D2 Resurrection Difficulty

[Jotaux]

How are you capped on resists in hell? I have plenty of damage level 72 and hammers are at like 4k flat, but I'm not sure where to get more resists. I have about 1200hp and 1600 def in HS right now, and have like 15% resist all, except fire which is like -35%. I get obliterated pretty quickly if I get hit. I have dual spirit, lore helm, a stealth 200 def chest, a decent all res ammy with +2 offensive auras, but my rings/belt, gloves, and boots are just MF fodder at this point. Not sure what to do, but I'd love it if my merc didn't die the first second we step foot anywhere, despite having a good insight polearm, a 1300 def chest piece, and 50% resists.

I'd love some ideas on what I should be doing right now.

I put spirit into this pally shield I found with 39 all resist, that helped a ton. Like you I'm using lore, I did find a naj's light plate with 25 all resist. But even before that I had stealth on and was still near cap with +resist gloves (I had to replace those for cast speed when I lost stealth). Boots, 1 ring, belt all have varying degrees of resist. I found a neck with +27 all resist. I also have a few charms: Small charm with +7 cold resist, large charm with +6 lightning resist, large charm with +6 all resist, Grand charm with +20 fire resist, and a grand charm with +26 cold resist. Yesterday, before I killed Baal, I replaced the necklace with a +1 to pally skills and was at 70 fire resist and 68 poison resist, all else was capped. My mf is actually really bad, only 50 or 75% irc, so mf runs have been shitty. I'm considering just making a sorc purely for meph and lower kurast runs. Oh and don't forget the Anya quests.

For you mercenary you can bug him so he doesn't get targeted by melee mobs. You just go to the inner cloister, go into the jail, come out, run through the door and close it behind him. Then run to the far side and he will teleport to you. If you go that route you will have to bug him every game. You can also put life steal items on him. I basically have to baby sit mine even with the life steal and being bugged. In act 5 I was still dying a bit so I just stopped ressing him.

[RobertoCarlos]

You need enigma to farm efficiently, not to make d2 hell easy as a hammerdin, it is, theres a handful of magic immune in the game that youd need to teleport around or you can just smite them.

I know this because i played d2 for a good decade lol. Yes if you laugh at people saying the game is pretty hard, but play the season start meta: hammerdin, blizz sorc, trap ass. Its easy, because you have that knowledge a new player doesent.

If you played for a decade you should know that hammerdin build is very gear dependent and has no relevance to normal difficulty at all which was the OP's difficulty

[Ange]

If you played for a decade you should know that hammerdin build is very gear dependent and has no relevance to normal difficulty at all which was the OP's difficulty

I played D2 from release (first ladder <100) till WoW KR beta and I would claim hammerdin is pretty stupid to play if you dont have key items like enigma. ALL of the damage comes from positioning and ideal positioning is in the middle of packs or slightly under.

But the difficulty needs some time to diggest and you never really get god-mode-D3 invincibility with gearing. Its a painfull slow grind game and for anything close to perfect rolls you have to trade, since thats even less achievable.

But the games biggest skill filter is SC > HC, you will see dumb things from SC players even with years of gaming, whilte thats "filtered" out in HC. Some people make the transition to HC, some cant.

[RobertoCarlos]

I played D2 from release (first ladder <100) till WoW KR beta and I would claim hammerdin is pretty stupid to play if you dont have key items like enigma. ALL of the damage comes from positioning and ideal positioning is in the middle of packs or slightly under.

But the difficulty needs some time to diggest and you never really get god-mode-D3 invincibility with gearing. Its a painfull slow grind game and for anything close to perfect rolls you have to trade, since thats even less achievable.

But the games biggest skill filter is SC > HC, you will see dumb things from SC players even with years of gaming, whilte thats "filtered" out in HC. Some people make the transition to HC, some cant.

Playing hardcore on these servers? No thanks.

The amount of rubber banding and straight d/cs and lag.

I really dont need the stress to flex on an 20+ year old game

[Vespian]

Playing hardcore on these servers? No thanks.

The amount of rubber banding and straight d/cs and lag.

