Good news. Normal Difficulty was bumped up in difficulty. Monsters have more HP and attack harder - you gotta play smart. Most monsters attack in packs - melee will charge, ranged will shoot from behind them. Champions + Elites AI are smarter (fucking bastards are a pain sometimes, I'll explain in the next paragraph). Gold was increased - in compensation for that, every-freaking-thing is expensive. It used to be easy to level up your Blacksmith with just 250-500-750 gold. Now, from the get-go, it costs 2K+ JUST to unlock the first 1/5th or 1/7th of the first perk. You are able to craft 2 to 3 items until you hit the max level for that perk which gives you more goodies. Unlocking stashes' gold price were increased as well. Crafting items were re-assembled - they cost more gold and crafting material(s) depending on the type of piece, rarity, and level of the item. Uh ... I don't know if I'm missing anything ... Ah yes. Drop rate for items isn't very wild like it used to be (lots of blue items and few yellow items used to drop, patch 15 doesn't drop a lot of blues and I've yet to encounter one yellow item ...).
So about Elities and Champions - so far every Champion pack I meet have an increased running speed and try to surround you very quickly. Best way is to CC (crowd control) them with stuns, fears, knockbacks, etc. and to use heavy attacks and defensive against them. Elities, on the other hand, have a very large health pool and their attacks do a lot of damage. They tend to have their minions go in first and usually they attack from behind (their melee attacks have a larger yard range since they're bigger). Sometimes, they'll use other non-minion packs to back them up. I had to fight this Elite in a narrow hallway. Whenever I kill off some non-minion packs or his minions, he quickly walks backward to get behind more enemies. When I cornered him and killed him, I had 30-40% of my health and few packs hitting me from the sides/behind. This is so far based on their aggression and type-of-play model.
I've also encountered some new side-quests which were interesting. The game is more pleasing now.
