Thinking about taking the dive...

[pakman]

UPDATE:

Yesterday (July 4th), I got up around 8:00am, fired up my computer, and loaded D2. I played until about noon when I decided to go and finish the 4th book in the Dune series.

Lord_Ungar is doing quite well now that I have activated /players8. I have been lucky in finding a few nice rare and magic item with which to make IGs. I also found a nice magic zombie head and yew wand with some +1 to some curses and it gives me two skellie mages which provide more bodies for things to swing at. I have really been liking terror for crowd control and keeping mummies from reviving skeletons. I like to cast confuse mixed in with a little AD on large groups of monsters so they kill each other a little bit first as my merc wades through and I get rid of the bodies with AD/CE. We'll have to see how my tactics are going to change in A3 when I get all those midgets running at me. I may switch to IM as my main curse with smatterings of AD and Confuse.

I have been doing full clears of all areas and haven't died once, even when taking chances and getting swarmed like I do in the false tombs. The summoner provided no problem at all, not even the firewall or iceblast, and even luckier I found him the first direction I went. The sactuary itself was hard, but the harem and cellars were really tough for some reason. The pathfining AI still sucks, but oh well, I fixed that with town portals so I could get the merc in the right spot. It wasn't that much of a problem in the maggot lair, but the AS was horrible with all the MC Escher stairs, etc.

I should hit level 30 when I get home from work today (July 5th) and I plan on killing Duriel. Is his load lag still killer? He's going to be the perfect candidate for IM/IG.

As far as skill point distribution goes, things are still fairly open. Bone Spear has one skill point along with IG, IM, AD, and everything else leading up to Lower Resist. Golem mastery also has one point but is boosted to three with my wand. Killing speed is fair, but that's not what I'm going for, just enjoying the experience. But I do think it's quite conceited to say that I'm inexperienced with the game and various builds. I always play a char from start to finish and have solo'd the entire game with "weak" characters. Weak characters are more interesting anyways. But this is the internet and you can hide behind the anonymity of a handle and call another player "inexperienced."

As for items and gear, I have NEVER used a character mod tool or muling program or any other third party software except for a no-cd crack when I forgot my LoD disk at home once, so that must instantly make me a dirty cheater. I have never had high end gear seeing as I never have made a MF sorc; sure I had a FO sorc at one time that tore through the game at an incredible speed, but she didn't have any MF gear. The only MF chars I had were a necro that would run NM Meph, and a trapsin that would also run NM meph and be throwing down 10 traps because shadow warrior was better than the master for the reason that it used whatever skills you were using at the time. So I was throwing down 10 lightning traps or 10 fire traps, or 5 of each depending on the situation. I got bored with that character really really fast. The same can be said about my Bloodletter WW barb back in 1.07 who could tear through the foothills in about 12 minutes if I cleared the entire area. I have never had any of the high end runes to make the high end words; hell, I don't even know if I've ever actually used a rune, but I may look into it now.