In a recent forum post by Bashiok it was revealed that Inferno difficulty will get ramped down a bit.
We purposely launched the game with Inferno being far more difficult than what we were able to progress in ourselves, assuming people would find it as difficult but with a few skilled players able to pull it off, or the difficulty would simply help root out problem skills and builds that allowed flaw-filled progression possibilities.
I think the main problem we’re running into is people progress more or less linearly to Inferno, and the brick wall effect makes it seem like these broken skills were the correct way to overcome the difficulty because the belief is that Inferno must be an immediately surmountable challenge, which it isn’t intended to be. Or the reverse, that because these skills allowed progression the classes that did not have them were too weak/broken, which isn’t correct.
We’ll provide a bit more info/context on Inferno tuning through an article we’re working on for the front page.
So it seems Blizzard purposely made Inferno ultra-hard in order to root out build imbalances, but this makes me wonder as to why they didn't just get the QA team to try out these builds. In favor of Blizzard however, I don't feel that Inferno should be beatable on the first attempt, as in after going through Normal, Nightmare, and Hell just once. It should take time getting good gear and good builds just like you would for an end raid in World of Warcraft. People flooding the forums asking for an Inferno nerf just need some patience and better gear, instead of asking for the game to be easier.
With that being said, I have not reached Inferno yet so I cannot comment on it's difficulty per se, but I don't want Inferno to be "Just another mode", I want it to be an ultra-hard mode that takes skill and gear to beat.
Sharing the same opinion as me, a fan recently asked Bashiok in a forum thread to not nerf Inferno difficulty. Here is the original question by the thread starter:
"Please don't nerf Inferno. All these kids are crying because they cant go and one shot a difficult situation like they could in their precious World of Warcraft. You guys said before launch you had no intention of reducing the difficulty, and I truly hope you keep that promise."
Bashiok responded on the first page with the following response:
There are definitely some aspects of Inferno and the way damage comes in that we're looking at. Before we get there though we want to address the skills that are 'must haves', and see how the skill and gear game settles out a bit before we address content. If there's a skill that you absolutely can't survive without, that's a much more serious issue to customization, build diversity, and the game as a whole than someone not being able to progress as quickly as they feel they should.
I think tweaks to content difficulty is a given, it's going to happen in some shape or form, but we're not there quite yet.
So we can pretty much assume that an Inferno nerf will happen (which was planned from the start) but I hope it won't be a big nerf making Inferno just child's play. Blizzard should stop trying to focus on the end game and fix other problems with the game since the majority of players haven't even gotten to that level yet. I am pretty sure that once players get better gear and master builds with the proper runestones, Inferno will be a piece of cake.