Tag: Diablo II Resurrected

My enthusiasm for playing Diablo II builds that I’ve been wanting to push to the endgame for decades, but for some reason or other never did, is still going strong.

While the Blade Fury Assassin is a lot of fun, after having her beat Hell difficulty I concluded that she’s not going to become one of my go-to farming characters after all. I’d really like to have another one of those though, not so much for boss killing, but for density-farming in terror zones. As my last visit to Uber-Tristram netted me my second Necro torch I decided to finally try a Poison Nova Necromancer in earnest. And good thing that I did, because holy crap, that dude rocks!

As the name suggests this skill is the venomous version of the Sorceress’s Nova and Frost Nova, and like all kinds of poison in DII it deals its damage over a set period of time. Luckily, in this case we’re only talking about two seconds, so while not nearly being “instant”, enemies lose health quickly enough to not die of old age beforehand.

I don’t know why, but it’s strangely satisfying to get in, spray two quick bursts of green goo all around me, get out again, and then watch my enemies drop dead like flies without me doing anything at that particular moment.

Now, I remember giving up on this build at around level 50 many years ago, mainly because its damage just couldn’t keep up with the monsters’ health and resistances anymore. While that would be bad news for any kind of character, it makes the life of a poison based one absolutely miserable. You just can’t afford to wait until the venom has done its thing, then reapply, wait again, so on and so forth…the monsters will rip you to shreds long before their own life runs out.

I guess what I’m saying is, this is definitely one of the more gear-dependent builds. Fortunately I’m not as poor anymore as I was during most of my Diablo II career – mainly due to my characters not getting deleted every time I take a break anymore – so this time around I was able to push things much further.

Aside from getting Poison Nova itself to as high a level as possible and maxing out its synergies the most important thing to increase the effective damage output is lowering the enemies’ poison resistance.

Of course the most obvious method is to use the Lower Resist curse the Necro has access to anyway. That alone doesn’t cut it for very long though, especially once poison immune monsters become more common, which happens as early as Act IV on Nightmare. I won’t go into the exact math of immunities here, all we need to know is that an immunity has to be broken before damage of the respective type can have an effect at all, and then gear with stats like “-x% to Enemy Poison Resistance” can take its full effect.

So what I usually do is to try and break any poison immunities with Lower Resist, and if that’s not enough I fetch the appropriate sunder charm from the Horadric Cube and put it in my inventory. I’ve talked about what those do here, keep in mind however that they are much harder to acquire nowadays (it’s quite bad, honestly, but that’s a topic for another day).

Once the immunity is broken the aforementioned gear can do its thing.

Specifically, my Necro wears three pieces of the Trang Oul’s Avatar set, most importantly the shrunken head (i.e. shield), which grants -25% to Enemy Poison Resistance when worn with at least two more pieces. The gloves give +20% Faster Cast Rate as well as +25% to Poison Skill Damage, and the belt has the all-important Cannot Be Frozen, so this is a lot of bang for only three bucks, so to speak.

Even more important is the weapon he wields, a Death’s Web unique wand. Its most impactful stat is -40% to -50% (rolled randomly) to Enemy Poison Resistance. Unfortunately that thing is one of the rarest pieces of gear in the game, and I’ve never seen one drop myself.

Which is one of the main reasons why I’ve always played online, despite only rarely teaming up with other players – I can trade for stuff I can’t find.

Obviously a perfectly rolled specimen is worth an arm and a leg, but compared to not having one at all a -40% piece is already a huge damage boost, so I got myself exactly that for the low price of one Ist rune.

I also asked Larzuk to punch a hole in it and plugged in a decently rolled Poison Rainbow Facet, and now this Necro kicks some serious ass indeed.

There’s one last piece of gear that I feel is almost a necessity, and unfortunately there’s no cheap version of this one: the Enigma runeword armor.

It’s the one pretty much every DII player at least knows about, because it grants its wearer one level of Teleport, regardless of class. It also sports +2 to all skills, loads of magic find and more…calling it overpowered would be an understatement. It’s no surprise then that quite a few players use it on every high level character they play – even Sorceresses.

I’m not such a big fan, but its usefulness can’t be denied, and for Poison Nova in particular it really is extremely strong. The ‘go in, cast once or twice, go out’-approach mentioned above just doesn’t work all that well without it.

