My noob gaming experiences in d2r, decided not to play Diablo 4 beta or open access because I was having so much fun.
The past month been playing Diablo 2 Resurrected season 3 ladder way more and completed both normal and nightmare difficulties. Now I am in hell the final difficulty, my character is a blizzard sorceress with a few runewards created, a couple very early and the last two extremely late at level 80 doh. Being a noob in a game with endless types of gear some of which is extremely rare surely I have vendored some good stuff. I made a mule to store more set gear in case I play another type of character in the season 3 ladder since it would appear I am going fast mostly playing SSF aka solo no trading.
Some things I did pretty good like collecting a ton of runes, at level 79 I got my first high rune of ‘lo’ which is not super good for me at the moment. When playing the first two difficulties the game campaign was not super hard, I died quite a few times and my act 2 mercenary died way more. Mistakes I made were not creating runewards soon enough during leveling, these are powerful pieces of gear that are created by putting in special rune into a base piece of gear. In many games with gear you have various types gray-white-blue-yellow-orange-red etc., usually the white stuff is trash. In d2r those white or gray items can be bases and with the correct amount of sockets and runes put in them in a specific order can create the powerful runeward with various affixes.
Update I realized after writing this post that there is a runeward called fortitude that can be made with ‘El Sol Dol Lo’ runes and I have all of them or I thought. After looking better at the runes I found out my rune was not a ‘Lo’ rune but an ‘Io’ rune so it just a low rune, all my dreams are now shattered.
When I hit hell difficulty for the first time ever I was getting slapped down fast due to me attempting to fight more powerful enemies with (cold) resistances which made them impossible for me to kill at first. The main issue was my own resistances were in the red as it was something I never paid attention to much until hell mode. I kept playing and making very slow progress by changing charms in inventory and was between 12-36% in all 4 resistances, this was way too low so I could die easily.
Back to the being slow to create some of the easiest runewards, I found that by creating an ‘Ancients Pledge’ runeward alone got my resistances almost all up to the max of 75%. It was a simple white kite shield with 3 sockets I got from act 1 normal charsi, already had a ton of the 3 runes needed. Then my helmet which should have been the very first runeward I made at level 80 ‘lore’, it’s not super special but has a +1 skills and better than my previous ones. This was so backasswards, lore should have been my first at like level 25 ish.
So in all my character has 4 runewards and mercenary has the insight runeward to help me maintain mana better, but keeping him alive better is current progress. My runewards spirit (sword), lore (cap), ancients pledge (shield), and stealth (chest). My mercenary has insight (poleaxe) and some exceptional low damage but medium resistance gear only and needs some huge upgrades.
When I didn’t have resistances high enough lightning was usually killing me.
Hell difficulty is now just a little bit easier, I was honestly expecting my character to be much tougher but it’s barely noticeable at 75% all 4 resistances. Even though resistances were boosted my defense stat went down about 100 points due to gear changes which seems to be more important than I was thinking. One way to boost that is to get better higher level base white gear since I am using the normal difficulty bases, believe that is how it works. Now I can progress a bit better because the past few days have slowed to a crawl due to hell and low resistances, currently on Hell Act2 to make the staff for Tal Rasha tomb quest. I am gaining about 1-2 levels each day, max is 99 then the game turns into perfecting your gear and finding even better stuff and fighting uber bosses, I think!
After spending some decent time playing this game daily I can see why in 20+ years people still love this game, which got a facelift in 2021 with a few new features. This game is huge on trading so there are places online where people trade gear for forum gold or the runes, I am not taking part in that type of thing for now. Another thing is getting your gameplay options, key bindings setup to make moving around, and popping some skills off faster. I binded teleport to my extra mouse button for instance, learning to efficiently manage your sash/belt slots with potions and knowing how many you have really help too, it’s a skill in itself especially early.
Very surprised I ended up loving this game, my first reaction months ago was ‘wow such an old looking and feeling game’. It’s pretty clunky and inventory space is tight, but the gear system is one of a kind. It blows the doors off of D3, but its a very different kind of game.
