I played a bit tonight, saw Loserhero before he went to bed :D
Clearly the last one or two patches decided that they would completely forget over my two singleplayer characters, which probably means that the builds I have traditionally played are now impossible to work. My trap assassin cannot kill anything, nor can she survive much. This is stupid, arbitrary, and irritating. Somehow it also made a barbarian weak.
Yeah that overhaul forgeted up every single single player character I had, it was just impossible to progress after that. I mean, Hell was already hard enough and they decided to make it almost impossible.
Anyways, I might play if someone can explain to me WHAT THE HELL WORKS NOW and also tells me where and when they are playing.
You need some pretty specialized yet flexible builds that take advantage of Synergy to survive, and you also need some good gear. For instance, I'm using a Meteorb sorceress (meteor and frozen orb specializing). The build is simple, dump 20 points in Fireball, Meteor, Fire mastery and Frozen Orb. Then get 1 point in Warmth, Teleport and ice mastery. Buy a good desert merc and that's it, I can now solo Hell, still very hard to pull off but at least it's doable.
One thing that is fortunate is that battlenet has Baal runs and stuff to help you level up ridiculously fast. You can go from 25 to 40 in an hour of baal runs.