Diablo III (Gameplay #16) - Butchered Beyond Belief
1The good news is that Diablo III is getting rather interesting and tense at Hell difficulty since at this point in the game good gear, thoughtful skill combinations and solid teamwork finally become far more important than just clicking rapidly on the left and right mouse buttons.
The bad news is that the kind of high-quality weaponry, armor and other forms of equipment necessary to survive on Hell seem statistically unlikely to ever drop from even the strongest of foes during any given player's playthrough (statistics being what they are there can obviously be lots of outliers, but browsing the Blizzard forums confirms that most players have had the same experience as me in this regard). I can only interpret the design of the loot drops as being tailored towards making the Auction House a necessary part of any serious Diablo player's gameplay experience. In other words, loot drops are balanced with Diablo III's total user population in mind (i.e. a unified collective with trading options) and not structured as to make sense for individual players going through the game mostly on their own and/or with small groups of friends. And even though there is a gold-based Auction House which is completely separate from the disturbing real money-Auction House, the game would have been a lot more exciting and rewarding if I knew that it was reasonable for me to expect to find decent weapons and armor by just going through the game and killing lots of challenging enemies. Alas, that is simply not the case, and in order to be of any use whatsoever to the high-level party featured in this video I first had to grind for hours to amass the 120,000 gold needed to buy a better (but still very cheap and comparatively weak) weapon from the Auction House.
It's a real shame that when the game *finally* starts getting good, it shoots itself in the foot by making the extremely controversial Auction House a mandatory rather than optional feature.