Tag: Diablo II Resurrected

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few days after talking about the Barbarian being a hot candidate for my next Diablo II Resurrected character I indeed started playing one. Or more precisely, I dusted one off that had been lying around at level 24, unused, for quite some time.

My initial plan for him, shortly after D2R’s release, was to use Frenzy as his main skill. However, I then decided that I wanted to level a buffbot-Barb on my second account first and use Frenzy as a means to get him through the game quickly. In doing so I had to realize that I don’t actually like the skill all that much.

First off, you basically have to clobber each single enemy one by one, and for my taste that’s never been a recipe for success in an ARPG. Sure, D2 doesn’t throw nearly as many mobs at you as, say, Path of Exile, but it’s still too damn many to deal with them more or less individually. A Frenzy Barb compensates for that with speed, but therein lies the second problem: he moves too damn fast for me to be able to control him properly. I’m not getting any younger, you know.

So after the buffbot-to-be had beaten Nightmare difficulty – and given me motion sickness in the process a couple of times, I kid you not – I immediately respecced him into his warcry-build and didn’t touch the other Barb again for almost two years.

I’ve always been a big fan of the game’s class-specific elite sets though, and since I now had a complete Immortal King set at my disposal – yet another “first” for me – it felt about time to give that Barbarian another shot.

The set’s centerpiece is a two-handed hammer, so using Frenzy or any other dual-wield skill doesn’t work with it, which suits me just fine. Some other skills, like Concentrate and Berserk, are purely single-target and thus out of the question for the aforementioned reasons.

Which leaves Whirlwind.

I’d never played a WW-Barb before, and to be honest, I didn’t expect much. But boy, have I missed out! I respecced into it at around level 40, and it’s so much fun!

The skill works like this: you point at a certain spot with your mouse; then, when you activate WW, your character starts spinning around in circles and attacking a couple of times per second, depending on weapon speed, while continuously moving towards the target spot at the character’s normal walking pace.

I didn’t think about it before, but what’s really remarkable about this is that you actually deal damage while moving. Usually you can either attack/cast or move in D2, but not both at the same time. It’s hard to describe how very different Whirlwind feels due to this, but it’s totally awesome. It’s especially great against weaker monsters – you don’t even slow down, you basically run them over and keep moving.

Now, technically speaking it’s also a single-target skill, as each individual attack hits only one enemy in range. You can get that speed up to about five attacks per second though, and coupled with a hard hitting weapon this shreds normal packs in a heartbeat. Even uniques and their minions don’t take very long to kill, and while it’s not the most efficient build to farm act bosses it can do even that pretty stress-free, albeit more slowly.

Speaking of stress-free, holy crap, dude is tanky!

His passive skills, which increase armor and resistances, combined with the massive HP and armor buffs from his warcries Battle Orders and Shout as well as a good amount of life leech make him a tough nut to crack indeed, even though he’s not wearing a shield. Aside from the Annihilus he also has no resistance charms whatsoever in his inventory, and they still all hit the maximum of 75% in Hell difficulty.

This is of course mainly due to the IK set itself giving a good deal of bonuses on that front. As it occupies a whopping seven of the ten available gear slots it kind of has to though, so it’s pretty well thought out in that regard. Also, all pieces except for the hammer sport pretty high armor values. Enhanced by the aforementioned buffs the total thus reaches a magnitude where it’s actually worth a damn, which is not something many D2 characters can achieve.

As I’m writing this he’s just spun his way through the first two acts on Hell difficulty, and I didn’t need to use a single potion of any kind! As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure his health never dipped below half, not even when surrounded by enemies while also being poisoned and/or cursed, which just…doesn’t happen! It’s a completely new experience to play the game like this.

The IK set brings two more features to the table that I really dig.

