Diablo II v1.00 (HC SSF Hell Difficulty) All Classes Challenge

[TWolfMech]

So just about a week ago I finished v1.00 with all five classes. All these runs were on hardcore, singleplayer and self-found all the way through Hell difficulty. So no muling was allowed. In total I had 3 deaths (Necro, Barbarian and Amazon) and also lost my save files early on (lost another Amazon that way ).
Each different class was named after characters from "Heroes of Might & Magic III", a game that I hold as dearly as Diablo 2. So you might recognize some of the names.

Queen Catherine, the Amazon was my starting Class, although I had beaten the game before with a barbarian. Considering that Enhanced Damage did not work on bows until 1.04, I went for a mana-costly but safer Javazon/Jabzon hybrid build. Maybe not the best pick, but being able to wear shields helped a lot with staying alive. I am playing the Bowazon in 1.05b now and must say that it feels way better. Except when fighting Duriel of course.
I gotta say, I loved using a Pike for Jab. Never expected it to be so effective, despite my friend telling me so. Kiting Hephasto on Normal with the Pike's long range was really fun.

Though I should have been more careful with the Cow King on Nightmare...

Next up was King Vilmar, the Necromancer, because I didn't expect him to be good and wanted to get it over as early as possible...
Yeah, once I figured out the Iron Maiden + Blood Golem combo, I realized this wouldn't be so terrible at all. Add in Revives and some Bone Spears and it was smooth sailing through Hell until...

Get rekt by a Multi Shot + Lightning Enchanted Toorc Icefist!
That wasn't the plan. But running around in hell with negative lightning res and just 500 life isn't that smart, either.
But I didn't feel discouraged. Actually, I was happy that the game hit me with that curveball! Just proves that it isn't so easy to run around in HC, even with a powerful Necro.
Eventually, I made it all the way back and finished the job.

On to our Paladin, King Roland Ironfist!
I tried to be a little creative and use Conviction with Vengeance. This ended up beaing nothing but a waste skill points, since I would need an amazing weapon to use this strategy on Hell. Would have been beter to combine Cahrge and Sacrefice(maybe zeal too?) with Concentration Aura, before moving on into Blessed Hammer.
In the end, I had a somewhat limited Paladin, that struggled A LOT with Lord De Seis. I also learned that Charge is the worst thing you can do against him and his minions:

Despite not dying a single time, it felt less safe than my Necromancer. The clumsiness of the Blessed Hammer skill got me into some tough situations against fast or ranged enemies.
But we managed! And the damage vs Bosses was pretty decent, too!

Now the Immortal Hero himself: Tarnum the Barbarian King!
Right from the start, the barbarian seemed way sturdier than other characters. Although I had a little hiccup that got me cooked by The Summoner in Act II:

But Tarnum isn't the Immortal Hero for nothing! He came back from the dead and once he was able to use his whirlwind, the rest was history:

Even the pesky Iron Maiden curse couldn't slow this force of nature down thanks to our Leap Attack and we ended up beating the game on Hell Difficulty at just Level 42.
But beware of Thief + Multishot Lord De Seis:

In my humble opinion, the original Diablo II Barbarian will stay the pinnacle of melee classes in all rpgs!

 

[TWolfMech]

Finally, the Sorceress: Queen Cyra
You now there is so much talk about how more powerful casters are in Diablo II v1.14 and even more so in D2R, how they shouldn't blow up the entire screen within one second, how melee needs AOE damage to keep up. (God forbid that!)
Not being able to buy mana potions and not having copious amounts of + to Mana or Mana Regen from Rune Words like Spirit and Insight...? This is one way to fix it!
Remove the Skill Synergies and the possibilities are endless. I ended up using so many skills and loved that there wasn't a cooldown on any of them.
And because of the lack of Mana Potions it's not even broken. You can keep spamming Frozen Orb, but you will run out of Mana very quickly.
If it wasn't for the Wall of the Eyeless that I got from normal Duriel, this run would have been a lot harder.
I made sure not to ruin this run by picking harder fights too early, which proved to be crucial in the fight against Nightmare Duriel, for which i made sure to get my Life up to almost 400.

