I recently felt like playing Diablo 3 again, which I bought at release and played for a month and then lost interest. I realized they changed a lot of stuff, but I cannot make sense of those difficulty levels. I can choose to switch a game to "hard" or more, and there is some advice about having good gear and stuff. But I cannot understand where Nightmare and so on went.
I created a hard game with my level 59 sorcerer, went into act 2 and faced mobs with 1M hitpoints, which pretty much killed me instantly. Then I tried normal, and again it was a very hard fight. The items those mobs dropped were something like 100%+ upgrades to my gear.
With this character I used to play in Nightmare before.
I don't want to read two years worth of changelogs, so my question is simple: Where did the Nightmare, Hell , etc, selection go, or how was the difficulty scaling changed between release and version 2.2?
Best Answer
The old system of "Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno" is gone completely, in favor what resembles the old Monster Power selector. New difficulties are called:
Normal - Hard - Expert - Master - Torment I - Torment II - ... - Torment VI.
(Torment VII through Torment X are coming in Patch 2.3)
New difficulties are defined as a direct multiplier of monster's hit points, damage, experience gain, gold rates, and drop chances. For example, Hard, compared to Normal, grants:
Difficulty of any given game is determined by its level (taken from the level of hosting player) and difficulty itself, in its new sense. So, level 35 monster on Normal will be weaker than level 30 monster on Torment I.
Below is a table of different difficulty aspects I've compiled during Patch 2.0 (some things may have changed).
HP - Monster hit points, Dmg - monster damage, GF - gold multiplier, XP - experience multiplier, DB - chance of Death's Breath dropping from Elites, Leg% - legendary drop chance, Rift% - legendary drop chance in Rifts.
per lvl - increase relative to previous difficulty level, dmg inc - how much damage should a player do compared to previous difficulty level, to achieve equal farming speed.