Well, I tried, but got invalid game name. Either A: You’re not on open B-net or B: You already threw in the towel for the night. Sorry!
Well, it’s certainly not B. I’m in the underground passage right now. How about C: B-Net’s having probelms.
I’m new to B-Net; does the realm matter? If so, I’m on USEast.
Jeff,
Im having trouble creating that game. I’m now in sdmb3 password cecil.
My necromancer has found a rare scepter. Anyone want to trade?
Nightmare Andariel has fallen, without taking the life of my sorceress, even once. On to Lut Gholein. For my triumphant victory over the evil demon, I have won the extremely sought-after item — Quilted Armor of The Fox???
(sigh)
Perhaps Duriel saved his allowance for some nice rare or unique goodies, rather than spending it all on bubblegum and comic books as Andariel seems to have done.
Goddamn Hell sucks. For anybody drawing near to this difficulty level, one word of advice: Don’t risk dying to try and kill a tough unique monster. It’s not worth it. You lose 200,000 experience every time you die. Bastardly game. 
Monster, I’m sure you’re joking. But at the off-chance that you aren’t, I believe in Hell you only lose 10% (or is it 15%?) of the amount of experience you’ve gained to reach your next level.
Thus, if you’re level 40 (and these are arbitrary numbers), which required 300,000 exp., and level 41 requires 310,000 exp., and you have 305,000 when you die, you lose 10% (or is it 15%?) of the 5,000. Nightmare is 5% (or is it 10%?).
You lose 5% XPs for Nightmare, and 10% for Hell.
For more info than you could ever hope for about the game, check out this site:
http://www.battle.net/diablo2/
There is a ton of stuff there, so you may need to dig around if you’re looking for specifics.
Be sure to check out the experience point table, and how experience is really awarded…very depressing!
She’s reached Level 30! YES!
The choice between Cold Mastery and Frozen Orb was an easy one; I chose Cold Mastery, then used my Book of Skill to learn the Frozen Orb spell a moment later.
I also found a rare “battle staff”, pretty sweet; stolen mana per hit, maximum mana increase, severe lightening damage per hit . . . too bad it’s two-handed, I can’t use it with a shield . . .
My Amazon has found a Wand of Shock with +2 Raise Skeleton and +2 Dim Vision. Anyone want to trade? I sure could use some better armor.
Hey, Daniel, I hope you haven’t taken on Duriel yet. Here’s a word of advice on how to defeat him: Blaze. Since you won’t be able to stand still AT ALL (he’ll kill you in one hit, if you’re the sorceress), you have to keep running from him… and he’ll be right behind you the whole time. The solution: Leave a swath of death and destruction in your wake, and keep going around the chamber.
Second, only run when he charges at you. His Charge is the attack that does the most damage, and after he does it, he’s motionless for a few moments, at which point you walk, rebuilding your stamina. If you do it right, you can kill him without getting killed yourself (unlike me, who got wasted several times before I managed to take him out).
By the way, Cold Mastery isn’t that good… it only lowers an enemies’ resitance to cold. Since only the unique enemies have any powerful resistance, this takes away Glacial Spikes’ advantage (being able to freeze the enemy). I suggest setting Glacial Spike to right-button, and Fireball to left-button (get a bunch of fire masteries, too). That way, you can freeze an enemy, then blow 'im away.
I killed Diablo with my 24th level amazon, he really wasn’t that tough, just tedious. You pop him with two or three cold arrows, then run like hell as he shoots flames, then come back and pop him a couple more times, run like hell again, pop back to town for a few more potions…
Cold arrows are the bestest thing in the world, especially against creatures with no ranged attacks. Just freeze two or three in the front ranks, and no one can get to you. They don’t stop bosses, but they are excellent if there are only a few monsters at a time.
After Diablo, I thought I’d try me some cows. But the COW LEVEL was awful. I ran around, killed some cows…cows getting thicker…well, I got killed, no big deal, ran back to grab my stuff…cows thicker and thicker…and three hits from a cow ax and I’m dead again…Now I’ve got two piles of goodies to retrieve. Well, now I can’t restart, because my corpse will have my second-tier stuff, not my best stuff. Now I’ve got to get through the level. Buy cheap bow, arrows, pop in, shoot once or twice, die. Buy cheap bow, arrows, pop in, shoot once or twice, die. Buy cheap bow, arrows, pop in, shoot once or twice, die. Buy cheap bow, arrows, pop in, shoot once or twice, die.
The ground was littered with bows and arrows right inside the portal, but I eventually cleared out enough room to make a run for my stuff. But my stuff is surrounded by cows…I’ve got to run away…but I’m followed by cows. I make a run for the portal, but get killed again…I count 150 cows on the screen after I die, they surround the portal, there is no escape, they keep getting closer and closer every time I pop in, and kill me a few seconds faster. Soon they surround the portal, you step out and you’re dead. Next time I can’t use the portal…there is no empty room for my Amazon to teleport into.
