Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Cover art
Developer(s)	Blizzard North
Publisher(s)	Blizzard Entertainment Sierra Entertainment
Platform(s)	Windows Mac OS Mac OS X
Release	(PC) / / / June 29, 2001 (Mac) / June 29, 2001 March 31, 2003
Genre(s)	Action role-playing game
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (commonly abbreviate LoD)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, it is an official expansion designed by Blizzard North.

More than a standard expansion, Lord of Destruction not only added content in the form of new character classes and an additional scenario, it also dramatically revamped the gameplay of the existing Diablo II for solo and especially multiplayer. As a result, LoD is largely considered a "must-buy" instead of only being an addition, making it one of the most successful expansion packs of all time. Also, this expansion has been a huge multiplayer success and is still being played.

Story

Template:Spoiler The story continues where Diablo II ended, with Baal leading an invasion against the northern barbarian lands.His first attack, against the city of Sescheron, capital city of the Barbarian homelands, leads to the stage where Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is set: Harrogath. Situated at the base of Mount Arreat, it is home to the humans who are sworn protectors of the mountain. Baal is currently besieging the city and destroying any settlements along the way towards the mountain's summit. The hero stands tall, fighting the three Prime Evils, Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal.

Baal, the Lord of Destruction, is seeking the Worldstone, a massive crystal of great energies, built to prevent the High Heavens and Burning Hells from consuming the mortal realm completely into their respective folds. It is the source of all the Soulstones and their powers, so Baal wishes to obtain it, corrupt it and complete his brothers' plan to conquer the mortal realm and use it as a staging area to besiege the Heavens in the endless war between the two.

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 and will eventually "deteriorate," so to say, so you cannot use them anymore, but they also have better characteristics and lower requirements than their repairable equivalents. However, some magical ethereal items are self-repairing.
• 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 Rune Words section below for more information).
• 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 for storing items (double the size of the Diablo II stash).
• An alternate mainhand/offhand setup that can be switched between via a hotkey in gameplay.
• Hirelings (mercenaries) as well as summons 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 one case). Hirelings also gain experience and can be resurrected (for a price proportional 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

Placing the runes "Jah", "Ith" and "Ber" (in that order) into an armour item with exactly three sockets produces the powerful Rune word bonus "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.

Assassin

The Assassin relies on her martial arts skills and her ability to lay passive traps. Her melee attacks rely heavily on timing and skillful switching of skills, whilst her traps suit a fire-and-forget style of gameplay.

The assassin introduces a very different style of play into Diablo II. Her shadow disciplines tree contains a mixture of passive defensive skills and offensive weapon masteries, along with a few spells such as Mind Blast which stun and confuse the enemy. Traps are a new way of attacking enemies. Up to five can be laid at a time; once laid, they fire (or activate) a given number of times at nearby enemies before dissipating.

A martial arts assassin is recommended for mature players, due to the rapid switching of skills and lack of crowd-control abilities. A pure trapsin is usually unable to solo the game due to reliance on either lightning or fire and therefore being unable to deal with the corresponding monsters immune to that element. Hybrid builds can be used to avoid this problem, using both martial arts and traps, making up in flexibility what they lack in power.

The rune word 'Infinity', which uses the combination of the runes Ber, Mal, Ber, Ist, into a socketed polearm, makes a lightning trapsin virtually invincible. The rune word weapon is typically given to an act 2 hireling, and when equipped the hireling projects a Conviction aura. This aura along with the rune word decreasing enemy lightning resistance means that a lightning trapsin can very easily solo Baal runs even in full games.

Druid

The Druid specialises in nature-based magic, including shapeshifting, summoning and elemental. The Druid shares common traits with the Barbarian, Sorceress, Paladin, and Necromancer.

The elemental attacks are generally associated with natural elements, such as fire, cold and air. These include Volcano, Firestorm, Fissure, Arctic Blast, Twister, Tornado, and Hurricane. Summoned creatures include Ravens, Wolves, Bears, spirits that provide beneficial effects for nearby players, and vines that poison the enemy or consume enemy corpses. Shapeshifting Druids have the ability to change into either Werewolf or Werebear form, each offering increased attack power and life, but at the cost of spell-casting abilities.

The Druid's summoned creatures are moderately effective in Normal and Nightmare difficulty but obsolete in Hell. Nearly all Druid players still supplement their primary skill tree with the life-enhancing Oak Sage spirit. In the pre-1.10 days of the expansion, the shapeshifting skills were considered the most effective and powerful; the Werewolf is faster and has a higher attack rating, while the Werebear has more hitpoints and deals more damage. After the 1.10 patch however, shifter druids became much less popular than elemental druids, perhaps due to the expensive equipment required to make a competitive shapeshifter, especially a Werebear.

Critical response

Lord of Destruction is listed at Metacritic with an average rating of 87 (with one perfect score from Computer Games Online). It is described at Metacritic as an expansion that "should reinforce the staying power of an already legendary RPG."

