uberdrops?

[Ruvanal]

No it wouldn't. A known side of Diablo's AI is his tendancy to hunt more powerful characters. Bearing that in mind, I'm left imagining a situation were a rusher simply slaps D down to a sliver then continues to draw fire while a 'rushee' tries for a ranged attack killing blow.

That does not match any of my experience with Diablo. Having helped get a friends mules past Diablo several times, I would not even attribute anything like that to his AI. On several occassions he would just go after a target and ignore my higher level character no mater what I did to try to distract him from his 'objective'. His AI at times seems to be to pick a target (not neccessarily the closest) and dog it for a while in spite of any distractions or who is doing the most damage. The only time that I have seen that would gaurentee that a target would be picked is if it was the only target in the AI 'visual range'.

Would this stop all efforts to get some characters 'rushed'? No. But it would greatly hamper doing so. It would require some intelligent and co-operative play among those involved to carry it out. And that is something that I do not see from the mass ranks of players out there (the majority of the LL and AB players do not fall in this catagory). I can't imagine most of the players knowing how to effectively 'hit' Diablo without problems from the clvl-mlvl factor in the to-hit calculations. Even if some do know how to go around this, they would probably have to keep making the new characters just for this. Remember that most the 'rushees' have problems if some does not just give them items to get started and are constantly begging for free help because they do not know how to get items for themselves (i.e. pick it up off the ground). Make the the help giving process more difficult and most of that will go away (the help is usually coming from a previous 'rushee').