It’s very worth the investment though. The build has exceptional clearing capabilities, on my account only surpassed by the Bowzon, and even she gets slowed down considerably by physical immunes, whereas the Necro can farm quickly anywhere. Also, with Poison Nova there’s no aiming required whatsoever – killing monsters like leapers and blood hawks, which can be very annoying to deal with for many builds, is easy as pie.

I also dig that I rarely feel the need to use Corpse Explosion. When the screen is chock-full of monsters, and/or they get constantly healed or revived, then, yes, I blow everything up. But usually I get by without it no problem.

Lastly, I’m glad to finally play a caster class that doesn’t have to rely on their mercenary wearing an Insight polearm for its mana-regenerating aura. I mean, he does spend quite a lot, but many of his gear pieces have either mana or some form of mana regeneration on them, and if push comes to shove I just quaff a potion once in a while. This freed up his weapon slot, so I gave him an Obedience socketed into in an ethereal Mancatcher.

With that he really slaps, and he also leeches enough life to die very rarely, which is obviously great.

So, yeah, if you’re tired of boss rushing and are looking for a build to clear whole zones with efficiently, one that requires an active and fun playstyle while not being completely overpowered – you can still die very easily if you’re not careful – look no further.

It’s been almost 25 years since Diablo II got its first and until very recently only expansion, Lord of Destruction. Of the two new classes it introduced to the game the Assassin appealed to me the most by a landslide.

As I’m a huge fan of all things martial arts that’s no surprise of course. She uses claws as her weapon of choice, throws shuriken and traps, hides in the shadows, kicks the crap out of her enemies…did I mention that she throws fricking shuriken?

Despite all this I never made it beyond level 25 or so whenever I created the first Assassin on a new account though. I don’t know why exactly, she just didn’t klick with me for some reason or other.

Some of her skills, most importantly Blade Fury, which is the shuriken one, were buffed in patch 2.4 however, and now I also have the complete Natalya’s Odium set at my disposal for the first time. So I finally buckled up and pushed her all the way through Normal and Nightmare, as well as half of the way through Hell.

She’s at level 79 now and indeed wears Natalya’s set, which unfortunately isn’t even close to her best-in-slot gear, but it’s ok for now and makes her look pretty cool to boot.

The Blade Fury playstyle is a lot of fun. You hold down the button, and she hurls throwing stars, about five of them per second, in the direction you’re aiming. This is as close to “beam weaving”, which I quite enjoyed in Marvel Heroes, as you can get in DII. Well, except for the Sorceress-skill Inferno, but that one’s so crappy that we don’t talk about it.

BF also has a pretty huge range, with the stars reaching farther than you can actually see on screen.

Blade Fury alone doesn’t cut it on higher difficulties though, where monsters are too numerous and have too many hitpoints to kill them all like this. Enter Death Sentry, which is one of her various traps. She throws these on the ground, and whenever there are targets in range they do their thing. In this case that means blowing up the corpses of dead enemies for massive AoE-damage, just like the Necromancer does with his skill Corpse Explosion.

The thing about the Necro skill is…I don’t like it all that much. Not because it’s crap, but because it’s too damn good to not use it.

You see, whatever flavour of Necromancer you play, the answer to all of his problems is always Corpse Explosion from the moment he gets access to it. As a summoner – wait until the minions have offed the first opponent, then blow everything up. Poison or Bone skills? Kill one, explode the shit out of the rest. You get the picture. To me that’s boring und uninspiring.

I don’t know why, but throwing a trap or two and let them do the exploding does make a world of difference to me. I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I guess to my mind throwing those traps just fits the Assassin’s playstyle, whereas clicking the corpses manually and blowing them up instead of reanimating them or something doesn’t sit right with me on the Necro.

Whatever it is that makes it work for me, I’ll take it. It also provides for a pretty active playstyle, while thankfully not being as fast and nausea-inducing as, say, a Frenzy Barbarian.

Of course the Assassin also has her own set of support skills and passives.

Since claws are her signature weapons – she’s the only one who can equip them, too – she has some passive skills to boost their damage, attack rating and even block chance, with the latter only working when she holds a claw in each hand to prevent using a shield and effectively double dipping.

She also has some good crowd control skills at her disposal. One blinds the targets and lowers their defenses, another even charms some of them into attacking their peers while stunning the rest.

You’re not an Assassin if you can’t control your own shadow, right? In DII it’s actually an autonomous helper that attacks stuff on its own, and you can even choose between a version that uses the same skills as you do, and one that has all of the Assassin’s skills on hand.

