I am glad to hear that they are fixing things for melee some! Good Luck to you!

It sounds more to me like you are just not a Diablo fan, than anything else

I think the rest of the week we will farm and play other characters most likely! And then try the spire over the weekend.

We pushed a little farther into act 3 last night, killing siege breaker (or whatever his name is) and killed every blue pack on the way with moderate difficulty. We also killed a few blue packs knocking out the ballistas with little difficulty. So you will have to excuse me for continuing to think that there is an issue with the soul lasher packs, but I don’t think that I’m going to rescind my statement that they suck and that I’m unlikely to do that portion of the zone on Inferno again.

As far as Act 1 goes, we didn’t really have any issues with it coming straight from Hell. Act 2 was more challenging, but we didn’t really have many problems there either, and didn’t have to “graveyard zerg” anything that I can recall – or if we did it was the exception and not the rule. So I’m not entirely sure that I agree 100% with your assement on difficulty, intended or otherwise.

I have both my Jewelcrafter and my Blacksmith at level 10. I’ve even ventured to make some of the rare patterns I’ve picked up. And they’ve been rubbish and not with either the gold or the materials it cost to craft them.

We do farm runs. We shop the AH for upgrades….every night, sometimes multiple times a night. We aren’t simply expecting to have Inferno just roll over for us. We do expect it to be challenging and have to work for our acehivements. But there is also a fine line between challenge and “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me”.

You will have to forgive me if I sound a little defensive, I found the tone of your post patronizing, and it didn’t sit well. If yo didn’t intend to come off that way, perhaps take a few minutes to re-evaluate how you say things

I was actually surprised you went with a monk, since I had thought you were thinking about a ranged class early on! Shows what I know

Long form:
I’m pretty sure they’ve been clear that the point is you *should* be farming earlier difficulties in order to progress. It was designed this way so that you could play for months without ‘finishing’ it. I only found a copy of the original quote but if you look here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Blizzard-Diablo-3-Inferno-Action-RPG-Pc-Gaming,15193.html
“So for the crazy people who play non-stop, they’ll hit Act I and get a challenge, but 1 month later they’ll still have something to work on (Acts II, III and IV). For the ‘hardcore-casual’ they will reach level 60 later and not get brick walled when they reach Inferno. They can experience some ‘small victories’ working on Act I with the dream of maybe someday reaching the later acts.”

Arguably they actually didn’t make it as hard as they wanted to, if only because of specific DH/WZ builds (which did end up getting nerfed). You were supposed to need to farm Act I for ~ 1 month to get enough items to be able to make it into Act 2, to repeat to do the same for Act 3, etc.

People saw that you could zerg rush/graveyard rush to progress really far, and Bliz realized that their design failed. So they are penalizing graveyard rushing. Specifically because it “isn’t fun to play that way”.

The point is, you didn’t have fun graveyarding your way past the mobs. The Blizzard approved way is to grind Act 2 until you can do act 3 *without* graveyarding it. Because you could spend a modest portion of your fortune to progress, Bliz decided to push harder on the “you need to grind to progress”.

There is certainly a fair bit of blacksmith confusion while leveling. Because of the random stat drops, you can pay a large sum of money to unlock a level of the blacksmith, then expect to pay a lot of money trying to gamble for an item (if an item sells for 100g, it probably costs 1000-10000g to attempt to craft it once, and you need to craft lets say 10 times to get something you want). On top of that, people are out-leveling their gear, and rather than throwing it away, they can put it on the AH.

So you can craft your own gear, at maybe 100x the cost of vendoring it. That gives a huge room for out-leveled gear to be sold at say 10x, still be very very worth it for the person who would otherwise be throwing it away, and still be very very worth it for the person who would have to craft it.

Blizzard mentioned wanting to balance the Blacksmith as well, but they’ll need to tune the cost a lot. I think if it cost 2x vendor cost to craft an item. then it would make sense to use the bs. You’d still need several tries, but 5 tries gets you to 10x the cost of vendoring it. (So gather 20 blues ~1 inventory, sell half, salvage half, craft 5-10 times and you have 1 new item that is good for you, and probably 1-2 items that are good for a different toon.)

You’d still end up with gear inflation in the AH, because so much more would get crafted, and some of it would be ‘perfect’. And because of the out-leveling aspect, you’d still end up with a lot of stuff that is worth selling and buying to level to get better stuff.

Not to mention the exponential gear and gold increases. (The largest stack of gold I’ve seen in Inferno Act 1 is about 1200g, and I’ve seen 5-700g in Act 4 Hell, both with 5-stack NV and pretty much no extra Gold Find.)
So you have a very large incentive to get to the end and farm there, because everything else is relatively crap. (I have found that farming Act 4 Hell with a dps spec monk is probably more profitable at this point than farming Act 1 Inferno as a full-defense spec, and I die about the same amount.)