The cow level is now closed! With half of my best stuff!!! No, No, this can’t be happening! OK, I decide to get another Wirt’s leg and try to open another portal into the cow level. That doesn’t work…I got another leg, pop it in the cube with the tome, nothing. GOD DAMN! Well, I quit, and came back…my second corpse was in town, so I got my second-tier stuff back, and I had rescued some of my items already, but I lost my unique amulet, rings, and belt…and now I can’t use my gothic plate of the mammoth because I don’t have my lovely +18 strength amulet.
I mean, I pick Diablo apart with surgical precision, and get chopped to bits by a bunch of fucking cows??? How are you supposed to handle the cow level?
In other news, the necromancer I started after this debacle is doing fine. I just cut through Andariel pretty easy. Just Iron Maiden with a bunch of minions, stand back and shoot her full of teeth, and watch her kill herself. Yes, she takes out your golem in one blow, just make another. I ran out of corpses in her level and had to back up to find enough to make mages and skeletons so she’d have something to kill herself on. Veeery nice.
Well after that I got the best “non-magical” wand I could find to give to Charsi to imbue. That didn’t work too well. The Imbue rescrambled the spell bonuses…I got a decent unique wand out of it, but it only has +1 bone wall instead of +3 skeletal mage +1 teeth. It’s great for fighting, but any magic sword would do better. I would have gone for boots or belt or gloves, but I didn’t want to be stuck with unique leather gloves, for crying out loud, when I knew I’d get greaves and gauntlets in Act II. So I decided to see what would happen. Big waste…just like the Cube, when you rescramble something it just picks a new item at random, it doesn’t even look at what the stats of the old item was. The same thing happened when I Imbued my Amazon’s superior studded leather armor. Don’t laugh…that was the best armor I had ever seen at that time, and I didn’t know about the merchants in Act II. I got a unique “Glyph Pelt”, but it wasn’t superior.
Oh, I think I also have the record for crappy unique items. My necromancer found two, two unique sashes. Both gave +3 light, +1 Life, and 3 Defence. One had 7% cold resistance and +4 Mana, the other had +3 Mana. I eventually sold them both for under 300 bucks each. I mean, you know a unique item sucks when you replace it with a non-magical belt just so you can get an extra row of potions.
Lemur… with imbuing, it’s best to wait 'til you get farther into the game so you actually have something good to turn magical… like, full plate or something. In fact, I think you can even save the imbues 'til the higher difficulty settings, allowing you to imbue the next-level items (there’re weapons and items that look like first-level stuff, but they’re stronger… like “Demonhide Gloves” that look like leather gloves, but have a defense of 40 or so).
Lemur, my roommate and I had a similar debacle with the Cow level the other night…
We each have a Sorceress, which we ONLY play multi-player. Mine specializes in ice spells (the only non-ice spells she has are Warmth, TK and Teleport), while his has all the Lightning and Fire stuff.
So, we killed Diablo in record time (after we popped the last seal, I buried the center of the pentagram in Blizzards, while he ran up and cast Static Field as fast as he could. Elapsed time until Diablo’s death: about 10 seconds). We both finished at level 26. So, we figured, hey, let’s go kill some cows.
We get everything ready, and while I am doing some last minute preperations in town, he jumps through the portal. In no time, I get the message that his sorceress is dead. So, I try to jump through the portal to try to give him some cover while he recovers the corpse. I step through the portal and am INSTANTLY killed. I’m dead before I even fully materialize throught the portal! There is a literal sea of cows filling the entire screen. The portal is hopelessly blocked. We tried in vain to jump through, try teleporting to safety, etc. No good, instant death each time.
So, we are at a loss. We don’t want to shut down the server and start over, for fear that we would lose the cow level entirely (since we can only do it once). He can’t leave, since he was hosting the game. So, I leave with my sorceress, and bring back my Big, Bad, level 32 Barbarian, equipped with Iceblink, 2 nasty weapons and a bad attitude. He jumps through the portal (which, incidently, has shown us that each character can only intiate the cow level once. You can join a game with anyone else and do the level again. So, since I created the portal this time around with my sorceress, we could actually do it again with my roommate creating the portal)…and dies instantly. How humiliating. He quites, re-starts, picks up his carcass and shuffles off.
Next, I try my 32 level Necromancer. I go pick up some minions, including 3 of the spider critters (he has Revive at Level 3: once for real, the other two from items), for a total of 14 minions. He jumps through the portal…and dies. Not quite instantly; he gets to actually feel the pain. But he dies too quickly for anything to be done about it. He picks up his corpse and leaves.
