Diablo 2: Resurrected remaster

[Average Manatee]

Use one of your respecs and max CE/skeleton summoning/skeleton mastery. You must have wasted skill points somewhere because you should not be getting to hell without maxed CE. If you are raising skeleton mages then stop, they are awful and even maxed they will more likely lower your DPS by blocking your melee skeletons.

CE may as well be the best PvM skill in the game because it deals damage based on enemy life like static field and crushing blow do, and unlike static field it doesn't stop at 50% health in hell difficulty, letting you kill stuff without swapping to other skills. Classic team even buffed it a while ago like it wasn't powerful enough. Max it and use it.

It's also 50% fire 50% physical. Physical is amazing because almost nothing is immune and you apply -100% phys resist through amplify damage which can break phys immune and still allow you to do minor damage to them (wtfbbqing normal enemies by making their phys resist way negative). It's also quite rare to find monsters both phys and fire immune.

 

[ArchAngel]

Doesn't maxing CE only give more radius and only a bit?

 

[Thal]

Doesn't maxing CE only give more radius and only a bit?

It triples the range. Also, this is a good site for planning characters: https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/

 

[Average Manatee]

Doesn't maxing CE only give more radius and only a bit?

Area increases with the square of radius and the damage already scales based on enemy HP to always be useful, so yes its great. 1->20 goes from hitting only adjacent enemies to half the screen (2.6->9). You'll probably end up around 10-11 radius with some +skills which is already basically hitting the cardinal edges of the viewing screen.

Also good to use attract to gather monsters into groups for the nuke.

There's also the fact that there's literally nowhere else good to place points. As I mentioned skeleton mages actually sabotage you more than they help you (block your much better melee skeletons pathing, 50% of the time your mages either are shooting something immune to their damage or are using pointless poison damage, 50% of the time they are shooting a wall, they die easily, cold mages shatter corpses so you can't use them for CE). Golems are also pretty pointless (Unless you are rich you don't use Iron, and of the rest only clay has worthwhile properties but they don't scale well past around 5-8). Raising any curse past 5 is mostly just convenience and you can get that with some +skills. The best point dump after CE is probably summon resist and the diminishing returns are awful there. Unless you want to be a super safe HC character spamming super range curses on of-screen enemies so they can never target you. Maxed Dim Vision radius with +skills can get to 18 yards which is fucking hilarious since it basically disables the AI from recognizing anything not adjacent.

 

[Peachcurl]

yeah, lol, minion army getting in the way of things is a real issue... *relives his maggot lair minion fuck-up trauma*

 

[Shadenuat]

Sadly it's all lost nowadays due to shops selling staves with telecharges.

 

[DDZ]

Don't see how that's worse than Enigma.

 

[Shadenuat]

You don't see how ability to skip any content and challenge in the game starting possible act 2 (or act 3) normal is worse than high level expensive top gear?

Even SSF HC becomes somewhat of a joke with this.

As for runewords, my tolerance for them finally ended completely even in 1.09 pre-new ones. I finally decided to play Sorc a bit (me like Fire Wall since D1, although Meteor of course also is lovely), looked at Stealth, looked at low level sets/uniques, and just sold it and decided to wear some set items instead (hey, Cathan gives MF too). Decided that I will only use Runes on Hell diff.

A lot of cool and (somewhat) balanced set-combos. Like Vidala amy+boots, Arctic gloves+belt, Tancred Helm+Amy. Also Complete Hzarus. Isn't that a just a supa kawai set? Antifreeze too, so low level, wow.
Hey, that's how I got Gull by just playing game in Act 1 Normal.

Too bad Berserker is not one of the good ones. But you can wear Helmet+Armor for resist/ar/def + 2 any other cool weapons. Especially since 1.09 has a fantastic bug where 1 point in any Barb mastery gives 100% chance of Critical Strike. SwordMaceAxe Barb

You kno when you look at some pre-op words gear, like
https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Baranar's_Star
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Azurewrath_(Diablo_II)
and I mean, where does one even go from here? There's already 200 ed 200 ar 50 as ~300 elemental damage mace and like, up to 1000 dmg swords and like, Windforce and Ocu and ability to cap your physical resists and... half of that shit doesn't even make any sense, why would there be weapons doing 3 kinds of elemental damage or combining crushing+open+deadly?
but go further they did!

