I played thousands of hours of D2, hundreds on D3.
D2 Immortal currently approaching 100 hours, I bought the battle pass and prodigy thing (about 32 bucks), the same as what I think the game would be worth.
Money well spent...... currently a wizard paragon 28 and grinding Hell 2 dungeons with my friends who are all not P2W and the content is perfectly challenging enough.
The game scales (at least for PVE) very well with F2P or nearly F2P (30-40 dollars).
I thought that I would play the game for 30 minutes and dump it. But this type of quality game on a mobile phone (never played a mobile game before) got me hooked.
The game to play, as a player, and with your friends, is very.very.very. well done. You don't NEED to get crazy legendary gems. The PVP sucks in the game anyway and that is where it is best show cased. Along with challenge rifts, challenge rifts are such a small part of the game. You don't NEED these gems to make the game fun, the game is actually better when you don't buy much/if at all because the games PVE content is scaling perfectly WITH the free gear you can find in the game.
Most people never care about PVP or getting rank 1 on a leaderboard. This is all crazy $$ gems do.
And another thing about PVP ...... if you are very casual (1-2 hours a week or something). All of the $$ players are going to outrank quickly and you will be playing mostly vs other F2P/nearly F2P players (from my experience)
Hearing people talk negatively or try to say that they "know" the game with less than 50-60 hours played and without reaching end-game content is cringe.....