All that’s known so far is that it’ll be down for approximately 6 hours, and that information will be posted in the battle.net status forum. That forum is currently completely blank, which presumably means that they won’t tell us anything more until it actually goes down.
The folks in my longstanding weekend D2 game pretty much refused to believe there will be a ladder reset/patch this week. Their reasoning was that random internet weenies have often predicted ladder resets and been wrong. My pointing out that the official Blizzard site (Arreat Summit), not some random Internet rumormonger, says so fell on deaf ears; I don’t know why. 
So if it doesn’t reset this week I will have to eat crow. Or at least Druid Ravens.
I think (hope?) that dual Dream or Dragon would still be okay. But there was still a bug recently that allowed you (using the trade window) to basically re-equip your items an obscene amount of times to stack it over and over and over. To the point that a character could kill enemies in Hell just with the pulse damage from his Holy Shock.
Beautiful! Are any of them interested in buying any ladder items? I was worried about where we’d find a market to unload soon-to-be-nonladder loot.
I’m a Westerner, but I can continue to play east.
I really enjoy playing a summoning necro, so I’ll jump in and volunteer there.
The forum that Chronos has a post from this morning say the realms will be brought down at 9am pacific time, or 12pm eastern. Says it could take as long as 6 hours… I’m planing on being there as soon as it resets.
The new patch is up! See y’all on USEast… My account is hirkat
Patch is live. I’m “appleciders” on USeast.
I’ll need another couple hours yet. Need to do enough work to justify playing games.
I’d love to play some with you guys, and I think my brother is game as well. I’m DrakThol on US East. I don’t know if I will have time to play tonight, but I’d be up for tomorrow night!
Justify playing games? What, the ladder resetting isn’t enough? 
Hey C, can you post or email me the wall directions for the act 3 areas? Don’t do enough to know by heart.
Almost everything is left. The only notable exceptions are Cats2, WSK2, and Maggot, which are right.
Tried my (off ladder) senior Sorceress who has 28 Hydra and 28 Fire mastery.
New Hydra rules are sweet!
For the record, the 1.13 patch notes:
Diablo II Version History
- Patch 1.13c
A new Mystery has been revealed!
-
Adventurers of Sanctuary are hereby warned once again, that a new challenge
awaits you. Within Diablo’s Bosses, spanning across the world from the
ancient Monastery Catacombs to the Throne of Destruction, is where you’ll
find what you seek…
Major Bugs -
Fixed an item dupe bug.
-
Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater.
-
Fixed an issue where some players could kill other players while in town
(“TPPK”). -
Fixed an issue where some players could disconnect other players when
they had too many active states. -
Fixed two issues where players could stack auras in an unintended way.
Minor Bugs -
Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed
before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal). -
The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the
window loses and then regains focus. -
Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in
windowed mode when it lost focus. -
Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn’t center properly when it
was created. -
Fangskin should now properly drop loot in Hell difficulty.
-
Fixed an issue where auras were not re-applied to your mercenary after
it was resurrected. -
Fixed an issue where if you had two items which provided auras to
a mercenary and you unequipped one, the aura from the remaining
item never became active. -
Fixed an issue where the Paladin class runeword ‘Principle’ wasn’t
having all of its stats applied properly. -
Fixed an issue where the Paladin’s Charge ability would become locked
out if Holy Shield faded while charging. -
Fixed an issue where the Barbarian’s Leap ability could become locked
out if they were hit when they started to leap.
Specific changes/improvements -
Respecialization is now possible! Completing the ‘Den of Evil’ quest
will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players
who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in
Hell difficulty. -
Increased the drop rate of high runes.
-
Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be
maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users). -
Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items
required for Uber Tristam. -
Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level.
-
Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character.
-
Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters.
-
Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal’s summoned minions no longer give experience.
-
Removed Oblivion Knight’s Iron Maiden curse.
-
Hellfire Torch Firestorm proc rate has been reduced to 5%.
-
Users can now toggle the display of text over the Health and Mana
globes by clicking on the bottom area of each orb. -
When creating a single player game, each difficulty button is now bound
to a unique key: Normal ‘R’, Nightmare ‘N’, and Hell ‘H’. -
The ‘Enter Chat’ Button in the battle.net waiting room is now
bound to the ‘Enter’ key. -
Added the windows system buttons to the game window (MIN, MAX, CLOSE).
-
Added new command line parameter ‘-nofixaspect’ which allows users to
not fix the aspect ratio to 4:3 when maximizing in windowed mode.
This lets the game ‘stretch’ to fill your monitor. -
Added support for ‘-sndbkg’ command line switch. This enables sound
in background. -
Added the following aliases for pre-existing command line options,
‘-nosound’, ‘-window’, and ‘-windowed’.
Revised Skill balance for Player Character classes
Amazon -
Immolation Arrow - Increased radius of Explosion effect by 33% and
Immolation effect by 50%. -
Immolation Arrow - Explosion effect damage increased by 20%.
-
Immolation Arrow - Increased base duration by 33%.
Assassin -
Dragon Claw - Synergy receives 4% additional damage per point of Claw Mastery.
-
Dragon Talon - The bonus to Attack Rating per point has been increased to 35.
-
Shadow Master - Increased resistance range per point from 5-80 to 5-90.
-
Combo points awarded by combo moves now last 15 seconds, up from 9.
Barbarian -
Whirlwind - Reduced initial mana cost by 50%.
-
Masteries - Changed critical strike chance from 0-25 to 0-35.
Paladin -
Blessed Hammer - No longer ignores resistances of undead and demons.
Druid -
Werebear - Damage bonus increased by 15% across all ranks.
-
Werebear - Increased health by 25% and armor by 1% per point.
-
Shockwave - Synergy from Maul adds 5% damage per point.
Necromancer -
Blood Golem - Removed negative shared life effect (player no longer
loses life when the golem takes damage). -
Corpse Explosion - Increased base damage dealt from 60% - 100%
to 70% - 120% of corpses health. -
Poison Nova - Increased base damage by 15%.
Sorceress -
Firewall - Synergy receives 1% damage per point of Inferno and
4% per point of Warmth. -
Blaze - Synergy receives 1% damage per point of Firewall
and 4% per point of Warmth. -
Hydra - Increased base damage by 15% per rank.
-
Hydra - Increased base speed of Hydra projectile.
-
Hydra - Reduced cooldown by 25%.
I’m holding out for Diablo 3. If I start playing D2 again I think I may end up jobless and boyfriendless.
The only reason I’m holding off is I’m still (years later) pissed off by Blizzard’s policy of deleting Battlenet accounts if they’re idle for two minutes.
You can resurrect “deleted” accounts and characters so long as nobody else has taken the name meanwhile.
And then they get deleted again when I step away from the computer to grab a soda. What’s the current idle time limit, anyway?
Is this game still worth buying or are you guys playing mostly for nostalgia related reasons? I’ve never played either of the Diablo games. Should I just wait for D3?
I think after you’ve put two hours into a character, the idle limit is 90 days.
Well, I wouldn’t have purchased the game again had I not been able to dig out my old disks. It’s a good game, with lots of replay value if you enjoy tweaking and trying to perfect different strategies of play. If you can pick it up cheap, then sure, I’d do it.
Oh Lord, I’m having flashbacks now to the heydays of US East dupe-induced lag. Tried to get a game going twice tonight, but simply nothing doing – unable to join, or freeze and drop, followed by unable to join. Sigh.