One, with the full array of set bonuses active the hammer deals all kinds of damage. Literally. There are six types of damage in the game, and it deals a good amount of each and every one, as seen above. Consequently he pretty much doesn’t care about immunities, another luxury not many characters have. Sure, he can’t leech off physical immunes, and those take a bit longer to kill too as that’s the only part of the hammer’s damage that gets increased further by his Whirlwind skill and Mace Mastery, but I feel that’s a small price to pay for not needing a sunder charm, a way to cast Necromancer curses and stuff like that.

The second “special feature” is that the gauntlets also get a bonus for wearing the full set which reads Freezes Target +2. I don’t know exactly how the game calculates this, but from experience I’d say that the corpses of normal monsters shatter at least 80% of the time now. Champions shatter less commonly and uniques only rarely or not at all, I’m not sure on that.

What this means in practice is that, for example, Fallen Shamans don’t keep resurrecting their foot soldiers all the time anymore, because there’s nothing left to resurrect. I’ve always found those to be quite annoying when playing melee characters, so I like this a lot. The downside is that the usual practice of Barbarians using the Find Item skill to loot corpses a second time doesn’t work with this set, and Necromancers won’t like grouping up with you either, but I can live with that.

In addition to all of the above playing a Barbarian also has some more universal perks, regardless of the gear and main skill you’re using.

Two of his passive skills increase run/walk speed and stamina, respectively, so he’s generally pretty fast (which also benefits Whirlwind move speed) and can sprint basically forever.

Furthermore, his skill Leap Attack is the only movement ability in the game aside from Teleport that can actually cross non-traversable terrain like rivers and sewers in Act 3 or lava in Act 4, which is obviously super practical.

Lastly, since his warcries are AoE effects his mercenary is tremendously tanky too. Unfortunately my mercs are chronically undergeared (and I’m usually too lazy to log in my buffbot just for that), so I’m used to them dying regularly, especially on my Sorceresses who actually use them to tank stuff. Well, this one just refuses to go down, which is another very welcome side effect of playing this big hunk of meat and muscles.

And there you have it, the IK Whirlwind Barbarian in Diablo II Resurrected. Highly recommended.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to dip back into Diablo II Resurrected after about a year-long break. I’d been without a game that managed to really grip and excite me for quite a few months, and I was definitely missing something. Since D2 has never failed me in that regard it seemed like the perfect time for another comeback.

Sure enough, it has delivered once again. Right now I play whenever I can, and think about playing when I can’t.

Of course it helps that they’ve really done an outstanding job with Resurrected, and still continue to improve it on a regular basis without messing up the basic formula.

For example, I’m still having a tremendously great time with my Frozen Orb / Hydra sorceress, which only exists because Hydra, along with a couple other hitherto underused skills, was reworked in patch 2.4 and is really good now.

The build is fun, and also relatively safe to play, because both skills can deal damage from quite a ways away. The hydras in particular can easily reach enemies off screen or behind corners, which makes fighting dangerous opponents like Nihlathak much less perilous.

I’ve also come to really dig Terror Zones. I mean, I liked the idea behind it right from the start, but didn’t actually enjoy them all that much in practice at first.

What bothered me was the game setting an arbitrary schedule for my gameplay. Zones in D2 aren’t created equal in terms of layout, enemy types and -density as well as various other factors, so I naturally prefer some over others for farming or levelling.

However, by now I’ve come to terms with the hourly rotation. Playing in different areas does make for a more varied experience after all, and whenever one of the few zones that really aren’t worth running come up I just do something else for a while, like playing an alt.

The main thing that’s won me over though is the loot. Within a matter of about two weeks I’ve found many awesome items scattered across various different terror zones, some of which so rare that they’d never dropped for me before, and I didn’t think it was ever going to happen either.

The Griffon’s Eye, for example, dropped in Nihlathak’s Temple, though not from the boss himself, but from a random monster on the way. That’s the magic of terror zones for you.

In addition to better loot the mobs also give lots of XP. A couple of years ago I talked about level 89 having been the highest any of my Diablo II characters had ever reached, and at that point Baal runs were pretty much the only thing that moved the bar at all anymore. Well, my current sorceress hit 90 a week ago and is now well on her way to 91.

