D3 HC in general

I have only ever played D2 in HC Mode both in classic and LoD back in the days when they were released, but with all the changes to the gameplay in D3 to remove the cheesy tactics to prevent dying, i'm wondering how playable HC will actually be.
In D2, you generally had 3 options to deal with particular encounters were you would definitely die because they couldn't be outplayed:
1. Spam Heal/Rejuv Pots on yourself or your merc
2. Escape with a Town Portal to remove curse/poison effects, buy more pots, revive your merc, relocate the fight to a more favorable position
3. Press ESC and exit the game instantly, mostly in lag situations the only way to survive
Now from what i've occasionally read about D3 in the past years, none of these things will be possible anymore.
So how well does HC work in D3? Have there been significant balance changes in game difficulty and item progression compared to D2?
|||D3 won't be filled with gimmicks like poison that lasts for 3 minutes and kills you 100 times over.
Or, we can only hope.|||Poison lasting minutes, exploding dolls, ranged bosses 2-shotting everything from off screen, iron maiden in the chaos sanctuary, yeah things like that were quite ridiculously overpowered in D2.
It's that kind of stuff which made the game feel really dangerous to play, and i still get that adrenaline rush today when i'm running around in hell with my brand new, untwinked ladder sorc.
I think no other game so far could offer it to that extent - even when you're playing some really scary first person horror shooter, you always know that you can just try again when you fail.
Anyways i'm still curious about how the game has changed, because to be honest even after 10 years of patching, D2 still seems to have been made without a proper concept regarding balancing in basically every part of the game.