A disservice?

[Roland]

I promptly proceeded to destroy all of Act 3, setting new records of monsters killed in one hit (48, I believe) and killing the bosses in less than 30 seconds each. It was exciting for a bit- walk into a room, fire off a few spells and watch everything melt in a blaze of fireballs and locusts. But then it got boring. There was no challenge, which is exactly what your friend was complaining about, Treesh. PapaSmurf joined me for a bit last night and I don't think he had much to do since things would be dead before he could get a few spells off. I felt kind of bad, really. (Sorry PS!)

I don't know if I will do it again. I will still use the AH to sell stuff and maybe keep my weapons current, but the wholesale upgrade of my entire gearset just makes the game trivial, which subsequently removes a lot of the fun. I enjoy making huge mobs of stuff disintegrate as much as the next guy, but there has to be some challenge to it. Granted, this was in normal mode, so maybe (hopefully?) I'll change my tune as the difficulty progresses. I doubt I'll be upgrading all my gear for 10k once I hit Inferno, though...

Normal difficulty is trivial, period. Nightmare will challenge you, and if it won't force you to use the AH it will force you to progress much slower unless your drops have been very good up to that point. Hell will stomp you into the ground and slow you to a crawl without incredible drops and/or AH purchases. Simply put, I have had to upgrade almost every piece of gear on my level 58 Demon Hunter, and I'm stuck at Belial. I simply can't beat him. If not for the two lag deaths last night I MIGHT have done it, but he was only at about 55% health so there's no guarantee I would have survived long enough not to get one-shotted by him (again). I have over 5.5k DPS (might be 5.8k), and over 33k life. My resistances are poor, but my dodge is just over 30% and my armor is just over 38% reduction (something like that). In other words, I'm not a complete glass cannon. His normal arm attacks dish out about 15k damage, while his dual arm attack doubles that (I can usually survive that if I'm at full health). His bombs, though? 30k - 35k damage. Instant one-shot kill. I have not figured out how to dodge long enough to beat him, and my damage is practically for naught because the only thing hitting him is my Sentry.

The AH is somewhat self-leveling anyway. At my level I'm vendoring all blues and yellows because they're simply not "good enough" to sell on the AH. Blues are virtually worthless, and yellows aren't much better unless you get something pretty godly. Every so often I'll keep a piece for a future character, but even then most of the time I know I can buy something decent for a trivial amount of money (~30k for most of my buys, although I dropped 100k each on two pieces of gear last night). Last night I got an awesome rare helm from a Zoltan Kulle run. Solid +stats to all four, a single elemental resistance, and trivial +experience / +life regen. What didn't it have? A socket. Thus, it's useless to sell on the AH. I'd say gems are the most broken thing in the game right now. I can buy Flawless Square gems for a fraction of what it costs to craft them. I have piles of Radiant and Square gems taking up inventory space because I can't get past the idea that they're "worthless" and yet it's pointless for me to sink the cash into crafting them up. I'd say that's my biggest problem with the (softcore) AH - 95% of the items in the game are worthless, not just for selling but for using. It's times like these I miss EVE Online. That game has a real economy. I think the hardcore AH will be the only true economy in D3. The softcore one is just as bad as D2 was, even without the duping.

Anyway, I personally don't worry about over-leveling myself via the AH. I've only hit it when I felt I needed an upgrade, and that's usually because my gear is ~20 - 30 levels behind my character. Some of my drops have been "that good," but by Hell difficulty 1k+ Vitality / offensive stat becomes almost a necessity, as does armor. My level 20-something requirement armor pieces just aren't cutting it, even if their +stats are decent.

Believe me, when you hit Hell Act 1 and get one-shotted by a Vortex / Molten / (unknown) zombie mother pack from almost offscreen, you'll realize just how trivial your character is - no matter how strong you thought you were in NM.

(Short story: I was roaming Act 1 in the first fields area after dealing with Rumford when I spotted a champ pack in the upper right corner of my screen. It was a zombie mother pack, with full zombie complement. I turned to run away when I was vortexed right into the middle of the pack from across the entire screen and instantly killed. I was dead so fast I didn't even get to see all the modifiers. This was after I died 6 or 7 times trying to escape the Den of the Fallen, where I ran across an elite Scavenger pack that was Extra Fast / Immune Minions / something. They were so fast they would trip my Caltrops and be out the other side before the slow kicked in. Eventually I was dying just trying to run out of the exit. After about the second death trying to beat the mob, I decided I would just leave the Den, but it took about 4 more deaths before I was successful. So, yeah... my first foray into Hell Act 1 was slow, and brutally painful.)