I've spent a couple million gold on the AH and really it has not done a whole lot for me. It made Act I a fucking cakewalk and Act II quite a bit easier, but not so much that I can clear it easily enough to cover the repair costs. Act III is still a bitch. Basically, I'm feeling like I should've just saved my money and waited for some huge upgrades, because none of the shit I bought is allowing me to progress any further.

But then again, lot of it comes down to luck. It doesn't matter how many repairs you have to pay for, if you get a nice drop that will sell for 10m+ it will be beyond worth it. But hey, if you don't, that sucks. I've made far more money playing the AH than I have actually doing Butcher runs, though....

Oh and FUCK ENRAGE TIMERS

I got bored of Diablo before I finished Nightmare.

I think @SJSchmidt93 is on to something. The repairs aren't the problem but the grinding that is more of an issue than the repair bills. Money isn't a problem where increasing the costs still isn't a big deal but we do that because players lack other options.

I leveled three characters in Diablo 3 to 60 (Barbarian Monk and WD) and I'm quitting. I had fun with all of them up until I got to Inferno. Hell was a challenge I enjoyed, but Inferno just feels cheap and I don't have any desire to pay millions of gold for the gear it takes to walk into Act II Inferno. I have done butcher runs where my group didn't die at all, then sometimes we'll wipe over and over not on a boss, but on a random elite mob that has some combination of Vortex + a-bunch-of-other-shit-that-melts-faces. I agree with the other guy here who said that some mobs feel like they are spawned as the exact counter to your spec or your group makeup. I was hopeful that the 1.03 patch would nerf the amount of damage that inferno mobs deal but after witnessing even more wipes in Act I the last couple nights, I don't see any difference in the way they behave and the cost is higher when I die from their bullshit.

It's disorienting for me since every patch I can recall from the time I played WoW was exciting and generally improved the game despite everyone bitching about the balance tweaks. I didn't like reading the patch notes for 1.03 but I was optimistic that Blizzard knew what they were doing and I didn't hesitate to jump back in and play. After playing for 6 hours over the last 2 nights and gaining zero progression for it I have no love for Blizzard and the direction this game is going. I even found a legendary item last night in Act I Inferno. It was an item especially for my class, but it had crappy stats and was level 57 even though my character is 60. When the best item I find after a hundred hours with the game is such a monumental piece of trash I just do not care about finding another.

I think I'm mostly upset that this game has been patched as much as it has. Diablo 2 had very few patches because they were so meticulous about changing something and fucking something else up. I thought surely since this game had been in development for so long and the fact that there was no PvP there would be less tweaking of base mechanics like attack speed or gold sinks. I don't understand how they can just decide to change this stuff when people are actually investing real $ into how these stats work. It makes me glad I never put a dime into the RMAH and it has made me realize that any stat that I might want to build a character around could be changed just because Blizzard deems it too powerful. The end result is that I value nothing in the Auction House and I have lost interest in playing a game that I really thought could keep me around for years like WoW without the subscription cost. After all my time with the game, I'm only left wishing this game was more like Diablo 2 and less like World of Warcraft.

I remain unbothered by these changes. I do not understand why so many people are so upset. Changes always happen in games like this.

I've found the game much more enjoyable since the patch. Farm places where you don't die every 5 minutes and you wont have to worry about repair costs. I've already been finding good stuff in act 1 inferno with the new item drop boosts.

These changes don't bother me at all...because I can't play D3 anyway. While I have a somewhat decent broadband internet connection, it drops out for a few seconds at a time fairly often, often enough to kill any idea of playing a game that requires persistent always-on internet. They lost me with that wonderful "feature" before I even spent a cent.

I just farm Act I Inferno like a good barbarian. I come out positive for gold every time even with the newly increased gold cost for repairs. Would be pretty cool to get the gear to progress further though for sure. Maybe I'll go back and finish leveling my wizard if they really have it so much easier. Makes me a little frustrated to be two shot as a relatively beefy tank barb and almost tempts me to just go glass cannon if I'm going to die so quickly.

Repair costs hurt quite a bit now, but that was the point. Too many people would just zerg rush elites until they died, because it cost them next to nothing. But they counterbalanced this change by making Inferno far less of a motherfucker to play in the first place. I can faceroll Belial now. Tonight alone I managed to kill Ghom and Siegebreaker in Act 3, pretty easily.

