Is it viable to grind above Normal for Torment now?

As I understand, before the recent patch, there was no point in doing any difficulty level other than normal to gear up for torment. The drop ammount of bloodshards and legendaries was the same in normal as in master. So basically, you grinded normal until you could handle torment efficiently and jumped straight to it.

Is it the same nowadays? My barb can't really handle torment yet. Should I just grind normal or is it better to play the highest difficulty she can handle?