So yesterday I finished the original Diablo and installed Diablo II: Electric Boogaloo. Yeah yeah, I know I’m WAY behind the times here. I’m really enjoying the game so far, except for the save game system.
Now I wasn’t wild about the fact that in Diablo you only had one save for your character. I had an incident with a bug that would have made the game unfinishable right towards the end.
It was during the battle with Lazarus. The bad guys just sat there not moving, and I couldn’t hit them. Fortunately Town Portaling out and back fixed it.
Now in DiabloII not only is there just one save game slot, but if you save manually you exit the game. I do not like this. I am a firm believer in saving often. (Save often! Floss regularly! Think happy thoughts! )
So is there a command I am missing? Is there a workaround that you could suggest? Thanks in advance.
Oh, and one more question. I found a stamina potion. Are the effects temporary, or does it function like the elixirs in the first game and give a permanent boost?
Diablo II will occasionally save your game automatically. It’s kind of like a MMORPG, it attempts to avoid letting you manipulate the game by quicksaving and loading. If you die, you have to deal with the gold/XP hit, if you kill a major enemy and don’t get any good drops, you have to deal with it, etc.
Also, stamina potions temporarily give you a large boost to your stamina and also make your stamina bar infinite for their duration. They’re not terribly useful, but they occasionally come in handy.
Diablo II’s saves don’t save game state, they save waypoint state – all of the waypoints you have discovered are kept, but all of the areas you already cleared will respawn fully populated, with new randomized or semi-randomized maps. This caused a couple of my friends to give up on D2. I found it annoying but learned to get over it.
If you’re used to saving often, try to change that behavior – you’ll find yourself fighting to re-clear areas. Unless your system is really unstable, you’ll want to save only when you are exiting the game. I’m assuming you are playing locally rather than on battle.net – the advantage to battle.net is that you can trade with others, the disadvantage is that your characters go away after 30 days inactive.
You can always re-visit that area and re-fight the same major enemy – one of the exploits is running the chapter-ending monsters over and over again, as they have good drops.
You’ll also want to grab ATMA for harvesting drops from your characters and moving them around. Be especially vigilant to save an item profile for set items, socketed items, and runes – later in the game when you’ve got lots of gems and jewels, and the Horadric cube, you can create amazingly powerful weapons by re-importing ATMA items to a specific character.
ATMA can also be used to give a character a stash full of high-value gems/jewels, which can be sold, so ATMA can essentially give you unlimited gold. I made a rule that any item I saved in ATMA had to be dropped on the ground (not sold!) and I could only import it onto one character at a time. In this way, I let ATMA work as an extra-large bank for items I couldn’t afford to sock away.
If you’re not fixated on “pure” play, you can probably find ATMA save libraries containing almost every set item in the game.
If you insist on circumventing the save-and-exit system, you can do so in single-player (but not online). Go to your Diablo II directory, and find the “save” directory in there. In the “save” directory will be a bunch of files with the same name as your character and various extensions. Copy those files to someplace else. Then, if you do something stupid and want to restore to that point, copy those files back from whereever you put them back into the “save” directory. This isn’t really necessary, though, since there’s not much you can do to permanently mess up your character. If you die, your posessions are stored on your corpse, you lose some exp and gold, and you respawn in town. If you can make it back to your corpse and click on it, you’ll get back all of your equipment, and some of the exp and gold you lost. If you decide that’s too risky, you can just leave the game and re-start, and your corpse will be in town with all of your equipment on it (you won’t reclaim any exp or gold, but it’s easy to get more of both). So death is really only a minor setback, not the end of the game.
I’m presuming that you’re playing single-player, here, because Diablo I used a similar system in multiplayer, and you seem not to be familiar with it.
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