Hey, got Sanders boots & wand from Duriel. Thought game broke since he only supposed to drop tp scrolls

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Gotta love how Azurewrath began life as a really underwhelming low level sword, then it got massively overhauled and made into a high level Ladder item... in 1.10 when people started to see runeword weapons were the hot shit and could be obtained without being in the mid 80s.

And even still, I'd rather use Lightsabre.

 

[Shadenuat]

To be fair pre 1.10 people were mostly going around games scammingbegging newbies to give them all chipped gems to roll their own crafted versions of da best sword.

tbh I need to do something with mine since after rolling all 7 classes into low-mid levels and some close to hell I have like, 7 pages of PlugY stacked with chipped gems and low level runes god. I thought about trying to make a weapon for Act 5 mercenary with them.

 

[Average Manatee]

This is why I never play online Diablo clone games. Any sort of trading or input from other players tends to ruin everything. Also hate lag.

 

[jackofshadows]

Good thing then Diablo 2 hasn't been designed with trading in mind, right?

 

[Average Manatee]

Good thing then Diablo 2 hasn't been designed with trading in mind, right?

Considering how easy it is to dominate the game with easily obtained runewords, I'd say this is correct.

Paladin can even do ubers pretty easily and shared stash in single player makes amassing some rare uniques and higher tier runes possible for a player who is doing multiple playthrough with different classes.

The only thing you can't really do is specific builds that require specific super rare runewords/uniques/charms to make bad skills useable. RIP poison dagger necros. Sad, I know. All the other normal builds just have to deal with slightly slower kill speeds and probably not having Enigma.

 

[mogwaimon]

so i finally caved and bought this the other day because I've never played Diablo 2 before and I figured, what the hell, fellow Codexers are into the remaster so maybe it's not so bad. Tried to play it, couldn't enter the game because Blizzard servers shat the bed and thus I couldn't even use my freshly purchased game. Woulda just bought it on a console except they apparently have online checks on console as well so you can't play fully offline there and that's the only reason to even get Diablo on console as opposed to PC. So instead of playing D2 I ended up installing Diablo + Hellfire with DevilutionX because, while I DID play Diablo for a bit as a kid with a friend, we never got super deep into it so I figured I'd try it out since a billion dollar dev can't manage to maintain their servers for a 20 year old game.

long story short I got hooked and ended up playing through to the end after experimenting with each of the 3 classes, ended up going rogue with my final character. Was pretty challenging but fair right up to Diablo. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, this Hellfire expansion which apparently wasn't even official anyways makes him super buff so he basically kills you in two or three hits from a spell that he can spam on your location as long as he has line of sight and if he gets in melee distance it's even worse AND he stunlocks you AND he can't get stunned AND he's got a massive HP pool. So I uninstalled that shit and went back after migrating my save from Hellfire back to vanilla...and now Diablo was so easy you can just stunlock him into oblivion. Like night and day, I guess mods probably fix it somehow.

I can log into D2 finally and the 3D graphics are okay and all (minus the manazon) but now I kinda feel like I shoulda just pirated the original and called it a day. Ah well 10/10 would recommend Diablo 1 but I'm gonna say maybe don't buy the remaster of D2 unless you like being told when you can play the game you legally purchased. I've been trying to go legit the past while but I end up having a worse experience with things I buy legitimately than I do with pirated stuff.

tl;dr play the originals instead

 

[Fenix]

combats.ru

Yep, played even. Crazy people...

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Good thing then Diablo 2 hasn't been designed with trading in mind, right?

It kind of is, but the big dick stuff isn't needed to beat Hell and if you really want to kill the Ubers it's better to just make something like a Smite Paladin since they dominate. People talking like you need Enigma to even breathe is a sign of someone that doesn't know shit and probably end up getting killed with Enigma on anyways.

