If you died somewhere with all your gear, how were you supposed to survive there with none at all? Depending on the area it could result in even more deaths, leading to more aggravating corpse runs. The only thing they removed is the corpse run, which was an unfriendly mechanic. Assuming that repair costs scale with items value, it might end up being quite a lot of precious gold coins. Since gold seems to be much more valuable in this game it actually is a bigger penalty than before. Now you lose durability, which basically means you lose gold. Now we all know D2 gold was pretty useless, so a death in Normal was pretty negligible then as well. In Normal you never even lost any experience, you only lost gold.
