In normal, you lose 0% of experience if you die I believe. And that's where folks don't really GAF. In cruel, it is a little bit more severe I believe.
I'm not shitting on softcore, because I think it is way more fun than hardcore leagues. I'm just pointing out a little bit of the differences between the two. In hardcore, people are a bit more serious about their builds (which takes away from the fun).
In hardcore, you re-roll all the time which can be quite time consuming. Surprisingly, its still a lot of fun to re-roll. The worst is when you get to merciless and realize that the build simply doesn't cut it. I've re-rolled quite a few times already, and died to some straight bull shit.
Normal is like 3 hours of gameplay, cruel maybe 4-5...
of course the exp penalty there doesn't matter
at lvl 80 you lose as much exp from a death as it takes to run through normal mode
I died to a game freeze today (10second freeze, hdd started trashing, memory leak? fuck if I know but it happened) , Can't even imagine pissing my scion away due to that on hardcore
I wonder how many hardcore players ragequit the game when they get to maps and get oneshot by the devourer unique in orchard despite 77 percent fire resistance
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there are sooooo many cheap combinations in maps that you only learn through trial and error at endgame.
it literally only takes 1 second of desync to die if it happens at the wrong time. (3300hp 6k armor, 6 endurance charges, overcapped resists and 16 percent life leech -which is way overkill
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so it's not like I'm undergeared or squishy)