Trading just makes getting to what you need easier, especially for really niche builds out there. I'm also certain that trading in D2R would probably be infested with turbo autism by people who spent two weeks reading all these dumb guides on whatever class and now just ask for retarded offers like Jahs and Bers for an item that would normally have costed another decent unique or a mid rune or two.

I only tried the D2JSP thing once and thought it was the most stunningly gay thing I've ever been apart of and I used to raid on MMORPGs with couples that would love to let it be known they were couples every waking second. Maybe it changed now but you had to go find a topic with an item you'd want, you'd type something that to a normal person looks like coded language to commit a murder on the mob boss, you'd meet in-game and then comes the fun part... the trade of your forum gold for their item.

Well here comes the good ol Mexican Standoff! You're some nobody, he's some nobody, you don't trust him, he doesn't trust you. He could jack your FORUM GOLD and run off, you could jack his Dracul's Grasp and slap him in the mouth with the glove and laugh. So what do you do? You call in a TRADING MEDIATOR. I shit you not, there's a little button that says "request mediator" and then you have to both wait in that game for who knows how long until it's responded to and a mediator finally blesses your presence. Now you got this asshole here talking like an ATM machine gone rogue and confirming you both did the trade honorably. If you did, you both go on your merry way. If you didn't, you got OUTLAWED from the site.

Which was pointless because 1) you could just make a new account on D2JSP the next hour, sell a Shako or something because you ran a bot all day when at school and 2) you could make a new BNet account and just transfer the item to a mule so they'd never know who you really were.

Because I'm not convinced I've convinced you just how fucking DUMB this process was, let me link you an example.

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=85939746&f=268

This is the guide. This is how people on that site communicate in those screenshots. I'm not joking you. These people are sick in the head. I can't believe I did this even once. I would feel less shame putting on my girlfriend's skinny jeans by accident and not noticing than admitting I use D2JSP.

AND YOU CAN'T EVEN CASH THIS FORUM GOLD SHIT OUT. All this botting for a fucking Mickey Mouse Monopoly board currency.

I'm pissed now, Jack.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

By the way here's another topic that shows what I'm saying.

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=87241749&f=268

Look at this goofy shit. It's a goddamn auction for IMMORTAL KING armor. Jesus Christ what has happened.

You know what really pisses me off more than anything? When people do things I don't like. Know what I mean?

 

[Anthedon]

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=87241749&f=268

You know what really pisses me off more than anything? When people do things I don't like. Know what I mean?

You are in luck, that's the reason the Codex exists.

 

[jackofshadows]

https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=87241749&f=268

Look at this goofy shit. It's a goddamn auction for IMMORTAL KING armor. Jesus Christ what has happened.

You know what really pisses me off more than anything? When people do things I don't like. Know what I mean?

I think auction is another layer of fun, so not really. It should be in-game though

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Jack...

I, I can't right now. I can't. I'm going to throw up from anger.

 

[Shadenuat]

1.09 uniques, pointless and merciless

early bird gets da worm:

Spoiler

...hell I even do with that thing, it has no elemental damage, and having just 1 type is not enough in no-break immuns meta.

Anyway, you know you're for some fun when Rakanishu or Countess spawn physically immune half of the time (actually it's about 25% of the time or less but it feels like always).
Andy died very easily tho, so it's all about getting wolf to Meph through Act 2 somehow.

it made me think tho:
who, when, how, why decided that in an ARPG, where you often can't even see enemy stats behind minions, is it ok to have lolrandom monsters with OHK effects? I understand some (cough poe cough) designers explain that as "well, we have NO IDEA how to give players any challenge in any other way... because we kinda made players in our game overpowered with our own design decisions".
Remember how slow and deliberate deaths were in older games? Generally to die in Diablo 1 you had to be stunlocked somehow, surrounded. Famous Butcher wouldn't really OHK you.
U liek Melee kid?

