I’m mostly definitely seeing slower XP gains now at T6 in high density areas now with trash mobs; this is with the 100% community event buff. The nerf affects the larger majority of trash mobs with a high density in the game, and does nothing to address the problem of the campaigns design that leads players to farm the most effective runs in this manner. So long as these runs yield more experience, players will continue to run them. The dev team would need to do a comprehensive overhaul of experience along with monster density to make running through the campaign, feel and actually be more effective over the same amount of time.
The problem is that they struggled with monster density in patch 1.0.8 to where some parts (like Fields of Misery) felt cut/paste contrived. Yet, other areas of the game remained devoid of mobs. It’s no different with some rifts where they were really heavy, but others were barren. This development team cannot even get that part correct with their continual micro management of dictating how they want players to play, to where the macro level game play actually does suffer.
If all they do is take a summation of the total possible experience from a high density area, and calculate the experience offered by these trash mobs based on this summation, the game as a whole will end up feeling underwhelming (because there is nothing for the lower density areas to make up with unless their experience is buffed – but that’s not the correct way to do it as it just leads to other problems like making little sense in killing just a few monsters, and getting better XP for doing so).
Diablo is supposed to be a game about slaying hordes of monsters; not a running simulator of trying to find mobs to slay (and not gaining any experience or loot in the process when slaying hordes of them). But one of their problems with increased mob density was the performance hit that their servers took. Thus the reason for areas that are periodically devoid of anything As far as I’m concerned, this is their design problem to contend with because they wanted this game to be online only.
When Reaper of Souls goes live, this XP buff is going to go away. Guess what? That is when players are going to really feel the effects of this (doesn’t matter if in Campaign or Adventure Mode since XP granted per monster isn’t going to be different). And while level 70 mobs will naturally grant more experience, people need to remember that Torment III at level 70, is nothing like Torment III at level 60. Many will be playing lower Torment difficulties for awhile, which will thus affect their experience gains.
The character progression will most definitely feel slowed for many once the XP buff goes away. My guess is that it will end up feeling unrewarding again. Even without the previous 50% experience buff on PTR, gaining experience even at P100+ was still happening at a decent clip. But having tested a bit on my hardcore character (Paragon still way below P100 at P70) before and after the hotfix, it takes awhile now to get one bar. So I can imagine how much slower progress will feel once the XP buff goes away.
What I also didn’t mention in my prior post was that the developers are balancing the vanilla game, based on the expansion. It’s why level 60 legendary/set items feel underwhelming because the real ones are the ones that are the level 70 versions. But not everyone is going to be upgrading to the expansion (but the developers constantly make decisions like this assuming that everyone will be). I get the fact they can do whatever they want; but when they continually balance vanilla against the expansion, they might as well call the current base game, the Reaper of Souls Starter Edition (because that is what vanilla Diablo III is now).
UPDATE: it took me awhile to go from P70-72 playing on T3 on hardcore. Note that doing these individual high mob density runs, still yields better XP because their nerfing of these low HP “swarm” mobs, also affects the experience totals one gets from regular game play. Basically, the 100% XP buff is a wash now due to this nerf (before the hotfix, the 100% buff was noticeable since it was fast at P195, to level to P200 on softcore).
