Playing A Game Diablo III PC

Diablo III has changed since 2014. It's not just me! On a lark, I searched for "what happened to diablo 3" and found this Reddit thread:

I one-shot everything. So I bump the difficulty up, not much seems to change. [...]

I ended up starting a new game on the highest possible difficulty (Inferno 1 I think it's called) but it's still easy as hell [...]

Right now the (base) game feels like a joke basically... What happened?

Game starts when you hit level 70 [...] Blizzard has done a lot to streamline the level 1-70 grind, as much of the remaining playerbase is uninterested in redoing that section each time a new Season starts.

So, pretty similar with what happened to World of Warcraft. (Which Blizzard then tried to fix in Cataclysm, and I think a few other times?)

And it's true. On the "Hard" difficulty, my partner and I cleaved through acts 1-4. My monk carved a path through enemies like a hot bullet through melted butter. Bosses fell in seconds, frequently skipping entire phases of the encounter. The enemy abilities I remember being genuinely afraid of - Arcane Enchanted lasers, Molten fire-traps, Frozen stunlocks - have become so insignificant, compared to my health and recovery stats, that I stopped making any effort to avoid them.

The first four acts are trivialized by these balance changes. Which, when combined with the trite story and insipid characters, leaves the whole campaign feeling unfulfilling and empty.

To put it more poignantly: replaying the game from the beginning is pointless. I'm surprised there isn't a WoW-like option to just buy your way up to level 70. Or, even more reasonably, to just skip it. Why is this content even here?

Has this same ethos bled into Act V? We'll find out, but... I'm not getting my hopes up.

Better than: ... man, I don't even know.
Not as good as: "Loot 2.0", or even the game at launch.
Really stretching: the lower bounds of "Meh" on this one.

Rating: Meh