do you think D2 developer actually made the game doable in hell?

or was that to be intended as "throw them into the water see if they can swim" kinda thing?

or you don't agree at all.

I mean, suppose you aren't using any trade system.

and have to manage on your own.

or do ubers.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case for all the normal uniques before the expansion.
how people finished hell its not clear back then...

also, did anyone here actually did diablo 1 nightmare and hell difficutly and found a correlation? or is it the same gameplay as normal diff.?

sure its a considerable difficulty spike compared to nightmare or normal, but i think depending on class its doable solo, sure there will be moments where You die a lot.
i played with

Frenzy barb back in d2 og days completed hell with most of IK set and some

Demon Limb and aldurs

Mace
now that i started d2r i also went with barb because sentiment used mostly random items i got along the way
i do remember having a lot of troubles with playing as sorc in the old days cause i was stubborn and encountering a pack of mobs with cold and fire immunity would take forever and i would not skip them XD
as for ubers and soloing them You really need good gear for it, but then again first ubers run i did in d2r i did with 3 friends all of them with not completed or stacked characters think firend's sorc was about 78lvl or some back then
also im pretty sure droprates are significantly boosted compared to og d2 so thats does makes a game way easier

Beating Hell without trading or any assistance in-game can be tough at first, but that's where you just apply the tried and true formula of going back to earlier content and grinding a bit for better gear / more levels.

The hardest part IMO would be figuring out how to take down Ubers all by yourself, without any guides. Just doing trial and error by fire and seeing what works. I made that my goal with my Barb early last year and it was very difficult and took quite a few attempts before he was able to survive against Meph and do enough damage to finish off

Baal. But felt so good once I finally got over that hump and took them down!

Some people played d2r offline from scratch during the months after the game was released because there were so many connection problems by that time.
It was, for sure, harder but doable once you know the game enough.
It would be too easy and boring if any noob without gear could finish hell.

I know at least a couple of people who played the game without ever farming for items, that is they have no idea of any runewords, nor any rare items (basically all elite uniques and sets) and still complete the game time after time. When they found out what the game has they were surprised but that did not make them farm. They're playing from time to time, they're in their 50s, so they just don't care.

Nowadays, we have a vast knowledge about the game. Tips and tricks, knowing where to farm, what to look for, how to handle each type of monster etc...

Back in the days, these things didn't exist. If you look at the guides Blizzard published, they are all crap
Imagine having to figure out the entire game by yourself. That's really, really hard.
I would never have made it through hell in any amount of time, if I had to do everything by myself.

I doubt that the devs had the time or Insight to playtest every single character/build in the beginning. I wouldn't be surprised if they wouldn't have been able to make it through the game (or at least not all of them).

I think I had beaten hell

Baal with my Bone/summon necro back then.

Or was it only hell Diablo before LoD?
...

No, the worst by far was Hell Ancients, so definitely did that in something like LoD 1.09 or 1.10 (first runes were there but did not even know about runewords). Gathered tons of Revives to do that finally.

To be fair, hell difficulty was quite a bit easier before, man, what was it, 1.07? Before immunities. Somewhere around there they also did xp scaling starting at lvl 70, right? Or am I confusing that with a different game.

I think the original developers meant for it to be a challenging, grindy game. The newer content, like

Pandemonium Event and

Uber Tristram, were much later additions that were never explained through game lore.

I do wonder what it would be like to play the game for the first time today, with no prior knowledge or experience of it. I think even if you just do the superficial content (i.e. the campaign and drops/shops), the game is probably fun and beatable blind.

Nowadays there are so many guides but they are almost the same.
Caster? Griffon, arach, SoJ, Spirit

Monarch, 2/20 Amulet.
Melee? LoH, Highlord, forti, Grief.
Budget? Angelic, Sigon, dual Spirit, Stealth, Lore.

Trading, parties, the race to 99 and the race to get rich every ladder reset make people ignore the fun when you beat The Ancients and Baals while using trash gear.
Agreed with @Necrarch, The Ancients is the hardest.

