Which D2 patches do you play?

Hey guys, just curious what patches everyone plays. Personally I've played mostly 1.13-1.14 during my time playing D2, though I started time traveling to old patches (1.00, 1.07, a tiny bit of 1.08 and the 1.10 betas) last year to check them out and see how different it was (and to get some of the powerful gear hehe ), and it's amazing how much the game has evolved.

A couple of things that I found interesting were the lack of immunities in pre-LoD, then suddenly after the expansion released in 1.07 you could run into triple immunes! Some skills were also ridiculously powerful, like

Whirlwind in 1.00 had 2 hitchecks per 4 frames regardless of weapon, so you could get a

Pike for the massive range and damage and just mow stuff down.

Cold Mastery pierced cold immunities until 1.08, and it worked as a percentage reduction instead of flat reduction. This made

Frozen Orb sorcs very powerful when combined with uncapped

Static Field (it was uncapped in LoD until 1.08, it has always been uncapped in Classic, from 1.00 all the way to 1.14).

But yeah I could go on for hours about old patch stuff, that's enough rambling from me lol. What are your thoughts/experiences with the old patches?

I hope there will be a way to play or recreate the old patches with modding in D2R, I doubt pre-LoD versions could be remade but it seems like you could at least go as far back as 1.07, apparently some folks at the Phrozen Keep want to try remaking 1.09 which sounds cool.

I play a lot of single player personally, but that is mainly due to the fact that I've only periodically played ladders since about 2008. With that being said, bare bones 1.00 happens to be my most-played patch because I enjoy Classic so much.

As for LoD, it's probably a 50/50 toss-up between 1.08 and current versions. 1.08 had such amazing unique items and the runeword meta hadn't snowballed out of control (IMO some runewords became so staple that it led to homogenized classes; such as Enigma, Hoto, Spirit, and CTA being staples on virtually every caster class).

I look back at 1.07 as being peak online fun for myself, but I'm very much in the minority.

I only play the latest patches because I predominantly play battle.net ladder. Having said that, I do want to at some point make the effort to play an older pre-synergies patch on classic so I can relieve some of the old glory days. I too find the runeword meta a little tiresome and I'm always trying to come up with niche or alternate builds. I still vow to never have a hammerdin haha... my loss I guess

Well, I just want to say the icon soul finger looks awesome. Good convo to read as well.

Selexin wrote: 3 years ago

I only play the latest patches because I predominantly play battle.net ladder. Having said that, I do want to at some point make the effort to play an older pre-synergies patch on classic so I can relieve some of the old glory days. I too find the runeword meta a little tiresome and I'm always trying to come up with niche or alternate builds. I still vow to never have a hammerdin haha... my loss I guess

I feel you on the Hammerdin thing. They're such a good class that anyone who gets bored on a Sorc seems to run one for MF.

I never had a personal issue with the runewords until I saw so many people running the exact same builds with the exact same items, which as a corollary led everyone to JSP. Those people stopped playing and enjoying the super rare drops and just perused whatever their bots found.

I know that's a lot of subjectivity but watching the trade channels completely deteriorate, I asked around, and then it became "ISO FG or HRs".

Rock on brother, go against the grain