On diablo 2 a barbarian get's 4 life per vitality point.

So you're saying a barb doesn't get a massive change from level 20 to 80? In 60 levels you get 300 stat points. 300 stat points in Vitality means 1.2k life. This 1.2k life would then be affected by something like BO which increase your life by about 130%. This would give your barbarian an extra 2.76k in life. Oh, that's no a big difference is it?

what ? 60 levels and you dont feel the difference ?

Yes but the system needed revising, it took progressively longer to get a level-up as you progressed, yet your rewards for doing so became mostly insignificant. The life you get extra, and the damage you get extra etc. was (usually) NOT affected by life- and damage-augmenting skills and attributes. Example - I played as an amazon and I thought I'd put most of my stat points up to level 90 on Dexterity to increase my hit rating, as well as using lots on the hit-rating-augmenting skill (whatever it was) - but the dexterity did barely anything because it was not augmented - yet there were weapons with "always hits" and "ignore enemy defense" that give you 100% or practically 95% chance to hit right off the bat. It was imbalanced.

1.2K life sounds good - but when the game requires you to run away anyway when you're getting hit a lot (you die a LOT in hell difficulty as a barbarian) you need that life - and it's still not really enough. Furthermore, this is the amount of life you have extra considering that you would not put ANY stat points on vitality (which is unlikely as strength/dexterity/energy are useless to a high-level barbarian unless you want to equip new weapons/armour - mana potions can replace energy and the damage/chance to hit augmentation is not worth talking about when you have +200% damage, +200% attack rating on your skills).

The system was too simple and not thought out for levels above 30, the difficulty settings favoured characters who stood back over those who went into the fray, and my level 60-odd sorceress who could fire a meteor doing around 8000 damage with 800 per second (or something like that) couldn't stand up to bishibosh. Of course online it's a different story because you have different classes capable of different things - but the difficulty level criticism still stands.

Someone without damage-enhancing _skills_ would not work past the normal difficulty in Diablo II. Strength has very little effect on increasing your damage (that's all it does) if you ARE a barbarian/paladin. A necromancer, for example, could do barely any damage to anything in Nightmare difficulty, save using corpse explosion which did a % of the dead monster's health - so you don't even need to level it up for it to be 100s of times more powerful than any of his attacks or summons.

A sorceress could use static field which did a percentage of damage to ANY enemy, even bosses (though reduced slightly). This skill, at level 1, would be enough to get a significant chunk of health off Baal on Hell difficulty. Yet the sorceress herself could never do any reasonable amount of damage, and would only be able to hit Baal 5% of the time even with ALL her skills put onto Strength and Dexterity.

This is a change for the better.

Yes you can. I used to rock a fire/melee sorc. I would kill Paladins and some barbs 1v1. ^ ^;

thxgold.

I mean against monsters in Nightmare/Hell difficulty. PvP is very different - anyway if you focus your skill points you can do crazy damage with a sorceress (meteor does the most at high levels). But the melee damage will do barely anything - especially when there are hordes and hordes of creatures.