That begs the question; Is the game properly balanced where dying results from being incautious, or does the RNG occasionally spawn mobs that will massacre characters without warning?
Imho, so far (I'm now in Act 1 Hell) balance is pretty good and with a single exception, I'd say all of my deaths would have been avoidable (if only I was a better player!).
The exception was a boss pack of Fast, Vampiric 'Bloated Malachors' at the end of Act 3 Nightmare that I encountered right after entering a zone.
Normally, you encounter them one at a time and they're quite slow, so it's easy to avoid the massive damage they deal with their attacks. But them being 'Fast' I found it impossible to get away from before being pounded into pulp. And due to having high hit points to start with and also being 'Vampiric' I was unable to kill even one of them. Separating them was equally impossible in the limited available space, so after dying three times, I gave up.
A friend of mine then joined the game with his level 60 Barbarian and killed them but was surprised to find they managed to beat him down to half hit points.
Incidentally, I noticed that in Patch 1.0.3 the basic damage of this monster type was reduced, so apparently Blizzard realized they were a bit over the top!
Having said that, boss packs in Hell difficulty have three random abilities and in Inferno it's four abilities, so the likelihood to encounter an 'unbeatable' combination of abilities increases.
After Nightmare I'd rank the survivability of the classes like this:
1. Monk: Using
Mantra of Evasion and self-healing skills Nightmare difficulty was a cakewalk.
2. Barbarian: The key was to continously use
War Cry with Invigorate and activating
Wrath of the Berserker when in trouble (granting temporary immunity to CC effects).
3. Demon Hunter: see my last post!
4. Witch Doctor: I'm still looking for a good replacement for my
Zombie Dogs which have become useless due to being killed too fast. Unfortunately, this means I can no longer hide safely behind a wall of 'bodyguards'
5. Wizard: After dying a lot in the beginning I switched my main attack to the Piercing Orb version of
Shock Pulse in combination with putting down
Blizzards to put some distance between me and the monsters. Then he worked okay again.
Imho, what can at times be hard to judge is how to prioritize the stats on your equipment: For me there's always a short period of try-and-error until I find a good balance between offense (dps) and defenses (hp, ac, resis). It would be nice to have a guide of some kind for this saying 'at level x an average character should have y dps and z hit points'.
