Deak2112 wrote:cut
Hell difficulty is actually where the game starts because of the uber areas in which you will spend your time, the main quest line is irrelevant save for the free skill/attribute rewards along the way, leveling was fast until now to get to around 100 and see how you should play your character but it gets much slower from now on by comparison, and you will need to grind xp in order to access the next set of uber areas. So get charms as soon as you can, some have attributes you may need to start wearing sacred tier gear, +max skills, +max life/mana, even %xp gain, and lots of other stuff you really need to progress further. Also i recommend you see the uber progression in this guide
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=22675 to easily find the ubers, and then check docs for more info if you have trouble in some areas.
Daerouie wrote:cut
By crafting you are rerolling the item affixes and guaranteeing certain affixes with the shrine you chose to use. So just the type of item matters for stuff like weapon speed, range of damage, maybe movement speed relevant to body armor type and sometimes STR/DEX requirements, because you want to be able to equip them sooner rather than later (when you may not need to spend any points into STR/DEX because you have free ones from the charms).