In terms of progress:

I have hit nightmare A2 going solo from A4 normal on. I have been rolling between 2 characters and bringing a 3rd along: mentalsin, fire trapper, es light sorc (which i started leveling after I hit nightmare).

- Mentalsin is mainly for bosses, as it's only a 40 point build and the tab makes for a strong fade/clawblock/shadow master, as well as not having counters with psychic hammer. Not very good with trash (mind blast converts too often, for too long, not enough aoe, not enough damage, no physical pierce available except amp which isnt enough, mana-costly). It's a matter of gearing for the bosses to mitigate damage, and with much smaller HP pools, red potions become a lot more useful. There are some very shitty gear options for weapons though on this character (runewords are good but good luck finding the runes for the appropriate level - I will be making a suggestion for a fix on runes. Finding level 40 and 50 runes when youre hitting level 80+ is so stupid).
- Fire trapper and light sorc are for trash and maybe some bosses that the mindsin cannot handle. The gear options here are better.

As mentioned before, it's about mitigating the damage you take, taking your time to run around, dodge attacks, cast when you can etc. The battles are longer but not really more difficult... it's about gear and potion preparation. A lot of times people just don't bring enough rejuvenation/health/mana potions and say "this is too hard to progress without a party or better gear," but most of the time its all available to you (runes/runewords excluded).

As a result of the experience so far, I would like to see juvs removed, hp buff skills reduced by 50%, and reds buffed a lot, like double for barbs and dins, tripled for everyone else. Reds are so bad on druids it's not even funny.

the only problem i see about removing juvs is having no way of dealing with big spikes of damage (there are a lot of them in hu)

we could add another form of mitigation. Like a Fire Retardant Potion that temporarily increases your max fire sorb or res and is on maybe a minute cooldown, so if you get caged+firestorm+lightning hosed at diablo you have an option besides die or s/e, for example

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we hit hell a4 but to be honest i've been rather disappointed with the push. i was hoping for more of a challenge from not having hp buffs. so far none of the bosses we've fought was really that hard. nm baal was a longer fight that the rest but not terribly difficult.