Hardcore players how often do you die

Hi,
So yesterday my lvl 91 necro was one shot by a lvl5

Herald in a players five game, or at least I assume that happened. Because it was 3 am and I didn’t hang long enough on Death screen to see what happened . Usually when you lose a high level character with valuable items your first instinct is shut down laptop and go rethink your life.

In the last 6 or so months I started playing d2 exclusively in hardcore. I never played much in the past, only occasionally LOD and a bit after D2r launched. The soft core grind never appealed to me, but I find the hardcore one extremely addictive. In that 6 months’ time I lost 2 assassins and 4 necros, all above 80 lvl. Everytime I die, I lose more and more valuable items. My last assassin Death was especially heartbreaking, because I was stupid enough to go in

Flayer Jungle with a lightning sunder and

Burst of Speed, forgot that souls can spawn there and got killed. I had at least a few survival mechanisms available, rejuvenate potions until my traps kill the souls,

Fade, mind break, cloak of shadow, but I panicked and instead kept miss clicking save and exit until I died. Lost among the usual a griffons and a good roll CTA among the occasional good skillets and anni.

Yesterday’s necro died (I named him NeverDead, joke’s on me) carrying my last self found anni, a hoto and a very good roll Infinity . Yes, I am the guy that built Infinity on a full Trang Oul summoner to boost my fire damage from firewall and

Corpse Explosion.

The point is, I don’t seem to have a problem farming and getting my items. Even now, I have almost a full equipment ready for a Mosaic sin in development. But, it seems to be inevitable I will do a mistake and die.

So, fellow hardcore players, help me to see if I am just worse than the other players or things are business as usual. How often do you lose high level characters? How do you avoid Death and mistakes? How do you items, what is your routine?

Business as usual. And with tier 5 heralds, risks have gone up significantly. If I were a hardcore player and my intend was to actually stay alive, I would avoid tier 5 heralds, especially if I only do 2k damage with

Fire Wall.
Either you avoid risks and live or you take them and die. Like in real life. If you wander to a Siberian Forest to search for bears, you might die. If you go for a walk in your local park, you will maybe lose your pocket, but you will live.

Sorry to hear that you lost your Necro. I just counted my characters and I have 8 high level characters online from previous seasons. My

Zeal Paladin died at level 91 (he wasn't fun to play with anyway) and I lost a Fury druid due to lost internet connection.

Most of my characters are shapeshifting druids or barbarian (fenzy and throw barb). Due to the rather large health pool of these characters it is (or was before the introduction of heralds) kinda hard to die. I only play alone (players 1) . In addition, I also have a

Strafe bowazon. She is a bit more fragile and I would not really hunt heralds with her.

Hunting heralds I have only done with my most trusted character, a Fury druid with a

Eth

Windhammer and a

Stun length of the twisters of 1.6 seconds. Some heralds are easy and some are very dangerous, in particlar if you only have one live. You cannot just run into them and smack everything down as before with all the endgame content. Heralds can be very tough, when some of them hit I lose more than half of my life pool (which is 4.6 k at the moment). And hits come in regulary when you slug it out. In a few cases I had to go back to town to refill my

Belt with rejuvenation potions. In one case up to now I said I am not interested in the fight.

Due to the introduction of heralds I expect the number of hardcore deaths to rise quite significantly. But nevertheless I like the introduction of heralds to the game. When you play hardcore, the spawning of heralds makes your heart beat faster

Imo Diablo 2 hardcore isnt a great idea. It has its desync and lag issues, there are many enemies which just one hit

Ko without any possibility to prevent this.
As long as game has 1 hit

Ko surprises, its not made for hardcore.

Note that I played d3 pretty much all in hardcore and it worked fine because you had to learn what can kill you and you can

Dodge it. In diablo 2, you do not have that possibility. Enemies can attack off-screen and you have no chance to avoid getting hit.

Javelin/

Spear thrower attacks barely can be registered with a naked eye due to the ammunition being tiny and its colours are grey / brown so they disappear in the background.