I will say though that I still enjoy boss runs the most. Andariel, Mephisto, Baal and the Uber-key bosses retain their status as my favourite targets. But even those benefit greatly from the new(ish) system, because whenever their lairs are terrorized they seem to drop even better loot, and every monster I kill on the way has the chance to do the same and also gives noticeable amounts of XP to boot.

Speaking of bosses, the event I’m most happy about right now is getting my first ever Annihilus charm.

Interestingly, this item only exists because the game had a massive duping problem back in the day (duping being the illegal duplication of items by utilizing bugs or glitches). The most-duped item by far was the Stone of Jordan ring, and to get those out of the economy again Blizz devised a system where players realmwide needed to sell large amounts to NPC vendors in order to spawn Uber Diablo in every Hell difficulty game on that realm. Killing this pretty strong foe guaranteed a unique small charm to drop, the Annihilus.

As far as I know the rampant duping has long been a thing of the past, but they decided to keep the whole system in place. They may have reduced the number of SoJs that need to be sold, but other than that nothing’s changed.

Which means that we can still get our hands on this powerful charm, but it also means that every ring that’s ought to be sold has to be acquired the hard way. It’s not a common drop either. Personally, I’ve yet to find my first SoJ in Resurrected – and I’ll definitely keep the first one or two, should they eventually drop, as it’s quite a good item (it wasn’t duped that much just for the hell of it).

There are websites that try to keep track of every realm’s status – the approximate number of SoJs that have already been sold can be displayed ingame – but still, at the end of the day only the player(s) that sell the last batch know the exact point in time when Uber Diablo will spawn. If you don’t have a Hell difficulty game open at that exact moment you’ve missed the opportunity.

About a week ago my time had finally come. I was farming with my sorceress when the message “Diablo has invaded Sanctuary” appeared. My heart skipped a beat, and I may or may not have screamed out loud “Hell yeah, finally!!!”.

However, my second thought was, damn, I need my Paladin for this. The sorc might be able to kill the bugger too, but it would be a lot harder and probably cost me quite a few XP due to deaths. Fortunately I always use password-protected lobby games to play, specifically because I can join those with a character from my second account. Usually I use this to mule stuff around or to buff my main character with an Enchant sorceress (great for levelling up alts), but this time around I just logged her in to keep the game open safely and then switched my main account to the Paladin.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

So, yeah, for over 23 years now I keep coming back to D2, mainly because it’s just an overall awesome game that holds a special place in my heart, but also because it still has, after all this time, new experiences and huge endorphine rushes up its sleeve. At least for me.

Uber Tristram’s next. Great Evils, beware!

When Blizzard released Diablo II Resurrected almost exactly a year ago I assumed that they’d only do a couple rounds of bugfixes after that, if needed, and then leave the game as is for good.

This seemed likely to me because a) they’d made abundantly clear that they intended to give us the original, basically untouched gameplay experience of DII – a few minor QoL-improvements being the exception – just with a fresh coat of paint, and b) since they have no means to monetize the game beyond the initial box price (yet?) I just couldn’t imagine any ActiBlizz-exec greenlighting more work being done on the project than absolutely necessary.

Well, color me surprised, as the team has been working on the game continuously since then. Until a few days ago patches mostly contained fixes, more QoL improvements, the revival of the ladder system and a handful of new runewords.

The update we received just now however is one of the biggest game-changers the game has ever seen, probably only surpassed by the introduction of runewords and the implementation of skill synergies, which happened all the way back in June 2001 and October 2003, respectively.

The update’s main feature is the introduction of Terror Zones.

Until now no area in the game had a higher level than 85. That’s important because the level of a zone also determines the levels of the monsters in it. A higher monster level means more XP, and it also affects which items they can and cannot potentially drop. Since most players always want to get the most XP as well as the best items and zone levels never used to change this naturally led to the same areas being farmed over and over for many years. Also, as characters have a maximum level of 99 this also meant that getting there was a painfully slow process as monsters more than 5 levels below you give less XP, significantly so the bigger the gap becomes.

