I've somehow never played Diablo II. I just started last night and ended up playing until 2AM. Damn, this is fun. Barbarian with two axes chop chop chopI'm having these annoying graphical glitches in my inventory and character menu, though. Anyone have any idea why I'm getting that nasty gray in the weapon slots? The footage I've looked up doesn't seem to have it, and black is rendering just fine on the globes. I'm using D2XD but I get the same effect if I just launch the .exe, too.
Glad you are enjoying it. Barbarian I find falls off hard in single player however. You are extremely gear dependent which means a lot of your skills are essentially noob traps until you find an especially powerful item that you think can carry you a good section of the way.
>>11497264Being so reliant on your gear drops as a melee archetype may not seem so weird if he's coming from Diablo 1.
>>11497271Diablo 1 has reasonable gear scaling though, and the game still throws you a bone with quest items every so often. D1 is also a slower pace about managing enemies and angles.D2 mutated too hard onto encouraging huge screenwiping one click spells. At least when you get Chain Lightning in D1 you are facing enemies who are immune to lightning.
>>11497275>Diablo 1 has reasonable gear scaling though, and the game still throws you a bone with quest items every so oftenAnd hopefully you get quests that are favorable for your class. My recent 'no reset' normal run with the warrior really screwed me there.
>>11497275D2's itemization isn't terrible until Hell difficulty though. Use cheap runewords (Steel, Strength) for basic weapons, use cheap runewords and crafted items for armor, run previous bosses repeatedly for chaff sets/uniques, or if you're extremely desperate, walk in and out of town to reroll shop inventories to spawn a cruel weapon. The only problem with all the above is that it basically requires you to look up a guide on how to do most of that except for boss grinding.I completed Act 5 Hell with a magic Cruel Colossus Blade I bought from Larzuk, it just took running in and out of town a few dozen times to spawn it.
>>11497264I'm trying not to worry about that too much. I really just wanted to swing two axes around.My goal is to hopefully beat the game on the base difficulty without looking into typical strategies and solutions. Pretty much every ARPG I've ever played I looked into too much at the start and became bored with the game before coming close to finishing it.
>>11497339you're gonna get schooled by the act 2 boss and the act 3 jungle
>>11497408Bring it on.
>>11497413Not him but I'm gonna give you a hint and tell you that the act 2 boss is the biggest pleb filter in the game and you better get a merc with an ice weapon, tons of thawing potions, tons of gold, tons of town portals, good armor and a keen wit or you will get your butthole stuffed.
>>11497339Nightmare/Hell are hardly different anyway. You go through the exact same maps, quests, monsters, and you are not going to get much different in terms of unlocked skills. Yes the enemies have their stats inflated and the stats on your gear gets inflated.
>>11497325>I completed Act 5 Hell with a magic Cruel Colossus Blade I bought from Larzuk, it just took running in and out of town a few dozen times to spawn it.That is a very revealing story about whats important in stats for weapons. Did you do HC?
After you complete the game at least once and know what you're doing buildwise, try a hardcore run.
So no one has any input on the weird visual issue? Bummer. It's just annoying enough to bug me, and it makes me paranoid that there are other things I'm just not picking up on yet.>>11497557I'd love to.I look forward to experiencing D2's fabled necromancer some time. I was too dead set on splitting skulls to do it right away.
>>11497481Why'd you ruin it for the newbie? He just said "bring it on". Don't spoon feed these people. I hate to see it.
>>11497582>So no one has any input on the weird visual issue?Can't help, sadly. I ran into issues getting graphical mods working through my current setup.
Hard to see what you mean about the inventory screen. Is it just really low resolution? Are you using any mods? Are you playing on a big screen? Sometimes old games just have shitty textures in some places. Could be a color issue or a GPU issue. It seems like people are having a lot of trouble with AMD's. I'm in no position to actually help. I just wanted to directly address it because no one else has and you asked.
>>11497623Futzing with the gamma and contrast seems to have helped. I tried that earlier but didn't like the results. Whatever, it's better and I'll live.>>11497629Thanks. I didn't want to make a tech support thread, so I appreciate the discussion people have squeezed out of this.Look at the background behind my axes in the OP. There's a noticeable swatch of gray that I think was supposed to be black or at least darker gray, looking at footage of the game elsewhere. It's more noticeable on the experience box here >>11497582.I'm using D2DX, which is a wrapper for DirectX 11 and allows higher resolutions (though I'm not using them), filtering (which I am using bilinear), alt tabbing, and some other stuff. But, I was having the same issue even if I directly launched the vanilla .exe.It seems more or less fixed now, so whatever. I don't know why the default gamma and contrast settings would result in such a messed up image for me, though.
