AK Mouths Off Yet Again

[Brother Laz]

In D1, vitality was almost useless: you would easily end up in stun lock, and die anyway. Acid dog boss packs and their fast spit were a terror, as were azure drakes and their charge attack and very fast attack speed. The way to survive for warriors was defense and a lot of it, and happy feet to prevent swarming. Mages (not counting the min/maxed mage with hacked godly full plate and duped zodiac rings to wear it) would usually die if caught in stunlock.

In D2, defense is worthless because of all the ITD attacks. And most importantly: character hit recovery is much faster, so you can just shrug off everything that does not one-hit kill you. THAT is why D2 is much easier, especially for ranged characters. :angry: Who cares if you get hit by a few bloodstars or LEB sparks? In D1 you would not die in less than about 8 blood stars anyway (unless all of them happened to do max damage, etc), about the same as in D2. But in D2, you are basically not affected by the blood stars, and can just teleport in their face and orb them off the level. Try that in D1, you'd get stunlocked in about half a second, and stuck stunlocked until death, no matter how much life you had or how many potions you used in your panic.

Vampires are the D2 equivalent of advocates, but not nearly as tough. Reason: when the fireballs are hitting you, just blast off a multishot and leech all that life back. In D1, get hit by two fireballs in succession, you'd get stuck in place and the next 50 fireballs would kill you.

So how to kill those enemies in D1? Happy feet. String them out, hide behind corners, to face only a few at a time. Teleport past waves of charged bolts, hide behind obstacles to make the succubus come to you and stop running away, stand in doors... all unneeded in D2, because as long as the damage rate is not so high that you die instantly, you can still fight, run, leech and everything else, and easily survive. And if it is, it is practically a one-hit kill. :(

All that needs to be done is getting rid of the pointlessly ITD attacks (minion of destruction's ram attack is ITD... fire and lightning arrows are ITD... tiger javelins are ITD... imp fire missiles are ITD... most special attacks are not ITD but carry a massive AR bonus...) and making defense rating matter more than like 10% (which would require a serious nerf of Defiance and IS/Shout to make builds without these viable...), and upping the hit recovery length.