I was going to offer to rush you on closed bnet, but last night I discovered all 3 hammerdins & both sorcs expired sometime in the last few months. So many unread emails... I let them down. The smiter’s still around, for ubers. If you were to play on closed bnet, would you do East coast or West coast server? Also - you have Lord of Destruction?

Edit: for some reason I have Enigma on my smiter. But it means switching him to hammerdin for rushing should be trivial. Just putting it out there. (East server btw.)

SafeAsMilk wrote:I probably do have the vanilla version of D3, so will have to keep an eye out for a sale to get the expansion.

The point of D3 seems to be an "endgame" that consists of exponentially increasing the power of gear, & competitive timed rifts. You have to have a certain completist/alpha mindset to find that enjoyable... imo not for casuals like me. I checked out the latest season content, and I'm seeing damage in the 100s of billions. BILLIONS. Sigh.

But if you pretend not to notice, the casual game underneath is about experimenting with skills, and teleporting across the map for mats & better drops, while being a superhero. I'm getting itchy trigger thinking about it. The grind is only enjoyable at max level, and only with the expansion - the base game is shit. Once your first character beats the campaign in normal difficulty (or is it - kills Diablo?) subsequent characters can skip it, and go straight to Adventure Mode.

I see they're pre-selling D2 remaster + D3 complete, for US$60, meaning $20 for the D3 stuff - not a bad price per se, but Reaper of Souls definitely cheaper elsewhere ($13 on G2A at the moment, for example). The necromancer addon may or may not make the bundle preferable, depending on how badly you want to try a necro... plus it comes with a pet.

SafeAsMilk wrote:...I'm a total noob compared to you guys

A word about that. I consider myself a noob too. Been on-and-off playing D2 since ~2000 (maybe only online for half that) but I've stubbornly tuned out most of the trade secrets. I only joined d2jsp... a year ago? There's a fragile boundary between playing D2 for the game mechanics & for helping ppl out (my main incentive once my gear's good enough), and playing to keep up with the economy... I can never stay on that side of the boundary for long.

Edit: parking a fresh sorceress in Act 1. Will be metamorphosing that smiter to rush her at some point. I don't have time to play this. Why am I playing this.

This fell off... now I remember it again: you can click the gem at the bottom of diablo2.com. It's similar to the gem in the bnet chat, which just switches between two colors ad infinitum... spawning a myriad urban legends over the years as to what it's for. Well, the one on the website has a twist. (Hint: once you find the twist, keep clicking in the general vicinity.)

It sounds like you've run through most viable builds, so that puts you way ahead of me! I picked the game up last year or so.

Now I want to play! The only thing stopping me is that it would have to be on the Mac because the PC is inaccessible late at night, so no mods

Also I am East coast, and yes I have LoD! It's an older version though for D2SE.

Never levelled a druid or assassin past normal difficulty, sadly. I had aims for a whirlwind assassin, and then I dropped the game for a few years.

I looked briefly into d2se earlier... looks a bit scary.

The last time I 'rejoined' D2 after a gap of a few years, I asked about a working map hack, and ppl were recommending kolbot. It's got a bunch of other features - the one I find most useful besides MH is being able to load game keys into it & run simultaneous instances of the game from the same installation. Good for self-levelling or transferring items. (Gotta buy the additional game keys though, ~$14 for D2+LoD at G2A.) Kolbot works with the latest version of the game.

D2SE took a little work to make happen, but it wasn’t that scary. Biggest problem I think was that I hadn’t worked on a PC in decades.

So is kolbot what you use for shared inventory, or something else?

Actually I didn't look at how the mod works I was leery of how many different versions were being hosted & how old most of them are.

I don't use shared stash (PlugY is it?) because I play only on closed bnet. I think it breaks the game. I just have 2 instances of the game running in windowed mode, and transfer items between profiles:



There's visual lag between the right and left, that's why the auras don't match.

Kolbot has various bot functions you can program, including item transfers, but... eh. That's a lot of tweaking. I've used bots for only 2 things: following someone for xp leech in chaos/baal runs (too repetitive); and opening chests - and only in the last year or so, once I realized it's straightforward & would reduce tedium & time-wasting.

Anthem development is officially cancelled (PC Gamer, 24 Feb 2021)

Report: BioWare wrests Dragon Age 4 away from EA’s online-multiplayer mandate (Ars Technica, 25 Feb 2021)

The internal meetings about Anthem were announced ahead of time, and that was the probable outcome then, imo. The more recent announcement re: DA4 is salvific. I don't think it surprises anyone that two big games under development were both discussed in those meetings... but it should be clear now that the original assumptions about what doomed Anthem (unrealistic compromise to appease EA) were fundamentally correct, even if the proximal reasons it failed (bad management) are also true. Of course a project is going to be badly managed if the expectations (incentivized by the people who cut the checks) are trash to begin with.

Correction: trillions.

(Necromancer)

No pylon buffs in that screenshot. Just abilities and whatnot. Eek.

Sunless Sea (2015)

OpenCritic page

Top-down 2D survival horror RPG with roguelike elements. Someone at Rock Paper Shotgun bestowed it the "Best Words" prize, writing that it had "the most delicious collection of words in all of gaming". Windows & MacOS.

DLC for Final Fantasy R VII.



Free PS5 upgrade.

Outriders. A looter-shooter which reminds me of Destiny, though the promise here is this is a complete game with no DLC or microtransactions.







Demo out now.

The Raid and Oldboy vibes.

Likely to be one of my favourite games this year if Housemarque's track record are anything to go by.

Idk anything about them, but yeah, that one’s looked good from the start.

Outriders has been compelling for a while, too.

(Click image for GoG link.)

Tasty sale... a point-and-click isometric sci-fi horror from 2015. Deluxe edition includes artbook, soundtrack (+lossless), screenplay, etc. DRM-free installation files, no launcher needed to install or play. Windows & MacOS.

Dev is active in the forum for troubleshooting.