My old boss would do that to me all the time! Then later on we would do the same in Ultima Online. He was a pretty cool boss actually.
Yup! He was a scary fellow back in the day but I trounced him this time around. Probably because I dumped all of my stat points into DEX which determines To Hit chance and then just went toe-to-toe and drank lots of pots till he was dead. Frankly, I had a much harder time with the Skeleton King until I decided to use Holy Bolt instead of relying 100% on melee. Took me at least 3 or 4 runs till I finally remembered my magic spells…
Anyway, I’m totally addicted to Diablo all over again and have played every night since it hit GOG. I’m down to dungeon level 8 now and things are getting dicey for my warrior what with other fast-hitters (Goat clans!) and lightning bats!
You guys are making me kind of want to buy this, even though I am pretty sure I still have the disc around somewhere. Though I don’t think I’ve played it since the late 90s.
I bought Diablo despite owning the original boxed disk version. I figured there would be technical issues getting a 20-year-old game up and running on Windows. It’s worth $10 to me.
Considering a lot of laptops and computers now opt out of having a physical disc drive, having a newer device with that has it and could run it smoothly would be really hard.
Still a great game. Been playing this and the original Master of Orion a lot recently. Fast gameplay that you can bite off in small chunks but still make progress.
Down to dungeon level 9, the Catacombs, with my sword+shield warrior and finally encountering worthy opponents in “phasing” Mud Men and Spitting Terrors (hate these guys!)
The Mud men are essentially invisible until they get close enough to smell and they tend to roam in packs and can surround an unwary warrior and beat him down quickly with their fast attacks, keeping the victim in a “stun-lock” so they cannot run away or fight back. Therefore, the wise warrior will never stand toe-to-toe with Mud men but rather “stick and move” and try to cut off and isolate a single target from the group and whack at it, while on the go, until the Mud man is dead and repeating the process until all foes have been vanquished in this manner.
Acid and poison Spitting Terrors in large packs can melt the flesh off a warrior in mere seconds! They can spit over long distance and fire rapidly which spells certain doom for the foolhardy warrior that tries to close and engage this group in melee combat. If this fact alone doesn’t deter an over-confident warrior then perhaps the acid pooling on the ground, that remain caustic for a short time, will make her think twice of charging a pack of Spitting Terrors!
Experienced fighters, will therefore, employ guerrilla tactics by luring the more ambitious Spitting Terrors away from the main pack to a nearby corner or doorway where the vile critter can be ambushed and cut down quickly and without the ranged support of its fiendish friends. The trick is to stay out of view until the last moment and leap out and attack the Spitter before it realizes its fatal error! This strategy takes time and is tiresome but the patient warrior shall prevail and may be rewarded with phat l00t!
The occasional Lighting Bolt or Fire Wall to reduce the larger groups certainly can help achieve victory but true warriors have little magic skill and scoff at such cowardly tactics as a general rule!
Man, door and corner luring is such a key roguelike skill. Far cry from “jack your movespeed up as fast as humanly possible, beeline to objectives while delete an entire screens of enemies at a time,” heh.
You have excellent taste, sir!
Yep. Still have MoM and MoO2 on my system.
I thought about it for a bit and maybe this is why at least some of the more modern ARPGs just do not appeal to me these days. At first I thought maybe I had just grown out of the genre and changed, but perhaps it was instead the genre that evolved and in not changing with it we grew apart.
So where was my Warrior when we last left him?
Ah yes, unable to defeat The Butcher because of getting locked into an endless cycle of blocking and not blocking his hits. So I jumped back in last night and went to Level 3. After clearing most of level 3, I’d been finding a few magic items that I didn’t need. This meant I was able to sell it and get gold. And Griswold happened to be selling a two-handed axe that did 6-16 damage, as well as having the special property that it knocked enemies back. Woah!
I figured that was exactly what I needed against The Butcher, so I bought it and went back down to the dungeon. I went up to level 2 and opened the door. The Butcher approached, I hit him with the axe, which knocked him back. He approached again. I hit him with the axe which knocked him back. He approached again. I hit him and knocked him back. Woohoo, I took him down pretty quickly like this.
