Yeah, last night I was sort of stumbling around one or another of the many dungeons you find in NIGHTMARE, and all of a sudden, there I was, facing Baal.
“Wow,” I remember thinking, “is this IT, already?”
It seemed so easy, so casual, and there I was, at the end of the game. Of course, there’s another, higher, level of catastrophe awaiting in HELL, but you HAVE finished the game, in the second-highest level of difficulty.
Well, I laid Baal to waste and to rest in short order, and having dispatched him neatly, my trusty merc helped me to limp on to HELL, where I now reside, in some slight disorder.
You see, I’m currently wandering about in STONY FIELD, which is not as easy as you might think, what with all the LIGHTNING immunes abounding.
While it’s not all that easy now as it was in NIGHTMARE, it’s still not insurmountable, unless you count the IMMUNE ALL creatures wandering around in COLD PLAINS and STONY.
The thing is, I can’t even level with TRIST RUNS, like you can in the lower grades back in NORMAL, because that just doesn’t work here in HELL.
Not much does.
It’s the same game, only up a notch, so why is it SO tough just to get across the street in HELL, where it was SO manageable in NIGHTMARE?
Like Jack Burton says, “It’s all in the wrist.”.
Like I sometimes say, “Don’t turn your back on incoming.”.
And like Abraham Lincoln said, “People will little note, nor long remember.”
Okay, enough “so-and-so said”. Let’s get right to the nitty-gritty, which is HELL. Now, most of the inhabitants of HELL seem to ignore the fact that’s staring them right in the face, which is the simple fact that they are in HELL, and there’s not a damned thing they can do about it, which is wrong.
Whenever you’re between-lives and you’re about to respawn in, you’re given the choice of NORMAL, NIGHTMARE or HELL.
You have to choose one, and you’re stuck with it for that cycle, until you’re between-lives again, where once again you have a choice between an easy run that earns you NO points, and a tougher run that might earn you some points.
Call it MERIT, or EXPERIENCE POINTS, it’s one and the same thing.
You won’t get any MERIT for doing what’s already become second-nature to you. The Easy Path draws little or no score improvement, but you might find some cool magical devices that you can share with your other manifestations, meaning character classes, such as Druid, Amazon, Assassin or whatever you choose as a type of character for your Avatar.
So when the makers of Diablo ii created the game, they first played it in HELL, and then dumbed it down for noobs and fumblers, but mostly for those once-in-a-while players who forget how to operate the controls and what you’re supposed to do and where you should go, and all that sort of thing.
It all must be re-learned each time, right from scratch, from Square One, a sort of “This is a football,” brand of coaching.
When you have to start from zero every single time, it’s a very different game.
So what happens when you’re finished with HELL? You may well ask. What I typically do is I delete the character, usually at around Level 90, and immediately resurrect the character as a Level 1, starting over right from scratch.
Why not?
You’ve done everything in the game, built up your character, found weapons and made items with runes and gemstones and now you’re ready to do it again.
OR…
You could SAVE the character for now, and start another character underneath that character on your characters screen.
You can choose the same class or a different class.
As a matter of fact, you can operate at least seven different characters without having to delete any of them.
It’s when you want to make just one more, that you start running into the limitations of the system.
If you wish, you can keep the great items in a “shared” stash until they are needed. To save room in the “shared” stashes, once you have a character, you’ll take all the accumulated stuff for that class into that character’s “my stuff” screen, the one marked “personal”. Get it?
When you’re playing in NORMAL, you’re just getting used to the graphics and weapons. In NIGHTMARE, you’re training yourself to play the game, and when you’re finally in HELL, you’re actually playing the game as it was created and intended.
Last night I worked on three Orbs and got them ready for Prime Time. Tonight, I worked on TESLA WARS, SEXX WARS and MAYA WARS, all of which work just as I designed them to work.
Can the games be won? Yeah. I won them, and didn’t bother with drops except once in a while when things got crowded and I ran out of armor.
As long as you have armor, you won’t lose life.
You can’t drink any more pots to give you more than 100% of life, so don’t bother to pick them up, if your LIFE is at 100. There is no LIFE 101.
Same with MAGIC. Now, the GOLD is another thing entirely.
In some of my games, you lose points just by standing still, while in others, you are severely punished for moving.
Go figure.
