How the fuck do people complete HELL diff in this game...

Have fun with that.

Don't listen to him, there is another secret to the game:
us.battle.net/forums/en/d3/topic/6572267487

It really does depend on which patch you're playing on. Also if it gets too slow you can always mod

Anyway. Anyone want to play some median xl sc/hc? Not sure if we can do hc, but who cares.

The drops rates were designed with online play in mind.

THIS

Learn to use your support skills (shouts are invaluable), Horadric Cube transmutations and runewords to get good items. Also learn about making good use of your mercenary and his/her skills/auras.

git gud

>tfw OP inspired me to do a solo barb run

Gud? You want gud?

Play nothing but hardcore.

tsw.median-xl.com/join
Here is all the shit that you need. I can post magnet for diablo if you need. Also use d2se for all d2 version needs. Anyone joining me?

pic related

I'm not manly enough to do it user, I'm sorry

Reminder that diablo 2 skill system was retarded.

Every few months my buds and I will do a hardcore run of D2.

Usually someone dies at Diablo, and then we start over a few months later. Furthest we ever got was Hell, but then someone dies and we start over.

Lets do hc median xl run, fags.

Some D2 skills were dependent on the skill points invested rather than being based on gear. A group of 8 german players use this fact & completed a no-equipment (except for 4 rejuv potion) run through HELL in HARDCORE mode.
Party composition was barb, necro (no skellies allowed), ass, druid, 2 sorcs & 2 pals. No Amazons as her skill trees were too dependent on bows/spears.

Big fucking whoop. You can do uber with no equip(except white belt for pots) on hc in 2 days with full party.

I started a solo Barbarian run just to prove how fucking wrong you are, you bitch nigger

also thanks for making me play this game again

But I heard they made Werebear Druid and Summoner Necro actually viable and fun to use.

It introduced Synergies, that changed the way builds were done and limited them a lot while opening some new ones.

Summoner Necroes are one of the most fun (and easy) builds in the game. I haven't tried werebears yet, as I don't realy like slow melee characters (and melee characters in general)

Diablo II drops depend on both your level and the level of the enemies you kill. The best way to get appropriate drops for Hell is to farm final bosses of each Act in each difficulty to garner the best drops for that act as you go.

That's why there's a waypoint for almost at the end of each act, so you can get to bosses easier. The best waypoint in this fashion is the Durance of Hate, because it's almost always right beside the final stairway down to the third level of Durance where Mephisto lies. "Meph runs" as they say.

The reason that these boss runs are so important is that boss-level entities drop runes, and runes are used to make rune words which are better than just your atypical RNG shit. Note that you need the exact number of slots in a weapon as the rune you wish to create, so if your runeword is "Tal Ort Ral" (I don't think this is a relevant runeword anymore, just saying), then you need to have 3 runes in the piece of armor or weapon.

And once you finish Hell difficulty, there's ANOTHER level of gear beyond that which is Super Boss runs where you can get Torcs (the highest level pieces of gear, they typically have no requirements other than level on them, but they are Unique, so you can only have one Torc at a time).

What the cuck? If you're in hell you should make a cheap runeword or be using a grandfather I think it was called.

to beat hell difficulty you're prolly gonna wanna hunt down certain gear as a barbarian before going past blood moor and the den of evil on hell
to beat nightmare as a bard, you dont even have to farm bosses(though youll prolly wanna do some countess runs anyway), just get a good build with 20 points in shout and iron skin and whirlwind; frenzy sucks in comparison

barb, my bad

oh, one more thing
nightmare griswold can drop hell difficulty items, such as the best gloves you'll ever get your hands on: set elite leather gloves
he can also drop magic hell difficulty items

OP, you must read a little about runewords, and make some cheap ones to improve on your elemental resistances and damage. Also get an Act 2 mercenary on Nightmare Difficulty, of the Offensive ("Might" Aura, improves your damage) or Defensive ("Holy Freeze" freezes and slows down enemies so you can deal with them more easily)

Other cheap and goos runewords are

In my opinion the best place to farm items for a barb are the ancients on Travincal, since it's easy as fuck to get there, and you can use your find item skill on them once they're dead.

noice, pic related

Just gonna put this out there.. Do cows. Do NOT kill the cow king. Do whatever you can to avoid killing the cow king. If you kill the cow king, you will need someone else to open additional cow levels for you. Enter cow level, kill every cow except the king, save and quit, start new game, enter cow level, and repeat.

