Ya definitely harder to play a melee attack build with no gear than a class that gets damage from +skills.
But there is good gear you can craft.
Sorc would be easy, druid would be easy, paladin would be easy, just build a Leaf and use their fire abilities. Leveling as Holy Fire paladin is hilarious. Or use your summons as a druid.
Amazon is a little tougher, but iāve played through as a bowazon without much struggle. Just craft a Tal Tal Tal weapon and youāll be doing 226 poison damage in 5 seconds on the whole screen.
Barb is the only class i havenāt really played.
This advice is in general but do act 1 to Trist, level in Trist till 14ish, solo your way to act 2, get to tombs, group up till 24ish, solo or get rushed to baal, do baal till 40ish.
Repeat in NM, do till trust solo, do the same as normal. Get to baal and level till 70 there if needed, then farm NM spots or if strong enough starter Hell.
Bam your there and can at least farm NM based off level alone.
Pick up a teleport charge staff from vendor in act5, may need to refreshā¦bam your good to go.
There are tons of builds that are easy to complete the game with poor gear.
An explosive arrow/freezing arrow zon can clean up hell with a friggin ral ral ral shortbow. Iām not joking.
Javazons do tons of lightning damage and will only ever struggle if they meet light immunes, you can just have valkyrie and merc deal with those or avoid them though.
Hammerdin can do quite well with poor gear because the hammers scale so well and almost nothing is immune to magical damage.
Not all builds need gear to succeed in hell, its just physical builds that really feel the pressure in hell.
Ya you can easily farm early hell with a skel summon build and lower resist plus a ele merc.
Donāt even need gear.
normal pindleskin just dropped a near perfect goldwrap neener neener
I am a bit jealous of that. I have not found a gold wrap yetā¦
I disagree with this heavily. You should level running Countess runs, not tristram. You will build up a bank of runes that will be very helpful as you progress. The XP isnāt even that much worse (i would challenge that its pretty close to tristram), thereās plenty of champion packs along the way.
honestly it has seriously screwed me over on set items. 3 total by lvl 36. Uniques have been sparse too but with high mf Iāve gotten really high quality rolls so when something drops itās primo.
Ya you could, I generally dont worry about low runes unless I need them, which is rare, but thatās me thing. I donāt even do NM or hell countess, I would rather hit lower kurast chests heh.
on a second or third character i would agree, but on a starter character i would def do countess.
You want to make a Stealth for the faster run/walk speed. Tal + Eth
You want a good weapon for your act 1 merc, Tal + Tal + Tal
You want a Lore at level 27, so Ort + Sol
You want a Leaf if youāre fire, so Tir + Ral
1 Like
Iāve been finding isenhart pieces since act 1. I have found like 11 pieces of it in total, probably 3 complete sets.
I did find a mavina belt, that got me a little stoked. Always nice to find the class set pieces.
Yeah, NM and Hell countess can get you some pretty powerful runewords for midgame progression.
Yeah isenhart and sanderās are it. The trash of the trash.
I donāt disagree but I could easily skip those without noticing it, all depends on what and how you play, I can get to lower fast and farm that in the wide open. Much nicer when Iām on HC.
Fair enough, everyone has their ways. Whatever works 
Door ways become scary things in HC. Getting ptsd at this point but itās always because I get cocky and start multitasking.
Me: nice and easy, I can easily take this group on without paying attention, pop.
Opens door
Group of extra strong extra fast cold enchant archers: hey man, wanna get one shotted today? too bad.
Me: well shoot. Guess im dead then.
1 Like
i just got my 3rd unique in normal playing soloā¦ havent even killed diablo yetā¦ plus ive found atleast 4-6 set itemsā¦ lmaooo well forget that i just got my 4th unique like 4 mins after typing thatā¦ blinkbats form armor
I have a feeling that being underpowered in normal is ehā¦ normal. Dont think its a gear thing. Some classes have a really hard time until you can respec and then finally start getting into the actual build you want. So far I feel like NM is way way easier than normal simply because most builds dont start to take off until NM.
This falls pretty to the category of hand holding, which have ruined and dumbed down modern games. Which we really dont need in D2R.
Some sort of recipe system would be ok in D2R i guess, but on the other hand, people have managed to find them from internet for 20 years, it literally takes under a minute. so why would they be needed now? Maybe use that development time to some other things?