You know, I actually prefer Diablo to Diablo 2 and all the successors. My recollection of it's history is that it was essentially a lighter version of Rogue, including being turn based and all. Then they switched to real time, and added multiplayer.
Personally, I greatly prefer the single player experience of Diablo. You couldn't grind. Your opportunities to min max were limited. You mostly tried to make the best of whatever you found for 16 levels. And the game was not anywhere near as loot rich as it's successors. It was a much tighter resource economy, and a much more meaningfully randomized world. Totally different side quests, random shrines that might mess with you stats, etc.
Naturally, the multiplayer quest for the best loot in the game, versus the more survival oriented single player experience, caught on. And everything since has been all about loot-splotions.
What I'm getting at is, if you hate every ARPG since Diablo II because they are mindless click fests, trying to hack your dopamine glands with meaningless random digital trinkets falling out of a bloody slot machine... well, personally I think Diablo is different. Especially offline.
You know... another thing I liked better about Diablo? There were no "character builds" in the sense that every ARPG after D2 had them. No skill trees what so ever. Just whatever you invested your stat points into, although you could always buy potions for more. And whatever spells you got lucky enough to find along the way. Those were the only relatively sticky parts of a character. It totally lacked the frustration of realizing the character you spent 200 hours slowly building had a totally unviable build, forcing you to start from scratch because skill points can't be undone. Thus driving most people to just copy builds off a wiki instead of playing the game themselves. Because dead ends after that much time invested fucking suck.
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