Well I'm glad they gave merchants better items, but it can also be disappointing when all your best gear is bought. Definitely a hard balance to make merchants have good items, but not to overshadow boss loot as well. I'm also not so sure whether merchants ought to restock every hour. Could be a big a factor in making them overly useful for loot because they conceivably have an endless supply of whatever you want, if you're patient enough. Even if you just check a merchant, go do a couple quests for an hour, come back and if there's several new divine items, that seems pretty excessively generous.
Also, it seems unfortunate you can't really save up for an item if it's just going to get refreshed later. I assume the whole stock is randomized every hour (except maybe what you sold them?). I might prefer something like merchants gain five or six items every time you level up, a couple of those being divine, max, and they slowly phase out older items that are 4 or 5 levels below your level. It's not the greatest thing to have merchants depend on you leveling up, but I think it's a better way to abstract time passing than real time when nothing else in the game really depends on the flow of real time. Are merchants really selling and buying loot that much?