>>11497513Not on that character, the only HC character I've ever actually cleared Act 5 Hell on was a Zeal Paladin. HC is an entirely different beast in terms of how you play and what's important and it's a lot slower than the carefree nature of SC.For regular softcore though, you basically just want a weapon with high max damage. There's other important stats, but the difference between a so-so weapon with middling damage that just sort of noodles things down vs a weapon with a massive amount of damage and nothing else, be it attack speed or leech, is absolutely massive.For a Barbarian, grab a level appropriate cruel weapon, keep a wand with amplify damage charges in your second weapon slot (Or try to find Atma's Wail so it auto-casts amp damage on things you hit), then go with Whirlwind or another physical skill for clearing things. Make sure to get lifesteal on your weapon or gloves, use the Blood crafting recipe if you can't find it.2H swords are great because you can easily switch between 1H+Shield to shore up resists and 2H for higher damage when you don't need it. Get a shield with high resists (Socketed Perfect Diamond or Um), high defense and block, but try to find enough resists on your armor to hit the cap otherwise. You could still keep a 1H and 2H weapon to swap between as you go, but finding everything you want on a 2H sword is just easier unless you really, really love axes or spears or whatever.
I'm an absolute diablo 2 nerd. But i have only cleared hell offline with an amazon. Got a buriza (before they nerfed the pierce stat) in mephisto nightmare that carried me until the end of the game, shit was so fun.
>>11497184I don't really see the graphical issue you're talking about. Are you just talking about brightness/gamma? You could try D2GL and see if it changes anything: https://github.com/bayaraa/d2gl/releases
I just feel wrong playing anything other than Warrior in D1 and a zeal builds in D2. I’ll fart around with other characters but they never stick.Going give a real, actual effort to play sorcerer on devilutionx this time around
>>11497325Runewords were a blight on the game honestly. The powercreep on them is so insane compared to normal difficulty blues, yellows, and even uniques. Biggest issue was that it is all meta-game knowledge. You aren't going to uncover any runewords playing blind, except for one at the very end. And if you do look up runewords, then what's the difference with looking up a full play by play guide for your class?Anyway OP, my only advice is to avoid putting any points into Weapon Specializations until you reach Act 4 and start finding gear that you think you are going to finish the game with. Regular skills and warcries are your bread and butter for now.
>>11498793>>Powercreep features? In MY Diablo expansion?Yeah, it happens.>Biggest issue was that it is all meta-game knowledge. You aren't going to uncover any runewords playing blind, except for one at the very endYou could've also experimented with rune combos as well as work with other players back during the game's heyday for rune and cube recipes. Failing that and on the fully casual side, these runes can still give some nice stats for someone just going through normal and some of nightmare blind.
Any reason to play the original Diablo II over the remake?
Diablo 2 is only fun on permadeath
>>11498568It's definitely related to gamma, but that screenshot was taken with the slider in the marked middle. My gameplay is noticeably brighter than videos I see online and this guy's >>11497623. I'll give your link a try. Thanks.>>11498793>Anyway OP, my only advice is to avoid putting any points into Weapon Specializations until you reach Act 4Haha oopsie!!
>>11498793>Weapon SpecializationsSuch a dumbass idea>'master of arms' guy is married to one (1) weapon type, any other class fighting with a weapon can use any type equally well, frame data notwithstandingWhoops there go 60% of your skills in that tab!
>>11498837It's free. I don't have to touch Battle.net servers. If I finish the original game and want more, there are overhaul mods that aren't compatible with Resurrected.It being free is really not as big a deal to me as simply not having to give Blizzard money they don't deserve.
>>11498837If you really want the original graphics, OG will run them better than toggling in the remaster. Also I preferred the original Cinematics.Besides that, the remaster is pretty dang good.
