1. Alchemist never felt like it was a huge impact. I didn't use it even once. Most of the loot was potions only so had plenty of those. Granted, it seems like if it wasn't so obscure it would have been used more often by people. But even with the just right difficulty curve of D2, there wasn't a need for the alchemist.
2. The bow had some small attack base, but it had at least +10 magic and some extras. Granted, not much. This is funny since so early you find such "Legendary worthless" loot. My first encounter with Legendary loot was after defeating the demon that was summoned by reading from the book at south valley? That fight made it awesome to get that kind of loot.
The difficulty in D2 was perfect IMO. Granted, you had to try and do all the quests that you could get your hands on and always try to get the best solution for them. But without that counterbalance, now you can prolly just breeze thru the game with looting and doing the minimum of quests.
