Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Cover art
Developer(s)	Blizzard North
Publisher(s)	Blizzard Entertainment
Platform(s)	Windows Mac OS Mac OS X
Release	June 29 2001
Genre(s)	Action role-playing game
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is an expansion pack for the popular hack and slash action role-playing game Diablo II. Unlike the original Diablo's expansion pack, Diablo: Hellfire, this is an official expansion designed by Blizzard North.

New features

• A fifth act taking place in and around Mount Arreat in the northern Barbarian Highlands, with an additional act boss, Baal.
• Ethereal items: These items do not fully exist in the mortal plane and appear translucent to the human eye. Because of this, they cannot be repaired, but they also have better characteristics and lower requirements than their repairable equivalents.
• Jewels: items serving a similar purpose to gems in that they can be placed in socketed items, but which have random characteristics as opposed to the set characteristics of gems and runes.
• Charms: items giving boosts to character's stats when kept in the inventory of the player.
• Two new character classes: the Assassin and the Druid.
• An expanded private stash (double the Diablo II stash).
• An alternate weapon/shield setup that can be switched between via a hotkey in gameplay.
• Runes: stones that give powerful attributes to a socketed item when placed in it or even more powerful bonuses when placed in a certain order forming a "runeword" (see section below for more information).
• Hirelings (mercenaries) can now follow the player outside of the Act in which they were hired. They can also be equipped with armor, a helm, and a hireling-specific weapon (as well as a shield in some cases). Hirelings also gain experience and can be resurrected (for a price equivalent to their level) when killed.
• Class-specific items: new items that only a specific character class can use. These items often contain class-specific bonuses, often adding additional skill points for that character class.
• Elite items: more powerful versions of items following the Normal and Exceptional items.
• New unique items, including many Exceptional and Elite Uniques.
• New set items, including sets that use Class-specific items (ie. only one character class can complete certain sets).
• The game can now be played at 800x600 resolution, up from the standard 640x480.

Rune words

A powerful runeword, "Enigma"

Rune words are a combination of specific runes that are inserted into a socketed item in a specific order, producing an enhancing effect on the item. Rune words are especially powerful in versions 1.10 and 1.11, although many of the more potent, higher-level rune words are restricted to realm ladder play only. Some rune words are considered by some to be extremely overpowered and therefore overpopular, such as the Enigma, pictured right.

Druid

This character class is loosely inspired by the Druids, the priest class of ancient Celtic societies. The druid calls forth wolves, ravens, and bears to fight by his side; he has a slate of elemental and other nature-based spells, including Volcano and Cyclone Armor.

The druid's most unique ability is shapeshifting, allowing him to assume various animal forms, including wolves and bears, which raise his attack power at the expense of magic; the only spell he can perform as an animal is Armageddon, although this is rarely done as to get Armageddon one would have to go through most of the Elemental Skill Tree, wasting many skill points that could be better used to increase Shapeshifting skills.

Assassin

The Assassin is primarily a melee class, but she is more subtle than the barbarian and the paladin and does not rely on brute strength. The shuriken related skill tree and the katar give this character a much more East Asian feel than the West Asian/Muslim Hashshashin they are named after.

The assassin introduces a very different style of play into Diablo II. Her shadow disciplines consist of Amazon-style passives and barbarian-style masteries, along with a few spells such as Mind Blast which confuse the enemy. Traps are a new way of attacking enemies; she can lay five at a time, and once laid, they fire (or activate) a given number of times at nearby enemies before dissipating.

The Assassin can cast spells from the Martial Arts, Shadow Disciplines, and Traps skill trees.

Patch history

The expansion was released in Summer 2001 as version 1.07, the same version as the beta, but the 1.08 patch was available for download on the same day. Within a few months, 1.09 was released. This was the last patch for two years.

The much hyped patch 1.10, released on October 28, 2003, radically changed the game by increasing the difficulty of monsters (especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties). Blizzard also implemented a system of "synergy" bonuses between skills to give players a reason to invest in low level skills, added more high level unique items and rune words, enabled resistance-lowering skills to break immunities, and provided a new hidden Realms-only quest to defeat Uber Diablo and gain a special, powerful unique charm called Annihilus. The patch was preceded by the Rust Storm, a sweeping clean-up of most or all hacked, duped, and otherwise illegitimate items on the Realms.