Enter Terror Zones. A whole range of areas throughout all of the game’s five acts can now become terrorized, always one main zone and the adjacent dungeon(s) – with some exceptions – for an hour at a time on a rotating schedule. The monster levels here will scale with the level of the character that created the game, like so:

Normal difficulty

• • Base: +2 levels up to level 45
  • Champion: +4 levels up to level 47
  • Unique: +5 levels up to level 48

Nightmare difficulty

• • Base: +2 levels up to level 71
  • Champion: +4 levels up to level 73
  • Unique: +5 levels up to level 74

Hell difficulty

• • Base: +2 levels up to level 96
  • Champion: +4 levels up to level 98
  • Unique: +5 levels up to level 99

As you need to have beaten Baal on the respective difficulty level for the terrorizing to even happen I’m not sure whether this will have a big effect – or any at all – on playing through Normal and Nightmare, but for levelling and farming on Hell this is obviously a huge deal. More XP, more gameplay variety and potentially more high-level item drops; what’s not to like?

Apparently not being content with having only one ground-breaking feature up their sleeves they’re also adding a new type of unique charm when ladder season 2 starts on October 6th: Sundering Charms.

For a very long time encountering and dealing with monsters that are immune to at least one type of damage has been a big part of playing the game on Hell difficulty. You pretty much had to choose between either playing a build that can dish out more than one damage type, or just accepting the fact that some areas are not meant for your character to farm in solo.

Now, there always were a few ways to break immunities, but those didn’t necessarily work for every class and/or in every situation and were mostly rather cumbersome to utilize as well.

From October 6th onward you’ll “just” need to get your hands on the appropriate sundering charm, put it in your inventoy and boom, no monster will ever be immune again if you deal that type of damage to it.

So why did I put “just” in quotation marks? Well, there’s a whole bunch of caveats to getting and using these things.

The biggest one for me personally is that they will only drop for ladder characters. I’ve never owned a ladder-only item in Diablo II and I probably never will, because, well, I simply don’t play on ladder. It’s not that I dislike levelling new characters, quite the contrary, but I absolutely don’t fancy having to start over from scratch without being able to make use of the stashed treasures I’ve spent so much time collecting. Having good items to deck out new characters with is actually one of the things I like the most about ARPGs.

Of course once a ladder season ends those items do become part of the non-ladder ecosystem, but as you can imagine the good and thus sought after ones tend to be outrageously expensive to trade for, and I’m fairly certain that these charms will be even costlier than most ladder items that came before.

The second obstacle is that they’ll exclusively drop in terror zones, and only from Champion monsters and upwards, meaning that they’ll probably be pretty rare even if you are playing ladder.

If you do manage to get one you’ll then have to somehow compensate for the hefty debuff to your character’s resistance against the very damage type the charms sunder, which they all have as part of their “bonuses”. You can’t kill the monsters if they kill you first, right?

Lastly, they require a character level of 75 to use and you also need to make room for them in your inventory, but after all of the above this should be barely an inconvenience.

Despite all these hurdles sundering charms totally are game-changers though, make no mistake – which is why it’s probably a good thing that they aren’t too easy to get.

Want to play a maxed out Blizzard Sorceress or fire Druid without having to dump skill points into anything else and still be able to farm any area in the game? Get the appropriate sundering charm and you can! Too poor to trade for the runes to build Infinity but still want to play lightning only? Equip The Crack of the Heavens and you’re good to go (what a hilarious name is that, anyway?)!

I won’t even try to count the builds that haven’t been viable to solo Hell difficulty or were at least severely restricted in where they could farm for the longest time now, but there are quite a few. With the help of a sundering charm many of these will become very viable all of a sudden, and who knows, maybe some of them will even turn out to be proper powerhouses.

So yeah, these are massive – and in my opinion pretty great – changes to a game that’s almost a quarter of a century old now. I kinda hate to say it, but…not bad, Blizzard. Not bad at all.