3.2 Sorceress

The Sorceress focuses on ranged elemental spells in the areas of Cold, Lightning, and Fire. Her cold-based spells are generally the weakest, but have the benefit of chilling affected enemies (slowing them down) or freezing them (stopping them completely). Moreover, any chilled and frozen enemies may shatter instead of leaving a corpse. (A corpse can be used by some enemies as an attack or can be revived by other enemies to fight again.) Lightning spells tend to have long range and are more "utility" in nature. Their damage is widely variable. Fire is explosive and relies on hard-hitting spells.

The strong points of Sorceress are powerful damaging spells, and mobility which is very valued in multiplayer games. Weak points are strength and defence. Finding the good balance between both takes expertise.

Some abilities of the sorceress are exceptionally effective. For instance, if a level 30 barbarian attacked a level 10 sorceress, the sorceress is in the best position to win. The elemental spells of the sorceress are extremely effective. Take the sorceress's frost nova for example. If a large amount of enemies attacked the sorceress, frost nova will freeze them, giving her either a chance to escape or advantage in a fight.

To build a strong sorceress, give her a high casting rate. Also, her gear should be powerful, but have a low strength requirement. High vitality builds are very important and give your sorceress great resistance, especially since in Hell you lose 100% resistance to all elemental damage. Fire ball sorceresses are great since fire ball is based on faster casting rate so the faster casting rate you have, the more fire balls you can emit per second. Lighting sorceresses are powerful but most of their attacks aren't based on faster casting rates like lighting and chain lighting, which are widely considered the best lighting skills. Ice sorceresses are largely considered the weakest build. Maximizing the ice mastery skill is helpful, though many people don't believe so. It really helps out your sorceress because it lowers the resistance of the enemy, allowing your ice skills to do more damage. Blizzard is a powerful ability, but it's not a very accurate skill. However, frozen orb is great for attacking monsters. Fire ball is thought to be the strongest though. At least 1 skill point should be put into warmth for any sorceress and allow your bonus to the skill to boost the effects. Warmth is essential for casting characters. Also learning teleport, a useful skill that is great for rushing people.

Sorceresses who specialize in ice skills may have difficulty forming parties online, as the necromancer, barbarian, paladin, and druid classes all have skills that rely on intact corpses for some useful effect.

3.3 Amazon

The Amazon is a very "active skill"-oriented fighter. While the Barbarian relies on brute strength and weapon skills, and the Paladin on auras and special abilities, many of the Amazon's abilities require far more attention. Her skills are oriented around personal (generally passive) protective abilites, the use of a bow and arrow (whose abilites are linked with the elements of fire and ice), as well as the spear and javelin (whose abilites are linked with the elements of lightning and poison).

In reference to the original Diablo, the Amazon is much like the Rogue: she is mainly good with ranged weapons (although her spear and javelin skills provide her with a solid melee force), and she is a middle point between pure strength and pure magic.

Although Amazons in Battle.net had been one of the greatest players in the past, after 1.10 became a very difficult build after nightmare level of difficulty, unless you can afford the appropriate gear.

3.4 Barbarian

Bar none the most powerful melee fighting character on a pound-per-pound basis. His skills are divided into various masteries, warcries, and combat skills. The masteries are purely passive in nature and allow the Barbarian to become highly specialized in various non-bow/crossbow weapons, as well as gain natural speed and resistances. His warcries are essentially "spells" that simply enhance his ability to fight in combat, or reduce the ability of the enemy. A good comparison would be similar to highly temporary "auras," like the Paladin. His combat skills are attacks that simply maximize the brute force he can deal. While the Paladin has very specialized abilities (such as the ability to convert enemies temporarily), the Barbarian simply has attacks that pound out more brute damage.

3.5 Necromancer

The Necromancer is a magician, like the Sorceress, but in a very different manner. Whereas the Sorceress relies on blasting out as much elemental damage as possible, the Necromancer is a bit subtler in effect. While he does possess direct-damage in the form of poison and bone-based spells, by far his most specialized abilities are curses and summons. His curses are similar to a Paladin's enemy-affecting auras, except they are very temporary and limited in range and effect; they make up for this temporal nature with heightend and more powerful effects. His summoning abilities allow the Necromancer to raise skeletons, golems of varying natures, even former enemies themselves.