Ah, that reminds me:
Back in 1.11 LoD days, I've been playin at 8ppl - the best xperience was when I started a complete walkthrough from scratch - with nothing stashed, no guide usage - just my naked azz gainst 8ppl everything Pure cold sorc, and that was when I found my ever 1st

Tal-rash armor. Was much more dear to me than any gg drop today, I swear it xD.
After that, I tried same trick - but this time, it was hc bowzon. That added some pale to my hair, must admit. But the gal found a

Hellcast from norm

Baal, then Buriza in nitemare, and

Iceblink jacket. All res -80 through all hell ppl8... that was scary af, but I did it. Reached 94lv, and even farmed an Eldritch for a while. But later, caught a

Charge on some pindlerun. Rip, but I'll never forget my brave bowa.

SuperIllu wrote: 1 year ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they wouldn't have been able to make it through the game (or at least not all of them).

that's what i think. without the expansion, i don't think they made the game possible in hell really. just throw the thing there. until the immunes came and the LoD.

savamano wrote: 1 year ago

I know at least a couple of people who played the game without ever farming for items,

I'm one of them, i started farming abit. and then-no. i am just playing for fun. i don't farm. just play builds.

mockingbirdreal wrote: 1 year ago

It would be too easy and boring if any noob without gear could finish hell.

there's a difference between doable, than completely annoying and frankly impossible without proper gear vs immunes.
because:

marek22 wrote: 1 year ago

troubles with playing as sorc in the old days cause i was stubborn and encountering a pack of mobs with cold and fire immunity would take forever and i would not skip them

SuperIllu wrote: 1 year ago

Imagine having to figure out the entire game by yourself. That's really, really hard.

that's how i played my original d2 23 years ago, that's why i think i only got to hell act1. and they just destroyed me.
I was like, "withouit proper gear, i aint gonna make it", and grinding for previous difficulty level never even occurred to me.

all in all:
the game is fun enough to play different builds on normal-NM. when it comes to hell, you need to get good build-not ANY build, or you'll just be pounding on the wall of immunes.
and then, there's the whole grinding/farming. if you want to maximize your builds. you can do hell, but without sunders and lower res, or Infinity etc something to deal with immunes, the game will put your head infront of a wall. which is part of the fun. no argument there.

Yea I remember when I saw immunes for the first time, playing my barb, and with physical immunes it was like “bersker and move on”. Ah when melee was a better choice…

So I just went though patch notes from 2001 and realized I played some LoD version patched to pre-1.07, offline only. No synergies on skills, no respec, and to this day I remember the combination of DolElHelIstTirVex as the goal of the game. Never made it.

I had a necromancer whose main shtick was

Blood Golem +

Iron Maiden which, now that I read 1.07 notes, was a buggy interaction. Didn't even know until now.

Your golem was pretty much immune to damage as he was healing to full from

Iron Maiden. That necromancer got stuck in, I think Nightmare, act5

Bloody Foothills where the 100-dmg hits from golem were taking ages to kill anything and I know I never even considered skipping enemies. All had to die on my way up to Shenk. Never got to Shenk.

Then got my hands on

Jamella editor and created an OP barbarian who dealt some immense damage with cheated-in rare sword (now it would be kinda on par with BotD), had like 20k health pool and always died in

Chaos Sanctuary upon leaving

Whirlwind animation to, you know it,

Iron Maiden.

I beat D2 (pre-LoD, so before

Baal/Ancients) on Hell as a

Holy Freeze +

Zeal paladin and as a Blizzard sorceress. The paladin had pretty much only rare items, but the weapon was pretty damn nice as far as I remember. I have no recollection of what items my sorceress used. It was offline either way, didn't play D2 on BattleNet back then. They got stonewalled pretty hard when LoD came out lol.

ShadowHeart wrote: 1 year ago

I beat D2 (pre-LoD, so before

Baal/Ancients) on Hell as a

Holy Freeze +

Zeal paladin and as a Blizzard sorceress. The paladin had pretty much only rare items, but the weapon was pretty damn nice as far as I remember. I have no recollection of what items my sorceress used. It was offline either way, didn't play D2 on BattleNet back then. They got stonewalled pretty hard when LoD came out lol.

both are power builds.
I remember getting to hell with fire sorc...and like "umm how does that little red guy die if he's immune to fire?"

guess your preferences were lucky.

Well, I'm talking about before LoD, and before immunities. Well, regular mobs didn't have immunities at least. It's been long time...

Throughout most (if not all) of D2's (earlier) history, there has always been "that one thing" that made it nearly impossible to get through hell for certain classes/builds IF you didn't know what you were doing at all. If you had kind of an idea on how to circumvent things, it may have taken unnecessarily long but was completely doable. And if you really knew what you were doing - especially since the advent of mid lvl runewords and act-crossing, gearable mercs - it has always been perfectly doable.

