Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
| Diablo II: Lord of Destruction | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Blizzard North |
| Publisher(s) | Blizzard North |
| Platform(s) | Windows, Mac OS |
| Release | June 30, 2001 |
| Genre(s) | RPG |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
Overview
The Lord of Destruction expansion set is a single-CD module of additional content and rule modifications for the popular computer role-playing game Diablo II. This expansion, unlike the Hellfire expansion set for the original Diablo, was made by the game's original publisher, Blizzard North.
Features
The expansion pack adds many more features to the game such as:
- A fifth act taking place in the Barbarian land of Harrogath, with an additional act boss, Baal.
- Ethereal Items: Items which cannot be repaired, but which have better characteristics in some cases than their repairable equivalents.
- Jewels: items functionally similar to gems, but which have random characteristics as opposed to the set characteristics of gems.
- Charms: items kept in a player's inventory in order to gain bonuses.
- Two new character classes: Assassin and Druid.
- An expanded private stash (about double the size of the Diablo II stash).
- An alternate weapon/shield setup that can be switched between via a hotkey in gameplay.
- Runes: stones that give powerful attributes to a socketed item when placed in it, or even more powerful bonuses when placed in a certain order forming a "Runeword" (see section below for more information).
- Hirelings (mercenaries) can now follow the player through the acts, use certain items, gain experience and can be resurrected when killed.
- Class-specified Items: new items that only one class can use that often contain class-specific bonuses.
- Elite Items: more powerful versions of items following the Normal and Exceptional items.
- New unique items.
- The game can be played at a higher screen resolution (800x600).
Runewords
Runewords are a combination of specific runes that are inserted into a socket weapon in a specific order, producing an enhanced effect. You can find recipes for weapons on-line.
Runewords are especially powerful in versions after patch 1.10, although many of the higher level runewords are restricted to Realm Ladder play only.
New character classes
Druid
This character class is (perhaps loosely) inspired by the Druids, the priest class of ancient Celtic societies. The druid could be best described as a "nature" version of the necromancer. Instead of raising the dead, he calls forth wolves, crows, and bears to fight by his side. Instead of poison and bone spells, he has a slate of elemental and other nature-based spells (sort of like a toned-down sorceress, including spells such as Volcano and Cyclone Armor).
However, the druid's unique ability is shapeshifting, allowing him to assume various animal forms. He has a number of skills that enhance this ability and provide him with different attacks while using it. However, he can't use his nature-based spells (excepting Armageddon) while in werewolf or werebear form.
Assassin
The Assassin is primarily a melee class, but she is more subtle than the barbarian and the paladin and does not rely on brute strength. The assassin introduces a very different style of play into Diablo II. Her abilities include shadow disciplines, traps, and martial arts. Her shadow disciplines consist of amazon-style passives and barbarian-style masteries, along with a few spells such as Mind Blast which confuse the enemy. Traps are a new way of attacking enemies; she can lay five at a time, and once laid, they fire (or activate) a given number of times at nearby enemies before dissipating.
Martial arts provide a new style of attacking enemies; they introduce the concept of "charges." Each of her martial arts attacks, instead of producing an immediate effect, adds a "charge" to her. These charges last as long as the assassin is in combat; she can hold up to three of a given attack type, and she can potentially have three charges of every attack active simultaneously. She then needs to perform a "finishing move" , at which point all the charges release. Depending on how many charges were built up for an ability, the "finishing move" effect changes. Phoenix Strike for example, releases a meteor with only one charge, a chain of lightning with two charges, and a chaotic blast of ice with three charges.
Because of the shuriken related skill tree and the katar, this character probably has a much more Asian feel than the Muslim Hashshashin they are named after.
The Assassin can cast spells From the Martial Arts, Shadow Disciplines, and Traps skill trees.
The history of the game
Patch history
The expansion was released in Summer 2001 as version 1.07, the same version as the beta, but the 1.08 patch was available for download on the same day. Within a few months, 1.09 was released. This was the last patch in two years.
The much hyped patch 1.10, released in Summer 2003, radically changed the game by increasing the difficulty, implementing "synergy" bonuses between skills in an attempt to give players a reason to invest in low level skills, adding more high level unique items and runewords, enabling resistance-lowering skills to break immunities, and providing a new hidden Realms-only quest to defeat Uber Diablo and gain a special, powerful unique charm called Annihilus. The patch was preceded by the Rust Storm, a sweeping clean-up of most or all hacked and duped items on the Realms.
The patch also introduced the Ladder, a competitive mode of Realm play. The Ladder was supposed to be reset regularly and all Ladder characters converted to normal characters. This was supposed to provide a fresh and equal start for everyone once in a while, but it has since then become clear that Blizzard does not actually intend to reset the Ladder often enough to make a difference. It was reset once in two years, at which time a batch of new runewords was also released. It was last reset in early august 2005 for patch 1.11
Patch 1.11, released in Summer 2005, was a surprise for many Diablo II players, since many people from the team who made the game and the patches up to 1.10 had left the company to found Flagship Studios and it was widely believed that Blizzard was focussing on its newer titles, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, at the expense of Diablo II. The patch introduced another Uber-quest, this time involving all three Prime Evils. The reward is another, even more powerful unique charm.
The state of the game
Many players consider the last patches before the expansion the most balanced and fun of all. When the expansion was released, it became clear that the new Act 5 was much easier than Act 4 instead of harder, and the focus of the game changed from survival to item farming. The addition of true monster immunity did little to keep the most overpowered classes and builds in check; characters were built specifically to run one high experience or high drop rate area, particularly the Bloody Foothills (the easy starting area of Act 5) over and over for very fast leveling.
Also, the shift from the randomised "rare" items to the preset "unique" items as the most powerful items in the game greatly reduced character variety. Certain powerful unique items, such as the infamous Buriza(-do Kyanon) crossbow, were vastly superior to any other item of the same class in the game. This created a major power gap between the haves and the have-nots.
In 1.09, the collective attention of the Battle.net players turned to the "Secret" Cow Level, with its large packs of harmless monsters with no resistances, high experience rewards and good item drops. As a result, the vast majority of Hell difficulty games took place in the Cow Level.
Due to a design flaw, the boss Pindleskin was both very easy to reach from town and very likely to drop good items. This resulted in players farming Pindleskin hundreds of times to get high level unique items. Soon, special bots were made to automate the process (Pindlebotting).
The much overdue patch 1.10 greatly increased the difficulty of the game and reduced the experience and drops in the Cow Level. As a result, the players shifted their attention to the Worldstone Keep levels.
The patch also introduced a large number of new and powerful runewords. Runewords, previosuly seen as nothing more than a gimmick, became the most powerful items in the game. Most of the new runewords had permanent auras, large bonuses to damage, stats or defense, and the newly introduced and controversial oskill bonuses, which grant any class access to specific skills of another class. Many paladin and barbarian players felt that their classes' greatest party assets, auras and Battle Orders respectively, had been stolen away from them and given to everyone.
When the ladder was reset in 2004, a second batch of even more powerful runewords (the Season 2 runewords) was added, including the powerful Infinity, which had the resistance-lowering, immunity-breaking Conviction aura built in.
The bots, duped items and the maphack have returned over time, and there is no intention of another Rust Storm.
Edit: The release of 1.10 made casters (elemental druids, necromancers, sorceress, hammerdins, trap assassins) extremely powerful, while weakening physical-damage type characters. Many dueling (also known as pking) characters then switched from the traditional barbarian/amazon/physical damage paladins to necromancers, druids, assassins, hammerdins and sorceresses(although sorceresses were also widely used pre-1.10).
Patch 1.11 did not live up to the high expectations of many players, despite being announced only two days before it went live. Only a few bugs were fixed, and nothing was done to improve class balance. The new runewords were both buggy and underpowered, and the supposedly impossible new Uberquest was beaten a couple of hours after the release of the patch.
Class History: Druid
In the expansion beta, the druid was an immensely powerful character. Skills such as Werebear and Hurricane at a high-level made the class near-invincible. This was fixed before the beta ended, and the skills have seen several balancings in subsequent patches.
When the expansion was released, the druid had become a very difficult class to play. His elemental spells had lost a lot of their potency and most were on a long skill timer and usually hit random spots or were otherwise very difficult to aim. Only Werewolf based druids stood any chance in Hell difficulty, and even the werewolf was greatly underpowered compared to any other class. Nothing was done about this in any patch until 1.10.
In 1.10, the new skill synergies greatly changed the gameplay of the elemental druid. Hurricane and Armageddon, both high-level spells that created a zone of death around the caster, could now be stacked thanks to the duration synergy, Armageddon could now be cast in animal form (which turned out to be a novelty at best, due to the large amount of skill points required for such a build) and the elemental skills in general and Tornado in particular received a massive damage boost. This made the skill viable as a primary weapon against Hell difficulty monsters and especially against other players in duels. One or two point blank tornadoes could kill any caster character, and getting close enough to use them was no longer a problem with the advent of the runeword Enigma, which enables any class to use Teleport.
Patch 1.10 did not alter the playstyle of the shape-shifter much. The contemporary werewolf still relies on Fury to deal large amounts of melee damage quickly. The life steal provided by Feral Rage is enough to render a high level druid nearly immortal, given a good unique or runeword weapon. Rabies is used occasionally in duels, mainly because it is bugged and not affected by poison length reduction.
The often neglected summoning tree was already underpowered when the expansion was released, and has never been substantially improved in any patch. Most players get the life-boosting Oak Sage spirit, but the other spirits and the animal and plant minions are almost entirely ignored.
A well-built druid is one of the strongest classes in the game, but this power comes at a price: the class depends greatly on specific powerful items, and is therefore mostly a class for the richer players on Battle.net. Tornado is not feasible without large amounts of +to skills items; and the werewolf requires a high damage weapon and other items that add large amounts of damage to be feasible in Hell difficulty, since the life steal on Feral Rage is based on melee damage.
Class History: Assassin
In terms of play experience, the Assassin switches between skills perhaps more rapidly other classes, which can result in something of a "function key stoccato" in order to perform a sequence of moves. For this reason, the player base of the class was sometimes thought of as more mature than that of other classes.
Despite the assassin's low hit-points, she is one of the easiest classes to play due to the Mind Blast skill, which stuns or converts an area of enemies, rendering them essentially harmless.
When the expansion was released, the class was notoriously bug-ridden and unbalanced. There was a brief episode when she could kill anything in the game by converting them with Mind Blast and waiting for them to unconvert, which erroneously reduced their hit points to 1, but this was quickly fixed.
Prior to patch 1.10, the assassin had to rely heavily on melee to do any damage. Her trap skills - devices planted anywhere on the screen to shoot fire or lightning at the enemy - did neglegible damage. The assassin's weapon of choice, claws, were on the low end of the damage scale, forcing her to rely on elemental melee skills alone. The buff skill Burst of Speed was a common sight, greatly increasing her movement and attack speed.
Patch 1.10 greatly improved the trap skills tab with some of the best synergy bonuses in the game, but also rendered melee combat suicidal in Hell difficulty, causing both trees to swap places in terms of usefulness. Most melee assassins now get one point in Blade Fury, a ranged shuriken attack with a weapon component, to kill bosses and other dangerous or bugged creatures from a distance. Many feel that pure melee is close to impossible in Hell difficulty. In fact, her melee skills are so underpowered that the runeword Chaos, which grants the barbarian combat skill Whirlwind, provides a better attack option than the assassin's own melee skills.
Additionally, due to the much higher damage of Hell monsters compared to previous patches, the improved Fade skill, which increases elemental resistances and reduces physical damage, took the place of Burst of Speed as the must-have protection spell.
In 1.10,Lightning Sentry with synergies is one of the most powerful spells of any character in the game. Two or three castings of Mind Blast stop an entire pack of monsters dead, and Lightning Sentry rips them apart. The fire traps are both weak and bugged, and usually not recommended for Hell difficulty, so most trapsins get Fire Blast as their weapon of choice against lightning immunes.
In conclusion, the trap-based assassin is one of the best characters in the game for new players and those without good equipment. While lacking the demigod status of perfectly built paladins and druids with top end equipment, she is by far the most powerful character without 'uber' items. The melee assassin is much less powerful, more dangerous and generally played by those who like a challenge.
Class history: Barbarian
This character was by far the most powerful character in classic Diablo II, and the character of choice for power-leveling and dueling. Until the expansion arrived and the hammer came down.
The global 50% physical resistance introduced in the expansion was aimed specifically at barbarians to cut them down to size, physical immune monsters were a major problem and forced all barbarians to get the magic damage Berserk skill as a matter of fact, the critical life steal and mana steal item properties were weakened in several ways and due to certain overpowered unique bows, amazons were capable of doing more damage than any barbarian, at range, to an entire screen of monsters at once. Still, barbarians were one of the stronger classes in the game, yielding only to amazons and sorceresses.
With the arrival of 1.10, the global physical resistance was removed, but the greatly increased difficulty made melee combat tricky to say the least, not to mention certain bugged monsters that can kill a character in one hit. The class did not really benefit from the new skill synergies, and the new and powerful unique and runeword items that were supposed to make up for it, such as the runewords with built-in auras and the godly Breath of the Dying weapon runeword, are notoriously hard to find or make. Many barbarian players ignored Whirlwind entirely and resorted to the defense-boosting Concentrate attack as their main mode of attack, until the challenges of 1.10 were better understood and the powerful items became more widespread.
In addition to that, the fact that Berserk is their only way to inflict non-physical damage and the lack of useful elemental mercenaries forces every barbarian to incorporate Berserk into his build. No other class has this urgent need to invest in a single specific skill. Battle Orders is nearly mandatory as well, but it is indeed a strong skill, doubling base life and mana at skill level 20. It is so good that many players keep a set of two +3 to Warcries tree weapons on weapon switch to cast Battle Orders at a much higher skill level.
The class is fairly easy to build up, but a barbarian without both of these skills has some serious problems in Nightmare and Hell difficulty, and being rich and having access to high end items is almost a requirement for Hell difficulty.
Class History: Paladin
Prior to the expansion, the hammerdin caster build using Blessed Hammer and exploiting a bug that caused the Concentration aura to increase hammer damage was the most powerful build in the game, while the actual melee combat skills were considered underpowered.
Patch 1.07 and the expansion pack hit the class hard. The hammerdin was greatly weakened and the advent of immunities and the global 50% physical resistance put all builds incapable of dealing elemental damage, including most paladin builds, at a major disadvantage. The paladin was again reduced to a mere novelty class. Fanaticism was boosted greatly and replaced Concentration as the aura of choice, but due to the global physical resistance, the class actually did less damage than before the expansion.
Patch 1.10, the sorely delayed legendary fix-all patch, introduced items with built-in auras, a further insult to the paladin class. Many players felt that the main selling point of the paladin had been given away for free to other classes. Additionally, the practice of "aura flashing" (rapidly switching between an enemy-affecting and a party-affecting aura to get the benefits of two auras at once), was no longer possible.
On the bright side, the global physical resistance was gone and the game difficulty had been upped enough to make some of the defensive auras useful, if only to prevent instant deaths by the bugged new Gloam-type monsters in Act 5. The newly implemented skill synergies allowed players to boost their Blessed Hammer damage to enormous heights, and the spell now ignored resistances of undead and demon class enemies. The hammerdin lived again, as powerful as before.
In fact, due to its ability to ignore resistances, the hammerdin is again by far the most powerful build in the game, and much hated by other players. In duels, using the Enigma runeword which provides the Teleport skill, the paladin player can teleport on top of the opponent and instantly kill him in one hammer hit, which is considered slightly unfair by the other classes. Against monsters, Blessed Hammer can typically kill any normal monster in one hit, bosses in two or three.
Those wanting to play an actual melee paladin in post-1.10 have a much harder time. The new items with the damage +x modifier increase the damage of the Smite (shield bash) skill, which makes the melee paladin a decent boss killer, and the paladin-specific runeword Exile features a chance to cast Life Tap on striking, which renders the Zeal-using paladin nearly invulnerable against normal monsters and most bosses. Still, neither build kills nearly as fast as the hated hammerdin.
The paladin's skill set is very diverse, but most build options are somewhat weak in the face of Blessed Hammer and physical immune monsters tend to be a problem for melee-based builds.
Class History: Sorceress
Prior to the expansion, the sorceress was the weakest class, so the announced implementation of timers on some of the more graphics intensive spells, elemental immunities, the weakening of Static Field and the introduction of the Blood Mana monster curse that causes the caster to use up health instead of mana when casting for the expansion pack caused a storm on the Diablo II forums.
When the expansion was released, it became clear that the abundance of +to skills items and the increasing returns on spell damage more than made up for the skill timers. The damage a perfectly built sorceress could put out was enormous, enough to kill any monster in two seconds at most. The layout of the Bloody Foothills caused the spell Firewall to work particularly well against monsters in that area. When the attention shifted to the Cow Level as the main hunting ground, sorceress players adjusted and used the area effect Nova spell with as many faster cast rate items as possible.
When patch 1.10 arrived, the exploitation of the Cow Level and the Nova spell became a thing of the past. The seemingly random implementation of synergy bonuses rendered many old builds useless and greatly boosted other, sometimes fairly odd builds. The lowly Fireball skill is the weapon of choice for many contemporary sorceresses, thanks to its large damage synergy from Meteor. Blizzard is the most powerful cold skill, though many Fireball users get Frozen Orb instead because it works well even without synergies.
An interesting melee subclass has emerged, using the Zeal skill granted by the runeword Passion in conjunction with the improved Enchant skill, which adds fire damage to melee attacks.
The class as it stands is still very powerful, and the skill set is very counter-intuitive due to the seemingly random synergy bonuses. Weakish low level skills such as Fireball, Lightning and Ice Blast can become immensely powerful after synergies, while some of the higher level skills have no synergies or bad synergies and are ignored.
The sorceress does not have a complicated or interesting skill set. Players typically pick one or two main skills and max them. The few defensive skills on offer, such as Chilling Armor and Energy Shield, are either laughably useless, bugged or a combination of both.
Class history: Amazon
Prior to the expansion, the amazon was already one of the more powerful characters, but still required skill to play effectively. The expansion pack introduced some immensely powerful unique bows and crossbows, removing the skill factor from amazon gameplay and replacing it with pure damage.
The legendary Buriza-do Kyanon unique ballista and Windforce unique hydra bow were not only the best bows, but also the best weapons in the game. Amazons with Multiple Shot and either bow were on top of the world, especially in the Cow Level, the once-secret level that offered enormous amounts of experience and items for very little risk.
Prior to patch 1.10, another powerful build involved using items with piercing attack, such as the Buriza, and Guided Arrow. This spell was bugged in such a way that a piercing guided arrow returned to its original target and struck again, up to five times, leading to enormous damage.
For the javelin users, the badly overpowered Titan's Revenge featured high damage and just about every modifier a javazon could possibly want. Javazons typically used the passive ability Pierce and the javelin skill Lightning Fury. A piercing Lightning Fury javelin thrown at a pack of cows usually hit three or four times in quick succession, unleashing a deadly storm of lightning bolts powerful enough to mow down the pack in one or two casts.
