What a depressing situation to witness, one moment you developers get it right, you make a version that's near perfect and everyone wants and in the next instance, you change it and everyone loses interest again.
I'm going to reiterate. The first version that was released when the PTR was open on Friday was the most perfect one in terms of PvE combat. Reason being because it was not too difficult to hunt and farm.
I don't really understand the logic behind making PvE hard. PvE is not the core aspect of the game. The goal of Ds is to do quests, level up, hunt items, collect stone from which to buy combat equipment, and then focus PvP- in short becoming level 55 and be ready for war. PvP & war is the main goal of the game.
Adding difficulties to PvE is a baseless and useless idea. This idea shouldn't be brought up. Yes, I understand that a player shouldn't rush the game, I also understand that you must do something to avoid players going too fast. But right now, that ain't it chief.
We don't even enjoy farming in general since it looks more like a chore to us (because it's dull, the drop are not worthy, the items sold are not worth much), what we like to do is PvP & war. Yet now, you've increased the difficulty against mobs.
Think about it for a moment, the more people you have leveling up when the PvE is not difficult, the more level 55 players will populate the servers. When there's more level 55, there are more players to compete among themselves, hence making them fight more. The end result being having more active servers with war.
In the first version of PTR from Friday, I was able to hunt level 44 mobs with level 40 equipment with violent boosters on a "medium" difficulty- and the drop was perfect for what I was hunting (Even tho drop was unchanged), now not even possible without dying in the current version. I would really love if the PTR version released on Friday would have been on live servers.