Stay Awhile and Listen! Let's All Play Diablo II: Lord of Destruction!

Hey everybody, let's all play Diablo II: Lord of Destruction! I'll be the host on this exciting adventure, but I want you - yes you! - to join in and play along with me!

The concept is the same as Sky Render's Final Fantasy V LP and associated group thread. I'll take the lead in playing the game, telling the story and showing off the mechanics, which will free you up to get as crazy and creative as you want with your own posts as you play through the game yourself!

What kind of crazy things could you do, you ask? Well, of course you could find a unique way to tell your story, but you could also give yourself some kind of special challenge if you wanted. You could follow in the feeble footsteps of Irene the Infirm and play a character with no skills, no stats and no equipment. You could also make a barbarian who refuses to fight with weapons or a necromancer that hates to kill things.

You could pick a silly or strange skill to build a character around, like Leap Attack, Grim Ward or Find Item. You could make something unusual but surprisingly effective like a melee-based sorceress. Or you could keep it simple and just make a really good, powerful character to show off the value of a solid build.


Ultimately, you can take whatever approach you want with your playthrough. Just be sure to have fun!

I'll be posting character guides and maybe some other basic information about the game in the coming days in order to give you some time to get started. If you want to be a part of this shindig, just let me know in the companion thread and I'll add you to the list.

Once the LP proper begins, I plan on posting an update every couple of days or so (he said, brimming with foolish optimism), with each update covering one quest/boss during Normal difficulty and multiple quests/bosses during Nightmare and Hell. Don't worry too much about matching the timing of your updates with mine. As long as you don't get ahead of me and mess up the continuity everything should work out just fine.

And that's it for the introduction! LET'S DO THIS

That's all well and good, Bungle, but...what is Diablo II?

It's a video game, silly! One that you play on your computermotron.

I know that much, jerk! What kind of a game is it?

I said it's a vide-no wait, come back! I was just kidding!

Diablo II is a hack-and-slash RPG made by Blizzard (well, Blizzard North) that features randomly generated play areas occupied by vast armies of monsters for you to slay. Your job is to save the world of Sanctuary from the Prime Evils get stronger so you can collect awesome loot, and to collect awesome loot so you can get stronger.


Okay, so why should I play it?

Because it's one of the greatest video games ever made, that's why! The combat has real impact to it, and the presentation is bolstered by exceptional art design, animation, visual effects and sound. Every monster offers its own challenge that requires you to think (at least a little) about how to approach it in combat, and while the game is the clicky-slashy-casty sort, it throws enough variety at you to prevent itself from becoming a mindless clickfest. It's also very mean and will gladly kill you if you let your guard down for too long. Or even if you don't! The game keeps you engaged because you have to be in order to survive.

In short, it's just fun to play. It's challenging and varied and it constantly gives you lots of feedback. Smack a monster, get a reaction. Smack it again, watch its tortured spirit rip itself from its cursed body at it screams out its death wail. Hear a magic sword clang to the ground as the body falls, pick the sword up, move on. Diablo!

Furthermore, each of the seven playable characters is totally different from the others, and every one offers a diverse assortment of skills for you to experiment with. These skills aren't simply separated by minor cosmetic differences or negligible variances in damage output. They all have specific functions, strengths and weaknesses.

The way you invest in these skills has a dramatic impact on how your character develops and, consequently, how you experience the game. For example, a paladin that focuses on Zeal is a significantly different character from one that focuses on Smite or Blessed Hammer. The variety of gameplay experiences offered by the characters is the most compelling factor that draws me back to the game again and again.

And then of course there's the Skinner Box nature of treasure hunting, but that's video games for you.

But really, the very best reason to play Diablo II is that it will make you cool like me, and everyone wants that, don't they?

You want to be Bunglecool, don't you?


Yes, I do! I want to be Bunglecool more than anything! How can I get my hands on this magical game that will impart such coolness upon me?!

Well, you could grab it from Amazon or your electronic game retail outlet of choice, or you could create/log in to a Battle.net account and grab the downloadable version. It's worth every penny/other minor unit of currency, I assure you.


Alright Bungle, I have or am getting the game and I want to join in this LP! What do I need to know in order to get started?