The long-awaited patch 1.10 finally fixed the elemental arrows to properly add the physical arrow damage and introduced some even more powerful runeword bows, but the increased game difficulty more than made up for it. In fact, amazons are commonly considered one of the weakest classes these days.
The common 1.10 skill to use is Strafe, which fires a machine-gun salvo of arrows at nearby enemies. While Strafe has been improved in 1.10, it is still buggy and underpowered; the reason it is now a mainstream skill is that Multiple Shot and Lightning Fury have fallen from grace with the demise of the Cow Level as a viable leveling area, and the Guided Arrow bug was fixed, rendering it relatively useless.
Additionally, there are many melee weapon runewords that beat the Windforce, and not really any useful bow runewords to make up for it. The best weapon runeword, the legendary Breath of the Dying, is not only very hard to assemble, but also contains a Zod rune. The Zod rune makes the item it is socketed into indestructible, which enables the Breath of the Dying runeword to be made in ethereal weapons (+50% total damage, cannot be repaired). But bows cannot be ethereal, so the damage of a Breath of the Dying bow is lower than that of an equivalent ethereal weapon with the same runeword.
The amazon's skill set is an odd batch. On paper, she appears to be a melee-ranged hybrid class, and her skill tree is easy to understand: javelin and spear skills, passive and magic skills, and bow skills are in their own separate branches. In practice, she does not have the defenses to stand toe to toe with enemies to use her melee skills effectively, spears are still among the worst weapons in the game and her high-end spear skills are marred by bugs, especially Fend and Lightning Strike, reducing her to a ranged attacker exclusively. She is also very item dependent in general and bow dependent in particular, making her a character for the richer players and not very novice friendly despite her simple skill tree.
Edit: In addition to the author's statements, dueling zons today are javazons that use charged strike. Like the author said, this type is also gear dependpent, requiring many +lightning skill items in order to make this type effective.
Class history: Necromancer
Prior to the expansion, the necromancer was a strong but not overpowered class, relying mostly on Revive and the damage reflecting curse Iron Maiden to deal damage. While somewhat slow to kill, the fact that the health of revived monsters scaled with number of players allowed the necromancer to almost ignore game size, while all other classes had a much tougher time in large player count games.
The release of the expansion was the end of necromancer domination. Monsters had so much life and physical resistance that Revive and Iron Maiden failed to do any significant damage, revived monsters no longer scaled up with number of players in the game, physical immunes were a roadblock, summoning spells in general were far too weak to be more than a distraction and necromancers were forced to use the direct damage spell Bone Spirit exclusively to get anywhere in Hell difficulty, Bone Spirit being one of the worst direct damage spells in the game.
When 1.10 was released, the necromancer was reborn, mostly thanks to the modifications to Raise Skeleton. This formerly useless low level skill received a major boost and became the most powerful minions in the game, capable of clearing Hell difficulty on their own with a little helping of Amplify Damage, which now removes physical immunity. While most other necromancer builds are still incapable of completing Nightmare difficulty let alone Hell, this one powerful skill more than makes up for it. With the increased difficulty of 1.10, the Dim Vision curse, which blinds monsters and renders them harmless, became a must-have as well for any necromancer in Hell difficulty.
The class-specific necromancer set, Trang-Ouls Avatar, has been modified in 1.10 in a curious way. It now turns the wearer in a "vampire"-class monster and grants the ability to use the sorceress skills Firewall, Fireball and Meteor. This allows the necromancer player to ignore direct damage skills entirely and rely on the set's fire skills to deal direct damage.
All in all, the skelliemancer is the best class for new players and players without good items, and still one of the best classes for rich players. The class requires no expensive runewords to be useful, and in fact there are very few runewords that are actually useful for the class. Trang-Ouls set is much easier to collect than the runes for most high level runewords, and Trang-Ouls and a good wand are all a necromancer needs to be successful.