Wrong, retard. The way to farm is to farm lvl 85 locations.

Frozen Orb + lightning + chain lightning, scrub. Orb is the value spell until you get enough gear for your lightning to clear shit super fast. You don't need many points in cold mastery either because it only lowers resist. I forget the optimal value. At the highest level, one point in fireball + fire mastery and tons of skill items lets you bot pretty much everything.

God, I hate this game. Life could have been different, but I logged years in that game coping with childhood dogshit.

So how do you make a good Werebear?

ya blew it

Fire paw, still remember a druid who could pull off 27k fire paw dmg, but if you ain't playing multi just forget it.

Why is it bad in Single Player?

It chains with:
But from what I remember, on nightmare and hell the majority of shit was immune to fire. It was the common immunity. And the fire claw itself has no aoe. You are really slow at clearing things out. Running it solo should be very tedious.
Additionally you can't cast fire spells as bear. So you are just limited to claw.

Though honestly there should be more builds for bear. I know fire paw only.

So basically non-Wind Druids…are still shit despite buffs?

werebears suck in comparison to werewolves

yeah non-wind druids either suck or are subpar, though werewolves can probably beat hell difficulty at least

Another hit-and-run cuckchan thread.

We have to get another purge here, or teach these fucking retards that you don't have to make some massive bait thread about your favorite game to flock people in.

Well, there went any interest I had in D2.

I'll take your fucking bait, get gud and get charms to increase rare item drop rates, you fucking nigger.

Is there an in-game way to find these runewords? Or do I have no choice but to look them up online.

step 1: /players 20 or whatever the max is
step 2: find a boss that you can kill really quickly
step 3: grind that boss about 100x

congratulations, you should now have enough equipment to beat the next boss at least

probably gotta look em up online if you dont have the guide that came with the battlechest

I see. I guess I never had that because I had bought Diablo 2 and the expansion separately. For 15 years I've just been selling my runes because I always felt like looking up runewords was cheating.

(noice)
For most builds (especially melee characters), getting runewords is a must.

classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/runewords-original.shtml

Another Blizzdrone thread?

I kinda agree with the crappy troll. I don't "get" Diablo II, at least in that I don't feel like I'm having fun collecting shit.

Stun-lock as werebear druid is fun.

It's KILL monster, get gear on repeat.

tbh, there's no hypocrisy in liking the older titles, especially Diablo 1 and 2. That shit was my life, even though I was an underage casual who got through the game with cheat items I had stolen from dead players on public servers.

Blizzard is how you tell if somebody's retarded or not. It's a shitty random spell, with a shitty AoE, with shitty huge cool down, with a billion shitty synergies that you never want to cast or invest stats in. Orb and 1 cold mastery, Chain and lightning and lightning mastery, 1 fireball and 1 fire mastery is the optimal build for clearing shit.

You must play that shit by hand or something. That's the only mindset that could tolerate waiting an hour for that shitty spell to kill anything.

What was the necro doing, cursing stuff and using bone spells?

What? I don't think I've ever seen Grizzy drop anything of value.

The council members you mean. Nowadays they're the best for gold, but pretty crummy for items. They used to be one of the most ridiculous though because they dropped like superuniques.

Blizzard depends too much on synergies. For a dual-element sorceress your only real option is Frozen Orb + another tree. Meteor and Fireball is the common one but Lightning is also good.

Also you can do lightning by itself with Infinity, that type of Sorceress is absurd. Another funny build is to get dual Dream runewords and combine with Lightning Mastery and Enchant, then do excessive aura damage, and obscene damage per hit with a weapon. Both of these are expensive however.

No you have to read online. The only one you get from the game is Ancient's Pledge where a character gives you the runes in the order they need to be added to a shield.

Diablo multiplayer is pretty fun, in particular because like Doom, you have to actually play co-op and keep friendly fire in check.

If I ask you're parents about you, I'm sure they would immediately change the subject.

Yeah, my bad.
That's kinda right. I used to have a money barbarian (caster focused, with maxed War Cry and it's synergies, gold and item find equipment and a Act 2 merc with an "Obedience" Cryptic Axe) and he was a lot of fun to make travincal runs with. I got a lot of decent items and (even if my equipment wasn't complete) I could make 400.000 - 500.000 gold each run.

On that party alone, a necro could do a lot of neat stuff

Orb is absolutely inferior in terms of dmg and equally random in hitting anything outside the path of the orb. Not only that, but the range is lower.
My blizz sorceress had the easiest time on hell. Everything maxed out for blizz damage with 1 point in teleport and 1 in static shock. With a lifesteal merk even the barbarians on hell were a joke.

At full boosted stats blizzard does higher damage than frozen orb, even if the orb passes through the enemy. The enemies in the aoe will take more damage over a longer period of time too. Baal runs are like cooking eggs.

Why do dual builds ? You use merk and static field against immune enemies like Duriel and one of the barbs. Everything else immune you pass by.
Why waste 40 or more points into another tree when you don't need it and you already need to waste points into lighning for teleport? To kill a few immune skeletons?
You might as well just say:

Dual builds are shit. Forget about them. Unless you are one of those that wants to kill every enemy. Then there is no cure for you. The mentality that the spell at level 30 is absolutely better than the level 24 spell is completely flawed.

Life tap = immortality with good hitrate.

You have no idea what are you talking about.

My sorc was level 84 and was pretty gud. Come at me frozen orb shitter.

Dual elemental sorceresses are quite fun because you get to spam lightning/fireballs between the Frozen Orb's cooldown time.
I had a Frozen Orb/Lightning sorc on level 86 and I had a lot of fun.

Orb has a 1 second cooldown. It might be strong around level 50+ when you can max it out in stats but blizzard has 4 dependencies. It grows and grows and grows in damage. Besides you spam the lower level ice spells while it falls. It's cooldown is higher than orb. It's 1.8 seconds or sth.

Blizzard is a main go for frost sorceresses, Ice orb is just a shitty crowd control, even in pvp its easily dodgable

The pro-orb fags usually show a 15 hit situation in which you drop the orb and hit the enemy perfectly. But if the enemy is not hit perfectly you can score as low as 5 hits from the orb. So pretty situational. They claim it's best for single target enemies who stand still which is true. Thus somewhat good vs bosses.

Again, frozen orb is not something you use as a pure cold sorceress. Where it excels is as a cheap secondary attack for fire or lightning sorcs so they can kill enemies immune to their main attack, or just slow them down. Meteorb only expects 33 points invested in the cold tree. Depending on your equipment you need more or less.

But are you telling me fire+cold sorcs would go without teleport ? Or would they put one point in it? That's spreading your stats too thin. At hell you will be slow at killing enemies.
Maybe at 1.09 it was popular to do it that way, but I absolutely prefer dedicated builds.

God no. All sorcs are expected to use at least 3 points in the lightning tree: static field, telekinesis, and teleport. They're the best 3 points you'll ever spend.

Slower. Not slow. Much much faster though at killing enemies immune to your primary attack, and cold works nicely with meteor too for slowing enemies down. I personally hate skipping enemies, and also if you do baal runs it's easy to get cold immune enemies to slow you down.

That is a matter of preference then. I personally stopped caring about not killing some enemies when I saw a couple of sorceresses get to hell in a day, while I was still slugging through nightmare.
The multiplayer guys just didn't give a shit. *Finish only the necessary quests and get to baal runs as fast as possible* was their motto. It was then that I discovered teleporting through the whole level. Those guys would finish my dreaded act 3 in 20 minutes or less.
Past that point I stopped caring about not killing shit. Act 3 was a chore and there was finally a way to get rid of it fast.

It's definitely a preference thing! I can't think of anything more boring than playing like a ladder player. I like to take on the multitude of challenges the game offers from Act 1 to Act 5, and generally play by myself offline.