My repair bills are around 40k now, but I get nice enough drops to sell, that counterbalance that. If you're dying so much that you are losing buckets of money, perhaps you need better gear first. I farmed Butcher runs for a solid two weeks before I even tried Act 2 (pre-patch). Inferno is supposed to be an achievement to get through.

To be complaining about these chances as a barbarian is even crazier - Inferno is way, way better for us now. I watch my ranged friends die over and over again against mobs that I can tank with ease after the changes. I die about 10% as much as I used to.

These changes will just be another thing the vocal minority on the internet lose their shit about for a while, then adjust to. They did it to force ranged players to consider wearing more survivability stats, and slowly they will adapt to that. Being a glass cannon just isn't as feasible any more.

Trust me, 2 months later you'll see that D3 is chugging along just fine. It'll take more than some unpopular changes to sink Diablo III. Diablo II had plenty of "unpopular" changes throughout its history and was still going strong right up till Diablo III. The game ain't dead. That's just hyperbole.

Really not enjoying my Inferno Wizard at this point due to:

A mountain of useless spells/runes.
(Which of course leads to boring gameplay)
Lazy champion mob combos. 
Blizzard's stance on hit detection.
Stupid gold sinks.
A limited and annoying AH interface.
 
I'm sure I could come up with more, but I'm really just going to have to shelve Diablo 3. Future massive patch or not, I don't think they can fix some amazingly faulty design decisions and I doubt they want to either.
 
My body is ready for Torchlight 2 NOW Schaefer!

I don't really see the huge problem. If you're not able to get 5k gold between every time you die you can't really be progressing much, and if you're dying that frequently shouldn't that alone be an indicator you might wanna step back a bit and farm instead ? The only point I can see it being a problem is if you're just starting inferno and isn't able to kill anything at all, but as soon as you're able to kill a one or two champion packs (and some of the random bosses early in the game) earning 5k gold is nothing.

I think you're spot on that the repair costs are going to drive droves away from the game. I've put about 120 hours into my Monk and about another 20 into a Demon Hunter I was leveling up when I hit the barrier in Inferno. I'm in a unique position where my gear still isn't good enough to handle most of the elite mobs on Act II. Thus, I moved back to act 1 to farm jailer and the butcher.

The gear that drops is still crappy high level gear that no one wants on the auction house so I can't rely on that as a source of income anymore... and I break slightly even after my runs... which is hardly enough to build up enough bank to buy anything in the auction house.

To me, however, what killed the game was Blizzards seemingly lack of response to the gold duplication issue a few weeks ago which caused everything in the AH to skyrocket in price. By not removing the duped gold, the economy got turned on it's head and essentially vast majority of players who were playing legit.

@C0V3RT said:

I think you're spot on that the repair costs are going to drive droves away from the game. I've put about 120 hours into my Monk and about another 20 into a Demon Hunter I was leveling up when I hit the barrier in Inferno. I'm in a unique position where my gear still isn't good enough to handle most of the elite mobs on Act II. Thus, I moved back to act 1 to farm jailer and the butcher.

The gear that drops is still crappy high level gear that no one wants on the auction house so I can't rely on that as a source of income anymore... and I break slightly even after my runs... which is hardly enough to build up enough bank to buy anything in the auction house.

To me, however, what killed the game was Blizzards seemingly lack of response to the gold duplication issue a few weeks ago which caused everything in the AH to skyrocket in price. By not removing the duped gold, the economy got turned on it's head and essentially vast majority of players who were playing legit.

How are you only barely breaking even on Butcher runs?

I'm not some mega-farmer who spends 14 hours a day playing this game, and I still have no issue plowing through Butcher runs as a barbarian (and didn't pre-patch either). In fact, I think I've only got about 90 hours total played on my barb. And now it has a much better chance of dropping lvl 62-63 loot, which is a bonus.

While a lot of the loot I get is crap (as is bound to happen with randomly generated loot), I still get more than enough stuff I can sell for 20k here, 50k here, the odd thing worth 500k-1mil, that I've still managed to amass a couple million gold (and that's after spending a few million on gear upgrades). Duped gold in the auction house hasn't affected this at all, for me.

If you've got half-decent gear as a melee class, you shouldn't wipe at all on Inferno Butcher runs. 40k+ vitality, and 500-600 resistance unbuffed, and you should be able to fearlessly run into packs of elites in Act 1 without caring what their traits are. Act 2 is where the big wall used to be, but now my friends and I are doing Kulle/Belial farming runs for fun, post-patch.

