Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[Chesspiece_face]

One thing that I've been mulling over the last couple days is that Blizzard originally advertised Diablo 3 as a game that you can jump on, play for a few minutes, have fun, and then bail off. Most of the game systems seem designed to support that (join a friend's game, use their banner to teleport to them, waypoints, frequent checkpoints that let you start right into the action in some cases), but the most important one for the end-game advancement, the Nephalim Valor buff, is entirely counter to it. I continued playing through Act 2 Inferno, last night, where it takes me over half an hour to get the full 5-stack of the buff, at which point I can finally start regularly finding rare items. If I just hopped on and played a half hour, I'd finally get the buff stacked (maybe, if you're fast enough) and then log off without really taking advantage of it.

I understand that Blizzard didn't want people to just keep playing the same areas over and over again, but I think it's somewhat unfortunate that they've sacrificed the ease of access to the game in order to achieve that goal. I guess kind of like Bolty said, damned if they do, damned if they don't...

This seems like more of a psychological issue than a gameplay or time limitation issue. If you have 30 minutes to play and you are looking to maximize your gear gain then playing A2, where the difficulty level for your character is high, is probably not the best use of your time.

If you went back to A1 with that 30 minutes of play time I'm willing to bet that you could get 5 stacks and then clear from the cursed hold to the Butcher in under 30 minutes easily.