His Cleaver actually did even more damage than this Axe that I’d bought that knocked enemies back, so I switched to it as I went back to Level 3. I went down to King Leoric’s throne room and I have to admit, when I went one on one with him, and I used all the health potions on my belt except one, I was getting a tad bit worried that he’d get me before I got him. But no, he went down to the Butcher’s Cleaver.
So now I’m on Level 4 and feeling a little bit unstoppable as long as I don’t get surrounded. I did die a couple of times when I got surrounded because if things can attack you from multiple sides, you get into a constant cycle of interruptions, and die pretty quickly. So yeah, the Rogue looked like the strongest character early on, but the Warrior has climbed back up the ranks to the top again.
I think we all know how this game of Linear Warriors and Quadratic Wizards ends though, haha. Great to hear that your Warrior is back to making progress downwards again, long may it last.
How have I never heard this before, that’s great.
I came across it in the RPG world, where it’s been an issue basically as long as there have been pen-and-paper RPGs. That classic OD&D/AD&D feel of being a Magic User/Wizard with 2HP while the fighter’s strutting around with 6, king of the world. Until, you know, a leveling curve later, you’re reshaping reality to your whims, and he, uh, hits stuff slightly easier.
Oh yeah I’m well aware of the concept, that’s just a great and pithy way to describe it.
IIRC, my friends and I never got far with warriors because:
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They could not run. Ranged mobs would just walk away from you at the same speed while others shot you.
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Your repair bills were outrageous. All your gold mostly went to repairs and health potions. Getting “of the ages” armor (didn’t need repair) was a god-send for warriors.
Update: All 3 of my characters are now on Level 5 (Catacombs?). The Warrior is the only one to have beaten the Butcher and Leoric (or was it Lazarus?) the Skeleton King. I did try to go back as the Wizard to beat The Butcher, since I had a staff of Fire Wall and I was feeling cocky.
Nope. Not even close. The Butcher comes in and walks all over the fire walls I set for him and kills me. I guess Fire Wall only works if I can somehow keep him in it, but away from me at the same time. I guess eventually I’ll find something down there that will help me beat him.
I haven’t really tried the Butcher again as a Rogue, but man, the game is so easy as a Rogue in comparison with the other two characters. I also have the most money. The Warrior and Wizard spend most of their winnings on repairs/recharging and potions. Especially the Wizard. The Recharging staff skill is interesting, as is the Warrior’s repair skill. You can save some money, but every time you use them, your maximum charges/durability go down. So if I keep using those skills, eventually the item becomes unusable. For a staff, that happens pretty fast. If you’re going to recharge your staff using that skill, you’d better be confident that you have another staff ready to go once that one is useless.
At least with the warrior, even if you get down on Durability, as long as you don’t get hit too much you can avoid stuff breaking. But with the Wizard, if your staff can only fire charged bolt 9 times before it runs out, it’s pretty f—ing useless.
Meanwhile, the Rogue has a useless disable trap skill. And the Rogue does need to constantly repair her bow, because using your bow as a machine gun basically makes its durability go down fairly quickly, but still, every run to town you can repair your bow and not worry about it too much. The Rogue also almost never needs to use potions, so I’m constantly selling potions all the time, which is an interesting contrast to the other two who are always buying more potions on their town runs.
I am making Decard Cain very rich.
Here’s a puzzle. There’s a room in Level 5 where you open a door to a relatively small room with only one door. The Warrior opens the door. There’s skeleton archers lined up so that 3 or 4 of them can shoot at the door. If you step inside to try to take them fast, you see that there are more seletons all along the left wall and the right wall. There’s also a bookshelf here. Ooooooh! My precious book shelf! I must have it!
But wait, how the heck to survive? If you approach any one of the skeletons around the room, you can maybe kill one before they kill you. I wonder if the only way is to just go in with all 8 full health potions in my belt and drink them all as I kill enough skeletons? It seemed like I was dying too fast even for that.
Of course, I am a Warrior. What the heck am I going to find in a bookshelf that’s all that useful anyway? This is a trap for Wizards, and ironically, not a very good trap for Wizards. But it’s a great trap for Warriors.
I’ll just have to let this room be.