I haven't played in about a week after having reached inferno act II, and the idea of repairs costing over a fourth of my current accumulated gold doesn't make me want to return anytime soon. I'm sure i could spike my gold stash up by messing around in the auction house more, but I'm not really interested in playing ebay the video game.

I feel Inferno was a mistake to put in this game, at least the way it is now. Normal/Nightmare/Hell worked a lot better in Diablo II and the fourth difficulty seems to stretch the game in too many ways (for most players). Balance, economy, itemization, everything was affected by making mobs hit that hard and have such ludicrous champion combinations. The vast majority of runes, hell even most abilities, are revealed to be useless. The renovated drop system seems to be forcing multi-million gold purchases on players just to progress through the game. I just don't feel any of this was a positive influence on D3's endgame, and clearly Blizzard are still working on ironing this out a patch at a time.

I'll most likely be back in a year or two, but as it stands, I'm part of the exodus.

How to not get high repair costs:
 
Die less.

I GENERALLY think patch 1.03 is a good thing. There are a few things I dislike, though they aren't in anyway what you (and many other softcore players) are complaining about. More the opposite really.

The Good:

The best change in the patch is easily the repair bill increase. Previously, SC players were getting through the game and Inferno by throwing their corpse repeatedly at enemies til they died. The new repair cost actually incentivizes SC players to NOT die. Yet they are so used to building glass cannon and dying 3 times to every champion pack that now they complain, because death actually has a minor penalty. If you want tips on how to die less as a SC player, do what Blizzard said and look to how HC players play. It's helped a lot of my friends, who were trying to progress in Inferno with only like 30k hp because they didn't realize that things like Vit are actually useful. Death should be something you want to avoid. Period. The fact that people find these repair costs to actually matter means that it is actually doing the job. The simple solution is DON'T DIE. You want to feel pain when you die, come play HC. Until then, I have no sympathy for SC players who complain about repair bills when they die. If anything, I'd like to see death penalties broadened to include XP loss (like in D2).

Don't try to tell me that Inferno requires dying to progress either, it doesn't. Inferno has already been fully cleared in HC (Pre-nerf too).

Other tweaks were nice, if mostly superficial. Some of the aesthetic changes with how stuff displays generally looks a bit better, especially in chats and the like. Nether Tentacles nerf was badly needed, though I am shocked to not see Venom Hydra receive the same treatment. Attack speed nerf was necessary, because that was just too ridiculously good.

The Bad:

The worst change are the tweaks to Inferno, I feel they were excessive and would ruin a lot of the accomplishment. I figured going into D3 that Inferno was going to start hard and get tweaked down after complaints, and I was right. I'm just very sad I never got a chance to clear HC Inferno before they nerfed it, because it'll feel a lot cheaper.

Also all the crafting nerfs were a bit disappointing. Especially after spending so much time and resources leveling up my crafters and crafting stuff originally. Not much to do about that one though, what's done is done. Pretty trivial to level them up now though.

It doesn't affect me since I only play solo, but the changes to monster damage in party games seems really strange. It makes playing in co-op vastly easier to playing solo. I'd rather see them be on relative par with each other.

The Wanted:

Generally, I think D3 is in a pretty good spot right now. I'd like to see death penalties expanded a bit more, but that can wait a bit til Blizzard gets an idea of how the current changes are actually affecting people. I am all for gradual modifications. I think some skills and abilities need to be addressed too, but that can wait til the basics are ironed out. The Venom Hydra/Blizzard combo is simply too strong for Wizards, and the Witch Doctors pets just don't scale well enough past Hell to be worth consideration. Seeing a bit wider variety of possible builds in the late game would be great. Though given the very limited number of viable D2 builds, I think we've already exceeded that at least.

Overall, the only changes I didn't really like in 1.03 were nerfs to Inferno that I felt were simply premature. Inferno has been cleared in HC Inferno, so it was obviously possible. I'd rather have had the time to work towards that goal, rather than Blizz making it that much easier for me.

@Cataphract1014 said:

How to not get high repair costs: Die less.

*applaud*

@Zomgfruitbunnies said:

@MariachiMacabre: To be fair, if an entertainment product fails to entertain, then it's not a very good product.

But it is, by definition, still a product! Only they can take that part away.

Also the fact that melee class has 20% more resistance to damage is an indication that melee should be taking 20% more damage... and yet people play the other classes as if they are intended to take 99% less damage than melee classes, this patch fixes this imbalances and will encourage people to only go for DPS if they have enough survivability.