Two very strong buffs round out her arsenal. Burst of Speed makes her run and attack a lot faster (which unfortunately doesn’t work for Blade Fury for some reason), while Fade provides resists and damage reduction. For balancing reasons you can only use one or the other though, not both at the same time.

I’ve always appreciated the love for little, seemingly insignificant details that Blizzard poured into their games during the nineties and early noughties (and Overwatch too, to give credit where it’s due), and DII is no different in that regard.

When they designed the new classes they obviously asked themselves “What can we do to differentiate them from the others?” Apart from her signature set making her near invisible instead of glow like a Christmas tree the Assassin got one little perk that suits her well thematically. It’s a really small one, but still pretty nice: she can pick locks, meaning that she doesn’t need keys to open locked chests. Like I said, it’s a small detail, not nearly enough to make the other classes fundamentally inferior to her or anything, but it comes in handy for sure.

Ever since the introduction of Charms inventory space in DII has become even more precious, so not having to lug around a stack of keys is a greater boon than one might think. It’s also one less supply of stuff that needs to be maintained, and since Reign of the Warlock we can even set the loot filter to hide those keys from our overview. So, again, it’s just a small perk, but still great.

And there you have it. The Blade Fury Assassin, as well as the class in general, really is a lot of fun.

Once we know more details about how Blizz intends to change the runeword Mosaic, which has been the uncontested go-to for martial arts Assassins ever since its introduction – because it’s hopelessly overpowered – I’ll probably try that out next.

So, yeah, Diablo II Resurrected really got an expansion, including the first new class added to the roster since the release of Lord of Destruction in fricking 2001. Which, if you ask me, is pretty huge, and I definitely didn’t have something like this on my Bingo card for 2026 (or any other year, for that matter).

Of course there’s lots of criticism going round. No new Act, no new monster types, the Quality of Life features should have been there from the start, so on and so forth.

Personally, I really like what we got. Sure, a new Act would have been awesome, but, again, I basically had made my peace with not getting any new stuff for one of my all time favourite games, so I’ll take it for sure.

What about that new class then? Well, I played the Warlock all the way through Normal difficulty, completely SSF (Solo Self-Found), and it was by far the easiest run I’ve done with any class or build that way. Nightmare came next, and for that I handed down some gear, making the whole affair easier still. Even Tal Rasha’s tombs and the Travincal council, which can be a pretty tough challenge for low- and mid-level characters, were a breeze.

Big fan of summoning builds that I am I went for the Demon-tree of course, and it’s awesome! Back in the original Diablo the monster type Goatmen was the bane of my existence because they are really quick and hit like trucks, so having them do my bidding now feels very satisfying.

Well, I say “them”…in the early game you’ll have to make do with only one. That’s not as bad as it sounds though, as these guys are sturdier and hit much harder than the Necro’s or Druid’s minions. Also, the goats have some sort of cleave attack that can hit multiple enemies, so it doesn’t take ages to kill larger packs either.

Even better than the minions themselves are the supporting skills. Most importantly: we can fricking teleport the buggers on top of a specific enemy and have them attack it! A game changer, that is! Engorge is another great one – consume a corpse to heal all your demons and give them a speed and damage buff on top.

At level 30 we get Bind Demon, and this is where it gets really interesting. This skill lets us bind any one demon in the game, barring act bosses like Andariel and Diablo, to fight for us. It even persists across games, you’ll only lose it if it either dies, you die, or you actively bind a new one.

My first thought was “Holy shit, let’s try to get Hephasto!”, the big burly armorer found at the Act IV Hellforge. I basically just wanted a hard-hitting, tanky beast to fight for me, but I’d completely forgotten that he always has an aura too – Fanaticism or Conviction are great options, depending on which of the other minions you use. This basically makes him the uncontested top choice for a long time, so we’ll see whether they’ll nerf this in some way.

Whichever demon you choose to bind, be careful, as it doesn’t heal or regenerate on its own – unless the monster in question has the innate ability to do so, I suppose – and you can’t feed potions to it like you can to your mercenary. Which means that using Engorge is the only way to keep it healthy, so trying to keep a supply of corpses around is pretty important for difficult fights.

All things considered, the summoning Warlock basically has everything the poor Necro and Druid have always wished they had. Again, it remains to be seen whether any nerfs might be incoming.

Traditionally each caster class begins the game with a weapon that grants one level of a starting skill. In case of the Warlock it’s Miasma Bolt, which does most of its damage via a small “cloud of entropy”, meaning that it’s an AoE. I was still using that in Act II to kill bigger packs more quickly without having invested any additional skillpoints into it, which is saying something.