>>11498793>And if you do look up runewords, then what's the difference with looking up a full play by play guide for your class?Bingo. >You could've also experimented with rune combos as well as work with other players back during the game's heyday for rune and cube recipes.No one does that. No one ever did. They looked stuff up. Blizzard revealed all the runewords. If you wanted to just test a 2 socket for runes A,B,C there are 6 different ways to socket them (12 if you don't know runewords don't ever have duplicates) and even if you got enough copies of runes A/B/C to test all 6 or 12 combinations all you did was test on one thing. Some runewords only work on certain things (ie you could test the combination on a helm, a armor, a sword, an axe, a mace, a bow, a crossbow, a pole arm, a scepter, a spear, a dagger, a staff, and the only correct item was a wand). And if you did manage to do those hundreds of tests it could very well be that A,B,&C do not produce a runeword at all. And runes just put into a basic item are garbage compared to rares and even blues you find on the ground.ITS A GIMMICK. They took something they already had (uniques and gems) and made it so you need to just collect multiple parts and constantly refer to guides to even remember what parts fit with which.It's superficial, like all gimmicks are. You are being mesmerized by the complexity of it all when it's just bloat. If they wanted a system where players had some agency instead of relaying solely on drops there is already a system in place for that. It's called shopping. They could have just had merchants that sell special gems/uniques which are always in stock either for gold for a separate currency (say instead of enemies dropping runes they drop 'runic power' which is traded to the merchants). But using mechanics that are already there to achieve the same result with less mess doesn't have the same spectacle as a gimmick.
>>11498921>Weapon SpecializationsSuch a dumbass ideaIt makes more sense when you consider this game is supposed to be played multiplayer first and single player second. People being married to certain weapons prevents people from fighting over the loot. Most people play the game solo and all systems in place where designed for multiplayer. It's kind of sad.
>>11498837Mostly og modding and community. If you already played d2 to death there's project diablo 2 which does a ton of rebalancing for original game and introduces something of an end game with maps.
>>11498912>Haha oopsie!!It shouldn’t be too bad finding the specific weapons you like to specialize in.>>11498968>IT’S A GIMMICK.Yes and it’s not too far removed from ‘crafting’, or finding specific pieces of a weapon and putting it together. Finding the ‘magical runes’ may not have the same impact as finding all the pieces of the Equalizer, but the concept is there as well as some choice of what kind of gear you want to put it on. I like it.
>>11498968Should have been a smaller rune pool where everything is independent of item class. Just make the bonuses much more manageable instead of absurd shit like Sorc getting leaf at level 10.Just a "+1 to all fire skills" that you can slap into any kind of item would be neat.
>>11499007Most crafting tends to be pretty gimmicky. Same results as just finding gold and buying stuff unless there are some rare reagents involved.>>11499013D2's devs are were mostly about making things big and complicated for it's own sake rather than something getting big and complicated as a result of the depth from refined things combining. Early on they had an idea for monsters dropping parts you would have to horde to combine into different things. Than they had the cube. Both, like the runes, are conceptually really big but it's just poorly balanced bloat. Like look at all the cube recipes that are cutsey (combine a spiked club and a shield to get a magic shield of thorns etc) and would have been just as bad as the runes if they actually continued developing it. You'd need to constantly consult a guide and horde things for all your cubes/monster parts.I agree with you this sentiment>Just a "+1 to all fire skills" that you can slap into any kind of item would be neat.Could have just turned the runewords/runes into gems/jewels. And rather than needing to collect triplicates of everything to upgrade them just a have a few upgrade items"Gem of +1 to all fire skills"+[1 lesser upgrade widget]="Gem of +2 to all fire skills"Like there are a lot of ways they could have given player agency over their items without having you need to constantly look up guides or have a stash with dozens of different widgets. Especially if they made it so you paid gold or used merchants for some of them. It's already a system in the game. Don't need to have any more systems than are needed. I think ultimately a convoluted mess of a system does more to sell the game than a simplier, tight system even if both achieve the same results because of the wow factor hearing "there are 33 runes and you can combine any rune into another rune and you get further bonus by combining runes in a secret order".
>>11499071>Most crafting tends to be pretty gimmicky.Yeah and that's fine. It's another means of acquiring new gear and with some degree of personalization.
>>11499101What I've been emphasizing is we already have a system in place to give you agency for acquiring gear. It's called shops. You go out and get money, you trade it for the gear you want. It's way less of a mess of a system, works with all the systems (the loot system is already set up for getting gold). You can gate equipment by just moving the merchant to later city. And if you want something that is totally custom that's something merchants do in real life.It even makes sense thematically. The black smith or enchanter is the one doing the crafting. That's his job. You are an adventure, you go kill things, sell their stuff, you don't spend time learning how to use magical items to enchant gear. You spend your time killing and pay other people to do that for you. Instead your character is just a master alchemist, master black smith, enchanter has learned a second language so they can read runes, and has all the arcane knowledge of hoardric artifacts, and whatever things the crafting system has. Just makes no fucking sense and fails to represent a proper fantasy story.The vast majority of crafting is superficial and could be done away getting the same results with merchants. It's just that most people (yourself included) are wowed by spectacle and prefer a bloated crafting system to a simple one even if they get the same result (and in many ways BETTER results as I described above).