I'm VERY casual about Diablo 3. I'll boot it up every two or three days, play about two hours, then I'm done for the next 2-3 days. So I'm in no position to talk about this patch. But I am enjoying the game, it's a fun little clicker for sure.

Ill continue to skip d3 just as i skipped the entirety of wow. Starcraft seems to be the only one wherein you dont find a universally strong disapproval of the game and because it is a competitive game by nature is also most likely to have constant patches since balance is key in keeping the game's competitive nature viable.

I took a break from D3 after reaching inferno with my monk, to play some Dragons Dogma and wait for the promised Inferno balance changes, so 1.3 actually made me come back.

blizzard totally doesn't give a fuck what you think. this isn't wow, where they want your subscription fees. they already have your 60 bucks, you can go play in traffic.

remember when everyone was like "why do we have to always be online that's stupid, i want to play single player and not have to worry about server bullshit and DRM" and they were like "fuck you, log in"

yeah

@SamFo said:

Meh, I'll keep playing for sure. Some people care too much.

The patch has killed the game for me for now, but it's more because I don't care enough. I'm not going to stick with it when the experience has turned into something that just isn't enjoyable, mind you I'm not screaming to the high heavens about it, I enjoyed the game for a month and was starting to get burnt out on it anyway, Blizzard kind of just put a final nail in the coffin themselves (for lack of a better analogy, I don't mean to say they've well-and-truly killed the game, just my enjoyment of it for now). It just seems interesting to me that Blizzard just seem to continually make missteps with this game. They've also done a lot right with it, don't get me wrong, but it seems crazy to me that they would do this to their own product - and I'm clearly not the only person who has had their enjoyment of the game negatively effected.

Let me put it like this, I'm glad HC mode is there so I can keep leveling all the classes there because end game is even more fucked than it was before now.

Repair costs are nuts because they want you to buy gold from the RMAH.

My demon hunter is dead to me now, time to move onto bigger and better things like an OP monk tank starting now.

@C0V3RT said:

I think you're spot on that the repair costs are going to drive droves away from the game. I've put about 120 hours into my Monk and about another 20 into a Demon Hunter I was leveling up when I hit the barrier in Inferno. I'm in a unique position where my gear still isn't good enough to handle most of the elite mobs on Act II. Thus, I moved back to act 1 to farm jailer and the butcher.

The gear that drops is still crappy high level gear that no one wants on the auction house so I can't rely on that as a source of income anymore... and I break slightly even after my runs... which is hardly enough to build up enough bank to buy anything in the auction house.

To me, however, what killed the game was Blizzards seemingly lack of response to the gold duplication issue a few weeks ago which caused everything in the AH to skyrocket in price. By not removing the duped gold, the economy got turned on it's head and essentially vast majority of players who were playing legit.

This is my biggest problem with the game too. In order to progress, you NEED better gear and the only way to get that is by endlessly farming or buying stuff from the AH (which requires endless gold farming).

I've finished Hell but don't feel like even attempting Inferno, because I know my gear isn't good enough and I don't want to have to repeat the game 100 more times just to get one part of the armour that will be good enough to start it. Reducing the cost of upgrading the blacksmith helps (although not for those of us who already spent all our money upgrading him) but he still doesn't offer anything remotely useful for the higher levels.

The only disappointing thing about the patch for me was that I was (finally) able to more or less breeze through Act 2, with only Kulle and Belial giving me a headache, but the very first elite group I run into in Act 3 completely obliterated me. Guess it's back to grinding for me, but at least I can finally grind in Act 2 now.

Thats pretty shitty, just started hell and I have to use AH to even have a chance!

I GENERALLY think patch 1.03 is a good thing. There are a few things I dislike, though they aren't in anyway what you (and many other softcore players) are complaining about. More the opposite really.

The Good:

The best change in the patch is easily the repair bill increase. Previously, SC players were getting through the game and Inferno by throwing their corpse repeatedly at enemies til they died. The new repair cost actually incentivizes SC players to NOT die. Yet they are so used to building glass cannon and dying 3 times to every champion pack that now they complain, because death actually has a minor penalty. If you want tips on how to die less as a SC player, do what Blizzard said and look to how HC players play. It's helped a lot of my friends, who were trying to progress in Inferno with only like 30k hp because they didn't realize that things like Vit are actually useful. Death should be something you want to avoid. Period. The fact that people find these repair costs to actually matter means that it is actually doing the job. The simple solution is DON'T DIE. You want to feel pain when you die, come play HC. Until then, I have no sympathy for SC players who complain about repair bills when they die. If anything, I'd like to see death penalties broadened to include XP loss (like in D2).