I assume you’re noticing a trend by now – the Warlock seems to be designed to have AoE-capabilities right from the start, no matter which route you decide to go. It’s almost as if someone on the current dev team agrees with me that it’s actually not all that much fun to click thousands of baddies dead one by one, no matter how well the game is designed otherwise.

Overall the Warlock is very strong and also a blast to play. I hope they don’t nerf the fun things into oblivion, but toning him down a bit numerically might actually be necessary.

Now let’s talk about the new stash tabs, shall we?

Well, they’re awesome! What did you expect?

I will say, however, that collecting, sorting, upgrading and storing gems and runes has always been a big and even quite enjoyable part of the gameplay loop for me, so I do have mixed feelings about this. There’s no denying how infinitely more convenient this is though, so I would by no means want to go back.

As you can see they’ve even baked the Horadric Cube functionality into these tabs (provided the character you’re on has one), as well as a shortcut to move three gems or runes at once to it, making upgrading even easier. Also, the tab for Essences, Uber Tristram keys and so on also holds both types of Rejuvenation potions, which I really appreciate.

The loot filter is pretty neat, too.

What I really like about it is that each single profile can have multiple independent rules set up. Due to this I don’t have to create a completely seperate profile for my Bowzon, for example, instead I just uncheck the rule “Hide Ammo” and leave everything else as is.

One feature that’s missing, unless I somehow just fail to find it, is the ability to change the colors of specific item types, add stuff like colored borders to them or even have the game play a sound effect when something really valuable drops. These things helped me immensely when I played Path of Exile to never miss anything good.

So there’s still some room for improvement.

Finally, let’s adress the elephant in the room: is this really a proper expansion, and is it worth the admission fee Blizz is asking?

As for the former – that’s debatable. If we don’t count romping through the same five acts we all know inside and out, just with a new class this time, actual new content is pretty thin on the ground indeed.

However, I’m still completely fine with the 25 Euros they’re charging. About a year ago I argued that Blizz selling us cosmetics and stash tabs was long overdue. If they had gone that route I would’ve gladly shelled out something like five bucks each for the three different currency tabs, and another two or so per additional shared tab (of which we got a pair). Which means that I basically got the Warlock, various new items and a slightly overhauled endgame for a grand total of six Euros. As far as I’m concerned that’s a pretty great deal.

Now get cracking on that wardrobe system already!

No, this is not an early April Fool’s joke! I took that screenshot myself, ingame, just a few minutes ago.

Yes, Diablo II Resurrected has really gotten an expansion! New Class! New items and runewords! Additional endgame activities! Loot Filter! (!!!) Currency Stash Tabs! (!!!!!) …

…and I’m too fricking sick to play right now, goddammit!

So my deep dive and subsequent report will unfortunately have to wait, but I at least wanted to let y’all know. You can find all the details here.

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few days after talking about the Barbarian being a hot candidate for my next Diablo II Resurrected character I indeed started playing one. Or more precisely, I dusted one off that had been lying around at level 24, unused, for quite some time.

My initial plan for him, shortly after D2R’s release, was to use Frenzy as his main skill. However, I then decided that I wanted to level a buffbot-Barb on my second account first and use Frenzy as a means to get him through the game quickly. In doing so I had to realize that I don’t actually like the skill all that much.

First off, you basically have to clobber each single enemy one by one, and for my taste that’s never been a recipe for success in an ARPG. Sure, D2 doesn’t throw nearly as many mobs at you as, say, Path of Exile, but it’s still too damn many to deal with them more or less individually. A Frenzy Barb compensates for that with speed, but therein lies the second problem: he moves too damn fast for me to be able to control him properly. I’m not getting any younger, you know.

So after the buffbot-to-be had beaten Nightmare difficulty – and given me motion sickness in the process a couple of times, I kid you not – I immediately respecced him into his warcry-build and didn’t touch the other Barb again for almost two years.

I’ve always been a big fan of the game’s class-specific elite sets though, and since I now had a complete Immortal King set at my disposal – yet another “first” for me – it felt about time to give that Barbarian another shot.

The set’s centerpiece is a two-handed hammer, so using Frenzy or any other dual-wield skill doesn’t work with it, which suits me just fine. Some other skills, like Concentrate and Berserk, are purely single-target and thus out of the question for the aforementioned reasons.

Which leaves Whirlwind.