I really dont need the stress to flex on an 20+ year old game

Maybe that's a US thing. I have to say rubber banding has been minimal for me, as well as other lag issues. D2 has always had minor issues with desync and during beta they were bad, but right now I'd say the game is pretty stable, except for the way too regular maintenance. Of course, things might change. It's by far not as bad as PoE used to be, but GGG fixed the issues completely in PoE. I had hopes the D2 sync issues would be fixed too.

That said, found Tal Rasha's Amulet yesterday. One more lvl

Edit; To reference the "flex" comment. We don't play HC to boast. We play HC, because it's the thing we do. I gave up on PoE HC, because the game is simply not balanced fairly. It's a matter of time vs the perfect build, but every time I die in PoE on SC, I can't find the will to continue playing. It's probably due to having played HC from 2003 to 2010.. it's just not the same.

[PedroloGeo]

Imagine using D2 and difficulty in the same sentence in 2021. Pathetic…

[Ange]

Imagine using D2 and difficulty in the same sentence in 2021. Pathetic…

Let me take a wild guess that you are a WoW classic player, new to most blizzard games and have zero clue about competing in old school grind games?

[seta-san]

i'd like to thank everyone for the advice... but i've been playing d2lod for the last several months. and i've been playing it on and off again for years before that. i know how to play the game. i just seriously feel that especially imp packs have been buffed.. significantly. i'm playing a class i'm extremely comfortable with it's just a strange situation.

[Vespian]

i'd like to thank everyone for the advice... but i've been playing d2lod for the last several months. and i've been playing it on and off again for years before that. i know how to play the game. i just seriously feel that especially imp packs have been buffed.. significantly. i'm playing a class i'm extremely comfortable with it's just a strange situation.

There have been some reports that the "ticks" on the server seem to have affected several abilities, like Fire Wall (? I can't actually recall the ability name haha) and Inferno seem to tick more often in the same time span and I can see how that could have affected Shamans. I will admit that at some point I was fighting about 6 or even 7 Shamans and it just became impossible to get through the wall of bodies thrown at me, but in a vacuum, they didn't deliberately change the difficulty.

And if you had explained your level of knowledge of the game in your OP, it would have been easier to formulate a response. Some people read your post and didn't read through the lines that you have previous experience, but even those that did, couldn't gouge how much.

Imagine using D2 and difficulty in the same sentence in 2021. Pathetic…

Ah, we found our first pro gamer. Probably family of Quin.

[Coldkil]

The funniest part of d2 is that balance starts to actually kick in at endgame.

I mean, since (iirc from when i was modding the game) all monsters level cap at 75 excluding ubers and black diablo, you start to overlevel them just naturally. This doesn't happen during leveling, and some skills/builds are actually better the more points you spend in them so the start of the game is generally rougher.

The balance shifts from being able to kill stuff to being able to kill stuff an hell of a lot faster. And here come the meta builds, which are incredibly proficient at doing so.

And in the end, it's exactly how it was. There's no excuse for new players, as there's so much information already available and valid that explains literally everything because the game is the same as 20 years ago.

- - - Updated - - -

i'd like to thank everyone for the advice... but i've been playing d2lod for the last several months. and i've been playing it on and off again for years before that. i know how to play the game. i just seriously feel that especially imp packs have been buffed.. significantly. i'm playing a class i'm extremely comfortable with it's just a strange situation.

Just an inpression. Nothing has been changed from the original. If there's anything happening it's likely due to unwanted interactions between the old engine and the new hardware.

[justandulas]

It’s not hard at all, it’s easy all things considered

The fact of the matter is older gamers were just better. Our games were made harder, and no difficulty sliders. Even games like the lion king were practically dark souls difficulty.

Games hand holding and making things so easy a caveman could beat it, is really only something that started with the millennial generation of gamers. Before that, games would actually challenge you. Like d2. D2 isn’t hard at all, but it does challenge you and expect you to rise to that challenge.

[Vespian]

It’s not hard at all, it’s easy all things considered

The fact of the matter is older gamers were just better. Our games were made harder, and no difficulty sliders. Even games like the lion king were practically dark souls difficulty.

Games hand holding and making things so easy a caveman could beat it, is really only something that started with the millennial generation of gamers. Before that, games would actually challenge you. Like d2. D2 isn’t hard at all, but it does challenge you and expect you to rise to that challenge.

