I finally entered Hell difficulty last night with my monk.  He came in with about 2K DPS, 10K in hit points and a fairly solid build.  I 1-shot Diablo in Nightmare and overall the path was simple enough.  Then Hell started.

First, every enemy has 12-20K hit points.  Each hits for about 500-1k.  On their own, not so bad.  In a group of 5, you need to deal 100K damage and take 5K per second.  Monks don’t have a choice here, we’re a melee class.  Still, it’s doable and I like the challenge.

Then we get to the Champions/Rares with multiple affixes.  In Hell, you get 3 affixes per though I think I’ve seen 4.  Anyways, I always seem to get a combination of the following Vortex/Jail/Frozen (which removes any mobility) and Molten/Plagued/Desecrator/Arcane (all of which can kill you in under a second if you get hit by their effects).  So combine the no-movement ability with the if-you’re-not-moving-you’re-dead ability and you can guess what happens.  One particular pack had me stuck at the entrance to a zone, so I died a solid 10 times just trying to get in and not die.

To top it off, the jump in difficulty is also a jump in loot quality.  If I were to go back to Nightmare to try to find gear, it would be significantly worse (35% or so) than what I get in Act 1 of Hell.  So going back isn’t so much for the gear as it is for the levels.  What do levels bring?  More skills, certainly but I have the ones I need to succeed already.  I need more Hit Points and each level causes a significant boost to the exchange of Vitality to Hit Points. I could use the hit points and the cash boost wouldn’t be bad either.  I’d then have access to the best AH gear too.  Mind you, with 400K in the bank, I would be able to afford all of 2 pieces of level 60 gear and cheap ones at that.

Finally, massive nerfs/bug fixes were hotfixed yesterday.  Monks had a skill completely removed (that allowed tanking in Inferno no less), Wizards has a damage shield removed and Witch Doctors an immunity.  I should point that every character than has cleared Inferno Diablo so far was one of those classes – the first ever was a Monk.  I should also point out that these problems would have been clearly evident if Blizzard had allowed testing past level 13 in their beta as it took all of 1 day for people to find these issues and a week for Blizz to “nerf it into the ground”.  Their game that was supposed to take months to complete was beaten in 4 days.  I’m sure someone got an earful.