Sell everything and run like Hell. That’s pretty much the philosophy I run when I’m blasting through Normal, but I get slowed down just a bit when I hit Nightmare — usually a result of a definite lack of hardware.
I don’t spend ANY time in the shop. What I find, I use. Improvise and adapt, and take your time working through it. Patience is its own reward.
By the time I’m a level 25, you can be sure I’ve made myself some Stealth Armor with a Defense of around 92.
Hey, if you can’t find a TAL and an ETH by that time, you’re cooked anyway. With luck like that, I wouldn’t buy a lottery ticket, much less risk getting crushed by Mephisto one more time.
Again, I generally don’t die until about level 26, which on average is what I’m at when I’m just entering Nightmare after a gruesome attack on poor Baal, who was just trying to make a living by squeezing the life out of his subjects. Laugh if you will, but that system seems to work in Washington.
I know what you’re thinking.
You think it’s cool to know what someone else is thinking? Oh, yeah??? How would you like it if all those sitcoms you’ve been avoiding for years came rushing in all at once?
Lucky for you that there’s an alternate world at the moment. When we were living in caves in Altamira, it wasn’t so easy to find some amusement or entertainment.
We were very limited in what we could do during the darkness of the night. What was there to do, lacking a radio, a television set, or facebook and twitter?
Back in caveman days, we could only eat, drink, sleep, sit around with your back to the wall, find a spot in the back of the cave and screw on a pile of bearskins and, of course, we could gamble.
Since a zillion years ago, there has always been gambling. People have always found a way to create some form of dice out of bones, shells or sticks. They always find a way to make some kind of cards, and some sort of shell game where you guess where the pea is hiding.
The Roman soldiers played hopscotch, dice and cards for money, to pass the time away. Tedium, boredom — people haven’t budged from that dim past.
And it’s even worse in the Higher Planes, where there are only a few things to do, and all of eternity in which to endure the boredom and ennui.
So what’s the alternative? Play D2R, of course, and immerse yourself in its reality, just as you do in the virtual Ashram and in the World of ZOOM, where you see your cosmic pals as images on a split-screen in “The Real World”.
Haw, haw!!! Looks almost real, don’t it???
No less real than the world of Diablo, speaking of which, if you’re thoroughly immersed in the D2R world, you’ll appreciate that I’m just now getting ready to find a four-socket poleaxe with which to make an INSIGHT merc, so I don’t gotta keep buying MANA pots a million at a time.
Now, when I’m fighting in Nightmare, I have a chance to find a four-socket sword and an open four-socketed shield, to give me my Spirit Sword and Spirit Shield, which is all I need to get through Hell.
Solving the problem of being able to teleport is easy, if you’re very frugal in the use of a TELE weapon, which you bought our found, and which you now carry in your alternate weapon slot.
You’ll pay plenty for its use, so only use it when you’re just on the wrong side of a wall and you can see where you want to go, but you can’t get there without going all the way around.
So that’s when you teleport, just the once, then switch back to your primary weapon, see? Use it infrequently, only when you get definitely stuck or you can see an easy way over the wall.
You know what you get when you cross a wall with a slave? About half way.
That’s a joke you can use after The Great Roundup, on the way to the gas chamber. You don’t want to live your life waiting for that to happen, so get into the World of Diablo before they get you and take away your computer.
But don’t worry — they’ll never take away your guns.
Haw, haw! From Norton Street on the Causal Plane, the whole thing looks predictable and hokey, but in the game, it looks so real!
Most phenomena is or are illusion.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby