I would say the only benefit, from both research and experience, to playing online vs. offline in D2R is being able to trade. I’d also say Baal runs but that would require playing with other people. Also, I don’t find Baal runs to be necessary now that we can respec our characters.
Back when I played D2 (which was a little later than Rock8man, mostly in the 1.10-1.13 era) online had Ladder characters, where the best loot was to be had. Now, everyone (offline and online) gets access to that same loot. I’ve read somewhere that even offline characters will have a chance at an Annihilus, the rarest of rare loot (I don’t understand how it works for offline, since the mechanism for spawning Uber Diablo, who drops the Anni, was intrinsically tied to IP addresses and whatnot). So my understanding, in regards to @Rock8man’s statement about loot disparity is that there is none, and if there is, it is only that single item.
In my mind, there are two pretty substantial benefits to playing offline/singleplayer: (1) There is zero lag offline (which may be substantial, depending on your internet connection) and (2) you can do the whole “/players” thing so that when you are ready to start farming for runes or magic items you can increase your drop rate without having to share or sneak around multiplayer games.
Thank you for the confirmation! It felt more generous with the loot, but I couldn’t be sure because it’s been so many years. Good to know we’re getting the more generous ladder drop rate. Believe me, back when we experienced the ladder drop rate in that beta, it was such a huge difference.
Being able to trade is the only benefit to an online character at this point, so if you have no intention of grouping, and want to play the game solo self found, offline is a much better choice.
Those ladder only runewords were quite a big deal, and it’s awesome they put them into offline mode.
Only with different characters. ie your characters “exist” either solely online or offline so you can’t play with the same character online and offline.
Single player characters are not realistically expected to ever complete high level runewords (you can easily play a thousand hours and never see a top 3 rune drop). Due to the randomness of drops, it’s generally more efficient to have multiple 75+ lvl characters(so you can actually use the rare items you eventually drop).
Lastly, playing hardcore will be restricted to only a few builds and reaching lvl 90 is hard and tedious(extreme caution at all times, which translates to low exp per hour). Trading is pretty much mandatory if you want to have fun on hardcore.
Damn. I screwed up. Obviously I respecced my paladin at some time in the dim and foggy past. I’m actually in the market for a respec cheat. Please don’t yell at me. :(
I’m still hoping that they’ll add the /players command to the console versions at some point. I’m fairly confident that I can finish the game on normal difficulty without it, but it makes it such a slog. For example, I wanted to get to level 24 before handling Duriel with some of these characters so that I could unlock that tier of abilities, but man, it’s such a slog to level to 24 before Duriel. With my Barbarian I had to do the various false Tombs of Tal Rasha multiple times just to get close to 24, and finally I was out of patience and did the real tomb, thinking I might get to 24 during that tomb, but I never did.
This is going to be especially vexing when trying to level an Amazon to get Valkyrie, or other abilities like that. What will likely happen is that I’ll just not have the patience to wait, and I’ll die, and start a new character. But in the meanwhile, I hope Blizzard releases a console patch that adds a players setting so that those future hardcore characters will then be able to survive and go into battle at higher levels against these harder bosses.
My new favorite thing to do when I don’t have any particular objective is to quickly go back to the Tower in Act 1 and kill the Countess and get some Runes. It seems she always drops at least one Rune. This is awesome! Since all the 1.10 rune upgrade formulas work for everyone now, doesn’t this mean that theoretically if I earn enough low level runes, I could upgrade runes all the way to the top? It would be amazing to finally get my hands on really high level runes. I’ve daydreamed about those many times over the years while reading Arreat Summit.
It sure does! Of course it’s completely unfeasible. If you started at the bottom and only got El rune drops you would need about 14 trillion to get to a single Zod, plus hundreds of thousands of gems. You’re far more likely to just have one randomly drop from a high level monster.
Standard leveling for me is cold plains waypoint until 6, and then countess runs till 14+. Countess runs are great, not only for runes, but there are always at least one champ/elite pack per floor, so it’s the best spot to farm exp as well.
Finished Nightmare with my BlizzBall Sorceress. Thankfully a couple minutes before getting to the Ancients I got a 4-socket crystal sword drop which let me finally make the Spirit runeword. That gave me a pretty big bump in damage. Right after that the Soulfeast Tine unique dropped which gave my Merc a boost in damage and a big boost in survivability because of its life leach stat.
Apart from Duriel, Nightmare was easier than Normal for my build. I was able to kill almost all of Baal’s summons with Blizzard without them hardly even being on screen, and Baal himself was a pushover.
Still only the one death, but now the real challenge begins. All of my resists are currently in the negative in Hell, and now the cold immunes are going to be all over the place, nullifying my most powerful skill. At this point I’m putting everything into Fire Ball, and then Fire Bolt after that, so hopefully I can get my fire up to a level where I don’t have to worry about cold immunes.
The Fire / Cold immunes though? Here’s hoping my Mercenary can keep up…
Reading all this stuff makes me want to buy it. But I’m not going to: sticking to Titan Quest and Far Cry 6 (co-op) for a while, and I still have to play The Last of Us 2 (which I bought two months ago already). So no, not doing it. NO!
