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?