I kept playing it safe and eventually slayed Hell Diablo one final time.

One thing that I had been told was that the pre 1.10 patches were so terrible. How the game felt to grindy and how you couldn't use so many builds because of the lack of items.
Guess what? I can use so many skills because the classes are less gear dependent!
Changing gear often happened because the games difficulty forced me to do so. Or because I found a meaningful upgrade.
Skill points had to be invested more carefully. The Skills had to be balanced out. Sometimes you don't want to max one skill, because the Mana cost might go through the roof.
Same goes for stat points. Putting some points into Energy is actually reasonable.
And the traits of some enemies are so much more meaningful, because they are actually dangerous.

Also, they use all their voice lines and sound effects! Listen to this Unraveler:

Throughout my playthroughs, the difficulty stayed consistent for every class, except maybe the Necromancer. But even he ended up dying, after all.

The boss fights! I remember getting to Duriel the first time on a Barbarian before I took this challenge and got critically hit for about 900 damage. I didn't record it initially, but I managed to recreate the moment with the same Barbarian a moment after. Behold!

You know, Diablo I and Diablo II have some elements from turn based, rogue-like dungeon crawlers, if I dare say so.
But Diablo II is the game that ended up defining the arpg genre. While it has some shades of a rogue-like dungeon crawler, it was an action rpg by heart. 'Action' should not being misunderstood for fast paced gameplay! It's more about being very engaging, while being in real time.
Modern Diablo II seems far away from that, though. It's all about clearing out maps very fast, with all these patches having caused such a huge powercreep, destroying the balance and the strategic and more engaging part of the gameplay. Back in the days, it was optimal for a Sorc to have a diverse build, using different skills for different enemies and in different situations was normal. So was using weaker skills to be Mana efficient. You teleported to a safe spot or used a Frost Nova to get some time to cast your other skills. The meta for the Sorc nowadays is to just teleport into the masses and spam Nova or Blizzard and repeat that over and over again. Meanwhile, Barbarians can't even get to the enemies in time, let alone do any damage. Unless you farm yourself an Enigma and a Grief of course.

With this older patch, I spent so much more time just playing the game. Even the farming for exp and items was more engaging. And playing on hardcore just put the cherry on the sundae.

It was intense!
And it was fun!

So, here ends my rant. Getting very invested in this, so I apologize!

As a little extra, here is a moonwalk compilation:

 

[galaxyhaxz]

One thing that I had been told was that the pre 1.10 patches were so terrible. How the game felt to grindy and how you couldn't use so many builds because of the lack of items

Perhaps it's because of the places I hung around historically, but I actually have only ever heard the opposite. Just about everywhere you go there are at least a few veterans talking about how much better the 1.09 days were, and nearly everyone says 1.10 was a casters patch that created tons of grinding and less build diversity and more item dependency due to synergies. But anyway....

1.00 is by no means a bad patch. You'll find tons of things you can do there that just don't work in later patches, even compared to 1.09. Not having casting delays is quite fun, but it forces you to balance your mana usage. Melee is actually viable and quite good. Maggot leveling with a WW barb is a blast! Duriel is quite difficult because his charge actually works. Also as you noticed, they broke many things in newer patches, particularly 1.10, various monster animations and sounds and such.

It's cool to see you played so many builds and had a good time with it! I will say though, like d1, there is no real end game, and once you hit about level 80, nothing gives XP anymore, so there's not much point in playing the same character.

 

[TWolfMech]

Perhaps it's because of the places I hung around historically, but I actually have only ever heard the opposite. Just about everywhere you go there are at least a few veterans talking about how much better the 1.09 days were, and nearly everyone says 1.10 was a casters patch that created tons of grinding and less build diversity and more item dependency due to synergies. But anyway....