Same here. I could get to Act 5 on hell on some hours on ladder, but it takes the fun out of playing the game. In that regard allowing 1 respec per difficulty was a nice choice, since you could experiment more and have fun with your low level skills before going with your main build.

I understand skipping parts ofthe game if you're just saving your points for lvl 30 skills, it's no fun at all to go through the game like that.

Well depends on how you started. My D2LoD playing started from singleplayer. It was long and absolutely tedious.
I did shit like crossbow curse necro, close combat assasin with shields and no points in hp. Max energy bone necro with 1 spit for hp. And I spend months on each character. Frozen orb/fire wall sorc. My builds were shit and every combat was painful and slow.
Once I got to multiplayer I just dropped single entirely and went for standard builds. Life got considerably easier.

You say *fun* when your fun gets to a point where it's weak and tedious you start looking for easier ways that waste less time.

question: runes are drop only, right? because years ago saw this guy playing d2lod and the shopkeeper was selling them.

Runes are drop only, sorry mate.
That thing you saw could have been a mod (like Diablo 2 Reworked, for example)

Some pirated servers had rune vendors.

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What's your definition of fun on Diablo 2 then? I'm lvl 22 with a barbarian on Single Player, and I'm going slow through act 2 with "/players 8" enabled, and I'm having tons of fun. I like having to choose my items carefully, and using skills like howl (to make enemies flee while I hit the unique/champion monster of the group) instead of just clicking without thought and killing everything without effort.

There's been a lot of (1) and run OPs lately. Maybe it's another halfchan exodus, bored goons trying to stir shit or Reddit newfags. At least we turned this thread into a good discussion.

Play Diablo 2, fag

No, we aren't that obvious. We usually hang around /sudo/ with our plant codemonkey.

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I've had your type of fun for 1 year or more of singleplayer with varied builds each of which a complete failure. At one point I just didn't find it fun anymore.

I've been playing Diablo 2 since 2004
Please help

I've been playing since 2000 dude. I just started a werebear the other day. Maul, Shockwave, and a little bit in Fire Claws. Too bad Hunger is shit on werebear.

I've never played with a Werebear before.
After I finish with my barb I'll give it a try

It's pretty lame compared to wolf, but I haven't done one in years so I wanted to try something else.

griswold on nightmare has a treasure class of 66 iirc
its just that like other superuniques, he almost always doesnt drop anything of value, and either way you pretty much only fight griswold either 3 or 6 times per character unless you like farming tristam for some other reason

It's good til about 48-49 on nightmare with p8.

/players 8 actually isnt the best way to go about it
theres diminishing returns for loot with the players=x command; the best way to go about it is to kill an act boss for the first time on players=7, and all times afterwards on players=3 unless you have trouble with that boss

furthermore, players=8 is not even marginally better for loot than players=7, assuming that you kill all the enemies in 1 hit either way
loot improves with players=3, players=5 and players=7 on singleplayer

so ive got a ~1.46 GB .flv recording of a skelemancer chaos run and im wondering how to fit it into a .webm small enough for Holla Forums

wait nvm that recording is awful
i set OBS to monitor capture and it just put D2 in the upper left corner while the rest of the screen shows the desktop; for me it had D2 fullscreen instead

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Is there any class in D2 that is actually balanced across all difficulties? It's always either:

or

Depends on the build. I've never had to grind on a throw barb.

there are only two classes that aren't "dump points into one skill and one-shot everything", and those are
and

Are these actually viable? I kinda want to try one

I remember a zeal paladin level 88. He took 7-8 hits per enemy. It was painful to watch.

user I… ?

Nightmare should be fairly doable for anyone with any build even if it's a wonky weak build. Do whatever the fuck you wanna do you can always respec.

Otherwise
Summon Necromancer
Bone Necromancer
They're a little slow but it's doable solo
Hammerdin is godtier easy mode
And you can make it work with a standard assassin, barb, paladin, bowzon, werewolf/bear but you're going to need a strong as fuck runeword weapon and solid gear and it will probably still be tough. Hell is truly where the challenge begins.
Sorcs are also doable but it's either slow dual element or you pick one element and skip enemies.
I'm going to skip mentioning any misc builds as well that people often claim get them through hell.

