Like the topic title says… could someone explaine what the ladder and non-ladder character are and what the differences are? I created characters under both online and offline tab and I’m assuming that the character I created under online tab is a ladder char, but not sure.
Also, when the new season starts, will all the items in my stash be gone?
Ladder = limited time pool for characters with leaderboard and special benefits like exclusive runewords etc. Usually ladder runs for 3-6 months in D2R. They talked about 4 month cycles, but they never handled it like that.
Nonladder = unlimited time pool for characters without leaderboard and without ladder benefits. After a ladder, all characters get automatically transfered to Nonladder. So after 28.9.2023, all your characters will be nonladder. New characters can be created with the “ladder” option afterwards.
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In addition to what Odin said,
Offline and Online are completely separate. You can have non-ladder and ladder characters both online. Offline in D2R tends to be up to date with any new Ladder features/runewords that are introduced, but doesn’t have any defined season cycle.
When a ladder expires, your ladder character becomes a non-ladder character and is still playable on non-ladder. All items you accrued in the ladder are kept and rolled over into your non-ladder side. If you had existing non-ladder inventory from previous ladders, or non-ladder characters, you have a “remove only” shared stash that lets you pull items that rolled over from the latest season into your non-ladder, so you can manually merge your stash and decide what to keep. You have until the next season to empty it out. So we’re on Season 4 right now, when that ends, Season 5 will start soon after, and anything from Season 4 will be in the “remove only” stash tabs (there’s a check box to toggle between them). You have until Season 5 ends to pull everything out of the “Season 4” stash and integrate it into your non-ladder stash. This article gives some more details: Diablo II: Resurrected Ladder Season 5 Coming Soon — Diablo II: Resurrected — Blizzard News
Also, a little note: Ladder(L) characters will have a little green flag with a ladder on it if it’s a Ladder char. If that’s not there, it’s a Non-Ladder(NL) char.
The new Ladder season starts Thursday evening next week, so that would be a good time time to start a Ladder char if interested. Otherwise, NL is fine too. After the next season starts, there will a LOT of people giving away free stuff on NL after their L chars get switched over, so it’s a good time to free-load! 
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also ladder runewords can only be made in ladder ie. spirit monarch and forti
spirit and fort are only ladder runewords on the original game. in d2r, only the runewords released part of 2.5 or 2.6 or whenever, with mosaic and bulwark and etc, are the only ladder runewords.
so i can make all old runewords in non ladder
Sure can! The only RWs that can’t be made in Non-Ladder now are the latest ones introduced in Season 3: Mosiac, Metamorphosis, Hustle, and the new resistance helms Bulwark, Cure, Hearth, Ground, and Temper.
They don’t allow the latest RWs on NL until they put out new RWs for Ladder. That’s a kinda sad thing that hasn’t been talked about much with us not getting a patch this Season, those RWs are still not gonna be enabled for NL yet.