As is shown in the next 3 screenshots, it's my opinion that the major point of Act I is to give you as many crap items as possible with increase in gold from monsters, as a stat.  Maybe the idea is to just give you a good gold base for later on in the game.  *shrug*

Now here I am in the citadel.  I'm a big fan of the Citadel dungeon because of all the rogues who were left behind when they had to flee.  Some of them became corrupted by the demons, and turned to the forces of evil and you get to kill them.  But the more resistant ones were tortured to death, in really awful, but fun to look at, ways, such as the two screen shots below:

For a while I used this rogu Amplisa as my hireling.  One nice thing about the expansion is the ease to keep hirlings alive.  You can drop potions on them and they'll heal themselves.  You can give them armor and weapons to upgrade them.  And if they die, you can resurect them!  So Amplisa stuck with me through most of Act I and all of Act II.  My favorite thing to do is give my hirlings weapons which leech life.  Amplisa has a bow which drains something like 5% life per hit.  This fight kicked my ass totally..mobs jumping out of the shadows everywhere, me barely able to keep up.  But not Amplisa, she's just fine at the end, and even leveled =P