New to D2. Bored

Greetings!

My first flirt with Diablo was with D3 RoS, when I read that they were getting rid of the auction house. Spent several hundred hours there, enjoying it more pre-GR than post because infinite difficulty is not my cup of tea. I also have several hundred hours in PoE and Grim Dawn each. Less in Wolcen and Last Epoch. The last one I quit until release to prevent burnout.

After reading for years that D2 was one of the greatest, I preordered when it became available, and was hoping that it would keep me busy until the release of Succubus, first person combat in Hell, in early October.

Always being in love with caster/undead themes, I picked the Necro, looked at a guide and launched on, offline, as a die-hard SSF. Got used to the controls and the WASD tricks for my curses, no problem. Now, in Act V on NM, I am getting more and more bored. I would find a talk in Youtube to listen to while progressing, but can barely make an hour. I wander if others are in the same spot like me.

This is not a critique of the game. D2 is what it is, and I got into it with open eyes, wanting to see what the experience would be like.

Cheers!

Sounds like youre a summon necro. Its a powerful class but kind of dull. Its not great as a first character. (Necro is my favorite but Its going to be my 3rd character) I recommend a sorc, paladin or amazon for a bit more action.

If you got respecs available you can also try the bone tree spells. Its magic damage to you wont run into many immunes in hell. May offer more of a challenge and require a more active roll.

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You picked probably the most boring class…
Also it only takes like 2 hours to go through NM to begin with. What exactly are you doing in there? Game doesn’t even get interesting until Hell.

If you are really bored go make from scratch physical Bowazon in HC. That’ll keep you busy.

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Simple, start over with another class.
The classes plays so dramatically different that you can have a completely different experience and not all classes or builds will be fun for everyone. Even Necromancer can have largerly different play styles depending if you went full Summoner, in which case you have your own army and you pretty much walk around doing almost nothing and just watching your army kill everything for you with little effort… or you can do for a Bone build and some curses in which you will play a bit more like a mage and be more active.

If you are on Act V on NM, getting bored is normal. Just pick another class and you have a brand new game.

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I hear you, but I love summoners. In all other games, this is my go to choice and I wasn’t bored. But I’d admit than an active caster is a more stimulating and I have done these as well.

Interesting, what about the d2 necro do you feel that can be better?

Understandable. I mean, it’s 20 year old with a fresh coat of paint. It both was and is a great game, but it has its faults. And, sorry to the people that think this game is some kind of pinnacle of gameplay, but it has issues and the people of Blizzard North were not infallible.

Stuff like “This runeword is for mace” then “‘mace’ does not apply to all mace-class weapons, just blah blah and blah.” There is no indicator of this ANYWHERE except an external site (technically, the runewords aren’t in the game either). It’s really stupid. Nobody sat around experimenting to find BotD. They looked in the files lol.

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You’ve never played a game, and instead of exploring it and trying things by yourself, you went online and used a cookie-cutter build and now, mysteriously, you’re “bored”?

That’s on you buddy.

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“Now in A5 of NM” lol… you’re bored with being in the mid game, with one character, and one build, out of the 7 characters and countless builds possible? I don’t even know what to say really.

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You’ve never played a game, and instead of exploring it and trying things by yourself, you went online and used a cookie-cutter build and now, mysteriously, you’re “bored”?

That’s on you buddy.

This! 100%

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I told my friends that new people to D2R and D2 in general would be bored to death in a very short time.

This is not a mini D3!

If Blizzard changes this game so drops come fast and easy with a couple hours a day played this D2R will fail big time.

D2 is perfect as is w/o any big season themes and changes.

Heck, just getting D2R to not crash would be a big thing!

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Also this. Start a new class and play in the dark. Don’t go online… Don’t look at specific tested builds. It’s a lot more fun to find stuff out for yourself since you are new to the game. Read what each skill does and plan ahead what you want. Discovering this is half of the fun.

People who make those build guides have been testing for 20 years and are more or less meant for people who also familiar with all that stuff and were looking for ideas they may have missed.

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I love the D2 Necro…. My 10 skelly warriors and 16 revives. What I dislike so much about the D3 Necro, it’s not a pet class at all.

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The real “necro” class in D3 is the -shudder- witch doctor

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Diablo 2 end game is pvp. Not rifts or whatever you’re used to. Grinding for gear to duel is what you need to be doing

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People will tell you d2 has many different end games but it doesn’t really it’s just people do different things with what they get from doing endgame.

diablo 2s endgame is the same as diablo 3s endgame only on a different scale, both end games are grinding for the perfect gear set but both the speed at which you get the gear and the curve to how you get gear is different.

in d2 it is very easy to get to a gear level you can farm nm and do some parts of hell, it’s tough to get a gear level to farm hell efficiently and its near impossible to get a “perfect” or near “perfect” set of gear solo.

in d3 they let you get to a higher level of gear quicker and have more levels of difficulty and it is easily done solo but takes a long time to get a “perfect” set of gear.

the big difference really is that d2 you progress slowly and can’t really do it solo were as d3 they give you the gear arguably too fast and then slow it down too much.

both d2 and d3 have problematic endgame but if you find d3 too grindy of a game d2 is much much worse repetition and with fewer viable builds for end game content. That being said d2 is the superior game imo but i do think it has pain points that make it less of an appealing game to many unless you grew up on it.

I would love to see them iron out some of the more glaring issues of d2 but i doubt it will ever happen some things people have been asking blizzard for for 15+ years and i just don’t see them changing much.

the fact that we still haven’t gotten a patch notes or at the very least a changelog of things they meant to change from 1.14 shows that the support is not going to be great for the game.

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Some people love summoner Necro, other people like myself find it the most boring character. Maybe try a different class or bonermancer.

It could also be the case that you just don’t find the endgame of d2 pvm interesting (grinding for better gear by doing the same zones or bosses over and over again), that’s totally fair.

I think the issue was because you followed guides. The first experience on D2 often are great to experience new stuff, is fine getting some tips. But when you start following one build you, most of the time, don’t learn the class and neither the game.

In earlier days of d2, following guides could be game changing because you couldn’t re-spec. But later they implemented several QoL changes. So my advice, in your first run on a class explore all skills(one point each). You could go through normal difficulty really fine and learn the class really well.

Then use your first re-spec on a build that you liked. You could go through nightmare just fine. Then on the last re-spec you should follow guides, because you can’t mess the build anymore and your chances to experiment are ended. If you learn enough you can sort things out and make a 3rd experimental one but being a bit conservative one.

On normal you have the thrilling of the discovery, on Nightmare you’re experienced in some ways but you can handle it with almost anything you want to try. On hell things gets more trickier and would make your build workable or useless.

Normal is about learn the game, nightmare is about test how well you learned the game and hell is about manage to survive and surpass your foes, some will play META others will sort things out to make things “workable”.

Like you said, Die-hard SSF, my advice would be pick useful hints but don’t blindly follow the guides, guides are optimized ways to play, but for starters are really bad. Because you will not have deep understanding about the class neither the skills themselves.

D2 was really punitive at beginning, with patches and expansion became really forgiving game. You have 2 chances to make mistakes and then, sort things out at the end. You could re-spec afterwards farming bosses but you really need a decent build to be able to do it.

The only difference between a good build and optimized build is about time. If your build can’t work on hell, most likely weren’t a great build for it. That’s why is important to experiment on normal and nightmare how to play and test it out on hell.

The endgame is about farming gear on particular spots, but you don’t need to follow guides blindly. You can sort stuff out on the go and adapt your gear for it.

That’s why I think you got bored on nightmare. My advice would test things out before fully commit to a endgame build. Experienced players already adapt on the go, starters should start learning the game not specific build. Optimized builds aren’t fun are just optimized.

Play hardcore.

I went to hardcore years ago and have never looked back. I now play every arpg in hardcore from start to finish even on the first playthrough. It’s really the only way to play this or any other arpg, unless you’re into PVP.

You will lose everything, over and over, until you get good. You won’t be able to sleep at the wheel and you’ll have to utilize different builds and tools than the standard softcore crowd. Every kill, drop, and level becomes so much more rewarding. If and when you get a high level hardcore character geared out, it will feel like an amazing achievement.

You’ll be able to help lower level newbs accomplished things they never could on their own because there are no second chances in hardcore. You will absolutely have to master the mechanics and deep dive into how everything functions in this game, hint, it’s a lot deeper than you might think at first glance.

Anyone can grind their way to 85, 90, even 99 in softcore. Believe me, it’s much, much more of a challenge to achieve that kind of greatness in Diablo 2 hardcore. Give it a shot if you think you’re up for it.

Oh, and drop by our hardcore only trading subreddit. Good Luck!

What other games have you preferred summoning in? D2’s Necro and City of Heroes’ Masterminds are two of my favorites.