7/22/2019 Diablo 2 Hell Difficulty
So here we are. You have a vision, a clear idea of where you want to go with your game. How the difficulty should evolve across the experience. You have a layout with your main values which will drive your entire work from there (see part 1)
Before we move on, itâs important to remember that one cannot always think about everything or plan for every situations. This preliminary work is not destined to be set in stone. Should you realize later that you have gravely underestimated some factors, you may have to return to this part and change some of the base values. More often than not, there will be a lot more rules governing the statistics of the player avatar than for their enemies. Hostiles will probably be influenced by fewer global multipliers for their damages and resistance. So if you need to do quick yet radical adjustments, keep in mind that it will probably be simpler to change the curve of difficulty for the environment rather than the curve of power for the player.
This part of the work is probably the trickiest. One could debate indefinitely about what you should or should not do here. How far you should or should not go. How complex it should be. Well, it really depends on your initial vision, again⦠You only can decide the kind of audience youâre targeting. And this, in turn, will decide how much efforts you can require of your players to experience, understand or master your game. Iâm not one to think that everything in a game must be crystal clear and written explicitly in little pop ups. I can live and appreciate some kind of mystery in the inner workings of a game. If it makes sense, if you can decipher how it works given the right amount of effort⦠fine by me! But youâll find people to disagree veeeeery strongly with that choice, game creators and players alike. You just need to be aware of the consequences of your choices.
That being said, weâre here to create a Diablo-like experience. A game where you make choices, a game where you create builds, a game where you have to analyze game mechanics and try to optimize your way through. Because YES, playing a Diablo-like by blindly following a build found on the internet is a disgrace. You would not be playing the game or not the entire game⦠certainly not the interesting part. But to be an interesting challenge your game systems must be significant, coherent and generate interesting choices.
Significant because each one of your systems must add a real value to the whole. If it does not bring new ways of making things right or wrong for the player, itâs probably useless. Cut it.
Coherent because all systems must work together, avoid being antagonistic and have enough logic or be sufficiently explained to be understood (provided the players made the kind of commitment you were expecting of them of course)
Generate interesting choices because thereâs no point in creating complex systems if you canât actually play with them. Creating an armor system to soak part of the damages do not make sense if you donât have things like light armors, heavy armors, with very different efficiencies but also very different requirements or penalties. If you have globally just one type of armor, you should probably just add upgrades to health points instead.
I wonât be able to cover all game systems in Drifting Lands but Iâll explain how Armor is handled for your ships. Why some equations were chosen and how values were defined. Hang in there, thereâs a lot to say!
What can we say about armor? Letâs retrace the different steps in the reflexion process I went through in a very condensed form
What now? How do you chose the Math and numbers for your game? Well first, you should play a lot of aRPG and dig deep enough to learn and understand how they actually work. Then you make game design decisions: significant choices or behaviours you want for your game. You tell yourself stories of how the game will unfold for different types of players, for different types of strategies. How it must react to different builds across all your difficulty levels. Then you find the Math and choose values that will fit in your pattern.
Back to our armor. As I said, we need the effect of armor to be non linear across all values. With a linear effect thereâs no reason to have a damage mitigation system when itâs similar to just x% of additional health. Very often armor effects use a mildly complex mathematical function causing diminishing returns. It means that the effect is tending to a maximum and that each point has less and less effect than the previous one. This maximum effect is usually reached by an increasing value of armor with each new level of difficulty.
For Drifting Lands, I wanted to keep things very simple and choose values or limits with a clear meaning. For each level, there is a set of 3 values, 3 targets for armor with different effects.
Between those values the effect is linear. So if you have a total armor average of No Modifier Player Armor and x2 Damage Player Armor, youâll take 1.5 more damage. Here are the actual values for the game :
Where do they come from? Well the first column is really just a set of purely arbitrary values. 100 is a good value to start from because we know that several items will give armor to the ship (6 for a Sentinel, 4 for an Interceptor). So we need a minimum of granularity here. Then we ramp up more and more rapidly to reach a linear slope around level 70.
These values are the primary target players must reach for their ships if they donât want to be severely punished. It must be a fairly easy objective to reach or even overcome at first. These values are just here as a âcheckâ that you are equipped with items of the correct level.
