How easy will Diablo III be? This is a big question on a lot of people’s minds. They are sick and tired of World of Warcraft and how easy it has become. Many players have long since left World of Warcraft to play FPS or RTS games, just for the genuine challenge. Leaving the argument aside about how hard World of Warcraft really is, or isn’t, will Diablo III suffer the same ‘too easy’ plight?

What we have experienced

So far millions of players have had access to the open beta and hundreds of thousands to the closed beta. What we learned was that the first 13 levels of the game are ridiculously easy. This can be expected though since these levels basically equate to the first 10 levels of World of Warcraft, where you face no real challenges, learn a few class abilities and eventually select a specialization.

If you played in the beta a month or so ago you may have joined where you were level 3-4 and were ported into the lower levels of the Cathedral. With an amazing 5-10 DPS you may have found it really difficult to do any significant damage to your enemies. When they hit you, it hurt. You may also experience this if you join a 4 player game and try to go off by yourself at level 10 or 11 in the Cathedral. In these cases you would have to kite and even run away from rare packs. This might be a taste of what the harder difficulties have in store for us.

How hard will Inferno be?

There has already been a lot of speculation as to hard long it will take to beat Inferno. A poll at Diablo Fans showed that most people thought they would beat it in under 2 weeks. The joke may be on them though. Jay Wilson said last week that no one among the internal test team has even beaten Inferno.

“Was anyone in the internal test team able to beat D3 Inferno difficulty?”

“no” – Jay Wilsom

Why does it matter?

You might be wondering why it even matters? Look at it this way, the harder the game is the more time players are going to play it. If you can beat Inferno in a month then a lot of players are going to transition back to World of Warcraft to get ready for Mists of Pandaria in August or to another game entirely. The harder the game is the more exclusive items are going to be and the more tiers of challenge will exist, these will create vibrant markets and higher prices for specific equipment and commodities. Remember, a single Radiant Star may have as much as a trillion gold embodied in it. Opportunity will lurk wherever players are challenged, whether that’s at level 50 at the beginning of Hell difficulty or whether it’s trying to defeat Captain Daltyn on Inferno difficulty. But, if difficulty is hard to find or artificial in nature like it is in World of Warcraft, there just won’t be a great deal of incentive for players to enter the real money auction house.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.