You need to make sure you have your “show items” button pressed the entire time your beating on Baal. I have my hotkeys as QWERTASDFGZXCV, and my “show items” is G - no fumbling for Ctrl or whatever the default is.
I know what you mean about drops. I never come up with anything. A damn Dshell finally dropped for me and it had to be in one of those games. Bastards left before I could even trade for it. Bottom line: don’t expect drops. Expect levels and the get your own drops.
In other news, I have a trapasin started. She’s about lvl 20 now so it’s time to get her to the ancients. 
You’ll like the name 
I would actually recommend, MDSL, that you get your trapsin to 23 or so (high 23); you’ll get a level doing Ancients at lvl 20-24, but level 21 is less XP than level 23, so you’re better off going for Norm Ancients when you can just sit down in Norm Baal runs for an afternoon after doing Ancients. You can get to 55 without much difficulty; after 46 or so the xp drops off, and drastically after about 52, but 55 isn’t impossible by any stretch.
Buggerall, that was me, not her.
Good point, and I probably won’t rush her just yet (unless I get the chance.) Exp is easy to come by and she’ll be running the Arcane till I am ready to get my level on.
Have you used a trap-asin before? I think I’m going to have to drop a lot of points into energy because of her inability to leech. She is the closest thing to a caster type that I have made and I’m not experienced at it.
I was wondering what a good looking girl like her was doing in a thread like this 
I have never built a trapsin, so I don’t know how to build one ideally. My method of dealing with leech would be to dump a few points into claw mastery, put a few into Phoenix Strike (that’s the leeching one, right?), then dump 70 or so points into traps.
And now for the reason I’m posting here:) I was doing some Hell Baal pub runs for XP (she’s up to almost level 84; another run should put her comfortably into 84). Last run I did, everyone but me died facing Baal (I think they were all standing around waiting for someone tg et LH so they could all try to steal the drop). So while they were running back from town through their Throne TPs, I cast a few meteors on Baal and got him.
Since the sorc is still a Champ, she automatically gets good MF when she kills Hell Baal. As such I didn’t worry about switching to MF gear (baba/Rhyme) when casting meteors.
Baal dies, as you’d expect he would when fairly well slivered and getting 11K meteors dropped on him. Along with him drops a unique Mighty Scepter and some other crap.
Now, I don’t know about y’all, but the unique grand/mighty/war/scorching/cruel scepters confuse the hell out of me when unIDed. So when I see this drop, I think to myself “Okay, it’s probably just your run of the mill scepter. Might even be Rusthandle and I’m forgetting.” But just to be safe, I open a passworded room and go ID the thing (it’s in my cube along with a rare bone knife that dropped. I figure if the bone knife is bad, I’ll sell it).
I have never seen this before in my life except listed on a page of uniques:
Heaven’s Light
Mighty Scepter
+2 Paladin Skill Levels
20% IAS
278% Dmg
-33% target defense
33% Crushing
+15 life after each demon kill
+3 light radius
+50% dmg undead
Socketed (2)
It’s FAS on a sorc and has 151-196 damage.
Anyone got any ideas?
Yeah, give it to a paladin. Ahem… we have two in our group…
I don’t get it. Is there some risk in IDing an item in a public game? Once it’s in your inventory, it should darn well stay there, shouldn’t it? It’s not like you have to drop it on the ground for Deckard to see it. There are two unique Mighty Scepters, btw, so you would have had to identify it anyway.
And Cobra Strike is the assassin leeching skill, but you need at least two charges on it before it’ll leech mana, and sometimes it just doesn’t seem to work at all. Plus, if you look at the damage on your trapper weapons, the leech probably isn’t going to be enough to really help compared to your casting costs.
This guy says you can get by fine with just +mana charms and items.
(on preview)
::gibber::
ShaelShael it and you’ll hit the lowest possible breakpoint for Zeal (4 frames).
Imagine that I’d been in a public game and tried to put the item in my stash. However, imagine also that I’d lagged out, and when I clicked to put it in my stash after opening my cube, I lagged bad and dropped it instead. No more happy fun scepter. I find, in general, that opening a private game when you just want to be careful is a matter of three seconds of security. Also, had someone else come in-game I’d have been able to mule it off much more safely.
Actually 3 pallies… but who’s counting
To be truthful though, mine couldn’t make best use of it anyway, as a hammerdin. I already have a +2 rare sword that I don’t use due to the 50% faster cast on the wiz spike.
I know that it wouldn’t be any good for you and that you don’t really like that build anyway. Thus I excluded you from my count
That is a good guide that you linked to. I think I’ll pump my str and dex a bit past that into the range for my firelizard claws. He also wanted to make a nearly exclusive build on the lightning trap side. I think I"ll use lit/fire as my build, as I won’t really lose anything in skill levels by it and most of the synergies go both ways down the tree. We’ll see how it works.
I had just gotten back from watching time-shifted/TiVo’ed Survivor and was about to start muling some things and no sooner had I picked my player and set up a game than the realm dropped.
Phew!
I’m so relived it happened then than a few minutes later with all my schtuff laying on the ground!
If you are going to mule anything more important than an ethereal cracked sash, I would simply wait in-game for five minutes before unloading anything. We actually mule in a very sloppy manner, since TS (trade screen)ing stuff is far safer. But then, when you are only muling some low-level runes, safety is not quite such the thing as speed so you can go get better gear.
Trade screen? What is this trade screen you speak of?
And yes, I was planning on playing for a bit in the game, a quick D and Ball run, then coming back and dropping for the mule. Never got that far, though, luckily.
Trade screen is that thing where you click on another player in town and that player clicks OK. It’s a safer way of transferring items than merely using the ground, and it’s used especially in the case of trades, where sometimes you can’t trust another person (esp. if you don’t know 'em) to not have someone waiting to steal your part of the trade.
Oh, well that I knew about, but it’s kinda useless for a one-person muling experience, you know.
Just go back into Diablo II after a looooong hiatus. Patch 1.10 is a huge improvement! So many good, necessary changes. I’m so loving those synergies!
I’m playing a Fire Druid right now. Firestorm-Molten Boulder-Fissure-Ravens. That’s right. A bowling, fire-snake throwing, lava-crack creating, raven lover! hehehe! Tis a lot of fun I must say.
I was in a game the other day with a couple of bowlers. O’ man was that fun! We had this routine down where one bowler would run around behind a pack of monsters and bowl them toward us [knockback]. When the monsters were being knocked back toward us, we would then knock them back the other way, towards the bowler behind them. That bowler would then knock them back towards us, and so on! LOL! What a trip!
And before you start laughing about Ravens let me just say this: Distraction, including ranged attackers, and big bosses. And all for 3 skill points!
Welcome back into the fold, Thorongil! Are you on East or West? Either way, we’d be glad to welcome you in with showers of gifts, quests help, and other friendly party play.