The second important column of values (x2 Damage Player Armor) is just half of the first column. These values are fairly close because we want the penalty to apply really quick if you donât match the no penalty requirement and then cap at x2 damages.
The third colum of values (-90% physical damage armor) is the objective to reach the maximum damage mitigation. Unless youâre playing at a level inferior to your stuff level, we wanted this be nearly impossible to reach. These values are 6 times the âno modifierâ values. Why?⦠well mainly because since the effect is linear between these 2 values, we wanted to keep a damage mitigation of 25% for an armor which is a bit over 2 times the armor with no mitigation. Through the rest of our work, weâve tried to keep this target of 25% mitigation really easy to overcome with a Sentinel and a bit hard to reach with Interceptors.
Now that weâve got those target values, the really important part is how we break them down into bits for players to collect. Hereâs another very important table for armor values in the game.
The first important column, Max Target Armor Total, defines the maximum we want you to be likely to reach for each range of levels. Well, likely to reach with a Sentinel. As you can see, at first itâs very close to the 25% damage mitigation target for armor then it quickly ramp up to 30 000. Why is that? Since the game difficulty is still growing after level 65 and items wonât get any better after this, we wanted to let you reach the 25% damage mitigation level even at difficulty level 100. It does mean that between level 50 and level 80, itâs probably quite easy to reach a fairly good damage mitigation if you farm a bit, but it also means that you can still progress quite rapidly even if you donât always maximize your armor. On the other hand, armor is only effective for physical damage and you have to take care of your resistances at the same time so itâs not THAT easy.
The 3 following columns defines base armor for ships themselves. In Drifting Lands, at least for now, you have 3 levels of quality for each class : basic at level 1, premium at level 20, elite at level 40. Each ship has a base armor stat, highly influenced by the class. Itâs very much on purpose that those values are not very high compared to the Max targets. Itâs a loot based game remember? We want players to look for items, not just buy better ships. And thatâs about now, that you exclaim : âhey! Your table is wrong! It says here that the armor for ships changes at level 30 and 60 not 20 and 40.â
Aaaaaand, youâre right. I havenât updated these values on purpose to make a point: all this work is temporary. Thereâs no way to be sure youâve thought everything through. Weâve changed those levels to unlock better tiers of ships for a reason that became apparent later once the game was pretty much done. 30 levels to unlock a better tier was too long and I suddenly discovered that i wanted it to be possible (even if hard) to skip the premium level entirely. It was way too hard with an elite ship unlocked at level 60. And yes, weâve kept the original values of base armors for those ships. Because, well because it rarely hurts a game to be a little more forgiving than what you first imagine as its designer. Believe me: most people will find your game MUCH HARDER than you do right now. Want to know exactly how hard? Easy: once the game is complete, stop playing it for 2 or 3 years and then try again. If you donât want to wait, have your game tested by a total stranger to the project.
And on we go! The next columns decompose our Max Target Armor Total into the different sources of armor :
Letâs study only the highest level of difficulty. We want you to be able to reach about 30k armor. Your base hull at this point will grant you 500 to 1000 armor whether you have an Interceptor or a Sentinel. From there, we imagine 3 archetypal scenarios :
Heavy Sentinel at level 100
you have 6 items armor related with a main Structure requirement. We want to attribute 10k armor to these items so roughly 1700 each. These are the heaviest pieces of armour in the game. We will grant a maximum of 7680 armour points via an absolute bonus for items which can be present on 8 items for Sentinels. Finally the same 8 items can grant a maximum of 75% of increased armor. So the total is : ( 1000 + 1700*6 + 7680 ) * 1.75 = 33 040. Weâre a bit above our 30k target. This is ok.
Medium Marauder at level 100
Marauders can equip any kind of armors provided they have the right requirements, but for the sake of our reflexion we will consider a Marauder with medium items requiring Structure but a lot less than heavy armors. Marauders can have 5 pieces of armor (3 plates, 1 thruster and 1 engine). We will aim a total of 7500 so 1500 armour per item. Marauders can only have 7 items granting absolute or relative armor bonuses, so itâs not 7680 and 75% you can reach but 6720 and 65%. For this case the total is : ( 750 + 1500*5 + 6720 ) * 1.65 = 24 700 Itâs well under the value for a Sentinel but itâs still doing good even at level 100.
