I know man... I didn't play for about a year, then came back for the patch... Had some fun at the beginning. But it came back to the same thing. You can pretty much make a character to lvl 70-75 in the same time it was taking in 1.09/1.08.

I might try a bit of classic since with those new monsters and without the use of the previously always present 1.05/06 dupes. It might be a bit more difficult. Well, not to get to lvl 60... Since cows are still there for this. But past this.

But hey, just my 2 cents. I was complaining about "everything is turning back into runs again" pretty much 4 days after the release of the patch. I was doing Flayers run, Tombs run at lvl 80+ cause they gave very good exp and were a change of pace. I mean the patch isn't that bad, it's just the people playing it that won't change... At the very beginning of 1.10, I said they should bring back bosses to drop magic only after you done them once (for those who are new to D2, that was exactly like this in 1.06). That's the only way to fix MF... if not you can do like a friend of mine who was proud of saying "I found 3 Shakos, 2 Occy and 2 Skullders yesterday"... What did he do you think? Spent the day making 1 min Meph run with maphack... How fuckin silly is that plz.

Of course, you may blame teleport for being broken. Ok, let's remove it... Won't change anything... Make a good party, have a super runner (barb work, pally work, zon work, sin work). No maphack... huh, I teleport without it and I can run without it... Block sorc really don't take that much damage. Only newbies who are not cautious complain about gloams. Get over it, if the game would be balanced, they should have monsters being as dangerous fire-wise and cold-wise. The problem is that they think by "adding always more difficulty" it will become harder... But then, what do they do. Add always more power to the character... And meanwhile, doesn't check what can be exploited to create cookie-cutter built (how exactly you plan to kill a hammerdin doing 7k+ magical dam with tons of block and defense and 95/90/95/90 resists and damage reduced and absorb -- which is quite easy to achieve)... Or no, ES was not good enough, let's give it a synergy to boost and make it possible for sorceress to achieve total physical damage immunity, but wait, let's not even stop there. Wouldn't it be funny if we could give to the other chars an Oak Sage and a runeword that will give them battle order. If you make the game harder, you're not suppose to give all the tools to make it even easier then before.

Two or three things they messed up. Upgrading the difficulty of the game while upgrading all the skills/items ratio. Minions give too much experience even at lower lvl. If you do Baal runs in hell in your 60's, the exp is insanely fast. If they made it the only way to reach lvl 99 like Diablo use to be in 1.06 that would be fine. The only problem is, they are the only way used to lvl now cause they are the fastest. Say, around lvl 70 your best exp would come from act 1, at lvl 75, act 2... at 80, act 3, at 85 act 4... and progressively, act 5 at different area would give you the most exp. Before lvl 85... act 4-5 would consider you a leecher and give you say, 1-3 exp per kill. It's actually quite easy to lvl to 85 doing act 2-3 (tombs and flayers/travincial). My first character on reset was doing quite well in 2-3 ppl game and I believe tombs lvl as fast if not faster then Baal runs at an earlier stage already. Lastly, if they really wanted to balance the game... Make the game like 1.06 use to be... Party exp = LOSER. Only the strong survive and only those who can play the game solo stay on top. Make it decrease the bigger the party. Say, party of 2 = 3/4 exp. Party of 4 = 1/2 exp... Party of 6 = 1/4 exp. Party of 8 = 1/8 exp.