Thank you, diabloii.net's Team Sha-ZAM!

Socialism

Socialism

Diabloii.Net Member
Thank you, diabloii.net's Team Sha-ZAM!

(and the absorbed members of Team Rocky [Balboa] as well)

This was the first and only ladder reset I've ever been able to catch, and you guys made this the most fun day (literally ~20ish hours or so) I've ever had playing Diablo. I even skipped a day of work to play this crazy old game through. You'd think our motley crew of randomly mixed-together characters wouldn't stand a chance vs. a group of organized, role-specific '1337 gamers' - but we did quite well.

The plan was to get Sha-ZAM (*Glimmer) - the lightning trap assassin - to level 85, quit, and be on my way back to the job, the life, the surviving in the real world. But my, this was a fun bout of escapism.

The journey was long and tough, but Guardian Sha-ZAM managed to make it to #1 overall for a few hours. It was good while it lasted and there were tons of laughs and sleep deprived moments where I thought I was dead for sure.

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't lonely at the top. I had a ton of people egging me on along the way - and a whole bunch of randoms asking me very random things. Some random (non diabloii.net people - or those that didn't identify themselves as such) unsolicited messages from people I've never met, heard of, or have in any way been associated with that I received:
- "hey glimmer can u rush me act 3?"
- "who are you?"
- "i'm blizz sork, u want me to baal u??"
- "hey are you baaling?"
- "hey"
- "hey can i join you? whos in your party? name them"
- "need a boer?"
- "oh look, you got overtaken"
- "are you with Zenks?"
- "room in party?"
- "can u give me some equipment?"
- "hey I need hell wps"
- "whats ur pw?"
- "i will tele u to baal safely"

Right.

Props to Jafrick for holding the fort and jamming out the competency and teleporting. This was the guy with 'heart'.

Everyone else along the way, gogo rockstars; way to level like fiends! Thanks for everything, this was a blast.

Awesome.

Quite while I was ahead!
 
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J

jafrick

Diabloii.Net Member
I definitely had more fun than I have had playing D2 in many years. Plus getting to my personal highest of 8th overall on the ladder was pretty sweet..

Big up to those who stuck with us and were team players- that makes it more fun for everyone.
 
Barrynor

Barrynor

Banned
Nice going

Funny that, I never really bothered with running the ladder. Last time I participated in a ladder event, I won gloriously... I think I can safely bet I was the first guy to butcher well over 300 people singlehandedly (and legit-style, of course) in the first three weeks of the Ladder. Heck, I even scored the first 6 LLD-pk-ears of 1.10, as I did that within the day with a level 18 Hammerdin (after which I got cocky, assaulted a level 50 sorc and got obliterated.... :D )
 
MYK

MYK

Diablo: IncGamers Member
Socialism said:
(and the absorbed members of Team Rocky [Balboa] as well)

This was the first and only ladder reset I've ever been able to catch, and you guys made this the most fun day (literally ~20ish hours or so) I've ever had playing Diablo. I even skipped a day of work to play this crazy old game through. You'd think our motley crew of randomly mixed-together characters wouldn't stand a chance vs. a group of organized, role-specific '1337 gamers' - but we did quite well.

The plan was to get Sha-ZAM (*Glimmer) - the lightning trap assassin - to level 85, quit, and be on my way back to the job, the life, the surviving in the real world. But my, this was a fun bout of escapism.

The journey was long and tough, but Guardian Sha-ZAM managed to make it to #1 overall for a few hours. It was good while it lasted and there were tons of laughs and sleep deprived moments where I thought I was dead for sure.

