Wow…ok, so, at a BARE minimum once you have even two pieces of yellow gear, the game needs to be at Master while leveling to pose any challenge whatsoever.
But as to playing through the story and being done with Diablo, I mean, that’s on you. I’m sure people play ARPGs that way, but if they do, they aren’t going to find the genre is to their liking, because they are meant to be played in perpetuity.
he only needs some time to realize that this is in fact an aRPG with a Lore part, skipped by most to get boosted past it, boosted to gear, boosted to 2000+ paragon…
…and then start their action and grinding endgame, totally skipping any RPG part.
As much as people are saying “Oh just turn it up to T6+” the difficulty system in Diablo 3 is designed pretty poorly.
They made way too many of them, and anything not named Torment is just an absolute joke. For new players they’re apparently so scared of them dying that they force you to play on one of the joke difficulties, and not even the highest one.
It’s a bad introduction to the game for pretty much anybody except people who would choose those difficulties even if they were offered all of them right off the bat.
On top of that it just becomes a gear check of cranking up the numbers for each torment or GR level up at some point. Diablo 2 wasn’t great in this regard either, but at least when it made you play through the game 3 times, they introduced things like immunity and more monster affixes.
It was the bare minimum, but at least it was more than just “Monsters now have twice as much health and damage as the previous difficulty”.
Ah, yes. The heady days of bosses having soft / hard enrage timers and where a failed dodge check for a melee hero was instant death. Belial ripped me a new one so many times in early runs at Inferno.
Maybe the Normal difficulty is pointless, though.
There is a rather nasty scaling issue by level 7, unless you are well aware and buy or craft upon every levelup (not that you have mats). I used to try and level Expert / Master and when it took 2 minutes to kill a single blue, I gave up 
at that point, you are still wearing nothing but 3 gray pieces and the starting weapon with 1.1 dps, given the excessive xp.
Grab a legendary weapon, though, and you’re good. A few more and it’s easy, even. Group up to trivialize it further (and mitigate gear continuity issues).
That aside, I think Hard should be the baseline. Maybe keep Normal and call it Easy for toddlers and our elderly gamers (though I doubt they’ll enjoy the game anyway).
ps.: Leveling with paragon points assigned or Gem of Ease doesn’t count. Buy a new account and record your questing in T1 or T6 solo. Bonus points for Hardcore. I will watch it! 
Good job. You had your hand held while you learned the game. Now put your big boy pants on, and crank up the difficulty.
Nothing to see here. Most games start off easy to guide new players without too much frustration.
Does the Challenge Rift season start method count? I have started on T1 before after a good Challenge Rift cache that gave me good multipliers. I couldn’t go all the way to 70 though, you hit a wall pretty hard in the 30’s or so since the mobs will outscale your dps.
To be fair, most games also don’t require you play through the entire story before being allowed to take the training wheels off.
Which in case anybody missed it: New players can’t go above Expert until they beat the game and even that only unlocks Master until you get to level 60.
Honestly at this point, there’s hardly any reason to have most of the game’s difficulties locked from new players. New players should have access to the first six torment levels, similar to when a person makes a new season character.
Torchlight 2 lets you jump into insane difficulty right from the get-go. Torchlight 2 costs 1/5 what diablo 3 with expansion costs. Torchlight 2 has 4 classes for you to play nightmare on. Nightmare difficulty is well scaled.
If I want to do the above with diablo 3 with 6 classes what do I do? Obviously on my first play through it’s not possible. On the second play through without using crafting or enchanting and playing it the old fashioned way what difficulty do I pick for a fresh character? Blue mobs have to be killable which on Torment 2 is more of a kite them here then run over there so you don’t have to fight them otherwise you get wrecked(using only drops and vendor gear).
I think people are still missing the point of arpg and have endgame tunnel vision. Arpgs don’t really have end games. Diablo 2 end game was secret cow level. The game ends when you beat the final boss. The journey is supposed to be challenging. 6 classes provide imo enough content even though I haven’t played them all. The adventure mode and rifts is a nice bonus if you want ultimate gear but I don’t think there is anything like an arathi basin battleground for you to show off you gear in. I doubt there is some omega weapon ultimate boss after you get ultimate gear for you to beat but I could be wrong.
Anyways diablo 3 metacritic score is 88. IGN score is 95. PC gamer score is 90. Player metacritic score is 4.1/10. I would give it at best 79 because the difficulties for a standard play through are terribly balanced. I should have skipped diablo 3 and held out for warcraft reforged because warcraft 3 is the best computer game ever made and better graphics can’t make it worse.
Now if there is anyone who really is an expert at diablo 3 without being cursed by endgame tunnel vision what is the best difficulty to play a fresh character without paragon points and without crafting. A difficulty that would be in line with insane difficulty in Torchlight 2.
If you are playing solo, I would suggest as a fresh 70, play torment 1. If you are dying/can’t kill things, I would bump down the difficult one step and repeat as needed. If torment 1 is too easy with your gear, try the same thing but start at Torment 6 and work your way down to the level that has the right feel in relation to the challenge that you want.
You have already had your question answered and just being completely noob about it.
Your very first character plays through the story on Normal / Expert / Hard and so forth whatever you might find challenging. Once you complete it you stick to adventure mode and never look at story again. You only have to complete story with one character. If you want some sort of Challenge why not place yourself in Torment 1 as a fresh character and treat that as the lowest difficult and ignore the others. Normal through Master are more legacy difficulties then anything from back in Vanilla Days when things were sort of difficult but not really.
Dont go crying game is too easy when you havnt remotely touched even MID GAME
I haven’t played Torchlight 2, but I tried a character this season and started at Torment 1. Starting a new season character means no paragon and no items/materials from previous characters, so it’s a 100% fresh character.
Though I do use crafting with what materials I find along the way.
That said the enemy HP/Damage scaling I find to be a bit messy at lower levels and often found myself in a case where the enemy felt very tanky but still wasn’t doing a lot of damage to me. This is even prioritizing damage on gear over survivability.
Please come back stating this once you can solo gr150 under 5 minutes.
Thank you.
I made BANK off RMAH. I miss it. Also vanilla wasnt that hard either. Ive barely played though ever since they removed the crit passive that fueled the og control wizard build.
This sounds like an informative answer. I shouldn’t expect the game to balance well on its own. T1 with all drops. If it gets to the point where stuff is to tanky drop it down to master and use blue drops only? Or use a gold weapon with blue armor on master? I think I’ll give this a shot:
T1 first and if I run into blue mobs that take to long to kill and have to be kited for 5 minutes I’ll try master with blue armor and a gold weapon.
Edit: I gave this a shot and did it with a fresh season which gives me movement and damage buffs for kills and clears my paragon ranks and craft status so I have a genuine fresh character. This might be the most balanced mode. Really this should be the default.
The only reasons I can think of for playing through the story with all classes is to hear the different voice acting and to experiment with the skills without dying when you choose a lame one.
Adventure Mode is much more challenging and offers things not available in Campaign. It is not really “endgame” until you can master your heroes’ abilities.
You will definitely hit a wall or two before being “endgame” capable.
If you are expecting the Story Mode to be difficult, you are about 7 years too late for that.
And grammar is to hard, ain’t that right? 
Too boldly go where no one has gone before! 
Grammer “becomes” bothersome when you want to state your propositions without a wall of text. 
Try doing solo campaign t16 then try act 1 in less than an hour then try act act 1 to 5 in less than an hour then try completing each set dungeons all 20 something, then try clearing all the acheivements… is it too easy?