The patch also introduced the Ladder, a competitive mode of Realm play that lets you get your name on a list akin to the "High Score" listing in arcade video games. The Ladder is reset periodically – when this happens, all Ladder characters are converted to normal characters. This provides a fresh and equal start for everyone once in a while, even though Blizzard does not reset the Ladder very often. It was reset twice in two years, at which time a batch of new rune words was also released. The last reset was on August 1, 2005, for the release of patch 1.11.

Patch 1.11 was a surprise for many Diablo II players, since many people from the team who made the game (and the patches up to 1.10) had left the company to found Flagship Studios. The patch introduced, among various enhancements and minor bug fixes, another Uber-quest – this time involving all three Prime Evils. The reward is the Hellfire Torch, another unique charm. On face value this charm is more powerful than its predecessor, but some players contest that the 10% bonus to experience gained makes the Annihilus charm more valuable, especially when both the difficulty involved in obtaining it, and the high experience penalties in 1.11 are taken into consideration. But the Annihilus charm is generally rare now, as to obtain it one has to sell a lot of Stones Of Jordan, a ring generally regarded as the best and most expensive ring in the game (and an item that was heavily duplicated by exploiting bugs in earlier patches). The Torch however just requires a player is able to slay certain bosses on Hell difficulty, which is a much cheaper (albeit, harder) method.

Patch 1.10

Long thought to be a myth or an aborted attempt, Patch 1.10 was announced in May 2002 and was finally released to the public on October 28, 2003. This patch adds several new features and items into the game.

Ladder Characters: The patch introduces a new type of characters called "Ladder Characters". Only Ladder Characters are ranked on the ladder (lists of the top 1000 characters on a realm in different categories), and these characters can only join games created by other ladder characters. This effectively creates a distinct economy for these characters free from the existing economy where any item in the game is available.

Ladder seasons are also introduced where ladder characters play together for a season. The standard season length is still unknown. When a ladder season ends, the ladder characters are converted to non-ladder characters. To continue playing in the new ladder season, players will have to create new characters, thus restarting the economy.

Ladder-only Features: The patch also includes items and cube recipes that are ladder-only. These can be found in game types except non-ladder Battle.net games. This restriction was added to compensate for increased monster difficulty in ladder games, and also because overall difficulty was further increased as the players have no longer access to their non-ladder items to help. When a ladder season ends the ladder-only items found will be moved to the non-ladder realm with the characters and will be quite valuable.

Rust Storm: Blizzard also implemented a new system for identifying and deleting illegal items on the realms. The system was dubbed "rust storm" because hacked items are "rusted" and removed from the realms. When Blizzard is made aware of a new hacked or bugged item, they can simply update the rust storm filters and the item will be deleted from the entire realm. The feature was intended to help keep the economy stable and free from items that give players an unfair advantage. The rust storm has had the unintended side effect of actually creating instability in the economy. Runes, extremely rare items that are ingredients in the most powerful weapons, have become the main currency in the game's economy. Runes have an extremely low drop rate which would render their availability very limited. Mass illegal duplication of these runes have made almost every high end rune a fabrication and subject to deletion by the rust storm. The problem then arises that players which do not duplicate runes are subject to trading for these runes. At any moment these duplicated runes would vanish and leave the legitimate player with nothing.

Leeching and Rushing: A popular playing style in the pre-1.10 realms was to "rush" a character, meaning that the player would have a friend of much higher level (the "rusher") quickly play through the game for them, completing the needed quests and skipping the others, while the friend of lower level (the "rushed") tagged along at a safe distance. This allowed the rushed player to bypass much of the long areas of the game that are time consuming to complete. The player would then "leech experience" (i.e., gain through no effort of their own) from higher level characters to gain levels before continuing. Leeching experience was most commonly done in the Secret Cow Level, since this level could be created repeatedly as long as the Cow King was not killed by the game maker, and because the level had the highest density of monsters, providing a fairly large amount of experience per unit time spent when the game had the maximum number of players. With 1.10 these tactics were made much more time consuming and more difficult because the amount of experience a player receives from being partied is based on the proximity to the actual fighting and the difference between player levels. This was meant to encourage players to play the game the way Blizzard designed it, in truly cooperative games. However, the player community found variant methods to leech (namely the so-called Baal runs and Pit runs), which, albeit slower than the "Cow runs", are still well beyond the intended leveling speed.