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't lonely at the top. I had a ton of people egging me on along the way - and a whole bunch of randoms asking me very random things. Some random (non diabloii.net people - or those that didn't identify themselves as such) unsolicited messages from people I've never met, heard of, or have in any way been associated with that I received:
- "hey glimmer can u rush me act 3?"
- "who are you?"
- "i'm blizz sork, u want me to baal u??"
- "hey are you baaling?"
- "hey"
- "hey can i join you? whos in your party? name them"
- "need a boer?"
- "oh look, you got overtaken"
- "are you with Zenks?"
- "room in party?"
- "can u give me some equipment?"
- "hey I need hell wps"
- "whats ur pw?"
- "i will tele u to baal safely"

Right.

Props to Jafrick for holding the fort and jamming out the competency and teleporting. This was the guy with 'heart'.

Everyone else along the way, gogo rockstars; way to level like fiends! Thanks for everything, this was a blast.

Awesome.

Quite while I was ahead!
Click to expand...
Wow! At 86 there was a huge gap between you and everyone else!

Congrats!


 
Rekoc

Rekoc

Diabloii.Net Member
Better be glad I wasnt there! I would of totaly owned sin ladder >.<. I dont think my season starter ever left the sin ladder, got her to 92 then quitzor playing her. Oh well, I didnt have time to play, I had surgery friday again, then I have been pretty drugged up since then, plus WoW is so much better kk, thx.

<3
 
Intolerance

Intolerance

Diabloii.Net Member
Good run. Congrats on the #1 position- that definitely takes some dedication.

Who did you initially beat Hell Baal with? Do you recall around when it was? Were there many Guardians at the time?
 
R

red-sauce

Diabloii.Net Member
YAYA! im glad i caught up with you guys at NM baals! thanks for carrying my big barb *** all the way to the first page of the ladder! Sorry to see you go socialism!

Intolerance, FtW did kill baal first, but we were either the first or second group after them.
 
F

Full_Circle

Diabloii.Net Member
Intolerance said:
Good run. Congrats on the #1 position- that definitely takes some dedication.

Who did you initially beat Hell Baal with? Do you recall around when it was? Were there many Guardians at the time?
Click to expand...
We didn't really have a set team, nor did we have a plan. Having tried two reset trial runs back when I was bored waiting for a reset, I have to say this run went 10x better than either of those (probably because it was "for real"). We were behind everyone when we started (about 10-15 minutes late, I think), but we passed people on my F List in levels when we were in late act 2 (they were in mid act 3), and we caught them in position at the end of act 4.

Our group changed a lot over the course of the game. Eury (Dahkar) bailed when we were norm Baaling... I think we had a Barb replace him (dow-red, maybe?). I bailed in act 4 nm the first night @ about 2am, then rejoined in act 1 hell on day 2 after AlRFORCE helped catch me up, then died :(

I believe our initial Guardian Group was something like this...

TVOnTheRadio - Sorc (Orb/TK)
Trebol - Necro (Summon/LR/DV)
Sha-ZAM - Sin (Traps)
AF-Alvito - Sorc (Blizz?)
BerzerkR - Barb (Zerk)
el-cielo - Paladin (Hammers)
DuneDuneDune - Necro (Summon/LR)
TheDune - Zon (Java)

We were basically the combined forces of 2-3 different groups.

Others that played through a lot of it with us...
Eurytus - Paladin (Hammers?)
meekZERO - Paladin (Fanat/Zeal)
dow-red - Barb
lazy-somethingorother - Barb
AlRFORCE - Sorc RIP

Losing AlRFORCE hurt something fierce... we went from a nice mix of cold & lightning dmg to all lightning just as we hit act 2 hell - TVOnTheRadio wasn't on at the time, nor was el-cielo. I bailed to run nm cows for a while, and I assumed everyone else would do the same, but they trudged through it. Crazy, I tell you. I joined up again when TV logged back on.

Sorry if I missed anyone.

Was a lot of fun.



From Act 2 Normal:
AL: "Should I tele?"
Me: "What, like twice?"


Trebol - Team Balboa - Peak: #15 Overall, #2 Necro



 
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Intolerance

Intolerance

Diabloii.Net Member
You had two characters in the mix? How'd you manage that?
How did AIRFORCE die?
Are Norm/NM cows decent exp? We just flew through everything and only ran Norm/NM Baal in our run.
 
