Well softcore already gives you an XP loss on death. I wouldn't mind some middle ground where each time you die a randomly equipped item is destroyed. But as it stands a death in hardcore is effectively 6 real life hours of my time to go back and re-level and that isn't a penalty I'm willing to swallow.
The more you level, the faster it goes, so you wouldn't take very long to go, but you might as well change it up some. You could also in theory just keep playing your arc witch in standard, but it's gonna be pretty dead there for the next few weeks. Chars aren't deleted, they're just moved to the permanent leagues.
I don't think leveling will be, but like the endgame farming certainly will. Considering leveling is like 1-10% of the experience depending on where you stop, even if it's slower, it'll still be faster to reach 80-90.
You can absolutely get other class gems that way, actually you can just go to the right vendor(can look it up on the wiki) and ask in town and generally someone will just buy you the gem and trade it for the currency he used at no cost cause it literally takes 10secs.
Yep, up to about 13000. I'm assuming it'll go down pretty quick when it releases and people start getting in.
