You don’t really need to haul the loot back to town. Just keep an identify book to check the rares you may need and throw the rest. The items that are worth hauling back to town are the ones that provide + to skills, even blue/white ones, and that only applies if you need money.
Now on sale for $13 directly from Blizzard. I finally picked it up.
That’s what it’s going for in the Xbox Christmas sale, presumably the same for Playstation. I’m sorely tempted to pick it up.
I recommend it. It looks very cool on the Series X. And it’s really fun to play with the controller, of course. The tetris inventory is a slight pain, but not much.
I recommend Hardcore characters to anyone who wants to play it for the long haul. Still the most fun way to play.
Hey! I got to Act 3!
I’ve never seen Act 5 before… i played a bunch of Diablo 2 at the time but i don’t believe i ever picked up the expansion. Oddly i picked up all the weird, off-brand expansions for Diablo 1.
This is a couple weeks old, but made some pretty significant changes to the offline (single player) experience:
Mainly, Terror Zones are now available to those who don’t want to play online. I didn’t mention them before since I hadn’t had much experience with them but they really change up how you go about farming for items and leveling your character. They also introduced Sundering Charms which allow you to basically play without worrying about immunes, but come with a significant penalty to a resistance based on the immunity broken (for example, the Fire Sunder charm gives you a -75% penalty to your fire resistance).
Here is Blizzard on Terror Zones:
The journey to level 99 is a celebrated experience for players and quite the milestone if achieved—a rite of passage, even. We want to offer an alternative to repeatedly farming Baal, Diablo, or Nihlathak. When playing a Terror Zone-enabled game, every hour, the armies of the Burning Hells will focus their demonic might on specific zones, terrorizing them. The monsters in these zones will be at least two levels higher than your current level or their original level, up to a maximum per difficulty. The experience received and the loot dropped by killing a terrorized monster will be based on this new level. In addition, terrorized monsters will also grant additional experience points.
You need to have killed Baal to unlock Terror Zones for each difficulty.
This is the bit on Sunder Charms:
You’ll notice a new keyword below called Sunder . This keyword means that if a monster has immunity to a specific damage type, their resistance will be reduced to 95% regardless of what their starting resistance percentage was—breaking their immunity and allowing damage of that type to be dealt to them. Sunder is applied before other resistance reducing modifiers and only affects non-players . These new unique charms will only drop from Terrorized monsters of Champion, Unique, Superunique, or Boss difficulty. There is one tradeoff the comes with the new Unique Grand Charms—while they reduce a monster’s resistance, they also reduce your resistance to the same element, allowing you to receive more damage of that type.
It is a bit unclear to me if they have changed up where Sunder Charms drop, as originally they were exclusive to Terror Zones but now I’m reading you can get them in the Chaos Sanctuary on Hell Difficulty (where you fight Diablo before going to Act 5). This would be really helpful because the place that always got me stuck was trying to do the Ancients before entering the Worldstone Keep, as they could spawn with some awful immunities (like having one be immune to both Cold and Fire).
The Terror Zone and Sunder Charm information comes from their 2.5 Patch notes, which are here:
All in all, I can really see myself getting a character up to 99 now. Its still a grind but now there is a great deal more variety available.
Hmmm… This is on sale for a mere $13.19 on the Xbox Store. I played the original over 20 years ago with mouse and keyboard. I’m assuming they did a good job adapting it to the controller, given the D3/D4 experience?
Should I buy this, as I loved D2 but barely remember it because it was half my life ago, or go back and finish Diablo III, which I think I only put 5 or 6 hours into when I got distracted by another shiny game?
D2R is an absolute blast to play with a controller and feels like the game you played 20 years ago without actually being that game, which was a bit clunkier and uglier. D3 on consoles is incredibly solid as well but I have a soft spot for D2’s classes, such as the Amazon and Druid.
1 Like
They have also changed some of the skills, for example a pet druid is now viable.
1 Like
Ha, those are two classes I played the least!
Sorceress, Barbarian, Necro, Paladin
Diablo 4 beta made us pick this up instead.
100%. The new graphics look how we thought the original did back in the day.
The controller support is kind of incredible, but it sucks for menu-ing. I hot swap when I go to town or have to level up or have to mess with my inventory which is kinda annoying because there is this weird pause whenever the UI switches.
That being said, being able to always access what is equivalent to “six right click skills” with a single tap of the gamepads face buttons instantly is so empowering. You can do all sorts of combat tricks effortlessly.
D2 with a controller is great. IMO D2 is now more than ever, just a much better game than D3.
Reading up on how to progress and best builds, it’s funny that the winning solution is always just make every build for every class like the Sorceress, or rather a more gear-independent spellcaster. Even the Barbarian via Warcry which is effectively a magic spell. Your weapon damage never matters, and the same rune words can be used for any class since we be turning all of them into mages!
I have mixed feelings about this. Like I want the Barbarian to be gear-dependent.
Discovering this option on KBM was also game changing. Here’s my layout for sorceress:
Left click, right click and then the Q-R, A-F for skills. Plays so much better than having to either mouse scroll or hit a hotkey, cast, then hotkey back.
Yeah, definitely a weakness of the design is how much easier it is to get through with a caster vs melee. Having magic spells always hit while melee needs to build attack rating to hit and survivability means the best budget builds are always going to be casters. And since they’ve added some amazing low level runewords like Spirit and Lore it’s even easier to gear a caster.
On the other hand, the fact that you can even make a Barbarian that plays as a caster, or a bow-wielding Sorceress, or any of the other out there builds makes this a better game than 3. I’m also liking the updates they made with Remastered. Some new runewords, some QOL, Terror Zones (love that there are now more farm options) - nothing too drastic and all feels in-line with the original.
Nice. I didn’t know there were the same options available.
The runeword thing is wild and totally arcane…like, how would you know without looking it up online? It’s definitely a thing introduced after I left the game originally. I think I only played the expansion once-off many years after it’s release and then immediately went on to other things. No time for runes. So I guess the vast bulk of my play time was with pre-expansion Diablo 2. Now I am wondering if they fucked with the loot drops between the two?
Play what’s fun unless min maxing is fun for you. If it is then just follow the latest flavor of the month guide. I completely ignore them :)
Finally time for the Martial Artist Assassin to shine?
Mosaic Assassin is already nuts. They really don’t need that buff.
I never got the Runes to make Mosaic, but I could never find a way to take a Martial Artist Assassin through Hell difficulty (Hardcore). I always died in Act 1. It was just impossible to stay alive.
I even cheated! The only character I’ve ever cheated with. I used an old save file to bring her back to life and then used an editor to give her the best Martial Artist Green set, just hoping that would help. And I tried playing it solo (it would be too embarrassing to admit to my friends that I cheated) and get through Act 1 with that set, and I STILL couldn’t do it.
https://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/sets/sets6.shtml#natalyasodium