Fun and Games in Sanctuary

So I’ve been playing Diablo II for the past while again. What I love about D2 is the fact that all of the classes are fun to play. Usually, I go for the magic using classes in RPGs because melee classes are usually a bore to play. Not so in D2. the non-magic classes are some of the most fun. This has led me to constantly make new characters and experiment with different builds.

Maozedong

Maozedong is my bowazon. She’s the first character of this install. I used to play with an assassin with my cousins on the last install. Anyway, this character started on D2 classic and I eventually moved her over to LoD. She’s the most advanced and she’s survived quite well, despite a few wasted skills and attribute points when I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t even know how she made it past Travincal in Nightmare.

Khan

Khan is my frenzy barbarian. He’s the first barbarian I’ve tried to play and he did quite well through normal. He’s pretty fast moving with frenzy, and with frenzied double-swing, his attack is lightning. He does some pretty decent damage and can mow through things in normal. On the other hand, he has some pathetic defence, something I’ve tried to remedy recently by switching to a defiant merc from Lut Gholein. Unfortunately, he gets hit like crazy in nightmare and dies too easily.

Telamon

Telamon is my defiant paladin. It’s a general misconception that paladins are boring to play. I know I believed that before. I guess it has something to do with the aura taking up the right-click skill. Anyway, Telamon is one of my favourite characters because he has such beefy defence and never gets hit. I’ve had an awesome time running him through all the way to Act IV so far. Basically, all of his points have gone into Defiance and Holy Shield, which now yields about a 500% increase in defence. His attack’s on the weak side, but that’s what the merc is for.

Exdetah

Exdetah is a bone and curse necromancer. I didn’t really want to play a summoning necro because it felt kinda boring. I wanted to try something new, and those curses were quite intriguing, so I went with bone and curses. The thing about curses is that they’re extremely useful with just one point in them. There really isn’t any reason at all to invest more than one point in each curse. So you can just have all of the curses and invest your points into other things.

I chose to invest my points into bone spells instead of summons. Because of the way bone spells synergize, you can have some very powerful bone spells at higher levels. In fact, for Bone Armor, it’s better to synergize than waste points in Bone Armor because the bonus is actually more. So when you put a point into, say, Bone Wall, it increases your Bone Armor and the damage on Bone Spear.

Now that my character has enough mana without running dry after a few casts, I can cast a curse (I like Confuse, it causes enemies to attack each other, diverting attacks away from your party), throw a few Bone Spears around, and Corpse Explode the rest. Yes, this character had a really hard time in Act I, but he’s survived quite niecly through Act II. He was able to go through the Claw Viper Temple without dying, something my melee characters couldn’t do.

The End

And so there you have it. I’m definitely installing D2 on my Macbook when I get it. Yes, I’ve settled on getting a Macbook.

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3 Responses to “Fun and Games in Sanctuary”

  1. larker says:

    Macbook eh? I myself am quite for the Macbook, regardless of the naysayers.
    I myself never got too into games like Diablo or Balder’s Gate or whatever… It doesn’t really intrigue me I guess. On the other hand, games like the Advance Wars series are always a hit with me.

  2. blkmage says:

    D2 is a lot more fun with other people and when you’re experimenting with new things. The other thing that I really like about D2 is that Blizzard always takes the time to add immense amounts of backstory to their games. Just last night, I was reading the Starcraft manual and it amazes me how much they’ve thought over their races and the units and how they rationalize the resources and why certain units have certain upgrades. Same goes for D2.

    The interesting thing about the Macbook is that it’s almost as fast as the Macbook Pro. The processor speeds are the same as what the MBP started out with. There are only a few things that the Macbook is missing and that is dedicated video, an illuminated keyboard, that ambient light sensor thing, and an aluminium case. All of the other laptops in my price range tend to be Celerons or Turions, which is not going to be cool later on when I’m compiling huge things in the later CS courses.

  3. AddONE says:

    Hurray, you’re getting a Macbook!

    I’m going to be leased a Lenovo IBM R52 *upgraded*…which has the Radeon X300 64MB O___________o.
    …but that’s not a big deal anyway.
    Everything else about the lap is basically standard though, haha.
    (You can check everything out @ dc-uoit.ca/mobile…cause they’re cool like that)

    I guess you’ll be going for the “Buy a Macbook, get a free Nano!” deal?

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