Diablo 2: Resurrected will test your resolve to boycott Blizzard

Stay a while and listen…

Classic! Thanks for the laugh.

No reason to play TQ when Grim Dawn is out there

+1


Actually, there is: I played Grim Dawn for over a hundred hours (might even be 200+) and I haven’t played Titan Quest yet. Sometimes you need something new (kind of).

😁👍.

I stand corrected. Have fun with Typhon. He’s like Duriel, but worse :)

The jump in difficulty in Hell is ridiculous. I managed to get some of my resists back up, but my Merc is just getting routinely destroyed. I’m considering just leaving him out of the equation until I can upgrade his gear substantially. He’s basically just using all my gold and rejuvenation potions at this point and not contributing a whole lot.

My goal was to get to the Tamoe Highlands / Outer Cloister so I could just farm The Pit since it’s one of the highest level areas of the game, but also not very difficult to clear.

Weapon - Spirit
Shield - Ancients’ Pledge
Helm - Lore
Armor - Que-Hegan’s Wisdom

My gloves, belt, boots, and jewelry are all mediocre, so hopefully I can get some good drops to improve upon them. My mercenary just needs better everything.

My palie is resist capped, with 2 of the resists being above the typical max, my merc is also just about resist capped with pretty amazing gear on, I still get owned in Hell difficulty. The game is just brutal on hell, especially if you run into the wrong combo of 3 traits mobs can have. I’m using a prayer merc with insight on (which doubles the amount of healing prayer does by the way), he’s got a duriels shell, and vamp gaze (big life leech helm), and still get’s dropped like he’s level 1 all the time.

I really love D2 in nightmare, to me it’s the perfect balance, you have to watch out for stuff, but you can actually get your character and merc to a solid defensive level. Once you get to hell, the game really loses me, I have never cared for ‘blink and your dead’ game mechanics, and Blizzard has always been really fond of that design.

How I remember the separation of difficulty

Normal____________________________________Nightmare

Nightmare_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Hell

Normal and Nightmare can be played through with some farming for items/runes and gaining levels.
Hell changes things and certain bonuses from items become mandatory:

  • damage resistance for most melee chars
  • increased max resistance to fire or lightning, depending on what you want to farm
  • a large health pool to decrease the rate of getting one-shot (you are unlikely to eliminate it). Usually this implies you must equip an item that lets you periodically cast Battle Orders
  • several items with + to all (relevant) skills levels (mostly for the dps)
  • max block/evade or very high armor along with max resists

It will take you thousands of hours to farm all of that alone, Hell is not balanced around single player.

I pretty much have all of that at this point. Like I said, all maxed resists, fire and lightning being over capped, every possible point into vitality, capped block with shield buff up. I’m certainly not at end game inventory filled with charms/torch etc, but my character should be a little tougher than it plays given what I do have going. A lot of it is just level vs mob level, I suppose I could go grind out levels doing nighmare ball runs or something, but I just lose the will for it at a certain point.

Eh, I just don’t like the transition to Hell, I think especially that first act or two shouldn’t be so jarring.

What build is it? What’s current damage? Do you have max block? Is your hp above 1k? I didn’t mean having resists over maximum, I meant having items that increase maximum resistance, ie. pushing it from 75% to 80%. Finally, you need to be at the very least lvl 70.

I got really lucking last night with my Barbarian who is doing Hell on Normal difficulty. An Amn rune dropped, and then a Dol rune dropped! So early in the game! Now I’m eyeing all these runewords wondering what I should make with this incredible bounty.

I started a bowazon last night, I couldn’t resist. It’s funny how sometimes our first experiences with a game completely color our perceptions for years and years. I spent most of my time playing not just Bow using Amazons in Diablo 2, but because it was hardcore, I spent most of that time playing the exact same build of Bowazon, trying to always build one centered around Cold Arrow. I initially tried multishot once and didn’t like how I ran out of mana constantly so I NEVER TRIED IT AGAIN in all those years. Same with Strafe.

Initially I did the same with Magic arrow, dismissing it, but then a friend of mine who hates Archers played an Amazon briefly and he was kicking ass by putting all his early points into Magic Arrow, and that’s when I discovered that when you put enough points in, you don’t use mana anymore, and those paltry editions to damage might not seem like much, but they get multiplied by various multipliers, and end up being a pretty nice default attack on the left click. So then the one bow amazon hardcore character I always kept trying was one with lots of points in the level 30 cold arrow skill, and 20 points into Magic arrow for left click, and then lots of points into various passive amazon skills. Eventually I discovered that incorporating a Valkyrie into that build was essential too, so that went in there too.

Anyway, TLDR: I spent all that time playing Bowazons and never really gave Multishot or Strafe a real try.

Until last night. I took my longbow with the 3 chipped emeralds that I usually give to my mercenary archer, and used that with multishot. Wow. I can poison stuff like using a shotgun, and everything dies! It’s so freakin’ satisfying.

And yes, the more points I put into Multishot, the more expensive it gets, so I don’t really have the mana for it, but I can use it sporadically and keep using mana potions as I come across them. It’s not bad.

The other factor is, the controller. My god, it’s so much better to just be firing the bow at enemies and seeing them die via button presses than trying to click all over the screen. Most of the time I don’t have the mana for multishot, but with the controller, I can almost fire fast enough around the screen as using Strafe. There’s no need to hunt enemies and click on the them. Just aim and fire fire fire fire fire. It’s so satisfying. This is a character transformed by the controller. So fun!