Skill Synergies: With Patch 1.10, Blizzard introduced a feature called "Synergies" (before 1.10, seen in the Druid's and Necromancer's summoning skills). Synergies allow skills to gain bonuses depending on the skill levels of other, related skills. This enables the player to build a more varied character while still attaining the efficiency and power of a specialized build (the so-called "cookie-cutter" variants). The downside to synergies is that many pre-1.10 characters were made essentially useless because the popular ways to allocate skills before 1.10 results in extremely low damage characters after 1.10.

The World Event: Patch 1.10 also introduced the world event. This is a server-wide event that, when in effect, replaces the next spawned super unique monster by a Diablo Clone that is much tougher than the regular Diablo act boss monster, but also drops the much sought after unique Annihilus charm. This charm is dropped only in the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion. The event is tied to the selling of "The Stone of Jordan" (or "SoJ"), a very popular ring that was/is, as such, very extensively duplicated, and remained resistant to the "Rust Storm". The objective seems to have been the removal of excess SoJs from the game. When 80-120 SoJs were sold on a certain ip server, a diablo clone appears in your game, spawning from the first superunique monster seen.

The general player opinion of Patch 1.10 is mixed. Some players celebrated the new cheat-free environment, while others were aggrieved that their characters were affected retroactively by new features, drastically altering their efficiency and often forcing them to start over.

Other patch 1.10 features include:

• The quality of rare armors, helms and weapons was increased.
• Over 100 new unique items were added.
• Monster speed, damage and toughness was greatly increased for higher-level characters, especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties.
• Experience gaining penalties for level 70+ characters were increased.
• The number of unique monsters was increased in every area and difficulty level.
• 20 new rune-words and 46 new Horadric Cube recipes were added.
• New XML format for the patch, allowing much easier future modifications.

Patch 1.11

On July 29, 2005, Blizzard announced the following:

A Call to Heroes! July 29, 2005 Great evil has returned to the world of Diablo 2. Will you answer the call to save Sanctuary? Patch 1.11 is coming...

Patch 1.11 was generally considered a total surprise by the player base, since the team responsible for the game up to patch 1.10 had left the company. It was announced only two days before its release on August 1, 2005, although the patch disappointed some fans. There was no real new content other than the new 'Überquest' and several new rune words. Many longtime bugs and issues were addressed in the patch; additionally, the patch also made it less of a hassle for the player's Hireling to "catch up" with the player in terms of Experience.

The new 'Überquest' involves getting the Key of Hate from the Summoner, Key of Destruction from Nihlathak and Key of Terror from the Countess, then cubing each of them into a portal to a new sublevel, featuring Lilith (a renamed Andariel), Über Izual, or Über Duriel. These bosses drop body parts, which can be cubed into a portal to Chaos Tristram.

In Chaos Tristram, players fight beefed up versions of all three Prime Evils simultaneously. When all three are dead, the last one killed drops the new Hellfire Torch unique charm. It gives +3 to all skills of a random class, random bonuses to all attributes and all resistances, and 25% chance to cast Diablo's Firestorm attack on striking.

Despite being quite difficult, several players found the 'Überquest' within a few hours after release. The secret seems to be the "Life Tap" skill, which gives a tremendous 50% life steal and renders characters almost immune to damage.

There is some speculation on how this quest will affect the 1.10 'World Event', which involved only Über Diablo and rewarded the player with a much less powerful unique charm, but requires a large number of Stone of Jordan unique rings to be sold by other players. The 1.11 'Überquest' seems highly exploitable by characters built for it and may well obsolete the 'World Event' and the Annihilus charm.

Blizzard North, the subdivision that created Diablo II and its patches, closed its doors on patch day, making a new 1.12 patch highly unlikely. However, 1.11 contained several bugs – another minor patch (named "1.11b") has been released recently due to the bugs.

Patch 1.11 also added ten new rune words. Seven of these have been released, and of these seven, each one must be done in a 3 socket body armor. They each give +2 to all skills for a specific class.

The new Ladder season began on August 8th, 2005 and two days later Blizzard banned 36,000 accounts for various ways of cheating, and had their serial-keys disabled for a 30 day-period, and around 2000 serial keys were permanently disabled for repeated cheating. The majority of bans were set due to maphacking.

State of the game

Some players considered the last patches before the expansion the most balanced and fun of all. Shortly after the expansion was released, players began to notice new ways to exploit the game in order to "farm" items. Eventually these item farmers found ways to create 'bots, capable of exploiting the game for items autonomously'. The addition of monster damage immunities did little to keep some players in check; characters would be configured specifically to run one high experience or high drop rate area, particularly the Bloody Foothills (a lower difficulty portion of act five) repeatedly for accelerated leveling.

