50 Tips & Tricks for new players

50 Diablo 2 Resurrected Tips & Tricks

Guide Created by Icy & Compiled by Fellowship

1. You can fill a

Tome of Town Portal or

Tome of Identify from mechants by holding shift and right clicking.

2.

Thawing Potion and

Antidote Potion provide +50% Cold/Poison Resistance respectively, as well as giving 10% Maximum Resistance for 30 seconds each. If you drink multiple potions, you can stack the duration time. The stacking effect also works with

Stamina Potion, which is helpful in the early game.

3. Poison Length Reduction has a maximum of 75%. In Nightmare and Hell difficulties, you receives the same penalties as you do for resistances (-40% and -100%), meaning you require additional stacking to reach the maximum.

4. Poison Shrines make you immune to Poison completely.

5. When you die and don't have inventory space for all of your potions, the game goes line by line from the bottom left to decide what potions are dropped and what you carry. Because of this, it can be beneficial to carry your Full Rejuvination Potion in the left-most slot.

6.

Smite and

Holy Shield don't normally appear on a

Scepter, but if the game attempts to select them multiple times during item generation, the game will eventually give up as a fail-safe and spawn the

Scepter with one of those skills. The chances of this is one in the tens of thousands.

7. Auto-mod properties on items (such as Mana on a Sorceress Orb or All Resistance on Paladin Shields) have no level requirement applied to non-magical items. For example, you could find a high ilvl

Targe with +45% All Resistance with a level requirement of 3.

8. If you're using

Conviction and an enemy is using a higher level

Conviction aura, their aura will cancel out yours. If yours is higher, you'll cancel out theirs. Enemies will never have higher than level 11 (Infinity gives level 12), except

Über Mephisto, who has level 20.

9. Using an

Eld or

El Rune with a Chipped Gem and a low quality Weapon/Armor, you can cube them to normal quality Weapon/Armor. Doing so will set the ilvl to 1, which can be setup for runewords. For example, a

Scourge with ilvl 1 has a maximum of 3 sockets, which means you'll get 3 from

Larzuk, or improve your chances of getting 3 with the socketing recipe.

10. In the

Blood Moor, you'll often get a small cabin which has a bed inside. By clicking it, you open a secret chest and can get a large number of item drops.

mroy16 wrote:

"By clicking it, you open a secret chest" sounds, to me, like a separate chest entity would open after clicking the bed. Instead, the bed itself is the "poppable" entity, acting like a chest. Might

Confuse new players thinking that a second set of items should pop from an invisible chest nearby.

11. When you encounter a unique and its minions, if you stray far enough where the unique can't see you, the minions may still run towards you, but won't attack. You can use this to lure them away and slowly kill the pack.

12. You can fill your

Belt with potions from a merchant by holding shift and right clicking.

13. Because

Diadem have such high quality and magic levels, you can imbue them at any character level and you'll have the same item generation as you would with even a level 99 character.

14. If you die during a game, the resistance scrolls from the quest where you save

Anya will stop working, but will not display as such on your stats screen. To reset this, simply exit and enter a new game.

mroy16 wrote:

I think this was fixed on legacy servers some time ago, but not patched for offline play. I don't know if it's still the case in D2R.

mroy16 from the LlamaSC discord wrote:

I believe the

Anya res bug was patched on bnet servers a long time ago, and only persists in singleplayer games. unclear what the status is in D2R. might be worth an adjustment in wording.

15. Magic Find has diminishing returns for Rare, Set, and Unique items, that is, you only get a fraction of your total Magic Find towards them (in a logarithmic formula). Any decimals are truncated in this formula, so you functionally, have "MF Break Points". For example, 300% MF is only effectively 136% for uniques, and 301% MF is also effectively 136% for uniques. To reach 137% MF for uniques, you require 304% Magic Find.

16. The superuniques from the waves of monsters spawned by

Baal only drop items as well as a champion would. For example,

Pindleskin has significantly better drops than

Lister the Tormentor.

17. Up until character level 25, monsters who are significantly above or below your level will give only a fraction of experience. However, once you reach level 25, only monsters below have this penalty.

mroy16 wrote:

While there is a specific penalty list for characters under level 25, there is still a penalty for being underleveled after 25. According to the Amazon Basin, underlevel experience is scaled by clvl/mlvl, so a level 26 character would only get ~25% exp from Hell

Baal. Obviously better than the 5% a level 24 would get, but still a penalty.

18. Certain Shrines cannot appear in places where the area level is too low, such as a Monster Shrine in

Blood Moor on Normal difficulty. However, similar to

Smite and

Holy Shield on

Scepter, if the shrine selection is re-rolled too many times, you can on rare occasion get any shrine.

