Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Game: Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Developer: Blizzard North
Platform: PC
Release Year: 2001
Stephen's Rating: 9/10

I'll make a note here that this blog entry encompasses both the original Diablo II and its expansion Lord of Destruction as I never played the original by itself.

Basic Plot

The story follows after that of the original game. You spend the game following the tracks of the Dark Wanderer who is essentially your character from the original Diablo who is being slowly corrupted by the soul stone.

During the course of the game and the expansion you encounter and defeat all of the three prime evils, Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal.

The druid class on the character selection screen.

Gameplay

Diablo II is an action role playing game similar to the original but much broader in scope and complexity.

You start the game by choosing one of the character classes. Each class has vastly different skills and abilities, and even within a single class you can drastically alter the way you play the game. The character classes are:

• Barbarian -The ultimate melee fighter class. Abilities involve special attacks and weapon specialization, improved defense, speed, and damage, as well as battle cries.
• Paladin - A multi-talented warrior who can specialise in a variety of roles including a melee warrior with elemental attacks, or even a caster using the "blessed hammer" skill. Paladins use defensive and offensive auras to augment their abilities.
• Sorceress - The standard caster had three tiers of spells; fire, cold, and lightning. If you wanted to progress to Nightmare or Hell difficulty you needed to ensure you had specialised in at least two of these elements as most monsters were immune to one of them. If you knew what you were doing this was probably the most powerful class in the game in terms of damage output.
• Amazon - A ranged warrior who could specialize in bow or javelin, augmenting these weapons with lightning, fire, cold, magic or poison damage. She also had passive abilities which improved her all-round combat abilities and could summon allies.
• Necromancer - One of the primary summoning classes. Many options for summoning undead allies, as well as pure bone magic attacks if you wanted to be a damage dealing caster. The necromancer could also theoretically become a melee warrior with his poison inflicting abilities although this was a tricky path to take.
• Druid - Jack of all trades, master of none. My second major character was an elemental druid who had cold and wind abilities. I took him through most of the game but found in lacking in damage later on. There was also a summoning tree with many options but less diverse than the Necromancer. Additionally there was a shapechanging tree where you could turn your druid into either a werewolf or werebear melee warrior. Both were inferior to the skill of the Barbarian but were an interesting challenge. Only in the expansion.
• Assassin - Another character available only in the expansion. The assassin took either the role of a melee warrior with martial arts abilities and finishing moves, or in essence a caster with the use of traps. My primary character was a trap assassin, who I go to level 91 and who I solo'd Hell difficulty with.

 The three druid skill trees. Each class had three trees to pick from, often specialising in one.

The expansion pack introduced the concept of synergy. Certain skills gave passive bonuses to other skills. The player also had (from memory) 116 total skill points to spend if they reached level 100, and skills could be raised to level 20 as a maximum. This gave each character around 5 skills they could max out to 20, with some extra points for utilities or skills required to reach higher tier ones. The end result was very diverse set of paths each character class could go down, each providing a completely unique experience.

As with the original levels are randomly generated each time you start or join a new game. This allows for a slightly different playing experience each time which adds to the replayability. There are exceptions to this rule such as some of the zones where you fight bosses as well as the cities.

Items and equipment were a huge part of the game. Items came in tiers; white for normal items, blue for magical items, yellow for rare items (magical items with better buffs), gold for unique items (had a unique name, many of the best items in the game were unique), green for "set" items (having the complete or partial collection of a matching set of these items provided improvements). Finally the player could find items with sockets where they could place gems or runes to improve them. The ultimate use of this was to create "runewords" by combining a certain combination of runes in the correct order into an item with the correct number of sockets. This turned a socketted item into an item of immense power.

A boss fight in Act V.

When the game was new multiplayer was big on battle.net. When I played it the game was already very old, and we played over LAN only. The game was primarily co-operative but you could do PvP by mutual agreement.

Positives

The combinations of characters and skills meant there was huge scope for customising a unique character for yourself. There are countless numbers of character builds posted all over the internet, with a fair amount of creativity left to the player in designing them. This is in stark contrast to World of Warcraft where classes are very limited - there are essentially a set of "best" skills which should be picked for each role.

The items were diverse and interesting. There was nothing more exciting than seeing a "green" or "gold" item drop from a boss and wondering what it might be.

The experience gain was very well balanced. Even into the high levels there was always a "sweet spot" where you could go to level fairly efficiently. Being able to put on /player8 in single player also greatly improved the experience gained from monsters.

The culmination of all of the elements of the game made for a fantastic and rich experience that was highly addictive.

Negatives

I found that multiplayer was lacking in some respects. Although it worked perfectly well and I got a lot of joy out of trading items and building up sets and runes, when we played we spent most of the time in different parts of the map essentially competing for loot.

A druid casting tornadoes.

Memorable Moments

Some of the character builds I tried were:

• A werewolf druid (my first character). Was fun in concept but very weak without good gear and I quickly fell behind my friend playing a fire sorceress.
• An elemental druid going down the cold/wind path. Very versatile and lots of options for damage dealing. Was amazing until I reached Hell difficulty where I couldn't deal enough damage to progress.
• A "wolverine" paladin build where I put skill points toward an aura which regenerated my health as quickly as possible. I was regenerating health faster than enemies could hurt me, but the side effect was that I couldn't do any damage. Fun to try it out though.
• A trap assassin focusing on the death sentry trap due to it's dual lightning and physical damage, with fire blast as a back-up. This was the ultimate build for me, not dependent on good gear and could solo Hell without too much difficulty.
• A "hammerdin" to trial it out. Powerful but boring.

We had a lot of "mule" characters whose sole purpose was to hold items for our other characters, along with a spreadsheet of all the set and unique items we had. We probably spent as much time managing all of this as we did playing the actual game.