Actually yes, much clearer.
I agree with some of what you say, but still:
1. How can you say weapon mattered above everything in D2 when you also say that there was a specific gear set for each proposed build? Yes, gear mattered a lot. But not weapons only, gear in general.
Which, in a loot game, is pretty perfect design.
Every class and build wanted something different, not the same high DPS weapon.
Just that these character builds worked backwards. You googled up (or dogpiled/yahood lol) the perfect weapon/shield combo, and worked backwards to design your character around those items, and specifically that weapon. As a gameplay design this is fine, but as acknowledged by Blizz, it made for a clusterfuck backed to balance any future changes to the game.
2. As you agree with me, all damage in D3 revolves around weapon DPS. Spells, skills, everything.
So even if items with varied abilities, such as freeze, or even teleport etc. do come out, weapon will still be extremely important and there is no way to circumvent that without changing one of D3's most core design choices: to have everything base off weapon DPS.
So while I do agree that obviously items with more to offer than stats+all resist+crit. chance would greatly add to variety, different builds, different people wanting different items and not all the same, I can't see how it is specifically D3's design that helps in that.
That would be true for any game (and was so for D2), and would also be true for D3, but it would still be less so, not more so, because of complete reliance of all classes on main weapon for damage.
It only helps in that adding items and making changes like that shouldn't (and that's a tentative shouldn't - Blizz aren't beyond ballsing it up) break the game.
I fail to see the awesome and revolutionary change in ARPG game design that D3 went with because of the rune system. D2 didn't have 'runes', it had 'skill trees', Titan Quest didn't have 'runes', it had 2 templates to combine and skills to choose... what's so different here?
Runes certainly are not the be all and end all, for sure. But basing your character on skills rather than your weapon is. Runes are just the support act to that. And yes, there is much work needed here to make them not just interesting, but viable. The diversity in builds just isn't there, Blizz were certainly caught with their pants down here. The WD's Giant Frog for example, could be much, much more awesome than it is
Why is that a bad thing? That sounds pretty cool that you could find items and build characters around it. Maybe it should be more like Path of Exile and you find ability gems, set passive skills in the tech tree, and use/create weapons with the sockets/affixes needed to improve the effectiveness of your builds.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, at all. That was never my contention, rather I think that a lot of people's complaints stem from this mismatch you highlighted. And that's fair - there is nothing unreasonable with that intrinsically in the loot-driven ARPG genre.
Thankfully, PoE and (from the little I've looked at, I'm trying to keep the surprises at a high) Torchlight 2 should both provide this game mechanic (let's call it, 'loot-based character design'), in some shape or form. I've enjoyed the short beta time I spent in PoE and the sometimes stark contrast it provides to D3;looking forward to the proper open beta soon!
In D3 it don't seem like you have much that make your builds unique. Crit chance and change runes, it's kinda boring.
And here is a legitimate complaint for sure at this early stage (compounded I think by the lack of real diversity between the classes themselves, which I think is the most egregious error in launch D3) This is where a huge portion of improvement can be made, both in item affix diversity and the way it ties in with skills, and the skills themselves.
Time will tell.