1.00 is by no means a bad patch. You'll find tons of things you can do there that just don't work in later patches, even compared to 1.09. Not having casting delays is quite fun, but it forces you to balance your mana usage. Melee is actually viable and quite good. Maggot leveling with a WW barb is a blast! Duriel is quite difficult because his charge actually works. Also as you noticed, they broke many things in newer patches, particularly 1.10, various monster animations and sounds and such.

It's cool to see you played so many builds and had a good time with it! I will say though, like d1, there is no real end game, and once you hit about level 80, nothing gives XP anymore, so there's not much point in playing the same character.

I guess it depends on whom you talk with. A lot of people that criticise the older patches don't really remember them well. had one guy telling me that Amazon and Necro werent viable in pre expansion and that's just nonsense. The Bowazon is one of the best DPS builds against larger groups of enemies and the Necro is probably the safest class to play on hardcore.

Another thing I heard, was that hitting 99 on the ladder was impossible. Or that it only works by botting. Or that the ladder just took forever. But the research I've done proves otherwise.

This is why I would love to make a video about this particular topic, talking about the misconception of pre expansion patches in particular.

Edit: The planned video will also highlight how people kept leveling at higher levels to reach 99, with GERBarb and RUSSBarb being the first two ladder characters ever to do so.

 

[galaxyhaxz]

I think pretty much all classes are viable in 1.00-1.06, however, bowazon is much weaker in 1.00-1.03 due to a bug which prevents enhanced damage % from working on bows. So she's better in 1.04-1.06. In 1.07, the druid/assassin were quite weak, and melee was nerfed a bit but not too much, so most are still viable there too. Leveling up to 99 is near impossible prior to 1.07, because monsters cap out around level 83, and diablo is the only level 90+ monster.

It takes something like 90,000 diablo runs to get to level 99 I think. The GER/RUSS faceoff had teams of people joining games just to kill diablo and go to the next, each game only lasting 10-15 seconds, which you can't do in 1.10+ because of a timer that will ban you for joining games too quickly. 1.07-1.09 bumped up monster levels to 90 which made getting to level 99 trivial in a few weeks of moderate gameplay. People complained, and 1.10 made it worse again by lowering monster levels, so it went back to 1000s of baal/diablo runs lol.

 

[TWolfMech]

I think pretty much all classes are viable in 1.00-1.06, however, bowazon is much weaker in 1.00-1.03 due to a bug which prevents enhanced damage % from working on bows. So she's better in 1.04-1.06. In 1.07, the druid/assassin were quite weak, and melee was nerfed a bit but not too much, so most are still viable there too. Leveling up to 99 is near impossible prior to 1.07, because monsters cap out around level 83, and diablo is the only level 90+ monster.

It takes something like 90,000 diablo runs to get to level 99 I think. The GER/RUSS faceoff had teams of people joining games just to kill diablo and go to the next, each game only lasting 10-15 seconds, which you can't do in 1.10+ because of a timer that will ban you for joining games too quickly. 1.07-1.09 bumped up monster levels to 90 which made getting to level 99 trivial in a few weeks of moderate gameplay. People complained, and 1.10 made it worse again by lowering monster levels, so it went back to 1000s of baal/diablo runs lol.

Not that many kills are needed in 1.04, the patch in which it happened and the one I tested it with. A Diablo kill on p8 used to gives you 416.497 experience points on level 98. So would only need slightly more than 700 kills on level 98 to reach 99.

It's true that they had a team that helped preparing games, as well as many volunteers helping them. I actually found a list of the people that partcipated via web archive.

 

[thrasher_565]

ya the soccer if fun a bit week but the orb you want to not hit a monster with it but have the shards hit them. something like 45 seconds of blizzard...
1.00 will for ever be the ww barb.
mancers is just op with cast radias increase
zon and play much weaker i want to make them some day auras across the map thow they make a good support and level too if you need too.
atm im 86 barb trying to level to gamble +2 ammys
lots of bugs too can be fun if you like that stuff
funny i made a video of moon walking...there a better one thow that i forgot about

you have that link to that post of leveling up love reading things like that. one day ill hit 99...one day... think farthest i got was 97 on my zeal paly maybe it was 95 i dont remember

love reading this stuff look forward for more.