Light Interceptor at level 100
Interceptors can only have 4 armor pieces of armors and 6 items with armor bonuses. Letâs image, it has the pieces of armor with the lowest requirements in Structure to maximize a damage oriented build. The total will be more like : ( 500 + 1250 * 4 + 5760) * 1.55 = 17 453
Ok so you might think that these are pretty forgiving scenarios. Gosh, even the Interceptors can go well over the 12 000 armor mark defining the âno penaltyâ target for a difficulty of 100. But what you have to remember is that we have considered each time the maximum values for stats and modifiers. More often than not, youâll have to equip items with sub-optimal values: because some of them have bonuses you want to have, effects you havenât yet found on high level gear. Because some of them are unique items with special effects and youâre reluctant to replace them just yet.
These values are born from a lot of tweaking, a lot of studied potential cases. They are the consequence of my will to make differences between difficulty grades quite significant, my will to make a difference between classes⦠yet to keep it possible to equip a lot of different items whatever your ship. The whole thing is certainly not perfect and sometimes I made late changes to further improve some aspects. A good example for armor is that we added a flat bonus of 5 points per Structure points you get (bought or granted by items). Another way to strengthen survival oriented builds if you spend most of your experience on Structure.
To fully study the whole thing, I would have to cover how Armor interacts with Health, how levels gets harder and harder with more bullets or more damage types⦠Thereâs no end to this. In the end, unless youâre a large team, you must try to cover whatâs more important for you. You take a guess at what part is unaccounted for as best as possible and then you roll with it. Your first iteration might not good but it must not stop you.
Drifting Lands is a loot based game first. Yeah I know it looks a lot more like a shootâemâup. My bad, I thought most people could get over it and I was probably wrong. If i wanted to get one thing right above everything else, it was how we handle items. Items must be the main source of your power. Your equipment must define your build as much as the skills or powers youâve chosen to play with. As youâve seen above for armor, the vast majority of what you can get is brought to you by your stuff and not by the simple act of leveling up a characteristic.
In Drifting Lands items can have a main characteristic (Armor, Skill power, Shield, Weapon Damage) and modifiers. These modifiers and base characteristics are the main sources of firepower and survivability. There are 42 modifiers in Drifting Lands to increase some of your stats. 27 of them are primary (structure, navigation power, health flat, health %, armor flat, armor %, fire rate %, cooldown reduction %, etc.) and 15 are secondary (movement speed %, resists to different damage types, shield cooldown reduction %, etc.). Ok, it may seem a lot, maybe a bit overwhelming, but it was how ârichâ we wanted our system to be. Each of them serves a purpose and deeply influence some aspect of the actual gameplay.
Beware though! Choosing how many modifiers you have will deeply influence how likely your players are to get the exact combination they want. Because of course, all items have a maximum number of modifiers. So this is not a competition of how many modifiers you can pile into your game. There must be a balance between how hardcore you want your game mechanics to be and how easy it should be for your players to get what they want.
For all our modifiers, very much like described above for armor, we had to define maximums you should be able reach for each grade of difficulty. Those maximums are not independent. Like armor canât be isolated from health, shield or resistances, weapon damage is linked to fire rate, critical damage probability, etc. Your main table of difficulty curves, discussed in the first part, must help you to define global maximums for firepower, toughness and other âhigh levelâ values of your mechanics. Then you break it down into individual maximums for each modifiers. For example if you combined ALL damage related modifiers of Drifting Lands, you would end up with a grand total of 600% increased damage. Itâs very unlikely that you will ever reach this maximum. But if you were able to do it, since the best weapon of the game do 25 times more damage that at level 1, you would end up with roughly 150 times more damage. 150 is also how many times a level 100 enemy has more health than at level 1. Coincidence? Again, we donât talk about average stuff here but about the maximum damage optimization you can reach probably sacrificing any chance of surviving at level 100 in the process. If you remember correctly the only thing we wanted to guarantee was that a level 70, players would do an average of 25 more damage.
