After playing a bit in both HC and SC I have a few concerns about this. I want to play HC very badly and I miss the HC community from sacred more than I'd ever expect, but in D3 as it is now I find it hard to believe it will work very well. I really hope I am wrong but there are things about Diablo itself that makes it seem very difficult:
- Gameplay seems to be purely missions, there are no large areas to run around explore, level and upgrade
- missions get harder and harder, to the extreme
- cooldown on health potions
- auto attributes and all skills are changeable, revertible and UN-UPGRADEABLE, which means you cant have any specialization, no way to pump up defense or damage by upgrading skills and attributes.
The only way I got my toons high up in HC in sacred was by planning out the entire build and pump up a defense and attack, farming xp and gear in high end places etc.
The only way to change attributes is by gems, which you can upgrade up to 14(!) tiers! but then again, to die with a highly upgraded gem would be like losing all the gems you ever got.
you need 3 gems for every 1 gem of the higher tier, so all in all for a max gem:
3^14= 4782969
You need to find 4782969 of the lowest tier of that specific type of gem to get one max.
oh and a gems attribute changes depending on what piece of armor you put it on, which means you cant really pump up things by socketing either.
oh well, im probably just being overly pessimistic because I die plenty in nightmare.. the ways to get strong will probably reveal themselves soon, lol.