 

[galaxyhaxz]

Not that many kills are needed in 1.04, the patch in which it happened and the one I tested it with. A Diablo kill on p8 used to gives you 416.497 experience points on level 98. So would only need slightly more than 700 kills on level 98 to reach 99.

Ok, so I could have *sworn* it took far more than that, as I saw a chart somewhere posted that showed how many runs it would take. It turns out, getting to 99 is awful in classic post 1.10. In pre 1.07, it's worse than getting to 99 in LoD 1.10+, but still doable. In classic 1.10, Diablo only gives 2000 experience at level 98 on p1. I didn't test p8 but you can easily see where the 90,000 runs came from. It's pretty much undoable to get a classic character to 99 in one ladder season. Assuming 3 minutes per run, players 8 games, it would take 24/7 gameplay for 183 days to get to 99. Yikes...

Edit: Ok I finally dug up a similar table which shows you, but doesn't say the players count. I was indeed right in recalling, it's ~90,000 runs:

90-91: 440
91-92: 800
92-93: 1740
93-94: 3780
94-95: 5150
95-96: 6750
96-97: 12250
97-98: 22250
98-99: 36375
TOTAL: 89535

 

[TWolfMech]

I was really confused too at first. But in an interview, a member of the GERBarb team actually explained in an interview how they could manage up to 250 Diablo kills on a good day and get close to 300 million Experience in a weekend.

About how much experience do you get for killing Diablo past Clvl 95? I assume in a multi-player game, 6 or 8 people always.

Don't know exactly. Should be about 470k in an 8-player-game with exp-shrine since we reached lvl98.

How many runs a day do you do, and what's the most ever in a day?

It greatly differs. We had some great weekends. One of them got us almost 300 million exp. So we made about 160-180 kills per day then. I guess if everything works absolutely perfect a team should be able to make up to 250 kills/ day.

So I thought to myself, whould this person really lie when people were able to check on the leaderboard all the time?
The only explanation I could think of was that the experience gained from Diablo must be way higher. I also remembered that I had farmed Mephisto a lot on my Barbarian and Sorceress, because he gave roughly 11.000 experience on Normal in a 1 player game.

So after testing it out, using the same strat of the RUSSBarb and GERBarb teams, which means clearing the CS out except for one seal, setting a TP up at an Experience Shrine and filling the game with other characters, I did end up with 416.497 experience on my Barbarian at level 98.

I have to admit that I've used an editor to get the character level and the necessary gear.
I was using similar gear to GERBarb as well as the same skill set here. Sadly I couldn't find any info on RUSSBarb's gear.

Considering that 291.058.498 experience is required to get from level 98 to 99, you need to kill Diablo at least 699 times.

Edit: Some support from other chars would have been nice!
Need some of them Static Fields and maybe an Amplify Damage curse!

 

[TWolfMech]

you have that link to that post of leveling up love reading things like that.

Here is the link to the GERBarb interview:

Archives: GerBarb - Diablo Wiki

GerBarb was the first character to reach level 99 in Diablo II Classic (D2C). Leveling up that high seemed impossible in D2C, where even reaching Clvl 85 required a great deal of grinding the (dangerous) River of Flame and (more dangerous) Chaos Sanctuary. The teams running GerBarb and RussBarb...

diablo2.diablowiki.net

The website can take a while to load.

