Diablo 2: Resurrected will test your resolve to boycott Blizzard

Welp, guess my level 71 Druid journey ended at the start of Act 2 in Hell.

I go outside the city, there is a gangbang of 20 cats and scarabs, almost all immune to cold, so I just get killed unless I just run and run and run away…my 26 level bear gets killed too near instantly…

It was fun, but I will not have patience with this…

Maybe I should do some Nightmare runs and pray for better equipment, and use my last remaining respec to change skills?

That is one of the big reasons I could not get into grim dawn very much. The world is just bland and the only real differences in monsters seem to be the color theme. Reddish guys vs Greenish guys vs Orange guys, etc…

It totally lacks the distinction and beauty of Titian Quest.

I polished off Baal without a problem and finished Normal at CLVL 41.

So of course the next thing I had to do was make sure the Cow level still worked…

On to Nightmare!

Operation: Kill Blood Raven with a Sorceress continued today with a brand new Sorceress, fresh out of the womb.

The first rule I made for myself: Do not, under any circumstances are you to go into this battle without Static Field. No exceptions, it doesn’t matter if I come up with a different plan along the way to level 6. I just am not allowed.

Secondly, after I killed Corpsefire in the Den of Evil, I came up with a new plan because he dropped two kinds of throwing knives. One blue, one yellow. Holy shit. I could work with this. Throwing knives! I could get Blood Raven with these. After killing everything in the opening area and the Cold Plains, I cleared the area around Blood Raven at level 4, and was tempted to go in. After all, I had this new plan with the throwing knives right? No wait! Remember the rule. Ok.

I left a town portal there and went to the Stony Field and cleared most of it before I came across yet another Elite boss archer who almost killed me. Holy shit, what is it with these archers. They’re basically sorceress hunters. Wait, this was a perfect time to test my throwing knife plan! Ok, so instead of just running away, I started running away, and then turning around and throwing knives at her. I got all her entourage that way, and eventually her too! YES! This could totally work.

I cleaned up the Stony field (except for Rockanicu, I’m not suicidal). And I finally hit level 6. Then I took the Stony Field portal back to town. Ok, before I go in, let’s test this.

I put Frost Nova on Right Trigger, Cold Blast on B, I already had Lightning Bolt on Y (that was my first plan, before I found the throwing knives), I had stab on X, and throw on RB. That didn’t leave any buttons, so I put Static Field on LT+RT. I went outside town real quick to practice. Good thing I did. I was terrible at this button setup. But I practiced until I had it down. RT to Frost Nova, and then RT+LT to Static Field, and then RB to throw knives. I had enough muscle memory down to give it a try.

I went through my portal. At first I was getting flashbacks of past tries. She kept interrupting me or moving far enough away that my static field never hit her. Wasted mana. Oh well, I drank health and mana potions and tried again, went in close, RT to Frost Nova, slowed her down, then Static Field, Static Field, Static Field.

YES. I got her down to less than half. Now I drank health potions, and dodged and threw knives. And I finally got her! Hallellujah! That felt good.

And guess what? She dropped a green sash! I know what that is!!! Death’s Guard! I used to consider that essential in tackling Duriel because it has the property “Cannot be Frozen”. Sweet!

Just facetanked Duriel, with a Barb, without any freeze buffs, other than 3 thawing potions drank on the way in.

Suck it, Duriel

Well I haven’t had any crashes but I seem to have regular problems connecting to Battle.Net.

Either I can’t connect to it at all or I get put in a queue. I’m 263rd at the moment. What’s up with that?

They blame modern player behavior.

oh ok thanks that was interesting.

Number 187 now…

I suppose I can always play offline.

I thought I would make a hammerdin, but the zealadin build I used to start out is still doing well, managed to beat Diablo without running back to town, though I did dial down to players 2 because of the trouble my necro had.
Back when I played before I don’t think there was a respec option., it’s nice to have it available But so far I haven’t used it yet

I wouldn’t have thought about that! Seems legitimate (although shouldn’t they have been ready to scale up anyway?)

In staying true to the original game, we kept a lot of legacy code. However, one legacy service in particular is struggling to keep up with modern player behavior.

This service, with some upgrades from the original, handles critical pieces of game functionality, namely game creation/joining, updating/reading/filtering game lists, verifying game server health, and reading characters from the database to ensure your character can participate in whatever it is you’re filtering for. Importantly, this service is a singleton, which means we can only run one instance of it in order to ensure all players are seeing the most up-to-date and correct game list at all times. We did optimize this service in many ways to conform to more modern technology, but as we previously mentioned, a lot of our issues stem from game creation.

We mention “modern player behavior” because it’s an interesting point to think about. In 2001, there wasn’t nearly as much content on the internet around how to play Diablo II “correctly” (Baal runs for XP, Pindleskin/Ancient Sewers/etc for magic find, etc). Today, however, a new player can look up any number of amazing content creators who can teach them how to play the game in different ways, many of them including lots of database load in the form of creating, loading, and destroying games in quick succession. Though we did foresee this–with players making fresh characters on fresh servers, working hard to get their magic-finding items–we vastly underestimated the scope we derived from beta testing.

Additionally, overall, we were saving too often to the global database: There is no need to do this as often as we were. We should really be saving you to the regional database, and only saving you to the global database when we need to unlock you–this is one of the mitigations we have put in place. Right now we are writing code to change how we do this entirely, so we will almost never be saving to the global database, which will significantly reduce the load on that server, but that is an architecture redesign which will take some time to build, test, then implement.

I agree. It sounds legit to me too. I know Adam and others upthread already played like that, but like I said, my experience was very different. Even people at Qt3 who played like that gradually started doing it over time, not at the launch of the game when traffic is at its highest. This time they’re playing like that from the word go.

Welp, latest patch actually hosed my game. Now I can’t play for more that 10 minutes without the screen flickering and then going black. Game is still running, can here in game sounds etc, very frustrating. I’ve had zero problems since I started playing and now this, bleh.

Wow, that sucks. Hopefully they can issue a hotfix for that soon.

An I am stupid moment. So a couple days ago my crossbow amazon died. (no shit). Today I decided to go on a corpse run. I geared up and brought a bunch of stamina potions. Lot of ground to cover. Ended up at the obelisk stones where I was sure I died. Nothing. After some running around searching I portaled back to town. And there was the body, next to my stash. Moron.

Lol, yeah, nothing on maps persists on a game reload.

I know now that I will not be going on corpse runs at all anymore. :)

Iirc you’re giving up on whatever gold (and xp, after normal) you could have recovered. But yeah, often worth saving the trouble, heh.

These days I leave my gold in my stash. I’ll lose whatever I pick up in the field.

I was in my back yard. I kept hearing ding ding ding. I thought, someone is dropping rings.

It was my wind chimes.

I may have an issue.

Heh heh!