So far it's well balanced. There's an abundance of magic items to support the crafting system which would be better if you could carry more and not have to salvage so many high priced items for the important "arcane tokens". I'd rather sell the high priced items and salvage lower quality ones to get a better return on my loot.
I'm coming up on level 30 and haven't finished Normal, in comparison on the vanilla I'm not even level 25 and I could easily take out Diablo in Normal. Maybe I'm too chicken but level 16 is a bitch. For rogues to use spells at this point is just inefficient unless you want 0 AC and get tooled by the charging warriors.
I think they should bring back dropping all your gear when you die. Some of my most intense moments were trying to get my gear back and with the proliferation of items in this version getting up to "gear" is just enough of an inconvenience and it brings back the excitement of finding items. Also there's a shit load of PERMANENT storage space so it's easy enough to keep extra gear on hand if you did die and lost your equipment Right now if you die you lose some percentage of gold. I've stopped carrying all of my gold on me so death is without much consequence which leaves the game more of a grind rather than a challenge.
A digital download for D1 is long over due and if it weren't for games like D1 I'd get a new computer without a CD drive.
How many of you use your CD drive?
