Simple solution is to just let players pick their own difficulty setting at the start. It’s weird how games used to do this back in the day but now there’s a culture of forcing it upon us, having the unpleasant side affect of things being too easy.

Diablo 3 has lots of issues on core mechanics, but i only played beta, i didnt bought it because DRM Online for singleplayer and RMAH…

Funnily enough, another of the reasons that Diablo 3 was completed at that moment in time because Blizzard was about to launch a new patch that would fix the Hydra/Life-on-Kill exploit and make multiplayer, the way these guys did it (i.e., relying on unintended potent spammable group healing to cover any mistakes) pretty much impossible.

Almost certainly never.

They very nearly didn’t put Hardcore into D3. It was only fan pressure and the tradition of earlier games that caused them to allow it.

Hardcore is a real headache for them. For a lot of players it’s completely unacceptable to permanently lose a character “when it wasn’t my fault”. It only works by having a customer service policy that never ever restores and even with that I bet the 4.2% of players who have chosen hc generate more than 4.2% of the Customer Service department’s work.

Plus the RMAH is a big monetiser and they don’t (currently) dare let that loose in the hardcore environment.

From Blizzard’s point of view HC is a relic of the old days they’ve inherited and wish they hadn’t. As a player I love it and it will keep the game alive much longer for me.

D3 Inferno Act 2+ was in need of them.

Act 1 Inferno was pretty well balanced, it was a rough ride to start, and seemed almost impossible with certain champion combos. Heck, starting out, even normal mobs could pose a moderate threat!

But smart play let you pass that barrier and into the realm of slightly more plausible tackling of the champs and rares as you gained in gear.

Act 2 by comparison was a brick wall to the face. That said, I must admit to getting up to Belial and probably even would’ve beaten him if had got friends together a few more times before patch hit (we one shot him post patch), but that was achieved primarily through corpse running and skipping anything deemed ‘too hard to be worth it’.

We’re into Act 3 and it is still a challenge at times, but doable. I do wonder if perhaps the nerf was too heavy though, particularly the MP aspect, but some form of nerf even if not this extreme was likely a good idea.

I wonder though if perhaps they should have upped the ilvl of the drops first and then taken a little bit of time to see how things shook out.

Because part of the issue was needing to use the AH for next act gear to complete the current one, with drops how they are now, I suspect that would’ve alleviated things quite a bit.