My problems with the drop system

[Kevin]

It's better than where things stood. Anything pre-Square rune before was practically useless, because Square drops too often for anything below it to be worth upgrading before 1.0.3. Even going Square to Flawless Square is not particularly viable. Past Flawless Square, since they don't drop, costs don't seem to bad. It's a hit for sure, but these gems are permanent.

My worry is they are going to run into a WoW style PvP vs PvE skill problem but it will be a HC vs SC economy issue instead of skills. In WoW most balance changes were because of PvP imbalance. In D3 most of the economy changes are going to be balanced around hardcore. Hardcore has a much bigger gold sink effect because things do leave the economy faster. The biggest hit to me when I lost my L53 witch doctor in hell was the gems. I still prefer to only sell on the AH (just because of the experience I'm looking for right now there will be other times I'll happily use it to buy and I did play a toon that used it to buy stuff once, I resold or melted anything that I stopped using with her so other toons didn't have access to it later) but I'm OK using stuff I've crafted or found on most other new toons. Losing access to everything above radiant because I no longer had a source of tomes or bigger drops slowed things down.

Of course even in hardcore, and even playing without AH purchases I'm net positive in gems. But I do tend to think that the SC economy is going to get a bit more out of whack because I think balance focus will be on the HC economy.

Though I haven't really considered the effect of the RMAH. Perhaps that will be the biggest effective sink and it will be the HC gold only economy that really screws up....