F

Full_Circle

Diabloii.Net Member
I think berzerkR was his character name, and *dow-red was his account... I just mixed it up. Either that, or I'm now even more confused than I was.

AlRFORCE died teleporting to Andy to a Fire Enchanted, Multi-Shot, and one other bad mod (I forget what) Tainted pack (the lightning ball dogs).

I was doing cows for the drops more than the exp. I was 72 at the time, so I was getting some exp, but not a lot. In 3 runs, I did pick up a Shael rune, a 18 life sc, and a 19 life sc, though, so it was definitely worthwhile.
 
Socialism

Socialism

Diabloii.Net Member
Ugh. "Quite while I was ahead!"-link Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz typo.

The times are all pretty muddled in my head; the screenshots were an afterthought. I was the (clearly) the first Hardcore Guardian Assassin. Overall, I'm almost 100% we were Guardians before the Zenk team; I'm assuming we were second (after FTW), but I could be wrong. That screenshot was taken after our 2nd or 3rd Baal run, if I recall correctly.

Questing through normal and nightmare was, for the most part, cake. I organized it so we'd go through acts in the most efficient way possible. Whenever I could, I'd deviate from the group to pick up side quests (especially in Act 3) to get things running faster. While far from a Basin game, we did manage to inculcate waiting for others to be ready before executing pivotal actions (seals, ancients, etc.). Damn nooblets! : ) Our original and ending groups had pretty excellent teamwork (and do-able leadership, haha).

We would have stayed on top a LOT longer, but our team disintegrated shortly after we started Baaling; people were dropping out left and right. We had a very frustrating and problematic time trying to replace our losses. Sure, I had offers from all sorts of random players to join us - but I didn't really want non-Bananas/dii.net forum people tagging along. Too many Druid/Sorceress (TPPK-friendly classes) requests for my liking. So rough. At one point, we were carrying 3 Barbarians - each dealing less damage than the former. Few people were in Hell past Act 1; we had to rush a new group.

During this rush, someone actually joined with 2 characters so he could leech more XP, detracting from ours and making the game significantly harder. Very disheartening. Several of us were quite angry at that point, almost convinced that he was trying to sabotage us. Durance 3 - while we attempted (fruitlessly) to kill Bremm Sparkfist + cold/light immune ghoul bosspack, he abandoned the fight, intentionally engaged the eastern council + ghoul lords AND Mephisto -- and brought them right to our already struggling fray. I had to tell everyone to bail out because I didn't want any deaths.

Trebolito/Full_Circle: Thanks for jamming in the writeup, I was certainly in no shape to do so yesterday. When you left us, I (very) slowly footed through much of Act 2 alone, getting waypoints for the group and several NDEs along the way. There were so many lightning immunes, our necromancer couldn't kill them, and our javazon/trapper combo were next to useless.

More screenshots when I get home!
 
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Intolerance

Intolerance

Diabloii.Net Member
Even though I took notice of the times we hit certain milestones, when I threw together my ladder run breakdown together, I wasn't exactly sure about times. Then I remembered that the screenshot properties listed the time taken, which was a huge help.

I hope Blizzard is serious about resets every 6 months. These runs are really the only interesting thing left to do with D2 for me. Baal runs are yawn (yet necessary to stay atop the ladder), which is why I promptly stopped once we got Guardian.
 
Hp_Sauce

Hp_Sauce

Diabloii.Net Member
Bah, it sounds like you guys had a blast! I was off camping and wouldn't have been able to play for more then an hour even if I hadn't been camping. But still, I'm sad that I missed out on this historic event, probably the last time everybody I know will be on b.net at one time ever again.

Shon, I'm glad your last "go at it" before becoming a working stiff was more then you had hoped for.

miss joo all....~!! <3

-hps
 
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