Also, the shift from the randomized "rare" items to the preset "unique" items as the most powerful items in the game greatly reduced character variety. Certain unique items were vastly superior to most other non-unique items of the same category in the game. In some cases, this created a major power gap between the haves and the have-nots.

In 1.09, the collective attention of the Battle.net players turned to the "Secret" Cow Level, with its large packs of cows running around with halberds, no resistances, moderate item drops and high experience rewards. As a result, the vast majority of Hell difficulty games took place in the Cow Level. Additionally, Pindleskin (a unique monster found in the first area of Nihlathak's Temple) was both very easy to reach from town and could drop the majority of elite items. This resulted in players killing Pindleskin repeatedly to get high-level unique items. This process proved to be so effective, that some of the afformentioned 'bots were made specificly to farm Pindleskin. Patch 1.10, however, fixed a great deal of these problems. By essentially turning down the quality of item drops in the most heavily-run areas, Blizzard encouraged players to hunt everywhere for powerful items.

The patch also introduced a large number of new and powerful Rune Words. Rune Words, previously rarely used, became a way to create some of the best items in the game. Most of the new rune words had permanent auras, large bonuses to damage, stats or defense, and the newly introduced and controversial oskill bonuses, which grant any class access to specific skills of another class. Many Paladin and Barbarian players felt that their classes' greatest party assets, auras and Battle Orders respectively, had been stolen away from them.

When the ladder was reset in 2004, a second batch of even more powerful rune words (the Season 2 rune words) was added, including the powerful Infinity, which had the resistance-lowering, immunity-breaking Conviction aura built in.

The release of the 1.10 patch made casters (elemental druids, necromancers, sorceresses, hammerdins, and trap assassins) extremely powerful versus groups of monsters, while weakening physical-damage type characters (except in the case of bosses, where some characters could quickly slay any boss in a matter of seconds, with the correct items).

Patch 1.11 fixed a few subtle game bugs, included a stronger anticheat program, introduced a new quest, and added new rune words. The main focus was the new quest, which would grant a single extremely powerful charm to the players who completed it. The new quest involves conquering three 'Über' versions of some of the game's normal bosses (Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal).

Patch 1.11b was recently released to correct for the "peace" bug which allowed players to crash the game and dupe items.

Class histories

Amazon

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Amazon

Prior to the expansion, the amazon was a heavily played character class with fairly decent damage output. The expansion pack introduced some powerful unique bows and crossbows, allowing players to kill other players and monsters much faster than most were used to.

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The Buriza-do Kyanon unique ballista, Windforce unique bow, and Eaglehorn bows were some of the most sought after uniques in the game. Amazons with Multiple Shot, and any of the prior mentioned weapons, were considered very powerful in the Cow Level; the not-so-secret level that offered enormous amounts of experience and items for very little risk.

Another powerful build involved using items with piercing attack, such as the Buriza, and Guided Arrow. This ability was designed in such a way that a piercing guided arrow returned to its original target and struck again, up to five times, leading to enormous damage. However, in later patches changes were made which made this tactic unusable.

For the javelin users, the powerful Titan's Revenge featured high damage and ideal statistics for an amazon. "Javazons" typically used the passive ability Pierce and the javelin skill Lightning Fury. A piercing Lightning Fury javelin thrown at a pack of cows usually hit three or four times in quick succession, unleashing a deadly storm of lightning bolts powerful enough to mow down the pack in one or two casts.

The long-awaited patch 1.10 finally fixed the elemental arrows to properly add the physical arrow damage and introduced some even more powerful runeword bows, but the increased game difficulty may have more than made up for that.

The amazon's skill set is peculiar. In theory, she appears to be a melee-ranged hybrid class, and her skill tree is easy to understand: javelin and spear skills, passive and magic skills, and bow skills are in their own separate branches. In practice, her defensive skills still make it very challenging to stand toe to toe with enemies to use her melee skills effectively. Her spears are also very challenging to use, especially as her high-end spear skills Fend and Lightning Strike have bugs to reduce their damage potential. The amazon is very item dependent in general and bow dependent in particular, making her a character for the richer players and not very novice friendly despite her simple skill tree.