Installing the game is simple enough, and it'll run on PCs and Macs of even ancient vintage, but if you want to run it in Windows 7 or Vista you'll have to do so in compatibility mode.


Speaking of running the game, here's a neat thing: as of the 1.12 patch, DII is now playable without a disc! This is a huge deal, as the game tends to hang while reading from the disc and this can lead to all manner of problems, like random deaths. I once walked down a set of stairs, saw the screen go black, heard the disc spin up, and then found myself dead when the game resumed. I was in the second to last room on the final difficulty level and believe you me, if I hadn't already died once during that playthrough I would have been mighty furious. As it is, that incident turned a one-death run into a two-death one, and that was still pretty lame.

So here's how to avoid that!

Some people, myself included, have gotten an error when trying to copy D2Music.mpq to the hard drive. If this happens to you, you can just download the file here.

Of course, if you downloaded the game from Bnet you won't have to do any of this! You can also play with the disc if you want, but I don't recommend it.


Once the game is installed, your next step is to create a character. There are actually several ways to do this, and I want to explain them up front because the type of character you choose will affect your experience of the game and determine whether or not you'll be able to play with other Talking Tyrants who are involved with this LP.

In this case, I'm not talking about choosing a character class. Instead, I'm talking about whether or not you make an online or offline character, and what type of online or offline character it is.

Here's a rundown of the different types of characters and what they have to offer:


Single Player: A Single Player character is played offline, is saved on your hard drive, and can only play with other Single Player characters over a TCP/IP connection (where one player hosts the game on their own computer). These characters do not have access to the regular DII online features and cannot play with online characters.

There are several advantages to playing a Single Player character. For one thing, having your saves on your hard drive means that you can back them up in another folder, or even send them to other people (while I'm certain that Blizzard frowns upon this, they really don't care what you do with your offline characters. Their concern lies with what people do online.)

Single Player characters also have access to third-party support software that can be exceedingly helpful, and they can be used to play mods, which - at their most extreme - make DII into an entirely different game. Playing one of these mods might be a good approach for your part of this LAP, in fact!

Good examples of third-party software are ATMA, which allows you to easily move items between your characters, and PlugY, which, among other things, allows you to respec your skill and stat points at will and gives you access to many online-only features.

I actually have a hard time playing the game without ATMA. The classic approach to sharing treasure among your characters is to make a bunch of level 1 "mules," whose only purpose is to hold all the random items you collect so that they'll be available when you have a real character that needs them. With ATMA this becomes totally unnecessary. Not only can you move items between characters freely within ATMA, you can also just save the items to your computer so you can load them onto whatever character you want.

ATMA is absolutely not approved by Blizzard, but the function that it offers is so essential to proper Diablo play that it has already been implemented in Diablo III. "Muling" is dumb and horrible and I'm glad to see it go.


Another advantage enjoyed by Single Player characters is the "/players" command. By opening up the chat console (hit Enter) and typing "/players X," with "X" being a number between 1 and 8, you can simulate a game with multiple players in it. Every additional player in a game increases the strength of the monsters, but also increases their experience payout and the quality of the items they drop. Many veteran players play exclusively on "/players 8" because of this. What's even better is that you can change the number of players at will, so if you want to fight through a dungeon on "/players 1" and then switch to "/players 8" just before the boss to make it drop better loot you can do so.

If you do use "/players," just remember that the number of players will revert back to 1 whenever you leave a game. You have to set it back to 8 when you start a new one.

Personally, I prefer to play Single Player characters over any other type. I have a huge stockpile of items to choose from, and stuff like ATMA and PlugY is just too appealing or essential to go without. However, online characters have their advantages as well, which we'll go over momentarily.


Hardcore Single Player: A Hardcore Single Player character is exactly the same as a Single Player character, but if a Hardcore character dies even once then it is lost forever. Seeing as Diablo is a game in which death is pretty much a certainty, this is meant to be the ultimate challenge.

Realms Character: An online character, commonly known as a Realms character, is a character that is created and played online, on Blizzard's Battle.net service. You make one by choosing the Battle.net option on the title menu, as shown here:


A Realms character can create and join online games and can play with other Realms characters. Having an online character is the easiest way to play DII with other people, and it's probably the option you'll want to choose if you plan on doing this LAP with other Talking Tyrants.