Patch 1.10
Long thought to be a myth or an aborted attempt, Patch 1.10 was announced to the world in May 2002, and was finally released to the public on October 28, 2003. This patch adds several new features and items into the game.
Ladder Characters: The patch introduces a new type of characters called "Ladder Characters". Only Ladder Characters are ranked on the ladder (lists of the top 1000 characters on a realm in different categories), and these characters are can only join games created by other ladder characters. This effectively creates a distinct economy for these characters free from the existing economy where any item in the game is available.
Ladder seasons are also introduced where ladder characters play together for a season. The standard season length is still unknown. When a ladder season ends, the ladder characters are converted to non-ladder characters. To continue playing in the new ladder season, players will have to create new characters, thus restarting the economy.
Ladder-only Features: The patch also includes items and cube recipes that are ladder-only. These can be found in game types except non-ladder Battle.net games. This restriction was added to compensate for increased monster difficulty in ladder games, and also because overall difficulty was further increased as the players have no longer access to their non-ladder items to help. When a ladder season ends the ladder-only items found will be moved to the non-ladder realm with the characters and will be quite valuable.
Rust Storm: Blizzard also implemented a new system for identifying and deleting illegal items on the realms. The system was dubbed "rust storm" because hacked items are "rusted" and removed from the realms. When Blizzard is made aware of a new hacked or bugged item, they can simply update the rust storm filters and the item will be deleted from the entire realm. The feature was intended to help keep the economy stable and free from items that give players an unfair advantage.
Leeching and Rushing: A popular playing style in the pre-1.10 realms was to "rush" a character, meaning that the player would have a friend of much higher level (the "rusher") quickly play through the game for them, completing the needed quests and skipping the others, while the friend of lower level (the "rushee") tagged along at a safe distance. This allowed the rushed player to bypass much of the long areas of the game that are time consuming to complete. The player would then "leech experience" (i.e., gain through no effort of their own) from higher level characters to gain levels before continuing. Leeching experience was most commonly done in the Secret Cow Level, since this level could be created repeatedly as long as the Cow King was not killed by the game maker, and because the level had the highest density of monsters, providing a fairly large amount of experience per unit time spent when the game had the maximum number of players. With 1.10 these tactics were made much more time consuming and more difficult because the amount of experience a player receives from being partied is based on the proximity to the actual fighting and the difference between player levels. This was meant to encourage players to play the game the way Blizzard designed it, in truly cooperative games. However, the player community found variant methods to leech (namely the so-called Baal runs and Pit runs), which, albeit slower than the "Cow runs", are still well beyond the intended leveling speed.
Skill Synergies: With Patch 1.10, Blizzard introduced a feature called "Synergies" (before 1.10, seen in the Druid's and Necromancer's summoning skills). Synergies allow skills to gain bonuses depending on the skill levels of other, related skills. This enables the player to build a more varied character while still attaining the efficiency and power of a specialised build (the so-called "cookie-cutter" variants). The downside to synergies is that many pre-1.10 characters were made essentially useless because the popular ways to allocate skills before 1.10 results in extremely low damage characters after 1.10.
The World Event: Patch 1.10 also introduced the world event. This is a server-wide event that, when in effect, replaces the next spawned super unique monster by a Diablo Clone that is much tougher than the regular Diablo act boss monster, but also drops the much sought after unique Annihilus charm. This charm is dropped only in the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion. The event is allegedly tied to the selling of "The Stone of Jordan" (or "SoJ"), a very popular ring that was/is, as such, very extensively duplicated. The objective seems to have been the removal of excess SoJs from the game.
The general player opinion of Patch 1.10 is mixed. Some players celebrated the new cheat-free environment, while others were aggrieved that their characters were affected retroactively by new features, drastically altering their efficiency and often forcing them to start over.
Other patch 1.10 features
- The quality of rare armors, helms and weapons was increased.
- Over 100 new unique items were added.
- Monster speed, damage and toughness was greatly increased for higher-level characters, especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties.
- Experience gaining penalties for level 70+ characters were increased.