A significant amount players tend to duel with javazons that use charged strike, also gear dependent, requiring many +lightning skill items in order to make the character build effective.

Assassin

In terms of play experience, the Assassin switches between skills perhaps more rapidly than other classes, which can result in something of a "function key staccato" in order to perform a sequence of moves. For this reason, the player base of the class was sometimes thought of as more difficult than that of other classes.

Martial arts provide a new style of attacking enemies; they introduce the concept of "charges." Each of her martial arts attacks, instead of producing an immediate effect, adds a "charge" to her. These charges last as long as the assassin is in combat; she can hold up to three of a given attack type, and she can potentially have three charges of every attack active simultaneously. She then needs to perform a "finishing move" (perform either a normal attack or use a martial arts skill of the sort called a finishing move), at which point all the charges release. Depending on how many charges were built up for an ability, the "finishing move" effect changes. Phoenix Strike for example, releases a meteor with only one charge, a chain of lightning with two charges, and a chaotic blast of ice with three charges.

Despite the assassin's low hit points, she is one of the simpler classes to play due to the Mind Blast skill, which stuns or converts an area of enemies, rendering them essentially harmless. But she is also one of the most complex characters to play due to her charges and releasing attacks.

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When the expansion was released, the class was notoriously bug-ridden. There was a brief episode when she could kill anything in the game by converting them with Mind Blast and waiting for them to unconvert, which erroneously reduced their hit points to 1, but this was quickly fixed.

The assassin had to rely heavily on melee to do decent damage, as her trap skills (devices planted anywhere on the screen to shoot fire or lightning at the enemy) did negligible damage. The assassin's weapon of choice, claws and (often dual-wielded) katars, were on the low end of the damage scale, forcing her to rely on elemental melee skills alone. The buff skill Burst of Speed was a common sight, greatly increasing her movement and attack speed.

Patch 1.10 greatly improved the trap skills tab with some of the best synergy bonuses in the game, but also rendered melee combat suicidal in Hell difficulty, causing both trees to switch in terms of efficacy. Lightning Sentry with synergies is one of the most powerful spells of any character in the game. Two or three castings of Mind Blast can stop an entire pack of monsters dead, with Lightning Sentry as the coup de grâce. The fire traps are both weak and bugged, and usually not recommended for Hell difficulty, so most trap assassins choose Fire Blast as their weapon of choice against lightning immune creatures.

Because of Patch 1.10, the trap-based assassin is one of the best characters in the game for new players and those without good equipment. While lacking the demigod status of perfectly built paladins with top end equipment, she is by far the most powerful character without über items. The melee assassin is much less powerful, more dangerous and generally played by those who like a challenge.

Also, an interesting exploit is an assassin armed with a pike, the most damaging but slowest weapon in the game, using the 'Blade Fury' skill, which launches blades at a constant rate, but deals damage from the weapon itself. This leads to quite interesting and quite damaging 'machinegunning'.

Barbarian

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Barbarian

In classic Diablo II, this was one of the popular characters classes for power-leveling and dueling.

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The monster's global 50% physical resistance introduced in the expansion took a major toll upon the damage output of barbarians; physical immune monsters became a problem and forced many barbarians to get the magic damage Berserk skill. The critical life steal and mana steal item properties were weakened in several ways as well. Still, barbarians were one of the stronger classes in the game, yielding only to amazons and sorceresses.

With the arrival of Patch 1.10, the global physical resistance was removed, but the greatly increased difficulty made melee combat tricky. The class became highly item dependant, and mostly popular among "rich" players, with rune words such as Breath of the Dying being notoriously hard to find or make.

In summary, the class is fairly straight-forward to build up, but a barbarian without a particularly selective skill build will have some serious problems in later on in the game, and having access to high end items is almost a requirement for Hell difficulty.

Druid

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In the expansion pack beta, the druid was a formidable character. Skills such as Werebear and Hurricane at a high level made the class very hard to damage. This was fixed before the beta ended, and the skills have seen several balancings in subsequent patches.

When the expansion pack was released, the druid had become a harder class to play. His elemental spells had lost a lot of their former potency and most were on a long skill timer and usually missed or were otherwise very difficult to aim. Werewolf based druids stood a better chance in Hell difficulty, but even then, the werewolf was not very resilient compared to many other classes. This problem wasn't remedied until patch 1.10.

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To the left, the Assassin. To the right, the Druid.