Bowazon is a fun one for me, too, doubly so with the controller. Magic Arrow is a nifty little secret weapon, because, as you mention, it can be developed into a mana-cheap default attack that provides extra hit prob %. I use a buffed fire arrow for AOE/shotgun attacks. I have points in exploding arrow when I need lots of distance AOE to chip away some health before engagement, but I don’t lean on it.

Since these are still my first few characters, I still don’t have good starting equipment with great resists. My Barbarian in Hell is sitting at 26% lightning resistance, for instance. His other resists are better, but nowhere near max, except for poison.

So I faced the dilemma last night: Look for good resists on equipment by gambling maybe? Or just say fuck it, and take on Diablo?

You can probably tell from how I phrased that choice that I went after Diablo. Luckily none of the Oblivion Knights cast Iron Maiden on me. Mostly just Weaken, which looks similar to Iron Maiden but is 1000x less dangerous.

The one curse that kept getting my mercenary killed is the one that looks like little fireworks going off above my head, it’s the one that lowers resists. Once the Oblivion Knights cast that one, they would then start doing huge damage with their elemental attacks. I had to revive my mercenary about 7 times.

Finally Diablo. Would I survive with such low lightning resistance? I’ve never survived in that battle with less than max lightning resist before with any of my previous Barbarians. But I had a secret technique this time! I was going to run away from his lightning instead of trying to face tank it.

So the fight starts. He does his fire thing and his cold thing. And then he does the lightning. I’m not used to dodging so I face-tank the first one. Ouch. I almost died. But I drank a couple of Full Rejuvs to prevent that. I would run out of full rejuvs pretty fast if I kept doing that. So on the next lightning, I tried dodging it, but it’s tricky to try to dodge all of it. I kept getting hit by some of it, which was usually enough to set off some panic. My merc died a few times and I revived him in town and bought some more healing potions.

I did get better at dodging the lightning streams the further I got into the battle, but I still got grazed by it sometimes, which really hurt. But I finally took him down. Phew.

TLDR: I don’t recommend fighting Diablo with a measly 26% lightning resist. Don’t do it.

Have been running 3 characters since the launch; a Hammerdin (my all time fave) and a Frenzy Barb and a Fire Druid. There’s a sort of synergy between the three and all are pretty simple to play. E.g. Barb is the only melee; Fire Druid doesn’t care about fastcast. So often if I find something ‘good’ but not right for the one I’m playing, I can make use of it with another character.

For a good while, only the Hammerdin had made it to Hell difficulty; the others were languishing. But then in quick succession I found both an Ali Baba (2 socket) and a Goldwrap. MF/GF time has come! With all other gear for Hammerdin being pretty crap I still am able to sport over 300% MF and GF and it’s made a huge difference. Now all three are sporting much better gear and I’ve got hordes of perfect jewels and millions in gold waiting to gamble and cube. Good times!

Held off on starting a necro. Just started one a day or so ago. So are they easy mode throughout the game or just early on?

Are you using bone, poison, or summon?

I only ever made the latter two, and the summoner was definitely the stronger of the two, but there’s a lot more to playing it properly. Between utilizing curses, corpse explosion, and of course maintaining your army, you’ll be plenty busy. But that’s what makes it so fun and interesting. It is one of the easiest to solo with, but it has its challenges later on in the game. It’s not the greatest boss-killer, for instance.

I highly recommend you stick with it though. It’s one of the best builds in the game, and probably the most enjoyable build I’ve ever done. There’s nothing like unleashing 20 minions on a room, and then using a string of corpse explosion to just decimate everything in sight.

Things are going a lot better for my BlizzBall sorceress. I’m in Act V Hell now at CLVL 80 and it’s been smooth sailing most of the way. Andariel, Duriel, Mephisto, and Diablo were all trivial to kill with SF + Blizzard. I’m talking less than 30 seconds.

I leveled up in the midst of a chaotic fight and accidentally clicked the skills button that popped up and put a point in Frozen Orb, which I thought was seriously annoying, but also funny. So I used my first respec to fix that, and I took the opportunity to take a few unneeded points out of Strength and decided to start upping my Dexterity to improve my blocking. I have about 850 HP, which is sufficient to get me through the endgame.

Act I was challenging in spots, but I farmed The Pit and the Countess for a while to level up which helped a lot.

Most of Act II was a cakewalk in comparison with the exception of the tomb areas. There are some seriously dangerous mobs in there on Hell; several of which are cold-immune. And of course it’s loaded with revivers, and getting to them with my Fire Ball and Merc without getting tore up was rough to say the least. I believe this is where my second (and hopefully last) death occurred.

Act III was fairly easy with the wide-open areas and low health mobs. I know the dungeons can be extremely dangerous so I took it slow and methodical in the Flayer Dungeon and Sewers, and I had to be pretty cautious with the Council. Thankfully most of them I just killed with Blizzard off screen, but I needed to kite the cold / fire immune dude into an empty area so my Merc could kill him. I did not complete the Lam Esen’s Tome quest, but I will eventually. Those little ruined temples are kind of a death trap on Hell. I stepped into the Ruined Fane and my Merc died within approximately 4 seconds, causing me to TP for my life.

Act IV was a breeze, which I figured it would be. Very few enemies here are cold-immune, so my Blizzard was able to lay waste to just about everything. I think Act V is going to be a different story since so many enemies are cold-immune.

Note - Telekinesis is underrated. I basically never used it before this run, but found you can more-or-less stun-lock enemies against a wall with it. This let’s my Merc take care of fire / cold immunes while I do more than just sit back and pump health potions into him.`

Summon so far.