>>11499117>And if you want something that is totally custom that's something merchants do in real life.Later Diablos do this in having a retinue of craftspeople follow you through the acts. I like that more as well but I'm not offended that I have to use the Cube in D2.
>>11499161I love D2. But it's filled with issues, the whole genre is. And they get addressed at a much lower rate than I would like to see.
I play single player vanilla lod and modded quite a bit. Sometimes private servers.Poe just can't get sound design as good as d2. It's not even close
>>11499187>I love D2. But it's filled with issuesJust like all my favorite games, especially a sequel as good and big as this one. Things could have also become just as wild if all these powerful runewords and gear were instead acquired through merchants, and at least with the Cube being portable I don't have to port real quick (one of my bigger issues with the 'genre', I guess).
>>11498837Beautiful cisgendered Amazon
>>11499195Recently burned out on PoE2. Got deep into mapping and just lost all interest. Came back to D2 and exploring the modding scene for it a bit more. I think the fact that PoE2's campaign felt like so much like D2's made me want to go back to D2. For me at least between the sound design, the monsters and environments nothing comes close.
>>11499007>It shouldn’t be too bad finding the specific weapons you like to specialize in.I signed up to swing axes. It's what I'll be doing. I'm set.Incredibly based clip.
>>11499203>Things could have also become just as wild if all these powerful runewords and gear were instead acquired through merchantsPower creep is an issue. It's a seperate one. For me the point was that runewords are bloat (either adding nothing new or what it does add could be done in a way that gets to the same result simplier), meta-gamey, and part of a larger trend of having the player not be an adventurer who pays tradesmen for their work but being an adventuterer who is also a master trades man.Power creep has always been an issue. Every patch either introduces new power, makes previous power easier to obtain, or makes a bunch of "quality of life" that end up just being a form of power (like when the game first came out merchants didn't sell mana potions so you needed to make sacrifices on stats if you wanted certain mana availability). I just see that as a part of the general trend of games getting easier. D2 started with no synergies, very low drop rate, no runes, etc. It's not just you now deal more damage but you need to make less sacrifices to meet certain goals (such as easy mana sustain, high resist, continuing to scale your damage). I feel like that eventually lead to stream lining. Like how D3 devs look at Diablo 2 and said "Well you get infinite mana so easily we ought to just scrap mana potions and statting for mana, just give you the sustain upfront."
>>11499517>D2 started with no synergies, very low drop rate, no runes, etc. It's not just you now deal more damage but you need to make less sacrifices to meet certain goals I disagree wholeheartedly. Drop rates were nerfed to the fucking ground because of how bloated the multiplayer economy was, to the exclusive detriment of single players. Enemy armor values also skyrocketed to make them more tedious to fight.I'm not some weird puritan saying 1.0 Vanilla was the only way to play, but for me, I have always enjoyed single player games more. So when the devs curve the balance towards the online grinding autists, it doesn't deter them. It just hurts me.
>>11499572Well one of the major issues with the genre is it the mechanics were designed for party play but most people play single player. The drop system is one example where it's clearly designed for multiplayer. if you play SSF you never see a unique/set and if you do it's almost certainly not for your character or not for your character range. And that poverty drop rate is needed to balance out an economy.The class system is another. Being able to do aoes is something a class would bring to the party. That's fine. But when there is no party member the fact the barbarian/paladin can do these aoe buffs doesn't make up for their poor aoe.Like you basically need two separate game modes. Maybe three. SSF, "partying with friends but not trading", and the big economy game. It feels like each one wants the levers of balance set to entirely different things.
>>11497603There's nothing to ruin. OP is a bandwagoner NPC using mods on his first playthrough and making a thread for a game he's only played for 30 minutes. There's nothing I can get from this thread other than indirectly boasting about my knowledge of the game by giving it to newbie that I know will still get rekt anyway, and hoping that it will somehow lead to meaningful discussion.
>it's the vanilla D2 autist that hates runes againrunes are one of the coolest things about D2 and you've somehow found a way to hate them because of faggoty calculator logic. you are a douche man.
>>11499591I actually kind of appreciated how D3 handles this by giving single player NPC followers a bit more flavor. I just wish the game didn't do just about everything else.