It’s all about game design. It’s not about architecture, although that certainly counts for a lot.
No, it’s how the game times, how it plays, MEASURED BY A SUPERLATIVE PLAYER.
Gosh, those are hard to come by, these days or any days, and that’s why game developers offer games ahead of release to those who would like to promote it or pan it, as they woozes.
Well, heck, that’s always been the best way — get the thing out to the critics and let them tear your work to pieces, that’s the way to market your goods!
I wish we could do that. We can’t. We were one of the THREE first game developers for PC in the trade, but we decided early on to leave the public stuff largely alone, while developing spiritual gaming, and that’s what we did.
We published several games that got millions of downloads, but we chose to ignore that fact, and just kept going with our specialized games, until here we are today, unknown but very experienced in the trade.
I’m releasing 32 NEW games for 2022. They’re the result of four of us working to make them for you, but it all depends on YOU to take action.
I don’t want to make it hard for you, but I can’t and won’t download them FOR you, and I won’t post them FREE, because I don’t want it to be quite THAT easy.
I hope that you will consider downloading ALL my games and trying each one.
You won’t like ALL my games. It’s okay, I never expected you to like ALL the games — nobody likes ALL the games, including me.
I’ve updated games that I wrote some 20 years back, and a few that I wrote ‘way back in 1987 on the AMIGA platform, but now in brilliant PC format, waiting for you to experience them.
I’d love to see these used as Holiday gifts.
Wouldn’t you have loved to have these available to you when you were a kid? Well, get some downloads for your kids today!
There are NO firearms used in ANY of my 2022 games, just magical weapons — no blood, no guts, no giblets. Just good, clean monster-killing fun.
Don’t forget, without you to provoke them, the monsters’ lives are nothing. They live only for you to come by and give them a great battle!
Sounds sorta like Valhalla, don’t it? Every day you get rezzed for another day’s struggle. If you’re a HERO, this is a great opportunity to prove it.
Meanwhile, here I am in HELL again. I found a Wind Force Bow, but I already made something better.
You need LIFE STEAL and MANA STEAL if you run a ZON, and the best place to get that is in a couple of RINGS, probably yellows.
I also found THREE 4 Open Socket swords and made one Spirit Sword for my Assassin, but I’m still looking for a four-socket shield for my Spirit Shield.
My other characters are only in their low 20s, so they won’t have need for anything like that sort of gear at this time.
I prefer not to over-gear my chars, because I want to even the odds, stack them slightly against myself, and the game can’t do that without my help and cooperation.
I deliberately don’t pick up things that might help me, unless it’s absolutely convenient.
I heartily recommend that you store most of your bank account in a SHARED stash, so when you die, it won’t come out of that stash, just out of your ACTIVE stash, the one marked “PERSONAL”.
Learning how to use the shared stashes is quite a trip, worth at least one workshop!
My HELL char can find great items for the other chars, but at level 20, they can’t use them anyway, so what’s the use?
The use is that these drops are happening all over the world, and some of those things are not likely to drop for you again, so you keep them.
But where?
The idea of maintaining herds of MULE accounts is no longer viable. You get one account, period, with a maximum of what looks like seven characters, not really sure how many they’ll let you keep. I’ll be right back.
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That didn’t take long. I looked it up on google, to save you the trouble. The answer is “20”
— you can create and maintain up to 20 characters in Diablo ii Resurrected.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I know for sure that I didn’t. That’s a LOT of characters. You can easily afford to keep your level 99 if you want to, then, so go ahead and put it in mothballs. It will drift to the bottom of the list, if it’s largely unused.
Gee, whillikers, I guess I’ll just go ahead and make 15 more characters — I’m only running five, at the moment, all but the Barb and the Pally, neither of which I tend to play.
My preference is the Assassin, although I’ve been known to favor the Elemental Druid and have on occasion played Necro, although the complexity of the keyboard button attacks and spells and curses and such make it tough for me to unsnarl enough to actually get anything done.
If pressed, I can play it, but not alone in HELL, and that’s why I’m an ASSASSIN and not a NECRO right now, and I’m glad of it, because like I said, I’m in HELL at the moment, and boy, have I got an ARMOR for you!
I always enjoy giving out items at our Bardo Safaris, and I’ll be happy to see you there, learning how to cooperate in the thick of chaos and mayhem, which is where it counts.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby