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

[Concillian]

The difference, in my mind, is that the results of item runs in D2 were more fun and varied than anything D3 has to offer. With set/legendary items being rarer than rare (and, for the most part, something to get excited over purely in a "hey, this might be worth a reasonable amount of gold on the AH" sense), you're left with only blues and yellows. These really are nothing more than utterly soulless and virtually indistinguishable affix containers for whose acquisition I, at any rate, find it just about impossible to muster any kind of enthusiasm – a bland mess of bonuses to attributes and resistances whose impact on my character's performance is so absolute, and strangely sterile in a way, that all but the godliest of upgrades will be met with a matter-of-factly "uh huh" and nothing more. In D3, items are far more important than they ever were in either of its predecessors, but at the same time this has rendered them transitory and their acquisition curiously unalluring, as far as I am concerned.

But if you place Act IV Hell as the endpoint, these items are much less tranistory. I definitely concede that the prime stat system makes upgrades a little sterile, but I think a lot of the issue with that goes away when you don't NEED the gear to "complete" a goal.

Diablo 2 may not have featured an overall greater amount of usable loot (though I'd disagree on that count as well), but farming Mephisto, say, or Pindleskin, still was far more engrossing simply because there were outcomes other than "bunch of crappy blues", "bunch of crappy blues and yellows", and "bunch of crappy blues and one yellow that's a little better than what I'm using", even if those additional outcomes were just as superficial and of equally little benefit for the most part. In D3, though? Once in a great while, your farming efforts will pay off (increasingly more rarely so as you near the threshold of Inferno-level gear),

Again, the entire point of what I posted was that if someone were to pretend inferno didn't exist D3 is more like D2 than most would like to admit. Inferno-level gearing wouldn't be necessary or any kind of issue. Gear progression would be for the sake of going from being able to beat Act IV hell to being able to BEAT Act IV Hell handily.

I still maintain that if people have an issue with the farming, they should try to pretend that inferno doesn't exist and treat the game like Diablo II. If you make an entire game mode that puts all the inferno legendaries / sets on Diablo, then you have that additional loot type that also is actually good when the only other loot to compare to is loot that drops in hell difficulty.

The issue people are having is that the farming that many people did by choice in Diablo II has become mandatory for inferno difficulty. By making it "mandatory" (inferno difficulty is optional, so it's not really mandatory except for inferno difficulty) people interpret it as work, or as a chore.

So... what if... these same people just pretend inferno difficulty doesn't exist?

It's a serious question.
I mean, I haven't seen inferno difficulty yet either. I'm in no rush to get there. I'm having fun doing what I'm doing, and apparently inferno will kill the fun, so why would I rush headlong into it? I'm going to sit back and farm the shit out of Hell and NM before moving on to inferno, because I had a pretty good time farming the shit out of Hell and NM in Diablo II for like 2 years.

It's like Blizzard added this supposedly bonus difficulty that they said was going to be harder than hard and people get there and find out it's harder than hard and are somehow surprised? I mean, there's not really that many ways to make computer games hard outside of huge timesinks / grinds. Even that isn't "hard" per-se.

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I've stated this many times - I play video games to have fun, not to do chores. Inferno is a total chore, and its not even because it is hard, it is because it is ARTIFICIALLY hard - meaning it relies on flawed mechanics and "cheese" to remove complete control away from the player.

How do you suggest they make it hard?

People on the official forums are whining about Vortex... that there should be a tell so you can move out of it... that's not hard in the slightest. See bad --> move out of it. That's not hard... that's Gaming 101, it doesn't get much easier. Especially for ranged... I mean they're on the move so much anyway... they don't even have to think about it. I mean this is a modifier specifically put on packs to make them hard for ranged and people's suggestion for making the game hard is making it so easy you don't even have to think about it...

Do that and it becomes a ranged-fest like Diablo II was and naked Amazons (sorry, DH) are clearing Act IV inferno because that would make the game super easy. In Diablo II, it was so easy, that people had bot scripts for fighting... I mean, if you can make a simple macro to fight for you (successfully)... how can that be considered difficult?

It's really clear with the hotfixes today or yesterday or whenever they were, that they're finding anything that a bot script can be written for to farm and nerfing the hell out of it... because that's EASY. They want the loot to be coming from the stuff that you can't write bot scripts for. I'm stating that with confidence, but I really have no proof beyond that it seems pretty obvious that's what they're doing. You can't bot script the champion pack and random elites, so that's where loot is going to come from.

So what do you suggest for difficulty?