19. Many types of Weapons and Armors appear as Uniques and Sets more than once such as

Sacred Armor for both

Templar's Might and

Tyrael's Might. Each one has an associated rarity, and lower level qlvls cannot spawn certain items. For example, given an unidentified unique

Sacred Armor there is an 8/9 chance it will be

Templar's Might and a 1/9 chance it will be a

Tyrael's Might, but if the qlvl is 86 or lower, it can only ever be

Templar's Might.

20. Affixes on items can only appear for certain ilvls. For example, the suffix "of Vita" on Grand Charms for 41-45 Life can only appear on Grand Charms with ilvl 91 or higher. When hunting for specific affixes, it's beneficial to go for the lowest possible to prevent unwanted affixes for better chances. You can use this website for more information: https://diablo3.ingame.de/diablodb/affi ... &patch=111

21. +% to Fire and Lightning Skill Damage from items only adds onto

Fire Mastery and

Lightning Mastery, and isn't multiplied separately.

22. Merchants in each act reduce their prices by 10% after completing certain quests. They are: rescuing

Deckard Cain, killing

Radament, finding

Lam Esen's Tome, and killing

Izual. Act 5 starts at 180%, but is reduced by half after killing Shenk.

23. Quest weapons (

Horadric Staff,

Khalim's Flail,

Khalim's Will,

Hellforge Hammer) can be used by any character since they have no Strength or level requirements. They're great budget items for twinking low-level characters.

24. Faster Run/Walk has no (realistic) caps and all increases are beneficial.

25. While typing a message, pressing up and down

Arrows will scroll through previous sent messages.

26. Weapon and armor racks spawn items based on RNG. In single-player if you move and perform actions in the same manner on the same map, you can get consistent item types. For other items, you can take different paths, use a TP and walk around town, etc. For example, you can repeatedly get

Plated Belt from an armor rack on a particular map and rack, which may possibly be magical, set, or even unique.

27. Assassins can open locked chests without a

Key.

28. It's easy to overlook the math regarding resistances and not realize that going from 75% to 80% means you're taking four fifths of what you were at 75%. To make more clearly, if you take 2000 damage from a fire attack at -100%, you would take 1000 damage at 0%, 500 damage at 50%, 250 damage at 75%, 200 damage at 80%, 100 damage at 90% and 50 damage at 95%.

29.

Telekinesis is an excellent quality-of-life skill, being able to activate a multitude of objects, pickup some items, use your stash, waypoints, and more.

mroy16 wrote:

In D2R currently, there are a ton of bugs associated with TK. I would recommend a cautionary note about interacting with quest objects (Horizon's Journal, Orifice, etc) with TK until this is fixed.

30. During combat, a pink splash will appear whenever Crushing Blow is dealt. There are also red and blue swirls for life/mana stealing.

31. Half Freeze Duration is a simple yes/no check and does not stack. Cannot Be Frozen is the same, except strictly better.

Holy Freeze while appearing to freeze does not actually do so and only causes a slowing effect.

32. You can restore

Hydra charges to

Hellfire Torch by dragging the Repair icon to it.

33. By using glitched rushes, you can save the experience points from Normal and Nightmare Ancients. The experience gained from them are 1400000, 20000000, and also for Hell, 40000000. These are not affected by experience penalties from being over level 70.

34. Damage Reduced by % is capped at 50%, but you can stack it to compensate the loss from

Decrepify or

Amplify Damage curses.

35. Holding Shift and pressing your potion hotkeys will immediately give it to your mercenary.

36. Safety crafted shields have 5-10% Magic Resistance, which reduces damage from

Bone Spirit,

Blessed Hammer, and other Magic attacks. It's not seen anywhere else, but isn't particularly useful.

37. Talking to

Warriv and going to Act 1 is much faster to access a waypoint when starting in Act 2.

38. Health and Mana potions have a chance to have double their normal effects based on your Vitality/Energy points. After 200 points, you receive diminishing returns.

39. Barbarians can dual-wield damaging potions such as

Strangling Gas Potion, or mix them with a weapon.

40. Certain types of Body Armors and Shields will decrease movement speed and also increase Stamina drain. See Base Items and filter by Light/Medium/Heavy.

41. Prevent Monster Heal cannot be inflicted by a Mercenary or

Iron Golem, only the player.

42. Light Radius by default is 13 and is capped at 18. Having a

Hellfire Torch with its +8 almost certainly ensures you have maximum visibility.

43. Defense vs Missiles is still applied while using

Berserk.

44. On rare occasion, you can see

Lut Gholein and earlier areas from around

Valley of Snakes and

Lost City depending on your map. However, you cannot

Teleport across.

45. Deadly Strike and

Critical Strike have identical effects and are calculated separately, but both effects can not occur simultaneously.