The Necromancer has perhaps suffered the most amount of play-change as Blizzard constantly "patched" and improved the original sale-version of Diablo II. Early on, the Necromancer skill "Corpse Explosion" was ludicrously powerful. Then, through successive modifications, the Necromancer decreased in relative strength and became mainly a favorite for the dedicated. With 1.10, however, the Necromancer is back in full force.

3.6 Druid

This is a character class and not available in regular Diablo II.

The Druid could be best described as a "nature" version of the Necromancer. Instead of raising the dead, he calls forth vicious wolves, crows, and bears to fight by his side or serve as his bodyguards. Instead of poison and bone spells, he has a slate of elemental, nature-based spells (sort of like a toned-down sorceress, including spells such as volcano and cyclone). However, the main difference comes in the fact that he can also shapeshift, and he has a whole slew of abilities that enhance his ability to shapeshift or give him different attacks. The Druids shapeshifting abilities and nature-based spells clash, however. When the Druid shapeshifts to either the wearwolf or wearbear, he can't use his nature-based spells.

3.7 Assassin

This is a character class and not available in regular Diablo II.

The Assassin introduces a very different style of play into Diablo II. Her abilities include "shadow disciplines," traps, and martial arts. Her shadow disciplines consist of Amazon-style passives and Barbarian-style masteries, along with a few interesting spells (involving blades resembling shuriken). Traps are a new way of attacking enemies; she can lay five at a time, and once laid, they fire (or activate) a given number of times at nearby enemies before dissipating. Martial arts is a radically new style of attacking enemies. It introduces the concept of "charges." Each of her martial arts attacks, instead of producing an effect, adds a "charge" of that attack to her. These charges last as long as the assassin is fighting; she can hold up to three of a given attack, and she can potentially have three charges of every attack active on her person (although this is a hard feat to manage). She then needs to perform a "finishing move" which may just be a plain punch or one a few specifically designated finishing moves (which add extra effects), at which point all the charges release. Depending on how many charges were built up for an ability, the effect changes. Phoenix Strike for example, releases a meteor with only one charge, a chain of lightning with two charges, and a chaotic blast of ice for three charges.

4 New Game Concepts

There are several new game concepts introduced in Diablo II, that didn't exist in its predecessor.

4.1 Socketed Items

While Diablo provided almost no item customizability, Diablo II improves in this area considerably. For example, all weapons (of which there are now around a hundred different varieties) can be socketed with gems that convey additional abilities. In , runes are introduced to further improve in this area, allowing players to create pseudo-unique items by arranging the runes to form runewords.

4.2 Rare Items

These are more rare than the regular magic items, and can contain more magic modifiers. Rare Item names are written in yellow in the game.

4.3 Set Items

These are a new class of items that, when combined, increase in power. For example, when wearing all items in Milabrega's Set, your character will enjoy new powers introduced by the fact that you're wearing the entire item set. These powers are not available if you would only wear one item in the set, or mix items from various sets. Set Items can be found in the game rarily, mostly from the hardest monsters, like Act Bosses.

In Diablo II Lord of Destruction Expansion, there are totally 15 Normal Sets and 15 Exceptional/Elite Sets. Each Set contains items from 2 to 6.

4.4 The Horadric Cube

One interesting new component of this game is the existence of the Horadric Cube. This is an in-game artifact that can change certain treasures into other treasures. For example, 3 partial rejuvenation potions may be combined to produce a full rejuvenation potion.

The Horadric Cube is further enhanced in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction to allow item crafting (giving items random properties not found on items dropped by monsters).

This device, which occupies four units of inventory space in a 2 unit by 2 unit configuration, is able to hold 12 units of items in a space measuring three units wide by four units tall. As such, it behaves much like a tesseractThe net of a tesseract In geometry, the tesseract or hypercube is a regular, convex polychoron with eight cubical cells. It can be thought of as a 4-dimensional analogue of the cube. Roughly speaking, the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the squ, storing 2 dimensional objects in 3 dimensions.

4.5 Hirelings

Diablo II introduced the concept of hiring help. This help changes with various acts. In the first act, a Rogue-type hireling (as in the original Diablo) can be used. In the second act, a spear-wielding mercenary is available. In the third act, one of three elemental mages can be hired. As for the fourth act... well, no one wants to brave HellHell is, according to many religious beliefs about the afterlife, a place of torment, of great weeping and gnashing of teeth. The English word 'hell' comes from the Norse Hel', which originally referred to the goddess of the Norse underworld. In most reli except for your character, so you're alone.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, however, expanded this concept greatly. Instead of having act-specific help that generally never improved with experience, hired help now persists for as long as you want (although you may need to pay a resurrection cost every once and a while). They can be equipped with weapons, healed, and they also become stronger with experience, just like your character. Moreover, there were many improvements to hirelings in general to make the more viable as actual help. The second act hirelings, for example, previously notorious for dying quickly, have many extra abilities (such as Paladin auras) that make them favorites for many. In addition, the fifth act offers hirable barbarians (although they aren't really related to the character class Barbarian).

5 Patch 1.10

Long thought to be a myth or an aborted attempt, Patch 1.10 was announced to the world in May 2002, and was finally released to the public on October 28October 28 is the 301st day of the year (302nd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 64 days remaining. Events 306 Maxentius is proclaimed Roman emperor. 312 Battle of Milvian Bridge: Constantine the Great defeats the forces of Maxentius. Roman e, 20032003 is a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar), and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Summary Perhaps the defining global event of the year 2003 was the Invasion of Iraq launched by the U. This patch adds several new features and items into the game.

Ladder Characters: The patch introduces a new type of characters called Ladder Characters. Only Ladder Characters are ranked on the ladder (lists of the top 1000 characters on a realm in different categories). These characters are separated from the rest of the realm and can only join games created by other ladder characters. This effectively creates a new clean economy for these characters free from the existing economy where any item in the game can be had for the right price.

Ladder seasons are also introduced where ladder characters play together for a season. The standard season length is still unknown. When a ladder season ends, the ladder characters are converted to non-ladder characters. To continue playing in the new ladder season, players will have to create new characters, thus creating a new economy.

Ladder-only Features: The patch also includes items and cube recipes that are ladder-only. These can be found in game types except non-ladder Battle.net games. This restriction was added to compensate for increased monster difficulty in ladder games, and also because overall difficulty was further increased as the players have no longer access to their non-ladder items to help. When a ladder season ends the ladder-only items found will be moved to the non-ladder realm with the characters and will be quite valuable.

Rust Storm: Blizzard has implemented a new system for identifying and deleting illegal items on the realms, that was dubbed the rust storm (since hacked items are "rusted" and removed from the realms). When Blizzard is made aware of a new hacked or bugged item, they can simply update the rust storm filters and the item will be deleted from the entire realm. This should help keep the economy stable and free from items that give players an unfair advantage.

Leeching and Rushing: A popular playing style in the pre-1.10 realms was to "rush" a character – meaning that the player would have a friend of much higher level (the "rusher") quickly play through the game for them, completíng the needed quests and skipping the others, while the friend of lower level (the "rushee") tagged along at a safe distance. This allowed the rushed player to bypass much of the long areas of the game that are time consuming to complete. The player would then "leech experience" (i.e. gain through no effort from their own side) from higher level characters to gain levels before continuing. Leeching experience was most commonly done in the Secret Cow Level, since this level could be created repeatedly as long as the Cow King was not killed by the game maker, and because the level had high level monsters, which provided a fairly large amount of experience when the game had the maximum number of players. With 1.10 these tactics have been made much more time consuming, and leeching was supposed to have been made a lot more difficult, because the amount of experience a player receives from being partied is now based on the proximity to the actual fighting, and difference between player levels. This was meant to encourage players to play the game the way Blizzard designed it, in truly cooperative games. However, the player community found variant methods to leech (namely the so-called Baal runs and Pit runs), which, albeit slower than the "Cow runs", are still well beyond the intended leveling speed.

Skill Synergies: With Patch 1.10, Blizzard introduced a feature called Synergies (before 1.10, seen in the Druid's and Necromancer's summoning skills). Synergies allow skills to gain bonuses depending on the skill levels of other, related skills. This enables the player to build a more varied character while still attaining the efficiency and power of a specialised build (the so-called "cookie-cutter" variants). The downside to Synergies is that many pre-1.10 characters have been made essentially useless because the popular ways to allocate skills before 1.10 results in extremely low damage characters after 1.10. This essentially forces all players to start over and create new characters that utilize Synergies.

The World Event: Patch 1.10 also introduced the world event. This is a server-wide event that, when in effect, replaces the next super unique monster found by a Diablo Clone that is much tougher than the regular Diablo act boss monster, but also drops the much sought after unique Annihilus charm. This charm is only dropped in the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. The event is tied to the selling of "The Stone of Jordan", a very popular ring that was/is, as such, very extensively duplicated -- the objective seems to be the removal of excess SoJs, as they're called, from the game.

The general player's opinion of Patch 1.10 is mixed. The players that dislike cheats find the 1.10's new relatively cheat free realm wonderful, while others dislike the fact that many of their old characters have taken a drop in efficiency, forcing them to start over.

It is probable that Patch 1.10 will be the last patch released for Diablo II (except for possible critical bug fix patches), as many former Diablo II designers have now left Blizzard to form the new company Flagship Studios. Besides, the size of the released patches already represent quite an unusual investment into a game that is no longer being developed and expanded.

6 Diablo II on Battle.net

The Diablo II section of Battle.net consists of a global online community made up of tens of thousands of people who connect to six primary realms across the globe, two in the United States, East and West, one in Europe and three in Asia. Each realm is compromised by several servers. Each realm has two ways to connect: there is the closed realm, where all your character data is stored on the battle.net servers making it difficult to cheat, and there is the open realm where you play with your off-line (single player or LAN / TCP/IP) characters. There are generally many more cheats on the open realm due to its nature – the characters used on the realm exist on the player's local hard drive.

6.1 Game Styles

Players may create characters to play with in the softcore, hardcore, softcore ladder and hardcore ladder modes. If played softcore, the user's character can be resurrected if they die. In hardcore, no such option exists. Ladder characters are ranked on the ladder. The non-ladder and ladder characters can't play with each others, and therefore has two completely different virtual economies. When a ladder season ends, ladder characters are transformed into non-ladder characters, and to keep playing on the ladder, new ladder characters need to be made. This is made both to keep the ladder more clean from hacked items, and naturally also to give the players a reason to keep fighting for the top spots.

6.2 The Hardcore game style

While Softcore is often refered as a tutorial of the game, Hardcore is meant for advanced players who succeeded in Softcore, but they begin to notice that once they had all their desired equipment, they are done. Due to the inability to ressurect players, Hardcore players tend to be more skillful and assist other players. Cooperative playing is a need and not an option, and the people playing in this mode tend to be more mature. Apart from the fact that the user's name is put in red in the ladder, the game itself and the "Item Drops" are the same, despite the common belief that in Hardcore "Magic Find" drops are better. Hardcore players are less likely to "miss" a good item being dropped, and are more likely to point out good items to the players in their party.

6.3 Battle.net Sociology

It is also an interesting study in sociology, as social groups organize to adventure together, usually based on geographical region, language, character affiliation/preferences, playing style and other considerations. Many players form clans to defend themselves from player killers (or PKs). There is also a significant economy associated with Diablo II, because the most powerful magic items are rare, and are often traded. Interestingly this trading occurs both in-game and in the real world. Certain "unique" items used to sell on eBay for upwards of 500 US dollars.

6.4 Battle.net Slang

Many people on battlenet or bnet utilize some elements of leetspeak. Some terms that appear only in Diablo II are abbreviations of item names, like "cgmboe" for Cruel Grand Matron Bow of Evisceration, or the description of certain builds of characters like Javazon for an Amazon which uses Javelins as her main weapon, a Bowadin for a Paladin who shoots a bow or crossbow, or boon instead of Barbarian.

A person that is new to Diablo II and joins a chat channel will be shocked and not be able to comprehend the majority of expressions. In game, they may be dumbfounded when someone preremptorily "opens a trade window" with them(the method of allowing players to exchange virtual items within the game) and sends the message "wug?", meaning "What you got?", or "wywfi", meaning "What you want for it?"... or they may be offered a hand in advancing to higher game levels in exchange for a quest reward by the cryptic message: rsh u 4 4rg? (Rush you for your hellforge quest reward?)

6.5 Battle.net Player versus Player (PvP)

PvP is another widely played feature of the game. Players can join into parties and declare hostility to each other. PvP has become a competition like a sport, with leagues, special rules, a big community and even rivalry between the leagues. The two largest leagues are Duellliga and Art of War.

6.6 Battle.net Cheats

Diablo, ever since the first version, has been plagued with cheats on the closed and open battle.net realms. These cheats give the players unfair advantages or the abilities to remove other players from the games by crashing their computers. The most notorious cheats have always been dupes. A dupe is a cheat or exploit of the game that creates exact copies of an item. These copies are then traded and/or sold for the profit of the cheaters.

6.6.1 Map Hacking

One popular type of a hack, that can also be found in games like Warcraft III, is a Maphack. This hack allows the user to see the entire game map and all the monsters. This sort of hack gives the player an advantage because they show where to find the monsters and which monsters to avoid, and also because they allow the player to quickly find a path to his destination. The author of the most widely used Diablo II Maphack is "Mousepad".

With this class of hacks, the effect is only on the client side and doesn't harm the servers. Blizzard has had to struggle to prevent maphacks from being used on the realm. They are notoriously hard to identify and only detectable if the maphack software itself is buggy or if Blizzard scans the clients' memory for the hack.

6.6.2 Hacked Items

The most controversial type of hacks on the realm are the so called "bugged" or "hacked" items. It is unclear how these items first appeared on the realm. Some of these items with extraordinarily powerful effects were spawned because of bugs in the game. These are generally referred to as "bugged" items. The "hacked" items have characteristics that are too powerful to have resulted from an accident, created by hackers on purpose.

6.6.3 Bots

More recently in the past year bots have become extremely popular. These programs allow the user to completely automate their game play. They are primarily used for magic finding (finding better randomly generated items). This gives their users a clear advantage because their computer is playing around the clock, collecting the best items in the game with little input from the user.

6.6.3.1 AutoIt

The first of these bots to appear used a program called AutoIt to automate key strokes and a d2hackit module. The first popular version to utilize AutoIt and d2hackit was called Infinite Pindle Bot (IPB); it was designed to repeatedly kill a boss monster, Pindleskin, without any user intervention, except to periodically remove the items it found from the bot character.

6.6.3.2 Mephbot

The first class of bots was quite simple, they where limited to killing monsters in a "static" area. Yet Diablo has many areas in the map that are "random", and to find your way around it with a bot you'd have to use a simple path finding algorithm. The first bot to use such an algorithm was called Mephbot, written by " Syadasti " also known as Mike Gogulski. He appeared on TechTV's The Screen Savers [1] demonstrating his mephbot. This bot used Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to find its path to kill "Mephisto", a boss character in the game.

6.6.3.3 JED

The next bots to emerge allowed you to write bots using JavaScript. These programs embed the JavaScript language into the Diablo II game itself. The first JavaScript bot was JavaScript Enabled Diablo (JED). This program was written by Ben Thompson (a.k.a. "Smoke") and revolutionized the Diablo II bot world. The first versions were only able to kill Pindleskin because no path finding algorithms were enabled in JavaScript yet.

6.6.3.4 d2jsp

Shortly after JED was released another project started, called Diablo II JavaScript Parser (External link). This program is written by Paul Taulborg (aka njaguar) and quickly became the standard for bots in Diablo II. It allowed you to fully interface the Diablo II game with JavaScript and bots were written to path find every area of the game and kill all major bosses. However, as Blizzard began scanning for bots, this was also the most severely hit bot with hundreds of thousands users penalized for using it.

6.6.4 Scamming

Scamming is probably the most widely tried type of hack, and its success is based on how well a player can fool another. A player creates a game with a name that would entice other players to join. The perpetrator then tries to convince the players to download a program, which he has disguised as a duping program (a program that makes exact copies of items). If the player being scammed is gullible enough, he/she will download the program and run it while still in the game. Generally the program is an Autoit script which opens Diablo II and drops all of their items on the ground, and then closes the game and shuts down the player's computer. This leaves the scammer enough time to pick through and take whichever items he/she wishes and leave before the other player can return. This type of program has not only been done in Autoit, but in VB.NET and its predecessor Visual Basic, as well utilizing API calls to manipulate the keyboard and mouse.

This type of cheat is still tried often, but generally doesn't work anymore becuase the Diablo II community has become very familiar with it due to overuse, and knows to avoid it.

There are other forms of scamming that do not involve convincing someone to download a program. One such example is to convince another player to drop an item of value on the ground and in return they will get another item, but instead the dropped item is simply picked up by the scammer. There have also been scams that convince someone to reveal his or her account password, thereby giving the scammer complete access to the person's account.

6.6.5 Anti-hack Measures

Blizzard has a strong anti-cheat stance. They've always aggressively pursued hack programs that are designed to attack their systems. These typically have been dupe programs, because they exploit bugs and flaws in the game's software. These dupe programs, when publicly available, have at times brought the online gaming servers to near collapse. So Blizzard has aggressively patched and fixed many of these exploits as soon as they became aware of them.

With bots, Blizzard has taken a more direct approach. Since their first appearance on the realm, Blizzard has banned over 200,000 Battle.net accounts that have been associated with bots. The first of these mass bannings took place on April 1, 2003.

With Patch 1.10, Blizzard has adopted a still more direct course to detect hacks. They have added special code into the game itself that can detect these cheats in memory and report back to battle.net.

Blizzard has also implemented a system to detect and delete the "bugged" and "hacked" items from the realms (in the form of the nicely mysterious, artifact-munching "rust storm"). The post-1.10 Diablo II realms are much cleaner than the realms have been in years, with less duped and hacked items around. The users also have the option to play on the ladder which is a totally clean economy separate from the old corrupted realms, and is kept so by the periodic wipes.

7 Diablo II off Battle.net

7.1 ATMA

ATMA (short for A Tenshi Muling Application) is a program created by Hakai_no_Tenshi that allows for those not using Battle.net to "mule," or move items across characters. Originally, items were muled via another player hosting a TCP/IP game (which uses single-player characters). Later, character trainers (programs designed for editing a character) were used to mule alone. Another common practice was to use an edited file that allowed for one computer to both host and join a TCP/IP game.

ATMA's initial release was merely a console window that displayed a character's inventory and the individual statistics for each item. Since these statistics provided "fingerprints" (of which each item has a unique one), duped items could be detected simply by asking others what fingerprints their items had.

Later releases allowed for simple drag-and-drop muling, character editing (which was removed with later editions), and "stashes," or files that could contain thousands of items in an organized list. Currently, versions 1.07 through 1.10 final are supported. The latest edition also has a drop calculator for all supported versions.

8 External links

• Official Links
  • Official Diablo II site
  • [http://www.battle.net/diablo2exp/ Official Diablo II
  • [2]

Strategy Guide]

• • Complete List of fixes from patch 1.01

• Strategy
  • The Unofficial Diablo II site
  • The Amazon Basin - Strategy for Diablo II in general and the Amazon in particular
  • Monster and treasure class data
  • The Lurkerlounge - in depth game mechanics and strategy analysis

• Other Useful resources and Add-On's
  • Diablo II Fan Site list
  • Diablo II Modding Community
  • The Diablo II Javascript Parser (d2jsp)

2000 computer and video games Diablo games Mac OS games

#REDIRECT Blizzard_Entertainment

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