you would approach pack of blues with 1 rare with caution.
Depends on the rare. If it was a reflect rare or it had those retarded aura combos like "haste aura" and "allies cannot die" on some dude with stupidly good defenses and you would get mobbed in short order. Most rares you didn't care about but there
were rares that could spawn with devastating modifier combinations that would just murder you if you weren't careful.
Would also have 2 separate skills, one for aoe and one for single target dmg.
Nah, even back on launch you had people whose idea of a good skill was GMP Freezing Pulse/Fireball and they would just shotgun bosses with it because you could do that back then (but only with spells, not ranged attacks) or dualwield elemental cleave (back when Cleave only reduced
physical damage to 60% when dualwielding) with increased AoE passives and shit and Concentrated Effect. You also had Shockwave Totem builds iirc where people stacked massive amounts of flat damage on the totems (back when everything had 100% scaling) and just tried to summon as many of them as possible. But packs were indeed much smaller back then. Nowadays it's "aoe or bust" but back then you
could progress through the entire game with single-target skills. I remember doing a weapon elemental damage flicker strike build which cleared fast (Flicker Strike CD did not exist back then) and killed bosses before they could do anything.
One of the more popular AoE clear skills back then was GMP Lightning Arrow with 100% pierce chance for the ridiculous multihits. In fact in Hardcore you just focused defenses (usually ES stacking with CI, but alternatively stacking tons of health) and used things like the 5L GMP piercing Lightning Arrow to clear packs on its own without even caring about how much damage you had on your passive tree.
You also had necromancers who just worked out that all you just needed to boost was the gem level, throw a source of flat damage (ie. Added Lightning Damage) on top, and stack massive amounts of auras to kill shit. Aura builds were also sometimes called disco builds because most auras reserved flat mana instead of percentages so you could stack a lot of them with a big enough mana pool (which was really fucking easy if you were Eldritch Battery build, because back then it straight converted energy shield into mana instead of creating some kind of ES shield on top of your mana) and they had more visual effects back then.
What did happen at launch was that people weren't doing hyper-optimized clear-speed builds, in part because MF stacking was a thing back then and maps with limited portals didn't exist back then so people were busy analyzing the appeal of item quantity mods on their everything and Increased Item Quantity support gems. And also because, if you were in hardcore, stacking EHP (Effective Hit Points, ie. how much damage you can take before dying) high enough to avoid dying was a thing. Later on one-shot patterns became the standard.
Also 6Ls were some expensive, rare shit so you generally built around the assumption of only getting a 5L, until Tabula Rasa and Masters came out anyway.
Potions were never a thing though
Potions were a thing but you usually went for buff potions even then. CI builds usually went for Persistent Granite Flasks of Iron Skin in HC. You got massive amounts of armor off of that back then. People also used Diamond Flasks a lot back then, because they just turned all your abilities into guaranteed crits for something like 2 seconds and 80 flask charges (1 use only). So Persistent 20% diamond flasks were popular.
I member when people used to form parties and combat in general didnt look like dragon ball
You never saw the guys who did 100% piercing spark spam builds before Fork was ever introduced into the game. They just flooded entire rooms in bouncing sparks. Those builds were pretty rare though. And when Fork came out Spork builds became absurdly popular (even though 100% piercing spark was still superior).