Just be sure that you're all playing on the same realm. You select your realm by using this option here:


Realms characters are saved on Blizzard's servers and will eventually be deleted if you go for several months without playing them. Furthermore, they do not have access to useful third-party programs like ATMA. Even if you do find a third-party program that works for Realms characters, you really shouldn't use it. Do whatever you want with your offline characters, but messing with Realms characters is very much against Blizzard's rules and is just bad form in general.

So why should you play a Realms character at all, if they have so many disadvantages compared to Single Player ones? There are a few reasons. For one thing, a Realms character has access to Battle.net and the people who play there. Other players can trade items with you, help you run bosses, rush you through parts of the game, and aid you in other ways. By trading with other people online, you can easily get your character decked out in the best gear available (there is going to be a rule about dealing with other players during this LAP though. I'll bring it up later.).

Another major reason to play a Realms character is that they have access to a set of super strong bosses that offline characters do not. These bosses provide the ultimate challenge in the game and are guaranteed drop two of the most obscenely powerful items available.

While these bosses can actually be unlocked for offline characters with PlugY, playing online is the only legitimate way to get access to them. Additionally, the final three of these special bosses do not behave the same way in PlugY as they do online, because the code for their AI and the minions they spawn is stored only on Battle.net and the creator of PlugY doesn't have access to it. The end result is that the final three bosses aren't quite as difficult in PlugY as they are online because they don't have the same ability set and they don't constantly spawn minions.

Finally, I find that playing a Realms character encourages me to play "pure," which means not giving my character gear from mules and only using whatever I personally find in my own games. Of course, everyone else uses online characters as an excuse to get all the best gear from other players (or buy it with real money, which is horrible), but whatever.


Ladder Character: A Ladder character is a special type of Realms character that is ranked on a ladder with other Ladder characters. The ladder records level and experience gain, and the ultimate goal is to reach the top by getting to level 99. This is a rather preposterous endeavor, as it takes months (yes, months) of mindless boss grinding to get up that high. It's also totally unnecessary. You can easily get to a high enough level to beat even the extra bosses in a couple of weeks of gameplay.

The real, non-insane reason to play a Ladder character is that they have access to some very powerful items that other characters do not (unless you play an offline character and use PlugY). A Ladder character can find and make some very nice ladder-only stuff, some of which is available fairly early on in the game.

Every six months (supposedly), the ladder resets and all Ladder characters become normal Realms characters so that the ladder race can begin anew with fresh characters. Fortunately, ex-Ladder characters get to keep whatever ladder-only items they got while on the ladder.

The other major feature of the ladder is that monster AI is significantly improved there, making enemies faster and smarter. This does increase the challenge a bit for Ladder characters, though I haven't found ladder games to be all that different from non-ladder ones.

Hardcore Realms/Hardcore Ladder Character: Hardcore Realms and Ladder characters are just like their regular counterparts, but are rendered unplayable if you die.

It's important to note that characters of any type can only play games with other characters of the same type. A Realms character can only play with other Realms characters, and a Hardcore Ladder character can only play with other Hardcore Ladder characters. Keep this in mind if you plan on coordinating games with other Tyrants for this LAP.

The one final option you'll have when creating a character is choosing whether or not to make it an Expansion character. This option is selected by default and should not be disabled. Unless, you know, you don't want access to any of the features of the Lord of Destruction expansion. Which is inadvisable.

So uh...what does that all mean? What kind of character should I make?

If you intend on playing alone or want to make use of various third-party programs or mods, then make a Single Player character. With the right software support, a Single Player character has access to nearly every facet of the online game, and can also do all kinds of things that an online character can't.

If you want to play online with other Tyrants, make a Realms or Ladder character. I recommend Ladder, as getting access to additional items outweighs the slight increase in difficulty in my mind. But again, remember that you and any other Tyrants you want to play with must all be the same type of character and play on the same realm.

If you want to give yourself a major challenge, make a Hardcore character, either online or off. I wouldn't suggest this option for a new player, unless you want your LP to be really short.

I want to play with you, Bungle! You're so handsome and charming!

Yes, yes, I know. So okay, the thing is, I probably won't have time to actually play the game while I'm working on this thread. I've already finished playing my character and now I'm going to focus on writing.

