What if Inferno didn't exist?

[FireIceTalon]

I would prefer they dropped Normal. Way too easy, to the point of being boring. Inferno just needs tweaking.

I like Normal (and Nightmare to a lesser extent) because it actually allows you to feel powerful, carving through pretty much everything in your path with hardly a care in the world. Hell and especially Inferno, on the other hand, is where the "whimpering weenie" playstyle necessarily takes over because the odds are persistently stacked against you to such a degree that anything but the utmost prudence will lead to a swift death at the hand of the nearest elite pack at best (unless, I suppose, you've spent lots and lots of either time or gold on acquiring high-end gear).

But then, I'm most avowedly not one of those who felt that D2 was "too easy"; the kind of difficulty (whether genuine or of the brick wall variety) that D3 seems to be aiming for would actually have diminished my enjoyment of it, in fact.

Yea, but you don't want the game to be too easy either, or you will get bored just curb stomping things all the time. It's fun to dominate sometimes, but even with the most high end gear, there should still be a degree of caution and risk involved. This is what made hell/hell on D1 a really good system - it was pretty hard unless you had decent gear and really knew what you were doing, but once u got the best items, you could play it pretty comfortably, even dominate it, yet if you got too care free you could still die. In D3 Inferno, I suppose this element is possible, but certainly not probable. In D1, it was both possible, and with enough dedication within reason, probable. I don't see that on D3 though.

I think the earlier difficulties, normal through hell, sort of come down to what class you play. I haven't tried Monk or WD yet. My Barb absolutely destroyed hell mode with little effort, my Wiz is doing pretty good but struggles with certain types of elites (usually fast mobs that have extra health or have vortex attached - but almost any elite Soul Lasher pack will destroy her regardless of mods), and my DH struggled through hell mode and I don't even play her anymore even though she has completed Act1 of Inferno - just simply not a fun class to play because of the flawed dynamics of their skill system.

Over at Diablo Inc someone made a post saying how DH is so easy to play and Wiz is so hard, and I could only laugh, since it is completely the opposite. Wizard is intrinsically a better designed class in almost every way.