>>11499195>two shuckle plushies>even more turtle plushies>Fidget spinner >I lieks turtles.webmwhyyesiamautisticchadfacehowcouldyoutel.pngbased botter ill never call d2 gold sellers filthy chink spics ever again because of this image
>>11499195poor cat, imagine how many semen particles it must have on its fur by laying in that spot
>>11499610>OP is a bandwagoner NPC using mods on his first playthroughI’m “bandwagoning” a 25 year old game? You’re retarded, dude. I could see you trying this if it was Resurrection’s launch week and I was here, but that’s not the case. And the mod I’m using strictly makes this game run and scale to my monitor without issue. I wouldn’t normally post about a game I’ve barely played, but half of my post was a tech issue.Anyway, blow me. You successfully got me to explain myself to you, but you’re still a worthless faggot in the end.
>>11499195>Bob Ross energy drinkI wasn't ready for that one.>>11499517>and part of a larger trend of having the player not be an adventurer who pays tradesmen for their work but being an adventuterer who is also a master trades man.That seems a strange trend to antagonize.>>11499721There have been some interesting D2 takes and posters over the past few years in these threads, so be wary.
>>11499721>dude I can't be bandwagoning because the game is oldYeah, just like 23 year olds buying PVMs and HDMI-modded N64s aren't bandwagoning either, because it's all, like, old n' stuff lmao. I'd respect your post if you had played the game vanilla, beaten it and offered your thoughts; instead you literally downloaded a game, modded it before even experiencing it in its original form, and immediately made a thread about it. Please, my son, you must realize how this is very gay behavior.
>>11499721>Anyway, blow me. You successfully got me to explain myself to you, but you’re still a worthless faggot in the end.you getting this butthurt about being innocently chided with typical fourthchin lingo is not doing your argument any favors, honestly.
>>11499739>dude I can't be bandwagoning because the game is oldNot when there isn't a large cultural impetus.>I'd respect your post if you had played the game vanillaI did try it vanilla. As anyone could have guessed, it scaled poorly to my monitor and made mouse sensitivity incredibly uncomfortable. I already dealt with that with the first Diablo - there was no reason to subject myself to a half-working PC game instead of downloading a simple wrapper.Your respect isn't needed. My only hope at any time here is that someone won't derail a thread for ridiculous reasons. But that's increasingly my fault with every post, so I'll take the hook out of my mouth now. I'm just thankful anyone replied to me seriously and used this thread to actually talk about games.>>11499753>typical fourthchin lingoIt was nonsensical and unnecessary. I didn't need more proof of how many posters we have running around this board with the bad kind of autism.
>>11499798>Your respect isn't needed. My only hope at any time here is that someone won't derail a thread for ridiculous reasons. But that's increasingly my fault with every post, so I'll take the hook out of my mouth now. I'm just thankful anyone replied to me seriously and used this thread to actually talk about games.You sound like a complete diaper baby dude.
>>11499798There's been a consistent "mostly d1/d2" thread so you technically did that guy a favor, though I haven't seen him around since he beefcake'd that warrior and dunked on Diablo.
>>11499813>warriorshit *barb
>>11499591>Well one of the major issues with the genre is it the mechanics were designed for party play but most people play single playerI wish these games felt more suited for multiplayer. Looking at the paladin's trees, he seems to get some decent auras for buffing the party and it looks better than some of the other ARPGs I've played (though I've certainly not played them all), but the times I've played these games with others it just felt liking multiple people wailing on loot pinatas.I think my ideal games is somewhere between Diablo and Diablo II, maybe more on Diablo's end of the spectrum with less emphasis on looting all the time, and MMOs with their focus on community and stricter role definitions. Obviously party-based RPGs that demand multiplayer seem to be less and less appealing to the market by the year so it ain't going to happen.
>>11499818One thing about party play is when you have people who plan their roles in advance and use some tactical thinking (like you and your friends decide to make characters and work out a plan) you crush the game so hard. In diablo 2 it's not that hard for 1-2 characters to lock down mobs with freeze/stun. Players can stack buffs and debuffs that help each other, bring multiple aura mercenary). If you wanted to design the game to half way challenge a tactical, organized group you would need to do much more than just buff monster health. The monsters would have to basically be built like armies in tactics games where they hard counter certain party members and cannot be taken at all without having several of your guys tactically break their formation. And that would render the solo or even the PUG group of 3-5 people who made their characters separately and are partying totally impossible to win.
>>11499709>based botterNah, I just multibox to rush and mule when I play on private servers that allow for more than one connection (most allow 3-4). Depending on how I'm feeling I'll use a maphack, but never botting.Usually I just play single player with PlugY so I can horde random junk with the infinite stash space and not get any latency. On vanilla i love bone necro, but 200fcr light sorc is the most fun for minmax grinding.
I had my first unique drop.It was hard enough to not beeline to paladin when I first booted up, but all it took was a shield to make the urge rise.>>11499195>Woodman's bagAy caramba!