- The number of unique monsters was increased in every area and difficulty level.
- 20 new rune-words and 46 new horadric cube recipes were added.
Patch 1.11
On June 29, 2005, Blizzard announced the following:
A Call to Heroes! July 29, 2005 Great evil has returned to the world of Diablo 2. Will you answer the call to save Sanctuary? Patch 1.11 is coming....
Patch 1.11 was generally considered a total surprise by the player base, since the team responsible for the game up to patch 1.10 had left the company. It was announced only two days before its release on August 1, 2005, yet it still managed to disappoint many fans. There was no real new content other than the new 'Uberquest' and several weak new runewords, and hardly any bugfixes.
The new 'Uberquest' involves getting the Key of Hate, Key of Destruction and Key of Terror off Nihlathak, the Summoner and the Countess, then cubing each of them into a portal to a new sublevel, featuring Lilith (a renamed Andariel), Uber Izual, or Uber Duriel. These bosses drop body parts, which can be cubed into a portal to Uber Tristram.
In Uber Tristram, players fight beefed up versions of all three Prime Evils simultaneously! When all three are dead, the last one killed drops the new Hellfire Torch unique charm. It gives +3 to all skills of a random class, random bonuses to all attributes and all resistances, and 25% chance to cast Diablo's Firestorm attack on striking.
Despite being theoretically almost impossible, several players have defeated the 'Uberquest' within a few hours after release. The secret seems to be the Life Tap skill, which gives a tremendous 50% life steal and renders characters almost immune to damage.
There is some speculation on how this quest will affect the 1.10 'World Event', which involved only Uber Diablo and rewarded the player with a much less powerful unique charm, but requires a large number of Stone of Jordan unique rings to be sold by other players. The 1.11 'Uberquest' seems highly exploitable by characters built for it and may well obsolete the 'World Event' and the Annihilus charm.
Blizzard North, the subdivision that created Diablo II and its patches, closed its doors on patch day, making a new 1.12 patch highly unlikely. However, 1.11 contains several serious bugs and an emergency patch (1.11b) may be released in the near future.
The new Ladder season began as of August 8th, 2005.
Player trends
Online gaming
Blizzard Entertainment only has 4 official Diablo II/D2X Battle.net multiplayer gaming servers:
- US East
- US West
- Europe
- Asia
However, many unofficial (though regarded by some as illegal) servers for D2X were created, in China, Japan, and other countries. These are based on the same server interface (e.g. IMPK.NET). But one advantage of these servers was that many people who knew their IP addresses can play online in a 'closed Battle.net' (also known as private servers or Player-Versus-Player Game Networks, PvPGN) with others; despite the fact that they lack 'CD keys' (which means pirated or downloaded copies of D2X can still be played online; this however is also true with the normal game installation. You can play online with people by using the normal "Multiplayer" option or using Kali.net tunneling, which in addition, offers Battle.net like features such as chatting and "meeting" rooms for people).
Item trading
Diablo II LoD and Diablo II Classic have spawned a myriad of different online shops and stores for items. The phenomenon of users buying items with physical or virtual money (e-currency) has increased within the last year or so. The creation of the 'Ladder' program on Diablo II Classic's Softcore, and Hardcore modes along with LoD's Soft and Hardcore modes has given birth to this "item craze". Most legitimate players frown upon the practice of selling virtual items for real money, especially hacked or bugged items, but Blizzard themselves does not seem to take much action against them, other than the occasional mass bannings of battle.net accounts of players using illegal items or other hacks.
Most stores are accessed through eBay, but independent ones have even created legitimate, aesthetically pleasing, and robust trade store sites.
Examples of links to item trader sites include:
There are many others out there – this is by no means an exhaustive list. In addition to stores there are guilds, fansites, non-game altering third-party software sites, and helpful sites with item listings and skill/character build ideas.
External links
- Diablo Wiki - The Diablo Wiki.
- Diablo II .Net - Diablo II .Net.