46. By using the weapon upgrade recipe, you can turn

Hellforge Hammer,

Staff of Kings, and

Horadric Staff into Hand Axes, Hatchets, and Tomahawks. See , .

47. Rare Jewels can be rerolled using

Perfect Skull, but the ilvl is degraded. However, this can be used to create powerful Jewels for lower level characters.

48. The path to

Nihlathak in the

Halls of Vaught can be determined based on which wall the eye texture is on. See Map Reading for more info.

49. While activating the

Halls of Pain waypoint removes the portal to

Pindleskin, he can still be accessed through the door in

Halls of Anguish.

mroy16 wrote:

This is no longer the case in D2R - a very noteworthy change! (similar to cow king)

50. An Act 2 Mercenary with

Prayer aura and holding Insight will have a double healing effect as

Prayer is also activated through

Meditation.

As a returning player with limited Memory I thank thee.

You are most welcome !

Good refresher and I learned some things I never knew! Thanks.

Glad to know it is helping new and old players alike !

amazing Tips and Tricks guide!
All Hail the ruler of the one ring! @Fellowship

Thanks so much my friend !

Means a lot coming from the best comedian hehe.

@Fellowship is doing God's work, the amount of detail in your guides is astonishing. There were some interactions i wasn't aware of (Who the hell checks information about light radius)

Thank you once again @Dzik ! I want to emphasize the fact that I am not the author of the informations displayed here, I am merely an archivist and a compiler that is passionate about details and Diablo 2.

My aim is to bring my selected favorite Diablo 2 Communities with the best informations possible regarding the game.

@Fellowship Ah, I must have missed that, I was out of state for almost a week. In that time the number of members more than doubled, so I'm catching up with all the threads.

Thanks mate for this quality of life memo

10. In the

Blood Moor, you'll often get a small cabin which has a bed inside. By clicking it, you open a secret chest and can get a large number of item drops.

This seriously blew my mind. Always enter that cabin and never realized this. Thorough and diligent list. Well done @Fellowship

Very nice list, lots of good tidbits of info in there that some veterans might not even know about. A couple of additions:

8. If you're using

Conviction and an enemy is using a higher level

Conviction aura, their aura will cancel out yours. If yours is higher, you'll cancel out theirs. Enemies will never have higher than level 11 (Infinity gives level 12), except

Über Mephisto, who has level 20.

While this is true, keep in mind that you must have your

Conviction active first before you enter the range of theirs, if you activate it afterwards then you'll still be under their

Conviction and yours will have no effect. Also, an opposing

Conviction aura is only canceled for the supplier, allies will still be subject to their

Conviction. For example, your merc carrying Infinity will be safe from aura enchanted mobs with

Conviction but you'll still be affected by the -resistances% and -defense%.

10. In the

Blood Moor, you'll often get a small cabin which has a bed inside. By clicking it, you open a secret chest and can get a large number of item drops.

This is a nice bit of info, there's also beds in the Act 2 Harem levels that can be clicked as well I think. Also, there's some Act 1 cabin tiles that have a superchest right next to the door, they can drop some good items for selling or chipped gems which is nice early on. See here for more info about super/sparkly/special chests: https://www.purediablo.com/forums/threa ... hests.380/

12. You can fill your

Belt with potions from a merchant by holding shift and right clicking.

You can also use this to fill your inventory full of potions very quickly, good if you want to stock up before a boss or to drop some potions on the Ground before you take on the Ancients. After you shift-click to buy potions, then you can pick up your

Belt and put it back down and all the potions except the first row will be emptied out into your inventory (or onto the Ground if your inventory is full), so you can repeat the process quickly. Speedrunners like this trick a lot.

14. If you die during a game, the resistance scrolls from the quest where you save

Anya will stop working, but will not display as such on your stats screen. To reset this, simply exit and enter a new game.

This was fixed on battlenet with one of the 1.14 patches, though it's still of relevance to those that play 1.13 or prior.

24. Faster Run/Walk has no (realistic) caps and all increases are beneficial.

FRW does have a

Cap (though you'll never reach it legitimately/realistically as you pointed out), item based FRW is subject to diminishing returns so it does sort of have "breakpoints". For example, 100 FRW from items is equivalent to 60 EFRW (effective FRW), to get 61 EFRW you need 103 FRW. Skill based FRW is already EFRW so it's not subject to diminishing returns, however the skills themselves have dimishing returns. See here for more info: https://www.theamazonbasin.com/wiki/ind ... r_Run/Walk

25. While typing a message, pressing up and down

Arrows will scroll through previous sent messages.

