>>545952795
>1
Free and obviously has the start of the plot. Don't get turned off by the dated visuals, the art direction is still great. EXTREMELY bloated with a bunch of old league mechanics still scattered around the acts but it does very little to explain them. Power creep has made the base story (acts) trivial but you'll very much want a build guide if you intend on touching ingame at all, a majority of skills in the game are not viable for high end content and you'll be getting walled quickly. Information overload is the main barrier, expect to sink in a lot of time and studying before you understand the crafting system. Play with the wiki open. Also the 1488 chat is much more active because the league just started.
>2
Technically $30 but you get an equivalent amount of the premium currency for buying it, loosely a sequel to 1 but the narrative itself doesn't entirely require having played 1 (you should at some point to understand Sin and the Beast). There's a "keyword" system that lets you hover over most mechanical terms to see exactly what they do e.g., if a spell would "Chill" you can hover over the word "Chill" to see what Chill's effects are and how it's calculated, which you can't do in 1 at all. That plus WASD support makes it extremely beginner friendly.

There's a very real argument for starting with 2 just because 1 is much easier when you understand the baseline mechanics for damage and defenses from the start. Either way you'll be asking a lot of questions here, don't be shy about it

One of my biggest fears is that we'll learn too much and attempt some kind of experiment and just delete the entire universe. Like the Dwemer in Elder Scrolls. People used to fear that even something as low yield as the first atom bomb would do the same thing so maybe I am superstitious, but it really feels like flying too close to the sun.

>>714067563
Floridaman here, I have the A/C running 18 hours a day. Can't complain much.