Posts across the net have been filled with laments to the difficulty of [wiki]Inferno[/wiki]. Some unfounded, some perfectly reasonable. It seems nearly unanimous, though, that Barbarians have it tough past the first Act.
Change may be coming, as [wiki]Bashiok[/wiki] mentions they are working on a piece for the front page that will be addressing the issues that many have been raising. Regardless of their intent with this initial difficulty, Inferno as a game mode will fail if people do not find it fun. Whether you think it currently hits the sweet spot of tuning for you right now or not, it looks like some tweaks will be happening.
[blue]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.[source]http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149180916#15[/source][/blue]
It makes one scratch their head as to why the QA team never attempted such builds. It would seem that rotations for Smoke Screen and Preparation would be a staple for Demon Hunters, or else Force Armor on Wizards for later difficulties. While it seems that Blizzard has killed the golden geese for the two favored classes with the most recent hotfixes, it raises the question as to how they will be tuning Inferno in light of vast amount of complaints filling the forums.
What we do know is that Blizzard has a vested interest in making this end-game fun. If people are not having fun, Blizzard will be taking action. Whether this will be in the best interest of all of their player base remains to be seen.