I missed when the patch is supposed to drop? Anyone know?
The PTR to test the changes is supposed to go up early next year. It's hard to say how long they expect the PTR to last. I'm hoping they give it longer than the 1-2 weeks typical for D3 so they have time to get stuff right. But, I know there is a lot of pressure on them to get ladder going, so we'll see. So, my random speculation: the earliest I'd expect the patch would be February, with March feeling more likely.
Am I the only one who likes the fixed Tomb Vipers? I honestly always lumped that one together with the FE bug and IM in the Chaos Sanctuary. Just something to keep some builds out of the area completely. My opinion may be colored by most of my play being pre 1.13 when Enigma was nearly unheard of and CtA was quite rare in single player, and the standard way of dealing with them was to skip Nilathak entirely or reroll until you didn't get vipers.
That said, I do agree with corale that the goal shouldn't be to smooth out the difficulty in general. I like that D2 has a wide swing in the difficulty of encounters based on what affixes spawn on boss packs (and what can happen when multiple boss packs can synergize each other.) You really don't get that with D3 and it takes away a lot of the "texture" of the game. On the bright side, upgrading all the Act 3 temples to level 85 areas gives us a reason to go survive some door traps!
I generally don't want to see the difficulty curve of the game changed to be either harder or easier. Harder just means less room for non-meta builds. I think that one of D2's strengths has been it got the difficulty curve right overall. With meta builds that are geared out, you can blast through the game (but you can still get taken off guard by the right affix spawns.) But, the game is still doable with more unusual builds. I'm the type of person who likes to define my own challenges, and D2 really works well for that.
The biggest danger I see is the new runewords as that is where the power creep is most likely to come in. I'm hoping we see stuff more in the Harmony range that fills in a mid game and starter end game role vs. something like Spirit shields that are super cheap stupidly powerfull stuff.
I've been mostly playing Amazon since coming back, and the live stream has me cautiously optimistic on that front. Just getting Fend to where it's a viable backup skill for lightning immunes would make Infinity feel less required. (Especially when combined with lower synergy point investment required for the lighting melee skills so you actually have the points to spend on a backup.) I do wish they had acknowledged that NAHM isn't actually fixed or that the AR bug on Amazon ranged skills is still a thing. (It is still a thing, isn't it?)