Something I've come to appreciate about D2C is how much friction there is to get items.
Yep. Something that I've realized lately after thinking long and hard about how I plan to balance my Diablo 1 rewrite are the problems the expansion gave D2. The thing is, in pre LoD bosses only drop good the first time, and even then only 2-3 items. After that they drop like a unique monster. Since Magic Find only works on white mobs, that means that drops in terms of rarity are evenly distributed. Not only that, but the game capped out at exceptional items, so effectively any base item can drop anywhere in hell, and roll all affixes except +2 skill amulets (which must come from diablo).
The expansion changed all that by greatly beefing up boss drops, and then lowering the divisors (rarity) of rare items several times. First a minor increase in 1.08, then huge increase in 1.09, and another minor increase in 1.10. 1.09 further created the special drops for super uniques and other various monsters. Then with all the new elite items, only a few targets in the game can drop them, moving all farming to late act 5/cows.
Effectively they created a meta where the most efficient way to get items involves skipping to specified targets (Mephisto, Countess, Baal etc.). This by default made the sorceress the de-facto best class in the game, as she can teleport past all the trash mobs and get to the good part, giving her significantly more MF power than all other classes. On top of the fact her damage comes from skill points, so she can further sacrifice gear for MF.
1.10 tried to do damage control from the problems the expansion created. They introduced the level 85 areas and monsters now upgrade to the area's level, allowing most items to drop in a wider range of areas. Then they added Enigma, so each class could have teleport+MF to stay on par with the sorceress. But all of this is fixing the symptom rather than the cause. They should have never create this meta in the first place. PreLoD basically got it perfect. Each class was relatively equal in their MF capability, everything drops everywhere, gear is fully random. But in 1.10? Everyone makes a blizzard sorceress, tele to countess for runes, do ancient tunnels/mephisto for gear. Use her to rush all your other classes to hell and gear them, but then go back to playing sorceress because she's still the best...