Torchlight

[Whacker]

I've played Alchemist and Vanquisher builds and had fun with it. Worth the $20 or so I paid for it. Yeah, definitely has a Diablo 2+ or 3- feel to it, not surprising given a major Diablo designer is directly involved.

Agreed about the unbalance--enchanting can get out of hand, yielding some outrageously powerful equipment eventually. Nevertheless, the enemies scale with you and become very hard eventually.

Worth a look if you liked Diablo 2, are looking forward to 3, and want something similar in the meantime.

They moderately nerfed enchanting with the last patch (that I'm aware of). Even so, it does NOT help at the higher levels like I was saying. I tested this through cheating with items. Removed the enchant nerfs, gave myself a fortune in gold, and enchanted equipment until I was blue in the face and a walking God, with a capital bold G. I still got my butt handed to me. It took me an average of about 120+ seconds to kill ONE boss monster on the lava fortress style map, and that's starting from full health with no minions around to attack.

I'd say this game has the potential to be far greater than Titan Quest, if it can be fixed. Diablo and Diablo 2 will always hold a special place on my all time favorite games list and can never be replaced, though the later patches did sour the game and my rose tinted memory significantly. My fear is that the devs are going to put all their weight and time behind the upcoming MMO version of this, which I will ignore completely since I did and still do loathe everything MMO.

[Scienter]

I really like it! Especially since Diablo III isn't coming out until 2017 or whenver. I've got a higher level Alchemist and a low level fighter (forget what the class is called) and really enjoy it. It's my default laptop game now instead of Plants v. Zombies. I like the pet, it's very useful for looting. I haven't gotten to a high enough level where I'm getting my butt handed to me, right now I still kill pretty much everything with my golems. Plus, my dog summons zombies, which is awesome.

[Togakure]

They moderately nerfed enchanting with the last patch (that I'm aware of). Even so, it does NOT help at the higher levels like I was saying. I tested this through cheating with items. Removed the enchant nerfs, gave myself a fortune in gold, and enchanted equipment until I was blue in the face and a walking God, with a capital bold G. I still got my butt handed to me. It took me an average of about 120+ seconds to kill ONE boss monster on the lava fortress style map, and that's starting from full health with no minions around to attack.

...

Yeah, I didn't spend enough time with one character to get past level 60; highest was 57 or so and things were getting dicey if I recall correctly. I thought it was my build (an Alchemist caster, trying to "synergize" all the possible bonuses to spell-casting through skills and equipment/enchant, etc.), but further reading supports what you are saying--that the games imbalances at high levels.

I kept reminding myself that it wasn't D2, and that perhaps the scaling was meant to be ideal in the level 30-50 range, not the 85-91 that is typical of D2 LoD. D2 holds a special place in my gaming heart as well, so I've been hard-pressed to keep from viewing Torchlight from a D2-istic perspective. Without actual synergies, I found the skills/equipment bonuses lacking in sophistication compared to D2. I didn't have nearly as many options to manipulate and fine-tune while designing my "ultimate" build for a given character type.

But I did enjoy the game for a while, long enough to justify spending money on it, and I'm sure I'll get more out of it at some point, when I feel like playing it again. A nice prequel to D3.