same as when you level up, but without the strengh, agility etc points.

I've been wondering where extra points where coming from but I just assumed they were quest rewards.  I'll try out having my kitty/elemental pick up things.

£3.74 ($5 ?) in today's sale.