Within the Diablo 2 community the expansion caused some controversy when Blizzard patched the original game with a patch that made Nightmare and Hell skill particularly harder than before, some players felt that Blizzard was effectively forcing them to upgrade to the expansion in order to find the items and gain the abilities necessary to deal with the new challenges. The controversy was mentioned in nearly every review of Lord of Destruction at the time.

Many players are also angered by the restrictive policies Blizzard enforces on game connections. Players are restricted to a certain rate of game play. Some rules include the amount of time between joining new games and frequency of changing accounts. These were put in place to reduce muling, which is done more frequently among dupers and farmers than casual players. However, duping methods such as bone wall spamming do not restrict a players access. The consequences for exceeding Blizzard's policies include being unable to join games and a temporary ban from Battle.net. Either of these can be overcome by obtaining a new IP. Methods for this differ, but simply waiting a certain time period(that is hidden to the player) will reset these bans.

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 was released on October 28 2003, which radically changed gameplay. The main change was the introduction of "synergy" bonuses that would increase the power of one skill by investing in a different skill. The difficulty of monsters (especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties) was increased accordingly. This resulted in a greatly reduced variety of "builds" for each character, since only specific, greatly "synergised" skills were capable of dealing the large amount of damage needed to complete the game. Several high level unique items and new runewords were also added. While the most powerful runewords often required multiple rare runes, duping of rare runes made these high-end runewords widely available to the public. A new hidden Realms-only quest was also introduced. When enough Stone of Jordan rings had been sold back to NPCs on a server, Uber Diablo would appear, dropping a powerful unique Annihilus charm upon death. The Annihilus charm was untradeable and only one could be held on one character at a time. The general consensus amongst Diablo II players is that this quest was introduced to reduce the number of "duped" Stone of Jordan rings on the realms. Many believe that this plan has backfired, as the Annihilus charm is much more valuable than the Stone of Jordan, and that they have caused more duped Stone of Jordans.

The patch was preceded by the Rust Storm, a sweeping clean-up of most hacked, duped, and otherwise illegitimate items on the Realms. The patch also introduced the Ladder, officially 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. Several runewords are only available on Ladder. The Ladder is reset periodically – when this happens, all Ladder characters are converted to normal Non-Ladder characters. This creates a separate, initially 'dupe-free', economy on Ladder, and a fresh and equal start for all Ladder players. 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 5, 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.You kill all of them to get a reward. The reward is the Hellfire Torch, another unique, untradeable charm. On face value this charm is more powerful than its predecessor, but some players contest that the slight 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. The Annihilus charm is far rarer than the Hellfire Torch, since the Annihilus charm can only be gained with the collective sale of some 100 Stones of Jordan (exact numbers are 80-120), an expensive ring (and an item that was heavily duplicated by exploiting bugs in earlier patches, as it serves as a form of high-end currency). The Torch however just requires a player able to slay certain bosses on Hell difficulty, which is a much cheaper (albeit, harder) method.

In early June 2006 there was a server side patch installed that allowed the movement of Gheeds Fortune Grand Charm, Hellfire Torch Large Charms, and the Annihilus Small Charm into the trading window. A few weeks later, another server-side patch was introduced that fixed a notorious bug involving the illegitimate stacking of damage-dealing auras on a mercenary.

In mid-August 2006, a Blizzard Representative posted a list of suggestions about things players have wanted to change. He stated that a patch is not guaranteed, but it is looking more hopeful, along with a Ladder reset (read a few paragraphs up for more information about Ladders).

Duping method

The bonewall method of duping ( creating a duplicate item from an original )has not been patched as of this writing, 11/30/2006. Almost all high runes ( from Ist through to Zod ), in the ladder games are duped, and will 'poof' if not 'permed'. Certain items are commonly known to be heavily duped, these include a perfect statistic Crown of Ages, Imp Shanks ( rare boots ), the Stone of Jordan unique ring, and a hacked item imported from non-ladder, Wizardspike gloves. The duping method involves bonewall spamming to lag a player out of a game and causing what is known as a ' rollback '. This method can only be achieved by using at least three computers and three characters in a game.

Chat Gem

There exists a chat gem that is only visible when inside of a chat channel. There are many theories about the purpose of this gem. There is, however, no purpose for this gem aside from a meaningless message. The gem toggles between an active and inactive state. When activated, a chat message appears stating, "Gem Activated" and likewise, a message "Gem Disabled" is shown when it become inactive. It is also known to say "Moo" and "Perfect Gem Activated", the later is rumored to have been removed in a recent patch.

The gem is a common Troll (Internet) used by trolls to entertain themselves in chat channels. Some of the better trolls are listed below:

• Activating the gem increases the rate of gem shrines in play.
• The gem can be leveled by pressing it multiple times. A higher level gem increases the players magic find.
• Activating the gem increases the amount of gold/drops/rare monsters in game.
• Activating the gem gives you administrative abilities in the chat channel.
• Activating the gem allows you to play more games before being disconnected.

External links

• Official site
• DiabloII.net
• Planet Diablo: Lord of Destruction
• Diablo II: Lord of Destruction at MobyGames