That being said hellmode feels like it was designed for a party so have fun and just play with others online and everyone can make up for their weaknesses.

Yes. Howl is fucking amazing.

The only slow dual builds are lightning builds in hell. Even then, lightning skills rip through everything not immune.

Physical zealots need a lot of deadly strike. Try a Holy Shock zealot with Crescent Moon runeword. Really strong. All zealots need some crushing blow though

it was a semantics joke. in those builds you don't one shot everything, either your aura or your skeleton does

i tried

Holla Forums pretty much told me bowazon was better before 1.10
what happened to them to make them worse? was it just that spear/javazon became better with synergies?
pic related

oh yeah skelemancer is lol
people say decripify is great, but the reality of it is you don't even need it; i can do hell chaos runs with ease without it, and my skeletons barely ever die anyway, and also duriel on hell isn't a problem without decripify
put 1 point in amplify damage, and 1 point into attract
also put 20 points in skeleton mastery, raise skeleton, raise skeletal mage, revive, and lastly summon resist, which you'll also max out

i guess if you'd have 2 points left over at level 99, then you can also get terror some time before that

1.10 gutted guided arrow, making it no longer repeatedly pierce the same target (Buriza has 100% base pierce, so that's really all you needed to beat Hell), and also heavily nerfed the tracking.

I got it.

oh
well i would've nerfed guided arrow too tbh; i think its allright in its current state but could stand to do more damage
im not even breaking 4k max damage per hit… though if i get a giant's skull and put 2 jewels fro my cube in it maybe I will

i thought it was good user

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Bowazons are one of the few characters where people deviate from the recommended stat layout, specifically, dex adds bow damage so you can pump that instead of vitality and have a glass cannon.

I understand how stats work in the game. It still makes no sense unless you have fuck tons of points dumped into all the evade skills. Most shit will 1 or 2 shot you on hell and shit will get up in your face.

That's why you have a mercenary, a valkyrie, a decoy, dodge/avoid/evade, and kill things before they can reach you.

I had a build like that and people just laughed me off the server. Every stronger enemy can one shot you.

GIT GUD

Glass .08 windforce socketed 40/15 zon here.

You're garbage.

Werebear is slow but steady. He's a tank; shockwave stunlock most things while your bear smacks them. Best when paired with a glass cannon team-mate.

I can not stop playing this shit, and it's twice as fun when you play it with your friends. Goddamn, the desert was fucking annoying, though. The wraiths and beetles are such a pain in the ass to deal with, plus, I think I may have a shit build since I'm coming in blind, and neither the gambler nor the drops came through for me. The Hajis were also fucking useless, using melee but being squishy as shit. I think I ran out of new Hajis there at the end of the chapter.

I remember doing pic related with the swarm of desert bugs, the maggots were okay but really? Bug swarms? This was the best you could come up with Blizzard? The mummy on the box cover was half the reason i wanted to play the desert level and I didn't even get to do that, that much except when inside those egypt styled tombs.

I have never touched a Druid before but this thread has inspired me to give the game another shot and make one. Am I in for a bad time or a strange one

Depends on the build, thought i'd avoid his summons as they're pretty meh and are synergy-dependent

It's been years but i can finally post this.

Fuck summons, I got bored as a necromancer before. Druid can be Were-shit, can't he? That sounds fun.

Yea they're worse it's been so long I don't even know why. You can still solo hell with relative ease in non expansion I think.
But yea you need runeword ladder gear to reasonably make it any further. R.I.P if you're singleplayer you're pretty well fucked might as well just cheat in your runes lol.

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I recall blitzing through this game as necromancer.
bone
poison
le balanced exploding corpses

Hell was an altogether unpleasant experience. I wasn't having fun.

Hell difficulty is the worst part of Diablo and it isn't worth progressing a character past Nightmare.

Have fun farming for runes for 100 hours on singeplayer like a fag.