I feel guilty advertising my mod here

[Brother Laz]

So far it has elements that reminds me of the better parts of Diablo 1.  Hopefully as it progress it won't be too itemcentric as D2.

No, it won't. ;) You can get good gear easily from shops or monster drops. There are some gosu items, but you don't need them nearly as much as you do in classic LoD.

(Though there is still the occasional respawn in Den of Evil, unless that was an intentional part of Prince Albrecht 's power.)

No, not intended. :( But the respawns are localised, so you won't have to run back and forth three times through the DoE until you've located all monsters, which was the reason there were (supposed to be) no respawns in the Den in the first place.

......

err... What are the new runewords? I couldn't find recipes for them and I would not like to spend dozens of hourse trying every possibility

I see you've already found them, you may want to take a look at M2006_cube.rtf too.

One minor caveat: the recipes in M2006_cube.rtf for the Witch profession are wrong; they do produce results, but often not the advertised ones. An updated copy of the file will be uploaded to my website soon.

EDIT2: What is "jewelword"?

There are two different things called 'jewelword'. The 'rune'word recipes at the bottom of M2006_runewords.rtf contain jewels and gems, and are called jewelwords. Additionally, socketing only jewels in a socketed item results in a hidden jewelword bonus.

......

I do however, slightly disagree on the lack of one hit kills. It might just be a case of semantics, but getting swarmed because of a case of bad luck in monster death respawning, produces the same result for me. Now I'm not complaining too much, since in D1 there are similar cases where getting stunlocked pretty much left you dead.

You need some crowd control. Your zon's innate Stormtouch knocks back and stuns everyone around you. The 15 second timer is harsh, but it's usually just what you need to break out of a crowd. Don't neglect the stopping power of Blindside either.

I've browsed a bit of the Median forum, and I did read the thread about the possibility of 'cuddly' alternate version to ease some new players in etc.

Yep, and it will be released Soon™. ;)

Personally I think I still might try some more with my level 13 Amazon who seems to be getting a lot of bad luck to make it to Dark Wood passage, on Players-1 Normal even.

The UGP is harsh for all characters, especially for amazons (and sorcs) due to the lack of a rapid healing innate or long duration crowd control.

To be clear I definitely don't want my chars to suddenly pwnz0rr all of Normal with barely a mouse click or two, but I hope reaching the tree of Inifus won't be my crowning achievement before I decide it's simply too frustrating for my taste.

Patience... Cuddly Mode is coming. ;)