Don't try to tell me that Inferno requires dying to progress either, it doesn't. Inferno has already been fully cleared in HC (Pre-nerf too).

Other tweaks were nice, if mostly superficial. Some of the aesthetic changes with how stuff displays generally looks a bit better, especially in chats and the like. Nether Tentacles nerf was badly needed, though I am shocked to not see Venom Hydra receive the same treatment. Attack speed nerf was necessary, because that was just too ridiculously good.

The Bad:

The worst change are the tweaks to Inferno, I feel they were excessive and would ruin a lot of the accomplishment. I figured going into D3 that Inferno was going to start hard and get tweaked down after complaints, and I was right. I'm just very sad I never got a chance to clear HC Inferno before they nerfed it, because it'll feel a lot cheaper.

Also all the crafting nerfs were a bit disappointing. Especially after spending so much time and resources leveling up my crafters and crafting stuff originally. Not much to do about that one though, what's done is done. Pretty trivial to level them up now though.

It doesn't affect me since I only play solo, but the changes to monster damage in party games seems really strange. It makes playing in co-op vastly easier to playing solo. I'd rather see them be on relative par with each other.

The Wanted:

Generally, I think D3 is in a pretty good spot right now. I'd like to see death penalties expanded a bit more, but that can wait a bit til Blizzard gets an idea of how the current changes are actually affecting people. I am all for gradual modifications. I think some skills and abilities need to be addressed too, but that can wait til the basics are ironed out. The Venom Hydra/Blizzard combo is simply too strong for Wizards, and the Witch Doctors pets just don't scale well enough past Hell to be worth consideration. Seeing a bit wider variety of possible builds in the late game would be great. Though given the very limited number of viable D2 builds, I think we've already exceeded that at least.

Overall, the only changes I didn't really like in 1.03 were nerfs to Inferno that I felt were simply premature. Inferno has been cleared in HC Inferno, so it was obviously possible. I'd rather have had the time to work towards that goal, rather than Blizz making it that much easier for me.

@Cataphract1014 said:

How to not get high repair costs: Die less.

*applaud*

@wmaustin55: Care to be more specific about what you objected to? I wrote a lot so I'm not really sure what upset you, I assume the repair thing? Or I guess you could play a VH Wizard. Venom Hydra is pretty overpowered in that case, I have to say. Sorry.

The addition of an actual death penalty is a good thing. Yes you can play something like poker with fake money and learn the rules, but it's a relatively boring game with no real risk once you actually understand how things work. SC Normal would be the moneyless poker, basically the tutorial for the game. The addition of a death penalty to SC isn't bad, it'll encourage more conservative play. I don't think anyone would argue that playing a total glass cannon build was ever a good idea or intended design, but the speed of killing outweighed the fact that anything touching you would kill you. Thus it became the standard method of progression. You died your way forward. In the same way that farming pots with MF gear was not intended design. We could debate the specific numbers of the change, but I am fine with them starting conservatively on that before moving it up. Death should be a bad thing. Even now, it's inconsequential for 2.5 of the 4 difficulties in the game.

I don't expect everyone to play HC (though they'd probably enjoy it if they took the plunge), but there should be some penalty for death when playing at the hardest difficulty. The options for that are basically gear, levels, or gold. With repairs, they went for the gold, which is probably the most tame way to do it. Additionally, this only affects Hell-Inferno players (likely late Hell unless you are very proactive in gearing) which are the highest difficulties in the game. The highest difficulties SHOULD be hard, they shouldn't be tuned for 100% of the player base to get through, that's why there are multiple difficulties. I doubt I'll ever actually see the end of HC Inferno, considering Blizz even said it wasn't designed for HC play.

but they do want subscription fees. thats why repair costs are so high, push you to using the real money AH where they get a cut.

$60 plus free to play micro transactions.

@phrali said:

blizzard totally doesn't give a fuck what you think. this isn't wow, where they want your subscription fees. they already have your 60 bucks, you can go play in traffic.

I got bored of it last night, and went back to playing Max Payne 3. And had more fun doing so. the 1.0.3 patch is so bunk. Nerfing my DH class. And making the game unplayable by random disconnects because the game feels when I have 5 stacks on NV, that's when it's time to put the condom on and fuck you.

