Is 1.10 Hell playable?

[Crystalion]

Yes, you are now required to have a Cannot Be Frozen item in Hell. [...] Plus, now you're required to have faster run. [...] The regen rate as it stands makes a Prevent Monster Heal just about mandatory for a physical attack based character. That's just ridiculous.

-[b]Pet and Merc rebalancing [...]

Well, given the number of bugs, it seems a bit early for me to proffer an opinion on v1.10beta as the release could be quite different. Still, thus far, I mostly agree with Ignatz side of the fence, as opposed to the "v1.10 sucks/is boring/is too hard" so I will make a few comments...

I don't think requiring one of:
1) fast kill vs. one target
2) poison of ongoing duration vs. one target
3) prevent monster heal vs. one target

is terribly restrictive, compared with saying +runspeed and can't-be-frozen are mandatory. Yes, these are new "requirements", but only for Hell difficulty, where one can presume you've kicked butt enough in norm/nightmare enough to accumulate passable gear (and the cube recipes now make that fairly likely, even if you've had little luck with unique and set drops).

So I agree with your Pros (and some more besides, such as v1.10 having "room at the top" for new toys) while thinking only your Pet/Merc balancing is a serious v1.10 beta issue. But the release isn't out yet, and quite a few things are screwed up (at least 3 bugs with iron golem that I'm aware of, for example), so perhaps this will be fixed.

However, as I've seen mentioned in another thread, DR has been under utilized, so perhaps Hirelings are expected to have better survivability only if boosted by +DR aura, Shout or else Battle Orders, Oak Sage or else good crowd control (since not every play-strat uses the Hireling to tank, right?) In other words, if Hirelings as meat shields doesn't work in v1.10 Hell without some extra effort or cleverness, then imho: great. (I agree that necro skelies, therefore, seem messed up).

...

I would agree with some players complaints about the pace of the game changing except that, given you can enjoy a faster pace in nightmare, if fast pace is what you desire, I don't see any necessity that D2 must also provide players with the highest level drops in Hell at the same rate of kill as nightmare. So, imho, Necro CE is now, relatively speaking, too powerful in Hell, from a "fairness to classes" point of view.

An opposite point of view to mine, with which I have some sympathy (given how Single Players get the shaft because they don't trade), would be that, at some point, every player is entitled to an easy time of it and all the goodies. D2X is actually much much closer to this than some other popular games, like Everquest.

In other words, if someone complains that a particular build had been fun until (v1.10) hell, I say: "great, glad you had fun--perhaps you shouldn't play hell (with that build)".

I may be a bit odd (relative to the D2 playing population as a whole, though, perhaps, not to Lurkers) in that I've played a fair number of builds through nightmare, because I wanted to, without going on and playing them through (...v1.09) hell. I had a lot of fun. I didn't see any need to insist that I be limited by some consideration of whether the build would be "uber" in Hell. "Hell difficulty", in my view, exists purely to reward the small percentage of players that are really into gaming with a serious challenge and the possibility of fun uber goodies (and I mean "fun", not "necessary"). If it is not possible, sans uber items, to make some builds, or even some classes, "fun" in Hell, then that is unfortunate but not, by itself, a reason to condemn v1.10 (imho, ymmv, etc.)