This can be useful in single player, if you spam a message around 10 times or so then it will "stick" between games, so you can spam "/players 8" 10 times in one game, then in the next game you can press the up arrow to recall it again. Good for Countess runs since her rune drop is more likely at lower player counts. Maybe you want to run through the Tower at p8 but then you want to switch to p1 right before her, this is where it can be very useful.

26. Weapon and armor racks spawn items based on RNG. In single-player if you move and perform actions in the same manner on the same map, you can get consistent item types. For other items, you can take different paths, use a TP and walk around town, etc. For example, you can repeatedly get

Plated Belt from an armor rack on a particular map and rack, which may possibly be magical, set, or even unique.

Yep, rack running can be very powerful for acquiring items if you can roll a good map. They are mostly influenced by the map seed, nearby monster spawns, and the way you approach it. Ideally you'll want a map where the rack is very close to the waypoint with no monster spawns nearby, that will give you stable racks more often. You can also use summons to "tick" the racks to get different drops, which can be very useful. For example, a rack might normally drop hydraskulls most of the time, but when you spawn a

Hydra on top of it to tick it, it might drop a

Shako instead. Racks have very good set and unique odds, around 1/150 and 1/400 respectively, with even better odds for class-specific items at 1/240 or so for uniques, I don't remember the amount for sets. See here for more info about rack item generation and using summons to "tick":
https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads ... ks.788376/
https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads ... ra.965878/

29.

Telekinesis is an excellent quality-of-life skill, being able to activate a multitude of objects, pickup some items, use your stash, waypoints, and more.

It can also be used to pop chests and racks, which is why Sorcs are considered the best LK/rack runners since they have

Teleport, TK,

Hydra (for ticking racks), and are tied for the best casting frames. Fun fact: TK used to be able to pick up ALL items from 1.00 to 1.08, runes, gems, weapons, uniques, etc. Sorcs were pretty good at ninja-looting hehe.

45. Deadly Strike and

Critical Strike have identical effects and are calculated separately, but both effects can not occur simultaneously.

Yep, this also has a lot of significance to Amazons and slightly less to Barbs and Assassins due to the way it's calculated.

Critical Strike is calculated first, then Deadly Strike, then Mastery

Critical Strike. Since CS applies first, Amazons often choose to skimp on DS a bit since it won't apply if CS does first. That's why some Amazons choose to use Cat's Eye over Highlords, or War Travs over Gores for example.

That's all the additions I got for now, overall very nice tips and tricks guide that many people will find helpful, well done.

Thank you everyone, remember that I am merely a compiler, not the author of this Guide.

Icy is the author.

Epic stuff

would you mind if I ask a question here?

As I am a casual player, just played with friends for fun most of the time. I wanna know, if a mediocre character could survive in Hell difficulty?
For example, a sorceror that can use every single magical skills with some elite items or an assasin that can do some finishing moves, can set some traps and call a shadow to fight on her side. I always want to pay attention on getting the best item, not the skill trees.

don't worry to much @Sutlore you get to reset skills /stats 1 time each difficulty. and you can farm for

Token of Absolution on hell difficulty.

Sutlore wrote: 3 years ago

would you mind if I ask a question here?

As I am a casual player, just played with friends for fun most of the time. I wanna know, if a mediocre character could survive in Hell difficulty?
For example, a sorceror that can use every single magical skills with some elite items or an assasin that can do some finishing moves, can set some traps and call a shadow to fight on her side. I always want to pay attention on getting the best item, not the skill trees.

For Hell difficulty (which can be brutal to some classes) I'd say you better spec into something instead of trying to push through with every skill available to you.

If you wanna go Sorc, Blizzard (and all its synergies +

Cold Mastery) is a good way to spend your Skill Points, early on.
Don't forget your 1 Skill Point wonders:

Static Field,

Telekinesis,

Teleport,

Warmth and

Frozen Armor.

If you wanna go Assa,

Lightning Sentry +

Death Sentry (and all their synergies) are also good ways to spend your Skill Points.
With that said, if you wanna go to the Martial Arts/

Shadow Master way, while also having Traps, you could but you should definitely focus on the Traps first.
Don't forget your 1 Skill Point wonders:

Burst of Speed,

Fade,

Cloak of Shadows and

Mind Blast.
Martial Arts is just trash (efficiency-wise, it's very gear dependent, tho it's kinda cool) and the

Shadow Master can be so annoying if it keeps using Traps to replace yours, previously cast.
I like to control the playfield and

Shadow Master won't let me do that.

Items are very important and will boost your character, there's no question about that. But if you don't have a solid damage output, to begin with, it won't really matter.
The only exceptions to this are the physical non-caster builds, like a Barbarian, for example, where most of its power comes from Items and not from the Skill Tree. It's the other way around.

Thank you so much for creating this site! Much appreciated.

Bubblesmcgoo

This was amazing information for an old fella returning to the dark evil