Once you have your maximum by modifier, you have to define a maximum per item. This maximum should of course depend on how many items you can actually equip with this particular stat or modifier at the same time. At this point you can start to create a biiiiig table looking a bit like this: (click to enlarge)
In most cells of this table, you can see two values. Youâve probably guessed these were minimums and maximums for modifiers. Because yes, so far weâve mostly talked about maximums you could or could not reach for a stat. But of course there is some variability to all our values. Finding the perfect item is not only a question of getting the modifiers you want but also getting the best possible ârollsâ. Since we did not want Drifting Lands to be particularly punitive or extremely demanding in terms of farming, we chose a fairly limited variability for most stats. Except for very small values, the minimum is often 80% of the maximum. Itâs enough to create a significant difference between whatâs best and whatâs worst but itâs not so big as to create a real chance of having a higher level item being less interesting than an inferior one. Again, this is a very personal choice. Feel free to think that a wider range could be more fun / interesting / rewarding.
We now have a list of modifiers and bonuses all items can grant. They have to be combined to create actual equipment youâll find in the game. For Drifting Lands, Iâve decided to take a LOT of inspiration from Diablo 3 and more precisely Diablo 3 post Loot 2.0 (the patch just before the release of Reaper of Souls).
I think itâs necessary here to take a few lines and explain why I personally think that Reaper of Souls is my favorite HackânâSlash while I didnât enjoy Diablo 3 vanilla that much (except for its kick ass art direction of course). Itâs all about how the loot is generated and how the Auction House was a necessary evil in the initial draft. In the first Diablo 3 iteration, loot was really, really, REALLY random. You could find pretty much any modifier on any item with huge variations even for a given level. And it was by design: the goal of the first game designers was really for any player to spend literally years on the game and still continue to find better items. Because they had this notion that Diablo was necessarily a game you SHOULD play for years and that it would be cool to keep finding better items years after the release. I really encourage you to watch this GDC conference by one of the lead GD behind the revolution that is Reaper of Souls for Diablo 3. It explains in details the evolution of the game and why this initial design was chosen⦠Now, Reaper of Souls is pretty much the opposite. There is loot, it is random, but by no mean as much as the loot of D3 vanilla. Because all items follow far stricter templates when they are generated. Templates with generation rules. Yes, it means that youâll find good or optimal stuff, much more quickly. Yes it means that you can see nearly all there is to see in Diablo 3 in a few âpitifulâ hundreds of hours. And for that, Iâll choose RoS over D3 Vanilla every single time because I was able to actually enjoy the experience while having a family life and a job (feel free to disagree).
Sorry, I got carried away⦠back to our item templates! Templates are sets of rules to define the numbers and types of modifiers you can roll on each item. The most famous addition of Loot 2.0 in Diablo 3 (which i shamelessly transferred to Drifting Lands) is the classification between primary and secondary modifiers. In a few words, primary modifiers are very powerful or very useful in nearly every builds. Unless youâre looking to create a very specific or extremely optimized build, most combinations for primary modifiers should be ok for you. Secondary modifiers are more circumstantial. You might or might not need them but you are guaranteed to have at least the primary modifiers to make for it. This way, when you drop items of higher levels than what you have right now, it is very unlikely that it will be completely useless.
Hereâs how it work for Drifting Lands :
Each time the game creates a new item it will roll :
Simple! And of course you can even control how likely it should be to roll this list of modifiers compared to this one, or inside the list how likely this modifier is compared to the othersâ¦
All these rules bring control to your loot system. By fixing rigid or very lax rules, youâll change drastically the influence of RNG in the experience, how easy it can be to find optimal items for different builds. The number of modifiers you allow by item is also crucial : you need enough modifiers to reach average or top values in different stats to keep up with the difficulty of your game, but you donât want too much modifiers and make it possible to max everything! You need to keep an eye on that and wire calculators in your balance documents to track what your current maximums are for⦠well for nearly everything!
Your game is now able to create interesting and balanced items but you still have to hand them over to your players! Now is the dreaded time to decide what should be your drop rates. As always itâs really up to you to decide how generous your game should be. A few key things to keep in mind :
In Drifting Lands each enemy as a loot table, a list of possible drops with different probabilities, different bonuses to the rarity of objects and sometimes a list of possible unique items available. On very small and numerous enemies, you want to keep drop rates really low (beneath 0.5 or even 0.25%) and ramp up towards bigger mid-bosses or bosses. Those tougher, larger enemies have often one or more âguaranteedâ drops with a few more that may happen or not.
