Difficulty, or lack thereof

For a new player the encounters are brand new to them -- they go in and have never encountered the bosses before. Their gear is low, they have only found gear from drops, their gems are low, they are running 3 socket gear with found gems for skills, and their passives skill tree will be non-optimal.

The acts and the act bosses are designed for these players. Not skilled players.

Don't know if someone already mentioned this but men... this weekend was a mess to level up your toon :D

"Basically, the giant forest spider in the merciless 2nd act was the point I've decided that I've wasted too much of my time mindlessly clicking stuff and wanted to ask why everything up to this point"

You haven't even reached the point that slightly became interesting. You shouldn't have any problem with anything until at least in Act3 Dock fighting that unique dog. Even that if your build is any good it should still feels like cakewalk. Btw, almost no rogue should give you any problem. I would say my challenges really started doing lv 68+ Map runs with as much mod put on it as possible. I know some ppl will say "68?! LOL, you serious? that's TOO easy. What kind of junk build you are running with?!"

I can only say my build is only so-so and I know my limit for now... one thing for sure, Act2 Merc is hardly any measure on how hard this game is.

Meh. I kind of like where difficulty is right now. The 1 month ruckus league is fun as hell.

Even leveling is fun because the mods just make whatever difficulty you are in that much harder.

The only thing I do really like about the "watered-down" difficulty is that more builds work so it's not always the same few builds that are clearing everything.

I would say the damage is way more balanced now than it was before. But then again, I've only really really gotten into this game within the last 1.5 years or so...so I don't know what it was like before then with any real amount of experience.