First Hardcore Inferno Belial Kill (by a Barbarian, too)

[Concillian]

Melee is perfectly viable, in Act 3, 4, 5 or 6. As long as you like farming the AH. If you play pure or at the very least rarely look at the AH, you will not go past Act1. Period. Well, I am speaking mostly on behalf of Barbs, but Monks seem to be in the same boat, although my view on them is based 100% on reading the forums and playing a few public games with them, with no high lvl personal experience.

Monks are even more gear dependent than barbs due to having absolute heals rather than % based heals, they need even more mitigation + life on hit / leech than barbs do so they can make use of their heals. Barbs have a little more flexibility since their heals scale better with their gearing. Monks do have the 'one with everything' passive to offer a little easier going on the initial gearing, but it doesn't help a ton on Act III / IV gearing from what I understand.

All classes require gear. All classes need to farm. The choice is to farm the AH or to farm the game (like the gobo farming).

However, I guess I just don't understand the issues you have. When you look at Diablo II and compare it to Diablo III... outside of some mechanics differences (armor being mitigation rather than what is effectively dodge, for example,) if you remove inferno difficulty from Diablo III, it's pretty close to the same game design.

By that, I mean that there is minimal farming NECESSARY to complete Act IV hell DII or DIII, and if you look at high end gearing obtained in that act compared to the monsters in that act, both games have players similarly OP compared to the monsters.

Adding inferno is is just that, adding in.

Plenty of people grinded the shit out of Diablo / Baal after they beat Diablo II / LOD. Even when they could RUN all the way there and kill with little to no concern of defense or death. Some did this for weeks, some months, and some even years.

Okay, so you can still do this in Diablo III if that's your thing, you just aren't doing it at the "end of the game". Instead, this kind of thing becomes necessary for the inferno difficulty level.... okay, sure, but umptweeen thousand people did just that in Diablo II... so what's the issue? The issue seems to be that someone else is doing the same thing at a higher difficulty level and people who aren't at that difficulty level don't feel special enough for the simple reason that someone else is doing it, so they should be able to also. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

This is what I don't understand.
I can't help but wonder how many of the people complaining about the grinds would be grinding the shit out of Act IV hell if Diablo III shipped without inferno.
If it's just a matter of the psychology involved with the placement of the grind within the game. When it's at "the end" and it takes you from OP to furiously OP is it somehow more fun than when it's more a part of the game as a way to "finish" the game (even though you've already finished the game 3 times by the time you get to inferno and you've finished the "Diablo II difficulty" with Act IV hell.)

I also wonder if they should create a 3rd "core" of the game. Hardcore, Softcore and nostalgia-core. Nostalgia-core would remove all the inferno ilvl items except the legendaries, sets, and patterns, which would end up a low % drop from Diablo, and only Diablo. Nostalgia-core would, of course, have no inferno difficutly level.

Just my ramblings, choose to ignore if you wish.