Awesome.
I always level a couple SC characters, and take the freebies, but also do an HC character each season. I am in the exact same boat you are with my HC Barb; total thrift store gear. Did my first T2 last night, (while my SC Sader is burning T16, and doing GR75 runs runs in 2 minutes), felt great.
I progress so much slower in hardcore mode. It’s a lot of fun thiugh, if I’m in the mood for it.
Completely agree. I have “beaten” each Diablo enough times that the only fun left in the game for me is HC. I start a new character in the new season immediately on Torment I. Rough start. This season, I only lost three Wizards before my fourth made it all the way, now she is on Level 80 Rifts, which is high for me.
Glad to hear others are having renewed fun with HC!
IIRC, Blizzard was not going to include HC in D3. Then at launch, I think they gated it behind beating the campaign or something like that. Apparently, they were afraid of “feel bads” in new players?
Last season I had 900 Paragon in HC and 500 in SC. Yeah, you start a little slower to avoid dying too soon, but it will creep up on you when you least expect it. Besides my goofs as I was being powerleveled (deaths 2 - 4), the only time I died is when there was red bar lag. Of course I dodged many a red bar lag bullets, only popped my passive. But we all know, it only takes once. One unlucky time and splat. D3 HC is all about how far you can go before the internet kills you. Maybe it’s yours, Blizzards, or both… it doesn’t matter. Lag will always be the real HC boss.
After enough time its almost the same imo, when you get used to it.
I switched to exclusively play HC in S19 cause my connection is a lot more stable since.
Actually I had 0 chars die to any type of DC so far. ‘knocks on wood’
Ofc I had some deaths here and there before but that was all on me, taking unnecessary risks or just not paying attention + drinking. 
O ye and season 21 theme that almost killed my char cause it reflected back on my char, so I skipped that season cause thats not cool.
For me the most dangerous part is the leveling process and the early lvl 70 when I don’t have a proper build going.
Thats when I’m more careful but after that I play it comfortably just like I did in SC.
I try to have a backup set and a gem of ease leveled just in case.
Currently I’m at GR 124 with a Bone Spear Necro, it was rather chill w/o o shet moments but I will try to go higher once my augments are finished. ‘playing solo only’
Also I don’t play HC like some ‘crazy’ ppl do, I mean I don’t push until my char dies for sure.
Just don’t see the point nor fun in that, when my char hits its realistic limit I call it and end the season and go play other games.
I don’t want to detract from your current enjoyment of hardcore as I experienced that same enjoyment at first. I think it’s the novelty of starting a different mode, not the mode itself, unfortunately. Even in hardcore, you eventually get to the point where you can guess the percentage of life you’ll take from each type of attack based on the difficulty level and your toughness.
So after you posted this thread yesterday I went ahead and tried HC… I got error 1016 again and realized I just can’t put myself in a place where I know I’ll lose my character.
I appreciate the positivity though!
I start the season in HC so I can get the free set, as SC is just so much easier. But this season I find myself playing SC a lot more than HC, probably because there are so few HC players out there and I am really enjoying grouping this season.
I totally understand where you are coming from. I enjoy the beginnings a lot more than the grinding for paragon and pushing GRs past 110.
The best advice I ever got for HC was, upgrade the Gem of Ease as soon as you can and save a backup set, so if you die, you can pop back up to 70 pretty quickly and be ready to jam.
In D3 hardcore is not a real hardcore, it is half-softcore, as you lvl up new lvl 70 char in seconds and always have x10 sets of gear replacement.
“seconds” “x10 sets” Hyperbole much?
how core do I have to be to be hardcore? How about Kore?
you should read this post if you want to know what to expect on HC
Yeah, I totally agree. As I said in my OP, I know my toon will eventually “grow up” and it will be back to the grind. That said, I’m happy that my attitude toward playing D3 has shifted from “It’s evening and, man, am I bored. Maybe I’ll run a few GRs since I’ve got nothing better to do.” back to “I should be doing [fill in the blank], but I really want to go and play D3 for a bit instead.” Maybe it will last for a week, maybe for a month - I know it’s not forever - but it’s something at least.
Thanks for the tip - will do!
It’s a lot of fun. When last season got long-in-the-tooth I made a HC necro and bard. I had played years before but had long since deleted the characters to make room for others. The inventory was still there though! I have a lot of really wacky pre-updated items in the vault. Plus like 6k yellows (yay). I was up to like #12 on the necro boards then I did a rebirth. I did the 65 gems for the conquests. I’ll start playing more once the season starts winding down.
Once you die, Blizzard deletes your account, is that what you are after in HC to make it “real”?
No. But in D3ROS hardcore is a joke.
Until you encounter the real boss of HC, then it’s no joke. You will see a ghost form of your character on your screen.
Y O U A R E D E A D !
I redone all my INT characters on Hardcore to free up stash space, and I don’t regret it.
Other upside: HC leaderboards are such a ghost town (at least in NS), so you can get into them even if you’re relatively casual player.
It’s a joke in a sense that you don’t really die.
I remember playing games when I was a kid and when you died, you had to start all over again, no saved progress and nothing carried over. That would be true hardcore if that happened in D3.
Can you imagine that happening? Lose all items in your stash. Lose all paragon levels. Lose the ability to go straight into Adventure Mode. Have to do Story Mode all over again to unlock Adventure Mode. Players (well the vast majority of them) now-a-days couldn’t handle that at all.
Of course, in D3, you could bypass that by making mules so that you wont lose any items. Also, you could level those mules so that they can access Adventure Mode right away. However, they are mules. If you wanted any one of them to be a main character, then you have to make another mule.
Since that new mule would have to go through Story Mode to access Adventure Mode, you might as well do that with your new main character and keep the mule as a mule. Even then, do you think the vast majority of players would be able to handle that?
Of course hardcore can’t be too hardcore, then there wouldn’t be a hardcore option. Everyone would play softcore. I, for one, like the fact that they implemented a hardcore option. Yes… I. Will. Die. A Death! Many many times.
True, but those games were much, much shorter and simpler, and didn’t have features such as achievements that can be completed once per year and dynamically created items with dozens of parameters and millions of possible combinations. Losing the progress was a matter of hours lost, not months.
The stash, Paragon levels and access to Adventure Mode are (game mode)-wide (SC/HC * season/non-season), not separate for each character.
Thy proposal would require regressing to D2 system, with separate stash for each character and no safe way of transferring items between them. Not nice in such fast-paced game, where players often switch between characters.
Also, campaign progress reset in D2 didn’t work as well - players just got rushed though all acts and difficulties and then powerleveled.
Gating multiplayer behind completing the campaign could work, but in practice, but I’m afraid that in practice the majority of players would quickly get bored with such repetition and just abandon HC after main character death.