So, I had the weirdest thing happen last night.  I upped the difficulty to Expert, played about 1.5 hours.  It was quite a bit more challenging and downright fun.  At that point, I happened to be standing still after a tough fight, checking out the gear that dropped.  When suddenly, my network disconnected.  I have been playing D3 for I think 3-4 months now, very regularly, and have never, not once, had a dropped connection.  I have been playing the hardcore toon for a week or so, also no connection issues.  I switch to HC Expert and it drops, for the first time ever? Coincidence? Or does Blizzard just mess with us sometimes? Would have been really, really severely pissed if had lost my toon due to a network problem, especially when I have NEVER EVER had a problem like that before.  Very strange, makes me very hesitant to play anymore in Expert mode (my crusader could likely survive for a few seconds even in elite fight on hard mode if I dropped connection - but certainly would not survive if dropped in Expert mode).