Here and there, with some free time I have, I occasionally play Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I've created many characters before, but since they were online multiplayer ones, they're long gone now. Nowadays, I play near exclusively single player or LAN, where I don't have to deal with bots, hackers and duped items. After making so many characters online, I had nothing to show for all character builds I've experimented with, offline.
After a few characters, I made a summoner Necromancer on softcore, but noticed he went through the game very safely. I figured it was time to make a hardcore character. Now, that hardcore Necromancer finished Hell Difficulty at level 81.
Highlights of The Final Act
I decided to record a video because I considered it a momentous occasion. Unfortunately, I didn't set the recorder not to downscale the resolution. The recording is 400p, down from 600p.
Lo Rune drops on Worldstone Keep Level 3: (direct link to video)
The Penultimate Event and the Finale: (direct link to video)
The Build and My Preferences
- 100 Strength
- 315 Vitality
- Base Dexterity and Energy
Resulting in 908 total health, 232 total mana (wearing gear).
A summon necromancer is extremely easy to keep alive. Out of all character classes in the game, he must be one of the ones with the most freedom for assigning stat points and equipment.
- 20 Summon Skeleton
- 20 Summon Skeleton Mage
- 20 Skeleton Mastery
- 10 Summon Resist
- 1 Decrepify (and its prerequisites)
- 1 Corpse Explosion (and its prerequisite)
Normally, after needed skills are acquired, I put the remaining points into Revive. There's some monsters I enjoy keeping around such as Gloams, Hierophants, Claw Vipers, and Blunderbores.
I pick Decrepify since it immensely eases the Baal fight. Once Decrepify is on him, all the hits from the skeleton army will interrupt his Teleport and lock him in place.
Typically I don't put points into the golem since all it costs to resummon him is mana and a potion to refill.
Cheap Equipment
Fire and lightning resists are top priority since potions can't be imbibed for them.
During the course of a playthrough, the runes I can reliably find are middle level runes, Thul to Mal. Everything else, is too rare to count on finding. This largely limits me to using patch 1.10 runewords because of the exceptionally rare runes required in the other runes later added.
Belt
Right Ring
Left Ring
Helm
Single Player vs Battle.net
There wasn't actually much grind involved. My equipment isn't spectacular, yet I got through the main objective of the game solo.
- No pre-gearing
- No rushing
- No given waypoints
- A full walk-through of the game
- Natural instances of getting lost
When I think about the general perception of the game, the grindiness of the game was likely the norm of the multiplayer. I remember on battle.net, starting out on the realm, players freely gave out rushes and waypoints. Then I'd end up undergeared with little idea of what area my character was strong enough to fight in. Naturally, to self-sufficiently play by myself every now and then I'd have to find gear, thus repeatedly farm some lower difficulty area to build up the gear I'd need. I never thought addictiveness was a gameplay perk since the amount of repetitive behavior required becomes an kind obligation to later abandon, or at least in my mind. I believe this norm of online play has influenced the design of future games, explicitly inspired by Diablo, for the worse- just my opinion.
Yet there is also the insanely high experience requirement to level up after the 90's which legitimately is grindy and requires thousands of Baal runs to achieve. But without the context of battle.net ladder, which was a leveling race to 99, there's little point in that effort. Reaching level 93 appeared beneficial when I read about the crafting, but overall, I don't feel the same pressure to grind as I did in battle.net for single player. Makes sense, there's no trading to grind gear for, and there's no ladder to race to the top of. I feel the paradigm, instead, to playthrough the game as gear efficiently as possible and have a save-collection of various characters and builds.
Epilogue
My hardcore necromancer has finished his journey. Any more fooling around risks him getting killed for little benefit (the vanity of a few extra levels I can live without). I got another hardcore character I will be progressing on. The quirk is, he's a co-op partner played with my friend's character over TCP/IP with a fun class synergy.
