If you don’t have a clue what “D2R” might mean, you haven’t been paying attention for the past several dozen years. Here’s a rundown of what you should be doing when you return to Rogue Encampment, and a few clues on how to get started in Diablo II Resurrected:
A short note on drops: don’t pick them up unless they’re going to sell well … but which ones sell the best and which ones are lousy to pick up and are basically worthless?
Eventually, you’ll catch on, but in the meantime, pick up armor, armor and more armor, have Deckard Cain ID it, and then sell it to Akara.
Meanwhile, you’ve picked out the best of whatever drops you’ve managed to find. How do you decide on what to keep and what to throw away? Eventually, you learn.
What is “Experiential Learning”?
Experiential Learning is the subject of this discussion, and it was developed by Dr. Claudio Naranjo, Lee Lozowick, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Venerable Thich Thien-An, Reshad Feild, Chogyen Trungpa and myself for a series of workshops back in the 20th century.
It’s a simple idea.
Rather than intellectual book-learning, the lessons come to you in a series of experiences that are set to provoke the correct level of understanding.
In other words, you learn how to fish by fishing. You learn carpentry by building a house and then living inside it to see how well or badly it works to protect against the environment and serve the daily needs of its inhabitant(s).
So Experience Personally Experienced will teach you which weapons to use, which armor to wear and what drops to not bother picking up.
It doesn’t work as well to learn from someone else’s experience. Maybe you’ve experienced that once in a while.
So Experiential Learning is learning learned by personal experience personally experienced.
Now, what about the settings on your weapons?
First of all, invoke the game and get into it, standing at Rogue near the stash. Press the “Esc” button on the upper left corner of your keyboard, and click into “Options”.
Find the “Controls” section, and scroll down until you see the “F” functions. Starting with “skill 9”, indicate “F9”, for skill 10, indicate “F10”, then do 11 and 12.
That’s all you’ll need.
Now simply assign the weapon or function in-game with the weapons organizer at the bottom of the gaming screen, more or less in the middle of the bottom.
You should always travel with the assignment of that weapons indicator as “F5”, your main RIGHT MOUSE button, and “F1” as your left mouse weapon fire button as well as forward movement.
The way you fire a weapon in D2R is by holding down your “SHIFT” key while you shoot.
This keeps you steady and in-place and makes firing and actually hitting a target somewhat possible at a distance.
Always light up an enemy with your cursor before firing, or you’ll miss, and what’s the point of firing and missing?
Believe me, it won’t fake out the computer, and it’s watching everything all the time. There is no way to hide from the computer while playing a computer game.
It always knows where you are and what you’re doing, sorta like God, Santa Claus and the CIA, all rolled up into one relentlessly objective viewer — that’d be the Dungeon Master, represented by your friendly local software.
So you want to set F7 to your armoring reinforcement, F9 will be your ally — your merc doesn’t have a setting like this — and your weapons will be on “F1” and “F5”.
Don’t stash a bunch of potions in your backback. You won’t need them if you play right. You should get a 4-slot belt at first, but then work toward an 8-slot belt, which you can easily find, and even more easily buy from Charsi.
You’ll eventually figure out which belt is best. Again, Experiential Learning will open the path and point the way.
Need more immersion? Put the sound level a little higher — not enough to annoy the neighbors, and certainly not enough to get a city citation, but enough to make it clear that you’re in a game of deadly battle and great destinies, or you could be playing Diablo.
Just kidding — Diablo is plenty tough, as you’ll quickly discover, when you get into the bowels of Hell in Acts 4 and 5, especially at the Hell level of difficulty.
The other thing I’d tell a newbie is to keep your Between-Mission Routine always the same when you get back to Rogue Encampment or in fact to any of the five towns:
- REMOVE THE MAP OVERLAY — just a simple press of the “TAB” button, pressing down on your MOUSE 3 button, or a quick thumb on your “SPACE BAR” will clear the map instantly, and return it, too.
- RESURRECT YOUR MERCENARY — If your Merc got killed and the body is lying there on the ground, you need to do something, and quickly, before your Merc suffers from the not altogether unexpected “Recently Deceased” state. It costs you money to rez your merc, so be more careful not to get him or her killed, or eventually get driven down to going hunting for more money to keep restoring your dead Merc.
- VISIT WITH DECKARD CAIN — to get your drop items IDENTIFIED for free — this is important in maintaining your personal wealth, which is used to buy equipment and to pay for repair (Charsi) and resurrections (Kashya) in Act One.
- SEE AKARA — to restore health, magic and to trade pots and scrolls — don’t forget to replace your Teleport Scrolls or find yourself trapped in Maggot Lair 3rd Level without a way to get back out except to walk. You’ll only screw this up once or twice before you learn not to leave yourself strapped for tele scrolls — again, that’s due to Experiential Learning. If it hurts, you’ll learn.
- VISIT CHARSI — for “Repair ALL” and any items you think you need now.
- PUT STUFF IN STASH — tuck away all the items that refer directly to your character in that character’s “Private Stash”, and the rest go into “Shared”.
- SET UP WEPS — Hit the F7 three times to armor up, then summon any creatures you need, such as your Golem or any such ally, then set your main weapon with “F5” as the right-hand weapon. After a few times doing this, you’ll get it.
That’s the main routine for when you return to town after a mission — it’s all about repair and restore and stash away what you need.
Don’t pick up anything you don’t need. It just slows the game down, and serves no real purpose.
Keep your stashes CLEAN. Get rid of anything that you really can’t and won’t ever use for any of your characters.
Don’t worry about your friends. There are plenty of drops, and the best solution is to not depend on the drops at all, for which I have a PLAN:
Forge Your Own
Yes, that’s right — the best weapons and armor you can get is what you make yourself. I can make these items and they’re invariably enough to get me all the way through Hell in solo.
ALL runes are placed IN THE EXACT ORDER in which they are stated in the equations:
- TAL/ETH Stealth Armor — You can easily find a double open socket armor and put in a TAL rune, then an ETH rune, but make sure it’s at least 90 Defense, and that the STRENGTH requirement is not too high; certainly it should be just within reach of your present condition.
- TIR/RAL — These two runes in a two-open-socket NON-MAGIC SHORT STAFF, to make a LEAF STAFF, which has tons of attributes in the FIRE SORC area, which might work for you until you decide which element you’ll want as your primary. You can always change your point assignments later, but don’t throw those options away. Don’t change anything until you know how and why. Again, personal experience personally experienced.
- TAL/THUL/ORT/AMN — This makes a SPIRIT SWORD or a SPIRIT SHIELD when placed in that order into a four open socket sword or a four open socket shield — not just any four-socket, either, but again, Experiential Learning will open the path and point the way.
- RAL/TIR/TAL/SOL — Makes your Merc into an INSIGHT MERC, but remember to use only a POLEAXE CLASS four open socket weapon into an Insight. If you try it with a SPEAR CLASS weapon, it won’t work.
- ORT/SOL — Makes a LORE HELM, which might help you at first, but you’ll have to replace it when your character gets into NIGHTMARE. This is the only one of these items that you might outgrow — the others are all good, all the way through.
Well, that’s enough on this subject for the moment, except that you might want to have one of each class ready to receive items that are native to that class. Each “Personal” stash in the stash box should contain only those things that are pertinent to that character’s class. Don’t just shove things in, like you do in the typical storage unit — arrange it and organize it so your items are easy to find and make effective and efficient things to have on hand.
Anything you don’t need right now must be evaluated in the light of future probabilities of finding that thing again. If you probably won’t, then you should probably keep it.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby