Lower Kurast finds

Spent about 40 minutes this morning on the hardest setting of Hell mode running (more like inching) Lower Kurast (in solo). Besides being 43 million away from level 83 I scooped up a couple of items I didn't have before: IK Gauntlets (set item), Snake Cord Light Belt (Unique).

Along with these items I found the usual round of flawless gems, enough to do 2 rounds of transforming grand charms (both of which resulted in worse charms). Two runes also dropped, Ral and Dol. Dol comes in handy cubing up. Still looking for that elusive Ber rune. I think Atma's item calculator said there's something like a 1 in 40,000 chance of getting Ber - something ridiculous anyway.

The monsters in LK are not quite as nasty as the last act, but I still had to inch my way around to avoid the lightning enhanced monsters... having bad memories of almost getting to Anya in hell only to be stopped by Frozenstein's lightning enhanced body. One of the problems with the hammerdin spamming hammers is if you find yourself surrounded and one of the monsters is lightning enhanced. Even with 75 max lightning resist in hell Frozenstein still took me out pretty easily. This is one of the reasons I jumped back to Lower Kurast, to build up a bit more health and hopefully find a few more runes to get Heart of the Oak or Enigma.

Diablo Hell down

Diablo fell to slicer in Hell mode relatively easily (e.g. Slicer didn't die or have to open a portal home). And Diablo dropped Mara's Kaleidoscope, a unique amulet recommended for Hammerdins. This makes 2 items from one of the recommended lists I now have (the other is Trang's gloves). Funny enough I believe my crafted amulet is almost better since it has 5% FCR, +15 mana, Regenerate mana +7%, All resistances +12% and +2 to combat skills.

Mara's is +2 to all skills so it may be better, but for now I'm not using it.

I managed to also complete the first couple of quests in Act 5 before getting swarmed and crushed by Thresh Socket. The crowd was overwhelming and had Slicer in a corner. Stealth in a Dusk Shroud just isn't enough. Enigma is nice, but running LK thousands of times is out of the question at this point.

I was also really lucky Diablo dropped the Burning Essence of Terror. At this point I could probably run Diablo without too much problem, the real problem is some of his minion, particularly if I'm not paying enough attention. HOTO is not really far off. I can probably cube up enough in a few weeks for this, but Enigma is the really elusive problem here.

Hammering up the lower kurast ruins

Slicer is now just shy of level 80, 2 more before I can use the amulet I crafted back at level 75. I can still hardly believe I got so lucky to have crafted a cool amulet appropriate to the character I'm playing.

Baal runs turned out to be a bit of a PITA (pain in the a**). Running seemed to take forever and the same large useless items kept dropping. For a little while I switched between normal and nightmare just so I could get a shorter map, but that takes time too. I

Why run Lower Kurast in Hell mode? It's rumoured that there are chests which drop the awesome Ber rune! But some of those people ran LK thousands of times to get the Ber rune. I have no such ambitions. My purpose was to cube up Flawless gems that would later be used on a grand charm in hopes of getting a +skills charm. I tried cubing up a few times and got some interesting results, but no +skills. I saw mention somewhere that the charm has to originally be high enough level. When I cubed the charm up its level seemed to jump all over the place. On top of all this doing Lower Kurast with the /players 8 switch gives loads of experience. In 5 runs I leveled from 77 to almost 80 (one or two good baddies should do the trick).

One trick that helps with nasty monsters that quickly deplete your mana is to orient them around the waypoint. You can do this 2 ways. Either trap the monsters on the waypoint and attack them with your hammers/spells from the other side of the waypoint. You can also, as I've done in the screenshot above, trap them around the waypoint and then you stand on the upper part of the waypoint and kill the monsters the same way.

In 5 runs here's some of the swag I scored: approximately 17 flawless gems, a couple of Amn runes, a sol rune, a hel rune, a couple of ort runes, some other minor runes, a couple of large charms with 14% and 15% fire resistance, a small charm with 7% magic find, Taebaek's Glory set item, and about 7 jewels of various sorts. In actuality I found a lot more, but nothing else really worth reporting. On one run I found 8 flawless gems, so much was dropping that I had to keep going back to town.

Marco solo!

It's been several years since I played Diablo II LOD on any kind of regular basis, perhaps because of work, perhaps because the friends I used to live close to who played Diablo don't live so close anymore, or perhaps due to family commitments, or perhaps because I steered for several months towards an anime-themed open Source RPG The Mana World (which I actually run a server for). Whatever the reason it doesn't matter except for you to note years have passed. One thing I really noticed on my return was how awful spam has become on the Battlenet servers. It was there before, but never so quite pronounced. It's also obvious from the amount of Youtube videos, forums, blogs, and other media that everyone's a Diablo II LOD expert and that if you don't do things a certain way... This isn't one of those blogs. I don't pretend to be an expert. The idea here is just to document the fun of playing the game.

Rushing from zero to hell is cool for some. And honestly I wish I had a good friend to help out with zero to hell, but after spending quite a few hours I think I managed to get close to the end of Act 5 in normal only to be left hanging before Baal's death. No big deal because I've always liked Solo and Multiplayer with friends anyway.

I play with a couple of boxes at home. One box acts as my mule dump, it just sits attached to our television until I need it to dump stuff. I have a few dozen characters on this box with names like SetMuleOne, UniqueMuleFive, RuneMuleOne, etc. I started mules for just about anything you could think of then found it was just too much. Runes, gems of all kinds (though I usually just leave most lying around), set items, and unique items are mostly what I 've been collecting.

The main character doing most of the collecting is Slicer, a level 76 Hammerdin. Slicer doesn't have fancy equipment like HOTO or Enigma. In fact in Hell he's quite a wimp, especially in Act 2 where there are quite a few magic resistant monsters. At first I ran Baal a few times and noticed it's a great way to get lots of experience (enough to level up in about 7 runs), but then I read that Mephisto has the highest chance of dropping Frostburn Gloves, and wouldn't you know it - the very second run Mephisto dropped unique gloves... which turned out to be Magefist, disappointing, but still better than the crafted gloves I was using. So I've continued to run Mephisto, probably about 30 times now, because he seems to have such a high drop rate and because I got an awesome map where the third level is in the next room from the way point. Sadly I'm packed full of unique and set items, so much so that I'm leaving cheap items like Cleglaw's Shield on the ground before I start a multiplayer session to mule off the other stuff... it's a good problem to have.

And speaking earlier about crafted items, I crafted a level 82 amulet with Slicer when he was level 75, so I've been thinking about running Baal until Slicer can use the amulet. But Mephisto runs have been so much more fun. In a really short time I collected a lot of unique and set items, something like 20 in 1 1/2 hours. I'm actually documenting all this in a spreadsheet so I can provide friends with a list of items and which mules have them.

Of course with Hammerdin's the big ticket items are the HOTO and Enigma rune words. Funny enough I don't even have a lowly Ith rune, part of the Enigma rune word, at the moment, but I do have Ko and Thul, two parts of HOTO and I have 2 Lems. 3 Lems make a Pul rune, leaving only Vex for Heart Of The Oak. Isn't solo fun?