Back in the olden days CS basically put a hard stop on any phys melee character that didn't know how to circumvent it because them skellies still cast

Iron Maiden which was basically a guaranteed instant Death to any

Whirlwind barb and the like (ok, not actually a hard stop since at least on SC you could just zerg it over and over and over until hours later you finally made it through).
Similarly, immunities basically put a hard stop on any elemental character that didn't know how to get a decent-enough secondary element going at the same time.
Then gearable mercs happened, allowing you to bypass the need for a 2nd element in most situations and instead just babysit your merc while he takes care of it.
Then IM was removed from CS, effectively removing the phys-stop.
Then low- and midlevel runewords came along and kind of made everything a walk in the park if you knew which ones to spend an extra 20 minutes on NM countess runs for.
(Not necessarily in that order..honestly can't remember anymore..not important)

The real problem back in the day was that respecs didn't exist. So if you had no idea what was going on and you made it to CS, only to find out that

Whirlwind is suicide or you made it to higher difficulties, only to find out that suddenly half the game is immune to you, you were kinda screwed and basically had to start from scratch, based on a best guess as to what may or may not work the 2nd time around.
If you knew what to do going into it..not a big deal.
Though even that had its limits, thanks to certain patches that completely changed the idiotic "binary approach to difficulty" over night, taking your perfectly viable build and making it suddenly unable to really progress any further. Just one of the reasons I have always despised the idea of immunities as "a measure of difficulty". A hard "yes/no" != "difficult", it is merely either "same damn thing" or "impossible as is" so all it does is reduce build variety while adding no actual measure of difficulty to those remaining builds not stopped by the immunity.

Be that all as it may..D2:R is well past all of that and has always been perfectly beatable solo. Obviously harder on classic as you still get the crap mercs and no runewords but even there you can do just fine. Even more so since today, it is indeed far easier to look up whatever hints you may need, if you so choose.

ShadowHeart wrote: 1 year ago

Well, I'm talking about before LoD, and before immunities. Well, regular mobs didn't have immunities at least. It's been long time...

sorry. i just can't imagine diablo hell without immunes *head

Bash*
I guess i only played normal or NM..

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

The real problem back in the day was that respecs didn't exist.

yep. i seem to recall something like "fu&* this, my build sucks, start all over again?? waaaa"

Schnorki wrote: 1 year ago

Be that all as it may..D2:R is well past all of that and has always been perfectly beatable solo. Obviously harder on classic as you still get the crap mercs and no runewords but even there you can do just fine. Even more so since today, it is indeed far easier to look up whatever hints you may need, if you so choose.

I think i disagree on this. especially if you are SSF.
i have a crappy elemental druid, which uses

Volcano to do physical, and phys+fire immunes are just merc meat, and that isn't always doable by the merc. unless you have good gear.
I don't know alot of builds, since i'm no expert like you, but I'm skeptical to this conclusion as to "all builds are doable solo".
also- doable is a matter of opinion. you can hack a single mob for 1 min and then another for another..doable? yeah. but gameplay wise? not very attractive. some builds aren't built for hell. I'm pretty sure they haven't thought of it(the devs), until sunders came to be with D2R.

Back in the olden days CS basically put a hard stop on any phys melee character that didn't know how to circumvent it because them skellies still cast

Iron Maiden which was basically a guaranteed instant Death to any

Whirlwind barb and the like (ok, not actually a hard stop since at least on SC you could just zerg it over and over and over until hours later you finally made it through).

dear god that was the bane of my existence worst part is i never played necro so it took me ages to figure out why the heck am i dying all the times

marek22 wrote: 1 year ago

Back in the olden days CS basically put a hard stop on any phys melee character that didn't know how to circumvent it because them skellies still cast

Iron Maiden which was basically a guaranteed instant Death to any

Whirlwind barb and the like (ok, not actually a hard stop since at least on SC you could just zerg it over and over and over until hours later you finally made it through).

dear god that was the bane of my existence worst part is i never played necro so it took me ages to figure out why the heck am i dying all the times

yeah, I remember trying to spin extra long distances, so that I could ESC and exit if that happened, since you couldn't die during the WW phase