Diablo IV, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 Forums - Diabloii.Net

I went to boarding school from like '96 to '02 if memory serves. We had LAN installed in our dorms and almost all of us loved us some gaming. Mostly strategy games (C&C Red Alert/AoE 1 and then Starcraft) and FPS (Quake 1 mostly), even to this day Starcraft/Broodwar is the game I have played the most, purely hour wise, with D2 a not too distant second. But we also played some Diablo 1, although more Hellfire than vanilla D1. My monk was a lot of fun with his King's war staff of haste :thumbup:, despite never having found any zodiac item...

Anyway, fast forward a few years and Diablo 2 comes out. I still remember sitting next to my friend watching him play it for the first time. Got it myself shortly after and started a SP Jabazone, but I don't think I made it to A4 Hell back then. A Frenzy Barb followed, alternating with Zerk when frenzied, my first Baron. It was a very casual game for me back then.
LoD was released just in time for summer vacation and I originally had wanted to start playing on Bnet with LoD, but I had no internet at home (only @ boarding school), so I continued my SP journey with a Fury Druid, but gave up on my way to the Hell Countess, damn Ghosts...

Didn't play until a couple of months into 1.09, when I made my first Bnet character. Played Softcore for maybe 2 or 3 months and then decided to make a switch to Hardcore, I never looked back. And ever since then D2 has been a big part of my gaming life, alternating between periods of huge activity and long periods (sometimes years) of not touching the game at all. This seems to be a common theme among D2 players

1.09 was when I played the most (played quite a bit in 1.11-1.13 as well, but more on that later), with a total of 3 level 99 characters, two Nova Sorcs and a Frenzy Barb. I actually deeded my first level 99 Sorc doing Cows simply because I was too lazy to drink that big purple...
Still remember my best/rarest finds: 200% ed ethereal Skullders (Pindle) - damn was my MF WW Barb happy, Cranium Basher (Lister, much harder to find back then!), Veil of Steel (? Baal Wave I think), 2 Sur Runes (one from Diablo rushing some friends, and I think I horked the other one from a random mob going down Pindle's red portal) - too bad they were useless in 1.09 and finally a Windforce literally a week before 1.10 was released. It never got put to use
A couple of friends and I would race each other for pindle runs and spam /f m while doing so. Was a lot of fun, although it always felt like everyone had more endurance running pindle than I did...

1.09 was a long time ago, so my memory is a bit shady (especially for some of the TC3 uniques and the like), but I think I was pretty far along 1.09 grail wise (other than runes of course). I know I was missing the following:
- all Runes >Vex other than Sur
- uniques: GF, Doom, Stormspire, not sure about Messerschmidt's
- sets: Tal Armor, Mav Diadem, TO Helm + Belt
Not much else I think!

I started in 1.10 when it was released, deeded my first character somewhere in A3 NM and stopped playing the game for years. Got back into it some time into it in August '07, which had to be ladder season 4 (Patch 1.11) according to some thread I found in the amazon basin and played for most of that season.

Tried looking if I still had any pictures from my old D2 times, but most were lost. None remained on my hard drive, but I was able to salvage a few from another board I used to be active on.

This is probably the most significant one. Found this with my longest time D2 buddy (<3 Elo, you'll notice him with different character names in some of the other screenshots):


Couldn't recover the picture of the drop itself, but it was the first unique Sacred I saw drop We even found a second one like two weeks later (literally):

"only" Templar's though

Some other stuff I liked:

Typical "not quite", what would I have give to find this for my zon in 1.09 with a tad more life

This looked like a dangerous xp region:

I don't think I made it much further. Didn't deed or anything, just stopped playin. Not 100% sure, but I think this was 1.12 (Ladder 5). I know for a fact this was my highest post-1.09 character though.

One of the reasons I even played in Ladder 5 again was for grail issues. Not that I had come across the term grail at that time, I just wanted to find some of the stuff that I had never found thus far. I have always been a mf junkie. If I could set skill points into mf I'd do it, and that's in hc. So in all of the three ladder seasons I played I ran the CS a lot (as well as some other arealvl85 stuff, but Chaos was always my favourite). Baal runs annoyed me for the most part. My CS characters never saw A5, had another character open the game and abused Diablo quest drop each game (I know he can't drop everything).

Since my pre-1.13 rune drops amounted to a handful of Ist and Vex runes, 1 Ohm and 3 Sur Runes (2 of them in 1.09, like I said) and I refused to trade for high runes (as did most of my friends), I resorted to hellforge rushing (in classic) in one of the seasons to at least get 2 Lo runes (Forti + Grief).

Then 1.13 came and this happened:


About a week into 1.13 my sorc (who at the time was still wearing stuff like an OrtSol - Lore? helmet) found a Jah from a devilkin while running the countess and from then on I went on a sick rune finding streak. Even with the changed drop probabilities I couldn't believe what I found.

Here are a couple:






After a while I started counting every rune that dropped in areas in which all (or most) runes where able to drop and compiled the following table of my finds:


I found that absurd on so many levels. Just look at some of the dates... Yeah I played quite a lot and much of it was in at least half full games, but still.
Anyway, I was able to built my first Enigma (well, two actually, one for my Hammerdin who until then had been quite happy with Skullder's Ire, and one for my Fishymancer). Some of the Runes went to friends who found them with me of course

My gold barb who found 1 Jah and 2 Ber in Travincal had some great karma in general though, he found the following Gheed's in like the fifth run of his career:


I also like this screenshot:

I know there's no clone in SP, but I guess most of you know how he spawns. Anyway, we were running Chaos and while we were fighting the Infector of souls (last seal the way we ran it) there was a single SoJs sold to merchants message. We didn't think much by it, because those are not very uncommon on the realms, and literally the moment Diablo died there was this "Diablo walks the Earth" message, perfectly captured in this screenshot

I think that's it for screenshots. Like I said I lost almost all of them.

Anyway - this is all history. None of the characters or the accounts they were on remain. Two months ago I broke my wrist and while I was home for about 10 days because of it I suddenly felt the urge to look at my old characters again, guess I should have refreshed them^^
I haven't tried D3, but from what I could read it's not for me. Pretty sure none of my D2 friends still play D2, so back to the roots it is -> D2 SP.

While I have mostly played on the realms in the past I think I'm well suited for SP. I mean I had a pretty large group of D2 buddies in 1.09, but by 1.11 many had moved on. There are a lot of morons on Bnet, but I was able to stay away from them mostly, there were a couple of pretty tight communities in hardcore (at least on Europe, but I suppose it was the same on the US realms), generelly much different from softcore (I guess there were exceptions there too). I played alone a lot in 1.11-1.13, but still quite a bit with some friends. Pretty similar to what some of you seem to be doing - playing mostly alone and then some hamachi or so.

I might never get into a position to seriously work on my grail again (dunno if the motivation will hold ), but here's what's missing:
Stormspire
Crown of Age
Shadow Dancer
Astreons
Gris shield
Gris weapon

Yes, I have found Tyrael's, Death's Fathom and Death's Web, but no Stormspire or Shadow Dancer