I am debating with myself whether to Cube all my rings and amulets before going after Baal. I have them all in my personal stash, since all the shared stashes don’t have room for all that junk. If I die, all these rings and amulets are lost. On the other hand, I’m only level 32, so maybe I should be higher before trying to get better rings and amulets? Tough decision. Ok, I’ll trust in this build. I think I can take Baal.
Anyway, I’m back now, one of Baal’s minions got me. My merc went down but I had cloak of shadows up so I thought I was safe, but one of them got close enough to spot me and hit me twice. 100 vitality didn’t help much. Dead! Level 32. RIP.
Just got the River of Flame waypoint, all decks are clear to go after Big Red.
I’m level 25. I don’t feel particularly good about this!
Kinda stuck without much that I want to spend my points on. I really need to commit to something. Choices are:
Tiger Strike. Damage damage. Combo with Cobra Strike and Dragon Tail (more on that shortly). Great single-target, bad AOE.
Claws of Thunder. Lightning damage! Strongest of the dual-claw elemental skills (more on that later). Basically sucks if you don’t dual-claw it. Very strong AOE, okay single-target. Will need to have a secondary attack to deal with lightning-immunes later, if we get that far.
Just kidding, that’s it. The other two non-trap skills that are worth investing in are at 30 (Phoenix Strike, Venom) and I don’t know if I’m going to make it there without getting something going to make it through Diablo, heh.
The Tiger Strike - Cobra Strike - Dragon Tail synergy is real. Tiger Strike boosts the physical damage of your finisher way up. Cobra Strike steals a yuuuge percentage of the physical damage of your finisher as life & mana. Dragon Tail applies a percentage of the final calculated physical damage of your finisher as AOE fire damage.
Because of animations, this is generally best done claw/shield. You get all that sexy shield defense and don’t lose much offense. Plus kicks don’t get anything from shields. You certainly can go dual-claw and use Dragon Claw as your finisher for single targets, which can be very strong for sure. Just not a super-fast clearing build.
You do need a secondary to deal with physical immunes later if you go this route.
Claws of Thunder, on the other hand, does a bunch of both single-target and AOE lightning damage. Good times! The thing is the attack animation is exceptionally fast with dual claws, and exceptionally shitty with claw+shield. So realistically you have to dual-claw it or you’re leaving an assload of damage on the table. However, it’s more mana-hungry and doesn’t combo with Cobra Strike (you can still CS, of course, you just won’t be getting the TS boost on it) which is a pain in the ass at my gear level.
There’s a case to be made for TS-CS-DT with a side order of Fists of Fire for Hell difficulty (FoF has a hidden damage conversion of physical->fire in addition to its fire damage, so it’s an excellent tool for physical immunes if you invest in it).
Got an email from battle.net today saying that I can download my purchase any time now. I guess the charge went through before the site crashed. I’ll soon find out if I like it with the controller.
So as a noob paladin, around level 6, I am really liking this. Right now I just put things in the right mouse slot depending upon what I think I might need. Of course I know that will change eventually. That’s when I plug in the controller and act like an old man lost in an airport.
Controller is good, but just remember what I said above: in the original you could use the mousewheel to change through your F1-F8 skills, as to which one is on the right mouse button. I’m assuming they kept that in the remake too.
Great question! Turns out he was not, in fact, shit! As usual the Oblivion Knights were more of an issue than the big guy himself. (They are immune to Cloak of Silliness, but it still works on all the other guys so it’s not all that bad.)
Leveled to 26 in the final zone, but now we’re on to Act V and glory. Running the Bloody Foothills themselves gonna get me that XP, friends.
Now if someone would just take pity on my and drop an Amn rune so I can make some Strength claws, that’d be ideal.
I got all the way to Baal (where I died), but I never saw any Amn Runes. I think without Players 8, Normal difficulty is too early for Amn Rune isn’t it?
I’m used to having characters dying, so that part really doesn’t bother me anymore. What does bother me is not having a single character anymore who has access to a Horadric Cube so I can convert gems and such. Sheesh.
I really should make a throwaway expendable character who is not viable past normal difficulty, but whose purpose is just to be a holder and a horadric Cuber.
This weekend, I got both my Concentrate Barbarian (who doesn’t yet have concentrate) and Trap Assassin V to the Outer Cloister in Act 1. God, I can’t believe that in the Jail, they still haven’t fixed the door bug. But Blizzard North couldn’t fix that bug for however many years, so maybe it’s not surprising. Still, I always assumed that bug had to do with treating single player like multiplayer and having sync issues, where the game doesn’t realize whether a door should be open or closed between server and client. But D2R has something the original D2 didn’t have: Single player Only characters. And yet, it still happens.
All my single player characters in Diablo 2 could be played in multiplayer. There was an excuse for saying “single player is just like multiplayer but with one character”. Right? But D2R got rid of that option. No more multiplayer outside of Battlenet servers. So the offline characters can’t be played over a LAN or other multiplayer anymore.
Regardless of having taken away the generally godawful LAN/Open Bnet play, it’s not like they re-architected the whole game from its existing client/server model (and I would be absolutely blown away if local play is anything other than the “server” living on your own machine instead of someone else’s, from a software perspective).
In fact, they made all kinds of hay out of “it’s literally the same game engine.” Not sure why anyone would expect old minor bugs to be fixed, at least in D2R 1.0 – we can hold out hope that they’ll do some new dev if it’s successful enough, I suppose (they won’t).
What what what? What is this? I don’t know anything about Open Bnet, but the LAN play in Diablo 2 was incredible. We had one computer that my roommate was using whose network card was bad, so he couldn’t even surf the web back in 2000. But it was letting enough packets through that it was good enough for Diablo 2. We were all amazed when he finally found how broken his network card was. Diablo 2 worked mostly fine though, because they planned around missing packets and syncing up. Truly impressive.
I had not heard about this! It makes sense to have all the old bugs and idiosyncrasies in there then. But then that would mean they specifically changed it so that Deckard Cain doesn’t identify items that are inside your Horadric Cube? Forcing you to take them out before doing Identify Items?