I’d never played a WW-Barb before, and to be honest, I didn’t expect much. But boy, have I missed out! I respecced into it at around level 40, and it’s so much fun!

The skill works like this: you point at a certain spot with your mouse; then, when you activate WW, your character starts spinning around in circles and attacking a couple of times per second, depending on weapon speed, while continuously moving towards the target spot at the character’s normal walking pace.

I didn’t think about it before, but what’s really remarkable about this is that you actually deal damage while moving. Usually you can either attack/cast or move in D2, but not both at the same time. It’s hard to describe how very different Whirlwind feels due to this, but it’s totally awesome. It’s especially great against weaker monsters – you don’t even slow down, you basically run them over and keep moving.

Now, technically speaking it’s also a single-target skill, as each individual attack hits only one enemy in range. You can get that speed up to about five attacks per second though, and coupled with a hard hitting weapon this shreds normal packs in a heartbeat. Even uniques and their minions don’t take very long to kill, and while it’s not the most efficient build to farm act bosses it can do even that pretty stress-free, albeit more slowly.

Speaking of stress-free, holy crap, dude is tanky!

His passive skills, which increase armor and resistances, combined with the massive HP and armor buffs from his warcries Battle Orders and Shout as well as a good amount of life leech make him a tough nut to crack indeed, even though he’s not wearing a shield. Aside from the Annihilus he also has no resistance charms whatsoever in his inventory, and they still all hit the maximum of 75% in Hell difficulty.

This is of course mainly due to the IK set itself giving a good deal of bonuses on that front. As it occupies a whopping seven of the ten available gear slots it kind of has to though, so it’s pretty well thought out in that regard. Also, all pieces except for the hammer sport pretty high armor values. Enhanced by the aforementioned buffs the total thus reaches a magnitude where it’s actually worth a damn, which is not something many D2 characters can achieve.

As I’m writing this he’s just spun his way through the first two acts on Hell difficulty, and I didn’t need to use a single potion of any kind! As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure his health never dipped below half, not even when surrounded by enemies while also being poisoned and/or cursed, which just…doesn’t happen! It’s a completely new experience to play the game like this.

The IK set brings two more features to the table that I really dig.

One, with the full array of set bonuses active the hammer deals all kinds of damage. Literally. There are six types of damage in the game, and it deals a good amount of each and every one, as seen above. Consequently he pretty much doesn’t care about immunities, another luxury not many characters have. Sure, he can’t leech off physical immunes, and those take a bit longer to kill too as that’s the only part of the hammer’s damage that gets increased further by his Whirlwind skill and Mace Mastery, but I feel that’s a small price to pay for not needing a sunder charm, a way to cast Necromancer curses and stuff like that.

The second “special feature” is that the gauntlets also get a bonus for wearing the full set which reads Freezes Target +2. I don’t know exactly how the game calculates this, but from experience I’d say that the corpses of normal monsters shatter at least 80% of the time now. Champions shatter less commonly and uniques only rarely or not at all, I’m not sure on that.

What this means in practice is that, for example, Fallen Shamans don’t keep resurrecting their foot soldiers all the time anymore, because there’s nothing left to resurrect. I’ve always found those to be quite annoying when playing melee characters, so I like this a lot. The downside is that the usual practice of Barbarians using the Find Item skill to loot corpses a second time doesn’t work with this set, and Necromancers won’t like grouping up with you either, but I can live with that.

In addition to all of the above playing a Barbarian also has some more universal perks, regardless of the gear and main skill you’re using.

Two of his passive skills increase run/walk speed and stamina, respectively, so he’s generally pretty fast (which also benefits Whirlwind move speed) and can sprint basically forever.

Furthermore, his skill Leap Attack is the only movement ability in the game aside from Teleport that can actually cross non-traversable terrain like rivers and sewers in Act 3 or lava in Act 4, which is obviously super practical.

Lastly, since his warcries are AoE effects his mercenary is tremendously tanky too. Unfortunately my mercs are chronically undergeared (and I’m usually too lazy to log in my buffbot just for that), so I’m used to them dying regularly, especially on my Sorceresses who actually use them to tank stuff. Well, this one just refuses to go down, which is another very welcome side effect of playing this big hunk of meat and muscles.

And there you have it, the IK Whirlwind Barbarian in Diablo II Resurrected. Highly recommended.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to dip back into Diablo II Resurrected after about a year-long break. I’d been without a game that managed to really grip and excite me for quite a few months, and I was definitely missing something. Since D2 has never failed me in that regard it seemed like the perfect time for another comeback.