However, on the off chance that there will be some Bungle x TT online lovin' at some point, I'll tell you that the character used for this LAP is a Ladder character on the U.S. East realm.


You know, this game sounds kind of complicated. Can you point me to some useful sources of information about it?

I sure can!

Before the concept of wikis was widespread across the internet, there was The Arreat Summit. It was, and still is, the greatest monument to Diablo II that exists. Use it. Love it.

There are a bunch of DII wikis nowadays though. Most of them are the same and all have lifted huge chunks of information from The Arreat Summit, but they have their uses. This one seems to be as good as any.

You can also find some good DII forums here and here.

This skill calculator is exceedingly useful for planning your characters out before you build them. Planning character builds isn't as important as it used to be now that the game offers one respec per difficulty level, but knowing your build ahead of time is still helpful. The calculator is also nice for comparing the effectiveness of various skills against one another, but don't judge the value of a skill based on its damage output alone. There are lots of other factors that come into play in-game that determine a skill's true worth.

And finally, I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I've done quite a bit of writing about the game here on this very forum. I will be recycling/rewriting some of that stuff in this thread though.


Neat! So earlier you mentioned a rule about dealing with other players. What's up with that?

I did! You have a good memory!

There are are few rules in place for this LAP. There aren't many, and they are flexible, but here they are:

-No cheating with online characters. Again, feel free to do whatever you want with offline characters, but don't mess around with your online ones. It's not cool, and Blizzard doesn't like it.

-No playing with any player or character that is not involved with this LAP. This is a Talking Time LAP. If you've got random people online rushing you through Acts or carrying you on boss runs, that's kind of lame.

-No trading of items with any player or character that is not involved with this LAP. To keep things as interesting as possible, I would like for every character involved with this LAP to only use items that drop in their own games or games played by other LAP characters. I do not want everyone out there trading with people online to get high level rune words and whatnot.

There are two exceptions to this rule. The first is that this restriction is lifted the moment you beat the final boss on the Hell difficulty level. Once the game is "finished," you may trade as much as you like to gear up your character. In fact, trading for items online or grabbing items from your own personal hoard is (almost) necessary if you intend on challenging the extra bosses later on.

The second exception is that this rule doesn't apply if you decide to play a special type of character that requires a very specific set of gear in order to work, like ol' Gunter the Barbarian Mage, who I mentioned in the introductory post.

And no, "I need Heart of the Oak for my character to work properly!" does not count. I'm talking about situations in which you have a gimmick character designed around abilities it can only get from specific items.

You are a strong but fair overlord, Master Bungle.

This is true.

Are there any other questions you want me to conveniently ask so you can conveniently answer them?

Nope, I think that's it!

oh monkies, i'm so there.

I... kind of want to do this. Fortunately the RPGMakery business is over and I have free time again! And it might be an interesting warm-up to my first real LP in August.

Not sure how to approach it yet. Maybe I might take the one class I've never touched yet and try to play it seriously: Druid. I could never get into them, and most other players I've talked to say they suck on top of being smelly.

Can anyone convince me otherwise? Because otherwise I'm tempted to just roll with a zookeeper Necromancer and snooze my way to Baal.

I won't have time to play, but by gum I'll follow along!

Here's how to make a druid that doesn't suck:

Elemental

1 Arctic Blast
20 Cyclone Armor
20 Twister
20 Tornado
20 Hurricane

Summoning

1+ Oak Sage (Drop all of your extra points into this when everything else is done.)
1 Raven
1 Spirit Wolf
1 Dire Wolf
1 Grizzly

Shape Shifting

Nope

Keep Hurricane active as much as possible (AoE cold damage) and toss Tornadoes (direct physical damage), and you'll be able to smash basically anything. Use Oak Sage as your spirit and Grizzly as your pet. Cyclone Armor is nice when there's lots of elemental damage going around, and you need to max it for the synergy bonus anyway.

Simple, but effective!

You know how to do stats, right? Enough strength for equipment (generally around 100 before bonuses from gear), enough dexterity for equipment (often you don't need any), NO POINTS IN ENERGY EVER, and everything else in vitality.

FUCK YOU BUNGLE!

I'VE GOT A JOB! AND CHORES TO DO! AND A LIFE TO MAINTAIN --- Anddd... and other games! and *sniff* and family to see and *tears forming* and ... and...