Itâs usually not desirable to change drop rates over the course of the game. It would probably mean that you would have too low drop rates at the beginning or far too high drop rates during the end game. Instead you will probably want to offset the quality or the rarity of items over the difficulty scale. In typical Diablo-like games a higher rarity is synonym of more modifiers rolled on the same item. With time, players will expect a minimum of modifiers to keep up with the difficulty of the game. Unless they find an item with base statistics that are far greater than what they already have, they wonât consider anything less than a given rarity. With time all your common and uncommon items become automatically junk. Hell, at the end, anything that is not a unique item is junk!
Hereâs a table fixing rarity ratios for the different difficulty grades in Drifting Lands :
You can see how rare items represent only 5% of the items at level 1 and 27.8% (17/61*100) at level 100. You can also see how unique items vary from 0.5% to 6.5% according to this chart. And unique items are really a key part of a good loot based game for me, so we added an additional mechanic here.
At first, you want your uniques to be really rare. You donât need them: you have many things to keep your players interested. You can reward them with new skills, new environments, new enemies, new ships, etc. But with time, you want your players to drop them more and more regularly because they have to become those little moments of excitement. And once the routine of the game is there, you donât want these moments to be too spaced in time. Itâs a classic trick but we added a small invisible counter increasing with each item you grab. This counter increases more for with rare items and less for more common items. With this counter, your chance to drop a unique grows until it reaches 100%. Once the bonus is enough to actually make you drop a unique item, the counter is reseted and you start over.
Why did we chose this method?
At very very high level of difficulty and for longer levels, this counter can trigger several times in a single mission!
And once more, Iâm slowly realizing that thereâs still too much left to say⦠So Iâll take a break here and come back soon with the 3rd and last part of this modest summary of what Iâve learnt about balancing a Diablo-like game.
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From United States
Or Hell difficulty for that matter..
Is it me or are the other difficulties like completely unplayable? Like cant get out of the first room unplayable? Like takes 40+hits to kill a level1 skeleton unplayable? Whats the point? Seems insane to even bother with it. I do like the expansion though, thats cool
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mk47at
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From Germany
kronikdaheghog: Or Hell difficulty for that matter.. The higher difficulties are only playable if your character has high enough stats and good enough equipment.
Is it me or are the other difficulties like completely unplayable? Like cant get out of the first room unplayable? Like takes 40+hits to kill a level1 skeleton unplayable? Whats the point? Seems insane to even bother with it. I do like the expansion though, thats cool
exiledalchemist
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From United States
You have to complete the Normal difficulty first, and then start a new game with a properly leveled up character. Preferrable a character you completed Normal difficulty with. This character should be at the proper level of 20 - 25+, and thus be able to survive Nightmare difficulty. Same thing with Hell difficulty you have to complete Nighmare difficulty to have a character of the proper level. If I recall Hell difficulty requires a character of level 30 - 35+, but it's been ages the last time I did a full run on all difficulties. Thus my memory could be wrong on the character level requirements for Hell.
juanp3
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From Mexico
you can actually start in level 1 in nightmare difficulty and still beat the game. its really not that hard but you need a little luck
as for hell you need to be at least level 10 to beat that difficulty. i have done the 2 above with the warrior.
advowson
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From Other
In multiplayer, entering Nightmare required character level 20. Entering Hell difficulty required character level 30. Higher difficulties are very playable with those levels.
kronikdaheghog
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From United States
exiledalchemist: You have to complete the Normal difficulty first, and then start a new game with a properly leveled up character. Preferrable a character you completed Normal difficulty with. This character should be at the proper level of 20 - 25+, and thus be able to survive Nightmare difficulty. Same thing with Hell difficulty you have to complete Nighmare difficulty to have a character of the proper level. If I recall Hell difficulty requires a character of level 30 - 35+, but it's been ages the last time I did a full run on all difficulties. Thus my memory could be wrong on the character level requirements for Hell.
THanks that makes more sense
phredreeke
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From Sweden
As previously been stated, Nightmare and Hell difficulties are meant for higher level characters.
In fact, the original game did not have any difficulties beyond Normal in single player (but there was a trick..), it was only added for the Hellfire expansion. Diablo Multiplayer always had Nightmare and Hell difficulties, but they required a character to have reached level 20 or 30. Now about the trick, if you have a high enough level multiplayer character you can create a Nightmare or Hell difficulty, leave, then create a new singleplayer game, which would now have that difficulty. Unfortunately NM and Hell doesn't actually bring that much more to the game, and the game's item generation is bugged causing item drops to have magic prefix/suffixes as if it had dropped on normal mode. So you're better off just doing hell runs (dungeon levels 13-16) on Normal than moving onto Nightmare and Hell (with the exception for if you plan to level your character to 50, in which case moving onto the later difficulties is eventually required). There is one more reason. The Helm of Sprits - one of the rarer items in the game, can only drop on the first few levels of Nightmare.
advowson
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From Other
phredreeke: Now about the trick, if you have a high enough level multiplayer character you can create a Nightmare or Hell difficulty, leave, then create a new singleplayer game, which would now have that difficulty.
Beware that the difficulty is not saved, so this trick must be repeated each time you restart the program.
phredreeke: the game's item generation is bugged causing item drops to have magic prefix/suffixes as if it had dropped on normal mode.
The game's bugs are extensively documented, and this is the first time I've ever seen someone claim that this particular aspect of item generation is a bug. Could you explain why you think this is a bug? The base items are upgraded as a function of the modified mlvl. The qlvl remains tied to the unmodified mlvl.
phredreeke
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From Sweden
advowson: The game's bugs are extensively documented, and this is the first time I've ever seen someone claim that this particular aspect of item generation is a bug. Could you explain why you think this is a bug? The base items are upgraded as a function of the modified mlvl. The qlvl remains tied to the unmodified mlvl.
Maybe it's not a bug, maybe it's just overlooked. Either way, it means item drops in early Nightmare and Hell are more or less useless to a character high enough level to venture there.
advowson
Diablo 2 What Level To Start Helladvowson Sorry, data for given user is currently unavailable. Please, try again later. View profileView wishlistStart conversationInvite to friendsInvite to friendsAccept invitationAccept invitationPending invitation..User since {{ user.formattedDateUserJoined }} Friends since {{ user.formattedDateUserFriended }} Unblock chat User blocked This user's wishlist is not public.You can't chat with this user due to their or your privacy settings.You can't chat with this user because you have blocked him.You can't invite this user because you have blocked him.
From Other
phredreeke: Maybe it's not a bug, maybe it's just overlooked. Either way, it means item drops in early Nightmare and Hell are more or less useless to a character high enough level to venture there.
Overlooked by whom? Jarulf's Guide notes that this happens, and this effect is why you can get certain rare unique items only in higher difficulty games.
GrimjackMV
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From Philippines
phredreeke: Maybe it's not a bug, maybe it's just overlooked. Either way, it means item drops in early Nightmare and Hell are more or less useless to a character high enough level to venture there.
advowson: Overlooked by whom? Jarulf's Guide notes that this happens, and this effect is why you can get certain rare unique items only in higher difficulty games. Phree is incorrect. Higher difficulty settings result in an increased chance for higher quality item drops.
phredreeke
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advowson: Overlooked by whom? Jarulf's Guide notes that this happens, and this effect is why you can get certain rare unique items only in higher difficulty games.
Overlooked by the developers. And it wouldn't be the only case of nonsensical item logic in the game (the bow Deadly Hunter for example has a +200% damage vs demons property which only functions on Melee weapons)
GrimjackMV: Phree is incorrect. Higher difficulty settings result in an increased chance for higher quality item drops.
The quality of the base item increases, the quality of affixes do not. So while a Long War Bow may drop in Nightmare Church, its prefix and/or suffix will be no better than had it dropped on normal.
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Diablo
Is it hopeless, or am I missing something? The difficulty keeping a sorceress alive with the kind of build that just mows through levels on easier difficulties, compared to a much less buffed paladin or necromancer, is dramatic.
I've used the character editor to create characters with different skill trees, even 'impossible' ones, but with only money for items.
Edit Originally the question asked about nightmare difficulty, which is indeed easy. I meant hell difficulty. Fortunately, most of the answers tackle hell difficulty.
Alti
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4 Answers
You cannot survive even Normal difficulty with a Sorc that focuses on one skill, at least not without help (and help is rare in D2 nowadays; most have moved on to D3). By the end of Act V Normal, you will have faced at least one powerful Cold-immune (Frozenstein, and Duriel in Act II also has high Cold resistance in Normal and is immune in NM/H) and several immune monsters in the gauntlet that you face when confronting Baal. A dual-tree Sorc is typically your best bet, and you can usually get away with select skills from all three.
As another answer mentions, the MeteOrb build is the best choice for a Sorc looking to be independently effective through Hell difficulty. This build maxes Frozen Orb, Meteor, Fire/Cold Masteries, and as many synergies as possible (mostly on Meteor; FO's only synergy is rather weak). You'll also want a decent hireling as a meat shield; the most common choice is an Act II Defensive merc, because their Holy Freeze aura will slow even Cold-immune enemies. The basic tactic is to FO everything that isn't cold immune, and Meteor everything that is. The trick is to lead the target with the Meteor; most guides say to basically cast it on yourself as you retreat, and watch them walk into it (for thousands of points in damage). Large groups of monsters with no immunities can be given a one-two punch of slowing them with FO, then slamming a Meteor into the mob (hopefully centered around your hireling and not you). High-hit-points enemies like bosses are generally handled by having your hireling toe-to-toe it with them while you alternate FO and Meteor. The biggest problem with this build is that both of your primary skills have a cooldown, which throttles back the amount of pain you can inflict over time. FO also has only one synergy (besides CM), and it's not very powerful, so you'll find that FO becomes much less powerful (relatively) beginning about Act V Nightmare.
Other variants on the 'fire and ice' theme include:
Pretty much all of these will give you a formidable build for Hell difficulty.
To this basic stew of fire and ice, you typically add two skills from the Lightning tree. Teleport (which requires Telekinesis) allows you to get around the map very quickly, including across chasms and moats, and is pretty much a must for boss runs (repetitively creating new games on B.Net to kill the same baddie over and over for item drops) including the popular Mephisto run, which requires exploring the largest single dungeon floor in the game (Durance of Hate Level 2, Hell difficulty). It's also useful for 'kiting'; staying in front of a large, powerful enemy who has to get close to do the most damage. Static Field is also a powerful friend for enemies with high hit points and resistances; it takes a flat 25% off of the HP of any enemy in range that isn't fully Lightning-immune (think of an enemy like Diablo, with 1,000,000 HP, and imagine executing an attack that takes off 250,000 HP in one blow).
Now, don't go crazy putting points in either of these. Neither skill benefits much from maxing it; Teleport's mana cost goes down, while Static Field's radius increases. In building your character, you'll be looking for as many '+X To All Skills' items as you can get your hands on, like the Skin of the Viper Magi, an Oculus or Death's Fathom, and/or a Memory or Heart of the Oak runeword staff (Heart of the Oak, while expensive, is one of the few runewords that makes wielding a staff instead of an Orb and shield a smart choice), and in addition to buffing your primary skills, these items will give you a significant return on the one point each that you put in these Lightning skills.
I've seen Cold-Lightning combos work as well; FO/Nova is an extremely powerful crowd-control build, combining the slowing power of the Orb with a zero-cooldown omnidirectional lightning spell. Less powerful against bosses than Meteorb, because the cost per cast of Nova is too high to just be hitting one enemy for around 200 damage, and the nature and cooldown of FO makes it less useful against a single enemy. Chain Lightning, or just plain ol' Lightning, is also a popular skill to mix with a primary Fire or Cold spell, but I find these to be too temperamental; their minimum damage is 1, basically halving their average damage and making them very unpredictable, reducing your ability to 'fire and forget' as you can do with most other spells.
Just remember that in Hell difficulty, virtually everything has at least one immunity, and the most common one especially in Act I is Fire. Focusing on a single skill tree is a sure-fire way to invalidate your build beyond Nightmare, but at the same time, a jack-of-all-trades build typically can't do enough damage to last long either.
KeithSKeithS
The most versatile sorc build I've come across is the Meteorb sorceress (meteor and frozen orb). Whenever I start fresh on a ladder this is my first character. She can get through hell with minimal gear. Here is an example skill build for a sorceress starting nightmare: lvl 40 Meteorb Sorc
The dual elemental damage allows you to handle a majority of mobs with only the dual fire/ice immune giving you trouble. As Blem said, having a merc with good physical damage is key to handling these packs. If you don't have a decent merc, just avoid them.
As far as keeping her alive, make sure you pump vitality (no energy and just enough str and dex to use the gear you want) and use teleport liberally. You shouldn't be letting monsters reach melee range and you should keep as few ranged monsters in line of site as possible.
tQuarellatQuarella
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An important part of having a caster in nightmare/hell is having a good hireling to take out the once you can't yourself.
Personally I preferred frost (frozen orb or blizzard) build, then with 1 point static field you should be able to take out most packs, with frozen orb build you can even put some points in fire tree to cover all 3 types of damage, something like this, with some +skill can help your hireling.
That being said some times you should just ignore some packs and run around them if possible, the reward for killing a really hard pack that you can skip will most not be worth it compared to what you could have killed in the same time somewhere else.
BlemBlem
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Here is my blizzard/lightning build, with firewall for enemy immunity. I have used this build to run all bosses on hell, in under 10 minutess per run.
Skills
Stats
Advice
merc act 2 nightmare ethier holy freeze if mobs giving u trouble or might more hitpower merceth andysassasin armour shael,thul,lem gives fade for resist and iaseth ca/cv infinity or insight
sorcmarasshako soc ist for mf um for res sol for dr you deciderings 2x sojs as mana is life soj gives great boostbelt arac 1 to skill and slows enemy ie mobs swarming youboots war travs mfgloves frostburn for manaarmour cohsheild spirit/ non ladder stormshield with um or perf dimaondwep eth occy soc with light facet
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Posted by7 years ago
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I started up playing Diablo 2 again, just local, not on battle.net or anything. I have no characters from before, so I've basically started all over again.
I'm now a lvl 69 Fury druid, and I reached Hell around lvl 63 I think. My inventory is just not good enough for hell, as I die way too fast, and kill way too slow. My resistances are all too low, and I always get mana drained from one hit already in the cold plains of act 1, which is as far as I can get, and I get brutally killed there if I stop to fight for just a second.
So I want some advice, where do I go from here? How can I get strong enough to actually make some progress again? Where can I gain experience to level up without killing all my motivation I have left to play the game? How do I get the right gear now?
19 comments
In Diablo II, what's the recommended level before starting Nightmare (or Hell) difficulty?
Frankâ¦
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Diablo 2 Hell Difficulty GuideNick TNick T
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4 Answers
I'm not sure if theres a real concrete answer to this. Different classes, built with different skills, with different items, played by different people will all function differently. Some characters (Like a minion-necromancer) will be able to handle higher difficulties at lower levels then say a mage (especially in hell when everything has multiple elemental immunities).
Without the expansion, I generally tried to hit nightmare around 35-40 and hell 50-60.
With the expansion, I tried to hit nightmare around 45-55 and hell 65-75. You'll want to be level up even higher if your playing a hard-core character.
Hope this helps
Aardvark
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One way to gauge is by using the following fact: those little fallens in act1 are level 36 monsters in NM and level 67 in H.
Apprentice QueueApprentice Queue
It really depends on how comfortable you are with fighting tougher fights, and whether you are playing HardCore or not.
I personally try and hit Nightmare as early as possible, as you level much faster if you are lower when going in. I generally enter Nightmare around level 30 if possible. I definitely wouldn't wait until 45 or higher as some comments have mentioned.
The earlier the better. It provides more challenge anyways.
Ben MacAskillBen MacAskill
Are you playing single player or on battle net?
Total war warhammer wyvern. Feb 12, 2018 - Orc Warboss. Wyvern is a Greenskins mount. It is available to the Orc Warboss. I don't.think. Greenskins had a Wyvern unit in and of themselves on TT. There are mods for wyverns on the workshop since Warhammer 1.
If it's battle net, I would just recommend getting rushed till a4 hell and then leeching chaos runs to hit whatever level you want. For single player, it depends heavily on the gear/class, but try to have your bread and butter skill maxed (or at least started if its a lev 30 skill) by the time you finish normal and have most of the synergies for it by the time you reach hell. Having high resistance and leech also makes a huge difference.
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l Il I
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