As the title says, I mainly just play normal and nightmare and then I move on.
It seems Hell was balanced for solo play at one point before 1.10 and immunities + monster HP was greatly increased. It seems like they wanted people to group more often in 1.10 to have parties deal with immunities and higher monster health pools and such.
The thing is, I mainly play melee characters like Barb and Paladin. The fact that casters have a major advantage shows the imbalance of the game. I don’t know why Brevik and his team decided to break balance and make Hell nearly impossible for melee characters unless you grind 5,000 hours or so.
Some of us play other games you know? Most players don’t live on D2 and have lives and other games to play.
Anyway, I hope perhaps those at Blizzard see this and can make Hell mode fun again and more accessible.
Not sure what melee char u are playing my fury druid has absolutely no problems carrying himself through hell on ssf gear with a bit of help from my wolves. Yes its not fast but its easier than trying to beat hell solo on a caster with no gear or sunder charm, any big two hander will get me through the game and if i find a lem rune and a ko rune i will use an act 5 merc and make him a lawbringer. Act 5 merc is super tanky and this combo allows me to run travincal pretty early and find sunders for my next char whenever its terrorized. I know what u mean, it will never have the clearspeed of a fully geared caster but its damn safe and reliable on basic ssf budget crap gear, just farm tower for some low runes, i find hustle to be the best budget armour for my char with the 65% frw 40% ias and the +6 evade which seems to outperform the much more commonly used treachery, people seem to forget that +6 evade is actually 40% chance to dodge any attack which in my experience beats the 15% pdr on fade whenever ur char has enough hp to not be onehit by trash mobs. Besides hustle is cheaper than treachery and u get the 65% frw which is huge and the weapon hustle provides fana aura which i sometimes use on the act 5 merc combined with the lawbringer (act 5 frenzy merc) as my budget option
So, since you don’t have time to play this game and you don’t want to play easier less time consuming classes, you want the more time consuming and challenging classes to be twinked into EZ mode?
its actually not too bad, and not many other chars will take u through the game solo ssf with no gear as ez and safe as this one. Arpg’s are time consuming and grindy but most of the things i mentioned are pretty ez to find doing tower runs on hell, sure u might need 100+ runs but once u get a hustle armour u can just run past most trash mobs and go straigt for countess, the wolves work like pseudo block chance/ meat shield and will keep mobs away from u making it damn near impossible to get swarmed and surrounded and they are excellent at dealing with the pesky stygian dolls and turn them into dog food. Summons dont take damage from their explosion btw. If i was going to play hardcore i would definitely consider using a fury/summon hybrid druid
People speed run the entire game, from norm to hell baal, in 3 hours. Thats right. Sorc record is actually 1 hour and 50 minutes, while the slowest, being Barb, is 4 hours and 2 minutes.
If you have not developed the skills to conquer hell then you are simply not good at the game. You are not getting better either because you don’t try.
This is kind of true but not everyone enjoy the speed running/ skipping content playstyle and u still need gear if u want to farm specific areas solo. I kind of like the journey from zero to hero and i dont mind spending a few hours farming when i reach hell if i want a specific runeword or whatever i feel like i need. But yeah it can be done pretty fast and even faster as a group
My first Character in D2r was a proper Zeal Paladin (melee)… in Hell the only thing slowing you down is Physically Immune… easily contested with Pgem’d weapons, AzureWrath, Demons Arch, Lacerator, GrimmerShred etc… the gems anyone can harvest, the uniques are cheap enough to be found/picked up - in “free” games.
Yes Casters have a much easier time, as do ranged, then minion based character… many a time i have read that melee builds are the last challenge to D2(r)…
Either you are up to it, or you are not… decision only you can make.
Speedrunners make the impossible look possible and those are outliers. Most people don’t play games in that way, and besides, speedrunners usually have hundreds of normal playthroughs completed before tackling something like that and even then it takes speed runners tons of grinding and attempts on their own to get good at something like that.
5000 hours huh? Hell is only hard if you decide to poorly invest your attributes and skill points while you ignore runewords…runewords make the game too easy if anything and I have made many many many melee chars over the past 20 years from scratch and quite a few of them I got through hell with only yellows and blues…
Man, as barb or pally, you only need to find a nice eth base to create insight or later on obedience, slap that on your a2 holy freeze merc and your merc can literally solo the entire game for you especially if you get obedience, the crushing blow will be huge against hell act bosses…but seriously with barb’s bo or pally’s auras along with their ability to naturally tank better than most chars, your a2 merc should be easily rolling the game until you reach that imaginary 5000 hour mark so you can finally start killing hell monsters on your own.
People like OP need to just post up a link to their stream so we can ask why they have 50% of their attributes into energy on their barb.
OP did you know as barb, you can literally just keep leaping to virtually permastun your enemies while your a2 merc takes care of them? Or that Fanaticism with a pimped out a2 merc is amazing in p1.
you dont have to it is perfectly capable of killing all of them, but if u want to collect the runes needed for ur basic runewords in tower or finish hell difficulty as fast as possible that is what you do. Only kill champ packs on the way if u want some extra drops
I used the world records to exaggerate the point that it is very doable to beat hell Baal if you have skill.
In my excitement before d2r came out I beat hell Baal with every character on Pluggy. It took about a week per character. It was a very fulfilling experience, to be honest.
You can’t just pick whatever skills and bumble your way through.
You can’t full clear… that’s not diablo 2 is played, even in norm. Clear only champs, uniques, their minions, and density. And don’t fight archers.
You have to know what gear to look for and what to farm efficiently… and yes sorry you generally cant do melee builds.
Hell does not need to be “more accessible”. Noobs need to get good, or maybe even, noobs need to be made to feel like noobs more. Just because you played since 2001 doesn’t mean you’re not noob.
Even though act 2 merc is by far the best lategame when he has good gear i have huge success with the act 5 merc on a budget with a hustle sword and lawbringer he just seems way tankier than act 2 merc which tends to die alot on budget gear especially when im doing travincal. On the other hand my act 5 frenzy merc can often do 50 trav runs in a row without dying and i still get frenzy + decrep which helps alot since half the runs one of the trav bosses is phys immune. I know its considered a meme using other mercs than act 2 but i find it better to pick ur merc based on the content u run+the gear u can afford and for trav runs act 5 merc is really great. Sanctuary aura is insane for chaos sanc too since it keeps all the undead away and reduces their phys resistance to zero which includes breaking their phys immunity
Edit: FYI chaos sanc is 66% undead and most monsters in hell have at least 50% phys reduction but with sanctuary they have zero (undead only) so u will more or less deal double damage to any undead monster u come across and there will be no phys immune undead
Some of us don’t live off of one game and play other video games. I’m quite glad that I never became addicted to this game to where you farm 12 hours a day doing the same mundane things just to clear Hell.
Hell definitely needs to me more accessible. Nobody really cares outside of these niche forums how good you are at a video game, or how decked out and powerful your fantasy character is. That’s…really cringe and nerdy.
I absolutely do play the game for fun. By “took me a week” I mean grind pretty hard on the weekend and play a couple hours after work most days.
It is about getting by on minimum gear… the exact opposite of being “decked out and powerful”.
Hell is perfectly “accessible”. If you can’t beat it, its not because of your gear, its because of your lack of skill.
you dont have to it is perfectly capable of killing all of them, but if u want to collect the runes needed for ur basic runewords in tower or finish hell difficulty as fast as possible that is what you do. Only kill champ packs on the way if u want some extra drops