*sobbing collapse*

.../reinstalling

That's how I've done the ALWAYS SKELETONS ALL THE TIME Necromancer builds, though the utter lack of Energy puzzles me for a Druid build based around the elemental set. Do Druids get some sort of passive regeneration, or am I relying on the base MP gain and potions to keep him charged?

I tried to load up my DII on my Windows 7 machine a few months ago. After several days running through forums I reached one man who spoke told me these harrowing words:

"If all that didn't work then I guess you can't play. Sometimes Windows just won't play it"

I'll try one more time, because this is a great thread and I want to be Bunglecool, but if not I'll just live vicariously through you all.

DO I dare play? Do I finally play as a Druid/Barbarian/Sorceress?

I've been really interested in this game for years, so I'm glad I don't actually have to play it. I'm really looking forward to the sea of awesome loot and crazy dungeon crawling endeavors.

If you had read Bungle's big block of text you'd see he includes a link to the Diablo 2 forums all about getting D2 to work on Win7/Vista

No sane person should read all of that!

NO JOB

ONLY DIABLO

Druids don't get any passive mana regen, but I got by with base energy well enough. Though I should point out that my guy was overgeared, so he likely suffered from mana starvation less than he would have otherwise.

I have a rule about never investing in energy with any character. Not even (especially not) sorceresses.

i dont even want to participate in the LP part, but i'll fucking play in any game you start, bungs.

Yeah, I've read that forum before. I have followed the instructions, twice! Still didn't play.

Unfortunately I don't have any other advice about running the game in Windows 7. I'm still stuck with XP!

We should try to organize some cooperative Diablo action, yeah. Maybe...just maybe...I'll play as something other than a necromancer with you guys. MAYBE

I don't attempt actiony games these days but I look forward to reading this. Sounds fun. I never got far into... chapter 2? I think.

Man, if I could find my copy of Diablo 2, I would totally join in the shenanigans! But I can't, so I'll just play Torchlight instead, and pretend its Diablo 2.

I'll pretend with my imagination!

So when we get around to posting our own jank do we do it in this thread or the other one?

If I weren't on the other side of the country using my aunt and uncle's computer, I'd be all over this shit.

While I'm a lurk-y type and probably won't try to get involved in the LAP part (else I'd be posting over there =P), this does tempt me to at least follow along, probably as a Paladin aiming for maining Conviction aura. Conviction interests me. (I assume since respecs are available nowadays - and as a single-player character I could just use PlugY anyway - I probably want to focus elsewhere early though?)

Last I played was a couple years back with friends and we stalled out getting lost somewhere in that stupid jungle... Act III I think? Still better than the not getting past the Act II boss I did as a solo assassin.

I remember this game. A multiplayer game that has retained a huge following. It wasn't all that bad even on dialup.

%leech is just unbeatable. I remember having a string of ears.

Black walls say no, dial up sucked. Life leech is the best though, one Werewolf Druid I rolled in the Middle Earth conversion mod was specced to use the move that was like the Paladin multi hit strike but also leeched life, with the legendary Great Maul that had a ton of life leech plus 2 sockets filled with, you guessed it, life leech jewels (not skulls, jewels ) of really high quality. I never died, and anyone who's played the ME mod will tell you that shit is hard.

Those of you who haven't played the game in a while are in for some major surprises!

OctoPrime, we need you.

We need you to Diablo.

Don't you want to Diablo with us?

The other one, I'm thinking. I'll do a normal-style LP over here and you folks can go crazy over there, just like the way the FFV threads are going.

I know where my copy is, but...

Awright, my first update is ready. Now, I wait for Bungle...

Excellent! I kind of want to begin tomorrow, but I'd like to give everyone a little more time to sign up and get started. We'll see how it goes though.

I think I'm just gonna watch this one. I've only really played about ten minutes of Diablo, ever.

I'm up for this. Would be a good opportunity to revive my Warcry/Conc Barb, always love wading into melee and I enjoy the team support with Battle Orders and so on. I'm in the UK so lag may be a small issue, my connection should be stable enough.

Taking and organizing screenshots seems like a lot of work, but I think I'll start the game up and try out a fire druid build. It's been a long time!