Monsters with complicated abilities and immuns are fine in party based games, where you have multiple units or even play tb or can pause. But this design looks actually alien in an ARPG, when you think about it. At least in how its realised usually.

For all their greatness in other places, some genres, design wise, are really a strange colaboration of mistakes, and more mistakes, all the way down.
Which is fine for old games. Mistakes = growth. But there is no reason for every other game to follow into same tunnel vision as if their devs are lemmings.

 

[Average Manatee]

who, when, how, why decided that in an ARPG, where you often can't even see enemy stats behind minions, is it ok to have lolrandom monsters with OHK effects? I understand some (cough poe cough) designers explain that as "well, we have NO IDEA how to give players any challenge in any other way... because we kinda made players in our game overpowered with our own design decisions".
Remember how slow and deliberate deaths were in older games? Generally to die in Diablo 1 you had to be stunlocked somehow, surrounded. Famous Butcher wouldn't really OHK you.U liek Melee kid?

It's a consequence of running existing in Diablo 2. With the player character being faster than 99% of enemies without speed buffs (and players very commonly getting 50%+ faster run/walk buffs), the only want to challenge them is OHKO. Player defense doesn't matter, it goes to zero if you are running but players don't care because they are fast enough that running is better than defending. Even resistances are mostly only there for when the game looks like a bullet hell shooter because certain enemies or lightning enchanted fill the whole screen with elemental effects.

 

[Perkel]

Good thing then Diablo 2 hasn't been designed with trading in mind, right?

I finished D2 hell on players 8 with amazon and was regularly doing bhall runs alone.

 

[Zeriel]

so i finally caved and bought this the other day because I've never played Diablo 2 before and I figured, what the hell, fellow Codexers are into the remaster so maybe it's not so bad. Tried to play it, couldn't enter the game because Blizzard servers shat the bed and thus I couldn't even use my freshly purchased game. Woulda just bought it on a console except they apparently have online checks on console as well so you can't play fully offline there and that's the only reason to even get Diablo on console as opposed to PC. So instead of playing D2 I ended up installing Diablo + Hellfire with DevilutionX because, while I DID play Diablo for a bit as a kid with a friend, we never got super deep into it so I figured I'd try it out since a billion dollar dev can't manage to maintain their servers for a 20 year old game.

long story short I got hooked and ended up playing through to the end after experimenting with each of the 3 classes, ended up going rogue with my final character. Was pretty challenging but fair right up to Diablo. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, this Hellfire expansion which apparently wasn't even official anyways makes him super buff so he basically kills you in two or three hits from a spell that he can spam on your location as long as he has line of sight and if he gets in melee distance it's even worse AND he stunlocks you AND he can't get stunned AND he's got a massive HP pool. So I uninstalled that shit and went back after migrating my save from Hellfire back to vanilla...and now Diablo was so easy you can just stunlock him into oblivion. Like night and day, I guess mods probably fix it somehow.

I can log into D2 finally and the 3D graphics are okay and all (minus the manazon) but now I kinda feel like I shoulda just pirated the original and called it a day. Ah well 10/10 would recommend Diablo 1 but I'm gonna say maybe don't buy the remaster of D2 unless you like being told when you can play the game you legally purchased. I've been trying to go legit the past while but I end up having a worse experience with things I buy legitimately than I do with pirated stuff.

tl;dr play the originals instead

IMO original is still better. The gameplay makes more sense, and ironically, some spell effects still look better than the new graphics. Some will think I'm exaggerating here but no it really is the case, sprites era spell effects still haven't been matched, neither here nor in Infinity Engine games. Even though they made the legacy mode extra shitty and its much worse than legitimate copy of Diablo 2, you can see with the legacy mode switch how bad some spell effects are. Compare Resurrected lightning graphics to legacy mode lightning bolt, it's depressing.

That's not even touching on the censorship and overwhelming SJW aspects, the pure gameplay & graphical side of it still argues for playing D2 on the original copy, maybe with the glide wrapper.

 

[Hellion]