And to the people whining about Lower Difficulties.Like Hell and Nightmare. Find a friend, play with them share loot, stop bitching. 'Nuff said.

The Diablo forums are so over dramatic it makes me laugh, and feel a little sick.

Diablo 3 hasn't really appealed to me as Diablo 2 did. Big issue seems to be that people tend to advocate solo play over co-operative. Since launch whenever I enter a public game at best I will have one silent person present who might promptly quit mid quest leaving me to either solo the rest or redo it all over again. Magic Find (unless they changed it) is handled in a way that makes it optimal to be solo to get drops. In Diablo 2 finding games with 7 others players were often quite plentiful and chaotic. For a multiplayer co-operative dungeon crawler, there is a distinct lack of co-op available. The tedium of grinding loot and things solo just dosn't really appeal to me and seems rather counter intuitive.

I don't know, I haven't played d3 in a week or two and don't really feel like going back to it as of right now, but the thing is, I have about 120 hours played time. That's quite a few hours of entertainment I got out of it, so for me calling it a "failure" seems a bit weird.

@Dagbiker said:

I skiped Diablo, I will be playing Torchlight 2.

I know that after finally hitting hell difficulty with a few characters, my personal drive on playing more D3 is wearing a bit thin as the 3.5 acts in the game really just seems rather short (makes me wonder how much they held back for a possible expansion). I think that they taking a lot of the gold drops out of the game in general made it a bit harder to just farm gold in the game but after a while gold isn't that much of an issue.

I'm just more surprised that it took until this recent patch to fix some of the random dungeons/event to appear that weren't appearing. Glad that other games like Torchlight2 are out so when I take a break from D3 (for them to patch/nerf more things), I might dodge more unfortunate patches like this one.

Man this stuff is super crazy . Ive played about 2 hours of the starter pack and Diablo just doesnt click with me. However all this crazy news really is interesting.


Also the click pun was NOT intended

Also whenever I read about the hardest difficulty of this game I just really wanna replay dark souls

Haven't played it in a couple weeks and the witcher 2 has grabbed hold of me at this point. May go back after a couple more patches. I got to hell difficulty and seriously could not progress any further with my barbarian. Looking through the AH for items just isn't fun to me. I don't think everyone should be able to beat this game on inferno though. Since inferno is the hardest difficulty. It would be lame is they nerfed the shit out of it for the masses. That's why wow went to shit with wrath of the lich king. It was way too easy end game.

@jakob187 said:

and almost an entire forum's worth of people on the Diablo 3 website seem to agree

Do not equate the opinions of the forum with opinion of the community overall.

No matter what Blizz changes, the official forums are a shit-maelstrom of whiners. They could change the font in the EULA and the forums would react like Blizz had murdered their entire family in front of them on Christmas. Then shit on the presents.

well i had played about 116 hours before the patch, and ill still play. the increased repair cost is fine that just means i have to die less making it more tense, ofc it sux when both my really bad mf gear and my normal reis gear was pretty much all done 124k repair cost. and i wish that weapons did not take dur dmg just by use. but in the end it matters little to me.

on the other hand they made inferno more accessible meaning less gear check and also made farming act 1 more fun since its really not about warden an butcher anymore. its all about the packs, since they are garentied to drop a rare. and the hole gear thats higher lvl 60 is just freaking awesome. its fun to see some loot that lvl 63 rare and look good and then when you unidentify you sitting hoping it something awesome

@jakob187 said:

and almost an entire forum's worth of people on the Diablo 3 website seem to agree

Do not equate the opinions of the forum with opinion of the community overall.

No matter what Blizz changes, the official forums are a shit-maelstrom of whiners. They could change the font in the EULA and the forums would react like Blizz had murdered their entire family in front of them on Christmas. Then shit on the presents.

Ultimately these changes effect only a very small portion of Diablo players. I imagine most people never get anywhere near Inferno. They complete a normal playthrough and maybe they start Nightmare, but more likely they either try a different class or stop playing the game. I've played for about 50 hours and I have a few characters part way through the game on normal and a Monk in the middle of Act II on Nightmare. I just don't think it's fair to say that Blizzard doesn't care what the fans think. They want to make the game approachable for normal players and I think the new patch made some great changes for most players. That it hurts the game for the hardcore players is unfortunate, but if Blizzard thinks it's something that needs to be done to keep the game approachable, then they have to do it. Maybe Blizzard is wrong, and if so, they'll probably fix it, just give them some time.