The fever dream of unique items in the German strategy guide

Hi,

I'm sure some of you have seen the offical D2 strategy guide (*). Some of you might have even had one as a child. I did. However, I never played the base game by itself back then as I got the battle chest containing LoD. Didn't stop me from reading the guides though.
Recently I was visiting my parents I remembered that were were some interesting items mentioned in that booklet. So I took a look once again and let me tell you... it was a ride.

I am presenting the highlights of the German verison of the booklet.

Gull: 4-22 damage
Let's start out tame. Who needs any MF if you get so much damage? even with the added 1-15 this doesn't make sense...

Nirom Malus: can be thrown, +20 hit chance, 60% damage
not sure how they dug up this, there is no such item in the game. Only reference I could find is here under development notes : https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Horadric_Malus

Knell Striker: Stone curse, 20 poison/fire res, 15 energy
Stone curse sure sounds terrifying, wonder if it was supposed to be crushing blow

Bonesnap: 300ED, 25% chance to turn monster into

Skeleton, 30cold/fire res
did

Bonesnap re-animate? wut?

The Gnasher: +30 hit chance, 8% chance to half enemy moster life
boy, crushing blow hit hard in the days

Deathspade: monsters get afraid, 10 damage, 10 hit chance
just love scaring monsters

ravenclaw: 150ED, fires randomly poison, fire, cold or lightning, 3 dex
I love the idea, thb

and my absolute favourite:

Pelta Lunata: bows can be carried one-handed, 10 armour, 10 hp, 2 strength
one handed bows, will not elaborate


and for good measure, nearly all set items are listed as having "1-2 random magic attributes"


(*) Here is an upload of the English version: https://archive.org/details/Diablo_II_O ... s/mode/2up
(sorry for the low res, had to scale them down a bit to upload them)

If you are a true veteran and have seen these items are they in the wild, please let us know

Wow, these are wild lol. Where did they get all of these, sounds like they've just made up some of these effects. Or were they really planning on implementing these effects originally? The items in English version you linked looks more like in the final game from quick glance.

SuperIllu wrote: 1 week ago

Stone curse sure sounds terrifying, wonder if it was supposed to be crushing blow

Stone Curse is a spell in D1. It turns the target into Stone, it cannot move or attack, and will have 0 defense, but I think it will also yield no XP if killed before the Stone curse ends. Not sure if that's what they were going for here though...