A lot of things. I'm playing through Torchlight right now, and the game's got issues. It's an okay CRPG for me that doesn't match up to Titan Quest and especially Diablo 2 at all. It has nothing to do with the lack of multiplayer, I should note - I don't like MP in these kinds of games at all.
1. Fix the AI's aggro behavior. Playing as a dedicated pet summoner kind of sucks in this game (a real bummer for me, as that's my favorite playstyle for CRPG's). Enemy AI has a very, very strong tendency to prioritize you over your pets if you're within their aggression radius (sometimes even if you're not), even if you haven't attacked them.
Meanwhile, your pets have awful prioritization, as well - they don't prioritize targets by their proximity to you at all, and they won't switch targets unless the one they are currently after is killed or another enemy attacks the pet enough to gain the highest aggro. I've run up to a scattered group of enemies and had all my pets go after one enemy, totally ignoring the 10 others in the group that run right past them and come to clusterfuck me. Your pets will focus on one target to the extent that even if it's in a bottleneck so only, say, two of the pets can get close enough to attack him, all the others will just stand there behind those two in "trying to get to enemy to attack him" mode, ignoring everything else going on around them unless their aggro is forced onto something else.
To make all that worse, the lengthy delay between when an attack animation starts and when the attack connects in this game means that any enemy that doesn't move at a snail's pace will still usually be able to run right by your pets whenever it's after you even if your pets are targeting it, as by the time they get to the point in their animation that their attack would normally connect, the enemy has already run several strides past them and they're swinging at thin air.
2. Better loot. I don't really know how to elaborate on this other than to say both Titan Quest and Diablo 2 had loot that had more interesting and satisfying effects. My "loot craze" is always rather mild whenever I play Torchlight.
3. Better skills. I've not encountered a single spell in the game that had a unique and interesting effect. The passive skills are all very mundane "this makes this better" skills, and I always feel like they're making my character less weak and boring, not more powerful and diversified. The active skills are usually always mild variations on other skills of the same type. For instance, all the vanquishers attack skills (except for the volley of arrows one) is the same idea - a direct fire projectile attack that behaves slightly different from the others.
4. A respec system. A modern CRPG has no business not having one, regardless.
5. Less samey and more well-designed environments. The entirety of Torchlight is a confined dungeon with repeating assets. There is no variation in the kinds of places you go through, just small variations in the tilesets of each dungeon theme. Diablo 2 had far more variation by comparison. In each act, you had large, outside environments broken up constantly by varying dungeon types, every zone and dungeon within an act having different enemies to fight, every act having its own unique sets of zones and dungeons and enemies.
Diablo 2 is a game in which everything you do is incredibly repetitive, but it gives you many of those things to do, frequently varying places in which to do them, constantly varying enemies against which to do them, and tons of varying, fantastic loot with which to improve your ability to do them in varying and interesting ways. Torchlight does comparatively very little about its repetition.
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There's more, but I'm tired of thinking about Torchlight now. :P
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