In Patch 1.10, the new skill synergies greatly changed the gameplay of the elemental druid. Armageddon could now be cast in animal form (which was rarely used, due to the large amount of skill points required for such a build, and the fact that the fire spells were still very weak and could not be cast rapidly due to casting delays), while the ice and tornado half of the elemental skills tree and Tornado and Twister in particular received massive damage boosts.

Patch 1.10 did not alter the play style of the shapeshifter much. The contemporary werewolf still relied on Fury to deal large amounts of melee damage quickly. The life steal provided by Feral Rage was enough to render a high level druid near-invincible, given a good unique or runeword weapon. Rabies was used occasionally in duels, mainly because it was bugged and not affected by poison length reduction. The often neglected summoning tree was already underpowered when the expansion was released, and continued to be rarely used after patch 1.10, despite some improvements to the tree via the new skill synergies.

Necromancer

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Necromancer

Prior to the expansion, the necromancer was a moderately powered class, with many necros using the damage reflecting curse Iron Maiden, Corpse Explosion, and revived monsters to deal damage. While somewhat slow to kill, the fact that the health of revived monsters scaled with number of players allowed the necromancer to almost ignore game size, while all other classes had a much tougher time in large player count games.

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The release of the expansion radically changed the strategies of most necromancers. Monsters had so much life and physical resistance that Revive and Iron Maiden failed to do any significant damage, revived monsters no longer scaled up with number of players in the game, physical immunes were a roadblock, summoning spells in general were far too weak to be more than a distraction and necromancers were forced to use the direct damage spell Bone Spirit exclusively to make progress in Hell difficulty, Bone Spirit being one of the least efficient direct damage spells in the game (particularly for the rather bizarre mana cost of the spell).

In Patch 1.10, the Necromancer was redefined by the modifications to Raise Skeleton. This formerly under-used low level skill received a major boost and gave the player significantly stronger minions, capable of clearing Hell difficulty on their own with the Amplify Damage skill, which now removed physical immunity. Patch 1.10 also brought about a rebirth in bone skills. Previous to this patch, the necromancers most powerful bone spell, Bone Spirit, dealt negligible damage. Patch 1.10 added synergy bonuses to the bone spells, increasing their damage immensely.

The class-specific necromancer set, Trang-Oul's Avatar, was modified in 1.10 in a curious way. It now turned the wearer into a "vampire"-class monster and granted the ability to use the sorceress skills Firewall, Fireball and Meteor. This allowed the necromancer player to ignore direct damage skills entirely and rely on the set's fire skills to deal direct damage. However, with a certain glitch, it makes the full set almost useless for a Necromancer who doesn't use summoned creatures, an exception being the Necromancer who relies on the poison skills, these generally don't need a fast cast rate. When wearing the full set, it reduces the player's spell casting speed down into the negatives.

All in all, the skelliemancer is the best class for new players and players without good items, and still one of the best classes for rich players. The class requires no expensive rune words to be useful, and in fact there are very few rune words that are actually useful for the class. Trang-Oul's set is much easier to collect than the runes for most high level rune words, and some would say that Trang-Oul's and a good wand are all a necromancer needs to be successful.

Paladin

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Paladin

Prior to the expansion, many considered the hammerdin build combined with a known game bug, to be a better strategy in comparison to melee combat paladins.

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The expansion pack weakened the hammerdin builds, and the advent of immunities and a global 50% physical resistance put many paladin builds incapable of dealing elemental damage at a major disadvantage. Fanaticism was boosted greatly and replaced Concentration as the aura of choice, but due to the global physical resistance, the class actually did less damage than before the expansion.

Since this patch introduced items with built-in auras, many players felt that the main selling point of the paladin had been given away to other classes, although some of the required items using auras were rare. Patch 1.10 also fixed the bug that allowed "aura flashing" (rapidly switching between an enemy-affecting and a party-affecting aura to get the benefits of two auras at once), which affected some paladin bugs negatively.

The global physical resistance was removed and the game difficulty had been increased enough to make some of the defensive auras more useful. The newly implemented skill synergies allowed paladins to boost their skill damage to new heights. In particular the Blessed Hammer spell that now, besides increased damage, also ignored resistances of undead and demon class enemies, caused a renewed interest in hammerdin builds, with many players once again considering it overpowered.