 

[thrasher_565]

sounds like its in hardcore? its posable for improvements but still fun to read. think you got a t shirt if you hit 99 in a lader season if they can find it was not cheated.

remember reading a level 99 assassin dipdancer...

on my quest to collect info ill have to go thow the forums and find other stuff

wonder if killing urdar would help? don't no about 1.04

 

[TWolfMech]

sounds like its in hardcore? its posable for improvements but still fun to read. think you got a t shirt if you hit 99 in a lader season if they can find it was not cheated.

remember reading a level 99 assassin dipdancer...

on my quest to collect info ill have to go thow the forums and find other stuff

wonder if killing urdar would help? don't no about 1.04

The pre LoD level 99 characters were all on softcore. there hasnt been any level 99 on the ladder leaderboards that i could find on battle.net via web archive.
Sounds reasonable to me. The GERBarb team mentioned that even their decked out Barbarian died during disconnects, before they switched into wearing a Shield with a Battle Hammer.
Two of those ladders took place before the expansion came out. There is another leaderboard for the classic ladder that ran at the same time with the expansion ladder.
Also the first ladder seemed to either include hardcore characters or there wasn't a hardcore ladder to begin with. Not sure on that...
Season 1:

Diablo II Standard Ladder - June, 2000 - December, 2000

web.archive.org

Season 2:

Diablo II Standard Ladder - January, 2001 - June, 2001

web.archive.org

Season 3 (classic ladder after LoD came out):

Diablo II Standard Ladder - June, 2001 - Sept, 2001

web.archive.org

Season 3 (LoD):

Diablo II Standard Ladder - June, 2001 - Sept, 2001

web.archive.org

You got to scroll down to see the hardcore ladder.

 

[galaxyhaxz]

I like how as soon as LoD came out, the entire thing became filled with 99's because of how much easier it was. Also ladders worked a bit differently prior to 1.10. Both non-ladder and ladder could play together in the same games, so it was super easy to twink/rush at the start of a season. 1.10 isolated them.

Also the XP penalty is different in 1.00 vs 1.04. I can't remember all the details entirely, but I seem to remember that there was no global XP penalty in 1.00. Either in 1.03 or 1.04 they introduced a global penalty starting at level 75, which went down to something like 25% at level 90+. This penalty remained the same until 1.10, which made the penalty exponentially degrading which is why leveling up from 95-99 is so punishing in classic.

 

[TWolfMech]

I like how as soon as LoD came out, the entire thing became filled with 99's because of how much easier it was. Also ladders worked a bit differently prior to 1.10. Both non-ladder and ladder could play together in the same games, so it was super easy to twink/rush at the start of a season. 1.10 isolated them.

Also the XP penalty is different in 1.00 vs 1.04. I can't remember all the details entirely, but I seem to remember that there was no global XP penalty in 1.00. Either in 1.03 or 1.04 they introduced a global penalty starting at level 75, which went down to something like 25% at level 90+. This penalty remained the same until 1.10, which made the penalty exponentially degrading which is why leveling up from 95-99 is so punishing in classic.

Interesting...
Would have to test the exp on 1.00 and 1.05, too, to see the difference.

Also notice how there are a ton of hardcore 99 characters in LoD, but we never saw a hardcore 99 character in classic.

 

[galaxyhaxz]

1.05 should be the same as 1.04. 1.03 and 1.04 were the only big patches in pre LoD, but I can't recall which one added the penalty or removed maggot leveling. I think the reason for no 99 HC Classic is that when LoD came out, pretty much everyone moved over and no one cared about classic at that point. Then 1.10 came out 2 years later and made it pretty much impossible to get to 99, even with botting, in a single ladder season. So it very well may be there has never been a 99 HC in classic in the history of d2 (at least ladder).

 

[thrasher_565]

1.05 should be the same as 1.04. 1.03 and 1.04 were the only big patches in pre LoD, but I can't recall which one added the penalty or removed maggot leveling. I think the reason for no 99 HC Classic is that when LoD came out, pretty much everyone moved over and no one cared about classic at that point. Then 1.10 came out 2 years later and made it pretty much impossible to get to 99, even with botting, in a single ladder season. So it very well may be there has never been a 99 HC in classic in the history of d2 (at least ladder).

maggot levelling was removed in 1.02 same with cow king killing over and over