I agree with the assessment that it's not hard, but offers a challenge. I think we're thinking a bit in black and white's, where easy means facerolling and hard means impossible. I do mean offering a challenge when I say hard. In fact, I would argue that D2 is great at lulling you to sleep and then throwing everything at you at once, once so ever often. I used to (and will be) run Baal Hell, as a sorceress, obviously, and I was teleporting across the Worldstone Keep (and mind you, this is with a decent amount of FCR. It wasn't the topmost breakpoint, but by no means slow) and while I'm doing that, and had been doing that for hours, all of a sudden I teleport in the middle of a pack of Hell Lords, or whatever they are called over there (the bulls with the fury) and one strikes me and I get just stunlocked by the entire elite pack (which happened to be Super Super Fast Fana) and I would have died, if I wasn't in the habit of running a Stormshield and reasonably high Mana Shield exactly for these kinds of events, just so I have enough time to press Save & quit\exit.

It's those moments where you think you have the game beat, it still manages to surprise you. It's not PoE kind of hard, where you have to follow the meta if you want to not instantly get wiped off the map by inevitable damage.

[Video Games]

For me its the performance. I have a newer i7 at 4.5 aand a 2080 super and even on high with normal resolution scaling and 30 sharpness, it goes down to 15 fps frequently. The hell is going on here?

[Jester Joe]

For me its the performance. I have a newer i7 at 4.5 aand a 2080 super and even on high with normal resolution scaling and 30 sharpness, it goes down to 15 fps frequently. The hell is going on here?

Have you tried turning it off and back on again.


But really I have far under you, an i5 I can't remember the number of, a 1050 or something, and haven't had FPS drops outside of when I'm meme swapping between old and new graphics. So I dunno.

[PedroloGeo]

Let me take a wild guess that you are a WoW classic player, new to most blizzard games and have zero clue about competing in old school grind games?

Let me guess, I was playing Diablo II before ur sperm got to find its way into its miserable ovule.

[PC2]

Argh! I don't think I'm skilled and sharp enough to beat this game past hardcore nightmare mode even though I've not died yet. Monsters now get me below half life pretty often... D3 seems so much easier because of the way that paragon stats accumulate and because your account can't lose paragon experience points when you die. That one difference ends up making a huge difference, imo.

[Vespian]

Argh! I don't think I'm skilled and sharp enough to beat this game past hardcore nightmare mode even though I've not died yet. Monsters now get me below half life pretty often... D3 seems so much easier because of the way that paragon stats accumulate and because your account can't lose paragon experience points when you die. That one difference ends up making a huge difference, imo.

What level, spec, class? Solo/single player?

I would recommend doing Baalruns in NM until about lvl 84, especially for new players (and in general, unless you're filthy rich and can take the punch of dying, or if you are speedrunning). Make sure you stack up on resistance and hp charms, gear, etc. Try to be capped on RES, or as high as you can get it for hell. If you're doing multiplayer, do Baalruns in multiplayer and try to catch games that go through Hell.

There's a balance between difficulty and playercount, so you need to be extra careful, but at the same time, having multiple elements working together will make going through hell a lot easier.

Try to avoid immune monsters, this can be especially hard in the underground passage of A1, or the Arcane Sanctuary in A2, various dungeons in A3. You can quit the game and start again to reroll some mob combinations, but you could be unlucky often.

I would help you if my Sorceress hadn't gotten RIP'd yesterday. Now, I'm in the same boat as you are :P

[Mendzia]

Argh! I don't think I'm skilled and sharp enough to beat this game past hardcore nightmare mode even though I've not died yet. Monsters now get me below half life pretty often... D3 seems so much easier because of the way that paragon stats accumulate and because your account can't lose paragon experience points when you die. That one difference ends up making a huge difference, imo.

Really depends on class and spec.
Try to farm easier parts of nightmare to get some good gear and levels.
There are many good runewors with cheap runes that can boost your survability.
On hell it is sooooo much easier to die than nightmare too.

[Ryzeth]

Gotta love how toxic people get when you say their game is easy.

The ad hominem is real.

[Vespian]

Gotta love how toxic people get when you say their game is easy.

The ad hominem is real.

What even is this a response to?