As examples of common Blessed Hammer abuses, in duels, using the Enigma runeword which provides the Teleport skill, the paladin player can teleport on top of the opponent and kill the player in one hammer hit, which is considered unfair by other classes. The new items with the damage +x modifier increase the damage of the Smite (shield bash) skill though, which makes the melee paladin a decent boss killer. The paladin-specific runeword Exile features a chance to cast Life Tap on striking, which renders the Zeal-using paladin near-invulnerable against normal monsters and most bosses. High-end Zealot (Zeal-user) equipment became the most expensive and most difficult to find.

In Patch 1.11, shortly after the addition of the new Pandemonium Quest Smiter Paladins (who primarily use the Smite skill) became popular as they are one of the few builds that can solo Chaotic Tristram (possibly the only build to do so, short frenzy barbarians). The reason is that Smite is not only an incredibly fast attack (using a suitable weapon) at high levels, but it also ignores attack rating and monster defense when calculating accuracy, meaning that Smiters can essentially hit with 95% accuracy (the highest possible accuracy).

Sorceress

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Sorceress

Prior to the expansion the sorceress was a reasonably popular character class. The announcement of timers on some of the more powerful spells, elemental immunities, the weakening of Static Field and the introduction of the Blood Mana monster curse for the expansion pack caused some players a lot of grief.

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When the expansion was released, it became clear that the abundance of +x to skills items and the increasing returns on spell damage more than made up for the skill timers. The damage a well built sorceress could put out rivaled other classes, enough to kill some monsters in only a few seconds. The layout of the Bloody Foothills caused the spell Firewall to work particularly well against monsters in that area. When the attention shifted to the Cow Level as the main hunting ground, sorceress players adjusted and used the area effect Nova spell with as many faster cast rate items as possible.

When patch 1.10 arrived, the exploitation of the Cow Level and the Nova spell became a thing of the past. The seemingly random implementation of synergy bonuses rendered many old builds useless and greatly boosted other, sometimes fairly odd builds. The lowly Fireball skill became the weapon of choice for many contemporary sorceresses, thanks to its large damage synergy from Meteor. Blizzard turned out to become the most powerful cold skill, though many Fireball users got Frozen Orb instead because it worked well even without synergies. A fighter subclass also emerged, using missile weapons with piercing and exploding missiles or melee weapon Runewords with various oskills such as Zeal or Vengeance in conjunction with the improved Enchant skill, which added fire damage and more importantly, Attack Rating, allowing melee attacks to hit more often and with more damage.

Another variant exploits the fact that Lightning Mastery on a Sorceress affects all lightning skills. When the runeword Dream is used in both a helm and a shield, the effect is a level thirty Holy Shock aura. Combined with high levels of Lightning Mastery, this "Dual Dream Enchantress" is one of the highest damaging melee classes in the game. Such builds rely on the runeword Passion in a weapon, giving access to the Paladin skill Zeal (repeated hits in a small amount of time), and enough Increased Attack Speed modifiers such that the Sorceress is able to pull off as many as 5 attacks a second, all potentially dealing a large amount of lightning damage. Coupled with Enchant and Fire Mastery, the build can become extremely powerful, but is rarely seen due to the cost of obtaining the required equipment.

The class as it stands is still very formidable, and the skill set is very counter-intuitive due to the seemingly random synergy bonuses. Weaker low level skills such as Fireball, Lightning and Ice Blast can become immensely powerful after synergies, while some of the higher level skills have no synergies or bad synergies and are ignored. The sorceress does not have a complicated skill set, and players typically pick one or two main skills and max them. She has a few defensive skills to offer, such as Chilling Armor, Energy Shield, and Teleport; however, some sorceresses prefer to pay more attention to their offensive spells, rather than putting points into defensive abilities.

Trivia

• Some undead enemies, such as Zombies, Ghouls, etc., utter words every once and a while. You usually hear them moan, but sometimes you can hear them saying "Brains," especially the unique zombie "Corpsefire" in the Den of Evil.* Enemies such as "Carvers" and "Fallen" will utter names of different super unique monsters such as "Rakanishu", "Colenzo"--both of which are super uniques of the general Fallen type--and occasionally the name of the weapon "dagger".
• Fallen (or upper class equivalent) Shamans utter the name "Bishibosh," which is another name of a super unique monster--and again, one of the same base type as the Shamans.

• When fallen shaman die, sometimes you can hear them mutter "coward"

External links

• Arreat Summit (Official site)
• DiabloII.net - Very thorough Diablo, Hellfire, Diablo II Fansite