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Diablo II and the Potions
It's kind of ridiculous for me to be writing about Diablo II, but I've been playing it again recently. Due to changes in Battle.net, I've been playing four different characters in turn, keeping them all within four levels of each other; that way they can "visit" each other's games and exchange equipment and items.
I'm playing:
- A sorceress who specializes in electricity and cold skills
- A druid, speciality werewolf transformations, combat, and dire wolves
- A necromancer, speciality golems (and later, Reviveds)
- A barbarian, speciality dual-sword use (aka Frenzarian)
It's interesting, trying to keep them all close enough in level. I get to see which ones have more difficulty in different parts of the game. I also get to experiment a bit. And that brought me to an interesting discovery, although I suspect that it was obvious to everyone else in the world.
Basically, D2 is VERY level-based. You gain access to new (and usually far more effective) skills every four levels. Once you've freshly gained those new skills, you're usually quite powerful...but as you advance towards the next four-level increment, you become less and less effective. This can be quite irritating, to be honest.
Another issue is bosses. They're not all equally overwhelming, but for many solo characters bosses can be challenging, to put it mildly. It's not uncommon (at least for me) to die over and over before finally destroying a boss. Since you lose money every time you die, as well as some of the potions that you've equipped in your belt, you can end up very poor indeed.
One thing I tried was to drop all my money before fighting a boss that I feared would kill me. And not just my personal money; all the money in my storage chest, too. Although why dying out in the field should take money from my storage area in town never really made sense to me.
Once I've dropped all that money, it's only a matter of time before it disappears. So it's a race against time to kill the boss before the money evaporates. Of course I can pick up the money and drop it again between deaths, but that's a mildly tedious process. It's also sometimes necessary, in order to pay to have your henchman resurrected.
So when I took my sorceress up against Mephisto, I decided to try something different. I normally save all my purple potions, and make full rejuvenation portions out of them; they tend to clog up my storage space, but I just hate to use them. Normally I keep full rejuves in my #4 belt slot, reds (healing) in the #1 & 2 slots, and blues (mana/magic) in my #3 slot.
But this time I took out ALL of the non-purple potions and filled up the belt solid with nothing but full rejuvenations. Result: I killed Mephisto without dying ONCE. And I still had enough purples left over to fill my #4 slot! I definitely would have died several times over if I hadn't loaded up with all-purples.
It sounds obvious, I know. But it took me a long time to figure it out. :P
Actually, I was also probably being stupidly cheap on potions. You can't buy purples, which makes them technically rare; so I tend not to use them. But since I lose lots of them when I die, it makes a lot more sense to use them and stay alive!
I'm playing:
- A sorceress who specializes in electricity and cold skills
- A druid, speciality werewolf transformations, combat, and dire wolves
- A necromancer, speciality golems (and later, Reviveds)
- A barbarian, speciality dual-sword use (aka Frenzarian)
It's interesting, trying to keep them all close enough in level. I get to see which ones have more difficulty in different parts of the game. I also get to experiment a bit. And that brought me to an interesting discovery, although I suspect that it was obvious to everyone else in the world.
Basically, D2 is VERY level-based. You gain access to new (and usually far more effective) skills every four levels. Once you've freshly gained those new skills, you're usually quite powerful...but as you advance towards the next four-level increment, you become less and less effective. This can be quite irritating, to be honest.
Another issue is bosses. They're not all equally overwhelming, but for many solo characters bosses can be challenging, to put it mildly. It's not uncommon (at least for me) to die over and over before finally destroying a boss. Since you lose money every time you die, as well as some of the potions that you've equipped in your belt, you can end up very poor indeed.
One thing I tried was to drop all my money before fighting a boss that I feared would kill me. And not just my personal money; all the money in my storage chest, too. Although why dying out in the field should take money from my storage area in town never really made sense to me.
Once I've dropped all that money, it's only a matter of time before it disappears. So it's a race against time to kill the boss before the money evaporates. Of course I can pick up the money and drop it again between deaths, but that's a mildly tedious process. It's also sometimes necessary, in order to pay to have your henchman resurrected.
So when I took my sorceress up against Mephisto, I decided to try something different. I normally save all my purple potions, and make full rejuvenation portions out of them; they tend to clog up my storage space, but I just hate to use them. Normally I keep full rejuves in my #4 belt slot, reds (healing) in the #1 & 2 slots, and blues (mana/magic) in my #3 slot.
But this time I took out ALL of the non-purple potions and filled up the belt solid with nothing but full rejuvenations. Result: I killed Mephisto without dying ONCE. And I still had enough purples left over to fill my #4 slot! I definitely would have died several times over if I hadn't loaded up with all-purples.
It sounds obvious, I know. But it took me a long time to figure it out. :P
Actually, I was also probably being stupidly cheap on potions. You can't buy purples, which makes them technically rare; so I tend not to use them. But since I lose lots of them when I die, it makes a lot more sense to use them and stay alive!
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CE, before any of the patches, the explosion was incrememtal. By level 20 it was like a nuke going off. They had to seriously throttle it back.
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I'm not a min-max kind of gamer (am I?), but something about all that just doesn't seem quite fair!
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Blue Tuesday is known that way because that's patch day and everyone has to see what Blizz nerfed in their characters this time.
50 patches from 1.12 to 3.1.1
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4 cd's for just WoW.
4 cd's for the first expansion The Burning Crusade
And then they got smart and put the latest expansion Wrath of the Lich King on DVD.
The full and complete install plus all the patches is a full-day install if you have a really fast system. +2Ghz, +2GB ram.
I really need to upgrade my system.
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I'd love a more thought-inducing game, but so far I haven't found one.