I knew my Amazon wouldn’t have a chance, so I didn’t even try her.
The only option left is my 33rd level Paladin. He fires up his Fanaticism and Zeal, ready to pound cows into hamburger, jumps through the portal, and dies.
OK, were desperate now. However, the Paladin has a trick that no-one else has…Thorns! So, with no equipment, he simply turns on Thorns and jumps through again. Cows take damage. Cows die! He re-spawns, and does it again. More cows die. And so on. After sacrificing himself countless more times, he finally succeeds in killing every last cow that was blocking the portal (or, rather, letting them kill themselves). He picks up his stuff, and leaves. My sorceress re-joins, and the two sorceresses then proceed to clean up the level.
And as for what SPOOFE said about the imbues, I agree. The same two sorceresses have yet to imbue anything for Normal mode, and cyrrently have the option to imbue in Nightmare as well. The truth is, we cant think of anything to imbue! My roommate’s character is using Sigon’s Complete Steel, whic covers all the armor. An imbued weapon would do a sorceress no good, so he saved it. My sorceress is wearing Heavenly Garb plate (216 def, +25% mana regen, +10 all resist), has rare Crown, Light Gauntlets and Light Plated Boots, and has a unique belt (Goldwrap). Her ‘weapon’ is Arcanna’s Deathwand. She has nothing that really needs upgrading!
Anyway, the moral here is you should defintely save the imbues until you find an item worth imbuing, and you have a need for said item. Whatever you choose to imbue, go for the best materials. Always shoot for Superior quality for the base item. Or, as SPOOFE suggested, if you can wait, go for an Exceptional item (Demonskin, Sharkskin, Ghost armor, War Belts, etc., or any of the nastier weapons that one might find in the higher difficulty levels).
Wow. Looks like I’m the only person that DIDN’T get massacred at the portal by a sea of cows!
Yeah, I died, but I was smart. My paladin walked in and thwack thwack thwack RUN AWAY repeat. I just hit the ‘lead’ cow (I was followed by a crowd at all times) and ran away. So I never lost shit in the cow levels. But the Cow King didn’t leave me something NEARLY cool enough, the blackguard.
I still have to say the Holy Hammer spell the paladin has. In just a few moments, dozens upon dozens of cows drop dead, with their hilarious “MOOOOO!” shouts.
I do admit I didn’t think of sacrificing myself with thorns to kill cows.
I hate Charsi. I am going through with my 3rd character, a sorceress. (BTW, how do y’all handle alocating points? Strength is the least important for a mage, but you gotta pump it up to wear good armor.) I gave her ghost armor that another character had found NM act 2. I figured it was better than anything she would find, and imbued it. That bitch made necessary to be L25 to use! And she also didn’t give it very good properties. I’m now L23 and have better splint mail, so I’ve already sold it. What a freaking waste.
That’s the problem with having something Imbued, it’s random. My necromancer was the first of my characters to have something imbued. At the time, I hadn’t known I could go to Lut Gholein and bring back something better, so I had him buy a pair of chain gloves. He now has:
Doom Knuckle
Required Level 9
Enhanced Defense
Poison Resist 17%
Lightning Resist 7%
+6 to Life
+4 to Dexterity
Slightly Increased Attack Speed
A paladin was next, with a pair of chain boots
He now has:
Stone Slippers
Required Level 13 (IIRC, he was L12 at the time)
Fast Run/Walk
+2 to Light Radius
Cold Resist 24%
Fire Resist 23%
+6 to Dexterity
By the time my Amazon brought back the Malus, I knew I could wait and go to Lut Gholein first. She now has:
Soul Lash
Heavy Belt
Required Level 10
+2 to Light Radius
Enhanced Defense
+16 to Mana
+6 to Life
While in B-Net recently, I heard about a trainer available which can imbue items. Maybe this is for people who don’t like what Charsi gives them?
BTW: I also had a barbarian who kept getting killed by Anderial. I hopes of getting a better chance at surviving, I ended up having Charsi imbue a sash. Bad idea.
Actually, we only got slaughtered in Multiplayer. when the Paladin did the level on his own (when he killed Diablo solo), he had no problems. The Blessed Hammer was much like a lawn-mower, and the cows were the grass. Similarly, my Necormancer walked through the level solo. And my bow-based Amazon (she has Doomslinger, a unique crossbow that adds +1 to Amazon skills and has Piercing attack. This is the ULTIMATE in crowd control, especially when combined with Multiple Shots or Immolation) had no difficulty. None of my solo attempts have met with difficulty. Both of my multi-player attempts have met with disaster. Hmmm…