Sure enough, it has delivered once again. Right now I play whenever I can, and think about playing when I can’t.

Of course it helps that they’ve really done an outstanding job with Resurrected, and still continue to improve it on a regular basis without messing up the basic formula.

For example, I’m still having a tremendously great time with my Frozen Orb / Hydra sorceress, which only exists because Hydra, along with a couple other hitherto underused skills, was reworked in patch 2.4 and is really good now.

The build is fun, and also relatively safe to play, because both skills can deal damage from quite a ways away. The hydras in particular can easily reach enemies off screen or behind corners, which makes fighting dangerous opponents like Nihlathak much less perilous.

I’ve also come to really dig Terror Zones. I mean, I liked the idea behind it right from the start, but didn’t actually enjoy them all that much in practice at first.

What bothered me was the game setting an arbitrary schedule for my gameplay. Zones in D2 aren’t created equal in terms of layout, enemy types and -density as well as various other factors, so I naturally prefer some over others for farming or levelling.

However, by now I’ve come to terms with the hourly rotation. Playing in different areas does make for a more varied experience after all, and whenever one of the few zones that really aren’t worth running come up I just do something else for a while, like playing an alt.

The main thing that’s won me over though is the loot. Within a matter of about two weeks I’ve found many awesome items scattered across various different terror zones, some of which so rare that they’d never dropped for me before, and I didn’t think it was ever going to happen either.

The Griffon’s Eye, for example, dropped in Nihlathak’s Temple, though not from the boss himself, but from a random monster on the way. That’s the magic of terror zones for you.

In addition to better loot the mobs also give lots of XP. A couple of years ago I talked about level 89 having been the highest any of my Diablo II characters had ever reached, and at that point Baal runs were pretty much the only thing that moved the bar at all anymore. Well, my current sorceress hit 90 a week ago and is now well on her way to 91.

I will say though that I still enjoy boss runs the most. Andariel, Mephisto, Baal and the Uber-key bosses retain their status as my favourite targets. But even those benefit greatly from the new(ish) system, because whenever their lairs are terrorized they seem to drop even better loot, and every monster I kill on the way has the chance to do the same and also gives noticeable amounts of XP to boot.

Speaking of bosses, the event I’m most happy about right now is getting my first ever Annihilus charm.

Interestingly, this item only exists because the game had a massive duping problem back in the day (duping being the illegal duplication of items by utilizing bugs or glitches). The most-duped item by far was the Stone of Jordan ring, and to get those out of the economy again Blizz devised a system where players realmwide needed to sell large amounts to NPC vendors in order to spawn Uber Diablo in every Hell difficulty game on that realm. Killing this pretty strong foe guaranteed a unique small charm to drop, the Annihilus.

As far as I know the rampant duping has long been a thing of the past, but they decided to keep the whole system in place. They may have reduced the number of SoJs that need to be sold, but other than that nothing’s changed.

Which means that we can still get our hands on this powerful charm, but it also means that every ring that’s ought to be sold has to be acquired the hard way. It’s not a common drop either. Personally, I’ve yet to find my first SoJ in Resurrected – and I’ll definitely keep the first one or two, should they eventually drop, as it’s quite a good item (it wasn’t duped that much just for the hell of it).

There are websites that try to keep track of every realm’s status – the approximate number of SoJs that have already been sold can be displayed ingame – but still, at the end of the day only the player(s) that sell the last batch know the exact point in time when Uber Diablo will spawn. If you don’t have a Hell difficulty game open at that exact moment you’ve missed the opportunity.

About a week ago my time had finally come. I was farming with my sorceress when the message “Diablo has invaded Sanctuary” appeared. My heart skipped a beat, and I may or may not have screamed out loud “Hell yeah, finally!!!”.

However, my second thought was, damn, I need my Paladin for this. The sorc might be able to kill the bugger too, but it would be a lot harder and probably cost me quite a few XP due to deaths. Fortunately I always use password-protected lobby games to play, specifically because I can join those with a character from my second account. Usually I use this to mule stuff around or to buff my main character with an Enchant sorceress (great for levelling up alts), but this time around I just logged her in to keep the game open safely and then switched my main account to the Paladin.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

So, yeah, for over 23 years now I keep coming back to D2, mainly because it’s just an overall awesome game that holds a special place in my heart, but also because it still has, after all this time, new experiences and huge endorphine rushes up its sleeve. At least for me.

Uber Tristram’s next. Great Evils, beware!