Diablo 2 challenge until D3:

[LTCrystallite]

-Single Player, Lan or Bnet affixed group (no joining baal runs etc) on Hardcore
-No Buying Potions (You can only use potions you find, including antidote/stamina)
-No Act 2 Mercenary
-No Runewords
-Full quest playthrough (do all of the quests)
-No Hammerdins or Frozen Orb sorcs
-No Gold or Items xfers/bank help/entering other games to get gold via Cows or others

The goal is to play D2 with caution and fear rather than playing it through like it's a farming or leveling job. See how far you can get up to defeating Hell Baal.

[Hellfury]

I tryed diablo2, 4 days ago and gave me a major headache, I cant play with that resulotion, I know about the reshack but that makes it worst cause I need a magnifying glass to see anything

[Exhorder]

I tryed diablo2, 4 days ago and gave me a major headache, I cant play with that resulotion, I know about the reshack but that makes it worst cause I need a magnifying glass to see anything

Play in windowed mode (add -w to the end of the shortcut). Game looks much better that way, helps me alot .

[Silentwrath]

My pick would be either of these when starting from zero:

Variant a) Summoner necromancer --> faceroll through everything in negligible gear, just takes a bit more time without a might merc
variant b) Full blizzard and synergies sorceress with act5 merc --> takes more skill, but entirely possibly

Used these setups at start of every ladder reset, can get to Hell Baal without any problems. Normal Duriel and Diablo are the biggest headaches in the progression because they can pretty much 1 or 2 shot you with bad luck

[Hellfury]

Play in windowed mode (add -w to the end of the shortcut). Game looks much better that way, helps me alot .

Thanks, but its too small, D2 clearly didnt aged well its system of 640x480 or 800x600 only its pretty restrictive

[Bigbazz]

Seems a bit pointless to me.

No buying potions? instead just waste lots of time for no reason, probably OOM.
No act 2 merc? As if he is going to live for more than 5 seconds without the best gear anyway, barbarion merc is better if you lack gear because he won't die so easily, no real great advantage to be had from an act 2 merc unless you can seriously gear him. pointless.
No hammerdins or Frozen orb? Why, whats so special about them? not a lot, thats what.
No baal runs? Instead just spend ridiculous ammounts of time farming exp on lesser mobs endlessly before you can progress, for no reason.
No Runewords? Because pointlessly restricting the gear you use makes a more enjoyable gameplay, if you're playing from scratch you're not going to make any runewords of any particular power anyway.


Its an "If you dont have a job or a social life and can play Diablo 2 24/7 with really random restrictions, until D3 comes out" challenge.

[Braum]

I always had fun on solo Hardcore with /players 8 toggled.

[Kittahsmash]

No Frozen Orb Sorcs? Alright, Blizz Sorc it is!

[herpecin]

Thanks, but its too small, D2 clearly didnt aged well its system of 640x480 or 800x600 only its pretty restrictive

when D2 came out 800x600 was awesome.

gotta remember really how old it is.

[Cairhiin]

With those rules everyone will just roll a Fishymancer.

[Bigbazz]

Summoner necromancer becomes really useless really fast without the right gear, especially without a healthy supply of mana pots to allow you to spam curses, any hard boss is just going to crush your skeles within seconds.

I have a full trangs set + beast runeword and a torch summoner necro on closed bnet at level 81, with a proper skeles summoner spec, and to be honest he is fairly useless compared to my barbarions. You need a decked out act 2 might merc, plenty of summoner grand charms and preferably much better gear than the trang oul set if you want to do some real damage as a Summoner. None of which is going to happen if you're starting from scratch without gear handmedowns ^^.

[Cairhiin]

Summoner necromancer becomes really useless really fast without the right gear, especially without a healthy supply of mana pots to allow you to spam curses, any hard boss is just going to crush your skeles within seconds.

I have a full trangs set + beast runeword and a torch summoner necro on closed bnet at level 81, with a proper skeles summoner spec, and to be honest he is fairly useless compared to my barbarions. You need a decked out act 2 might merc, plenty of summoner grand charms and preferably much better gear than the trang oul set if you want to do some real damage as a Summoner. None of which is going to happen if you're starting from scratch without gear handmedowns ^^.

Fishymancer requires really little gear to succeed. Mana wise true it can be harsh on mana but mana pots are relatively easy to come by without buying them though. The only thing that will hurt is the lack of a might merc. I leveled a Fishymancer last ladder reset to 90 without issues. So totally untwinked. For this reason Fishymancers can stack the highest amount of MF as it doesn't really affect their killing speed. However on the negative side, Fishymancers are the slowest killers in Diablo 2 which does make 500+ MF kind of a must.

EDIT: This could be a bug, well it probably is a bug, but since patch 1.12 (i think) Reviveds are near enough immune to damage. I've seen them tank Diablo in Hell without too many issues, and Diablo is a pretty trivial kill really. Just summon 10+ Reviveds (any type will do from the Chaos sanctuary but my favourite are the Knights) and the rest normal skeletons (no mages) and you steamroll everything. Add a Clay Golem for the slow effect, and use Decreprify and its well super super easy.

[VXFadhel]

With these kind of rules , certain classes already been ruled out. Thats not a challenge, a challenge should be something doable but hard. A challenge like that is impossible for certain classes. You should make challenge for each class, aka separate rules for each.

Edit: Removed (near impossible) part.

[Hellfury]

when D2 came out 800x600 was awesome.

gotta remember really how old it is.

I agree but 1024x768 or even 1280x1024 was already widespread, seems like D2 has those restricted resolutions cause of the stupid 3Dfx Glide, they only added D3D at the very last minute.

There was alot of games for that time that could take any resolutions and properly scale with it

Original Starcraft wich is older and WC3 wich is 3 years younger can scale fine and can run properly on today's machines if properly patched