08-05-2011, 12:20 PM
It never becomes impossible, although you do have to be careful and focused to avoid deaths. You can heal so quickly, and you can consider using the odd item from Wirt like a cap of the whale to withstand an extra hit in the higher difficulties. To be honest this could be a quite powerful character if approached with a careful "arty mage" style. One issue that always hurt even playing rogues without mana shield is only having the 4 hot keys for spells. If you need healing and fire spell and a lightning spell, now you are forced to choose between stone curse and teleport. That is tough because either of those spells can be very valuable in keeping yourself out of range of the bad guys.
To be fair, I never played Hellfire, so I can't vouch for any unique difficulties in the end game there. But as long as stone curse works and you can withstand a couple ranged attacks without dying, the character should be playable.
Back when Diablo was my drug of choice, I created a crazy variant called the Geezer who, among other things, could not use mana shield, stone curse, fireball, chain lightning, lightning, or teleport. It was very different from normal mage play, and a lot of fun, and very difficult, but as it turned out hell/hell was still quite playable (if you don't mind dying repeatedly when things go bad).
To be fair, I never played Hellfire, so I can't vouch for any unique difficulties in the end game there. But as long as stone curse works and you can withstand a couple ranged attacks without dying, the character should be playable.
Back when Diablo was my drug of choice, I created a crazy variant called the Geezer who, among other things, could not use mana shield, stone curse, fireball, chain lightning, lightning, or teleport. It was very different from normal mage play, and a lot of fun, and very difficult, but as it turned out hell/hell was still quite playable (if you don't mind dying repeatedly when things go bad).