i've always loved the idea of VLLD and look for it in any games i play, but never got around to doing it back when i played d2. recently got back. i'd love to make one and not worry about jewels and charms, i think classic would be a blast. any level 9 classic duelers or anyone else interested?

I feel safe saying there is no existing classic VLLD scene. if there is it's a few guys who still own prepatch no lvl req items, so saving on charms and jewels u still lose because they have better unattainable gear.

if you're interested in VLLD tho wait for a new ladder and make a char on there.

There is one person on eu who tries occasionally to get some classic vlld going. A couple of years ago some people made a few lvl30s on nl but that died off again fairly quickly.

even without prepatch items, ie on ladder, its not like there's any imaginable way to make it balanced.
pallys can smite with crushflange/gnasher and keep prayer on to negate poison javelin. DR, MDR from nagels, sigons set, all simply negate the minor damage of skills/spells. There's no items to actually deal significant damage, what are you going to do, sacrifice din whacking people with a clegs sword with +0 off-weapon damage? Ice Blast is the only projectile with any damage and at 92 with a +3 staff it gets negated by 15 MDR and just using 2x nagels, sigons boot, death's glove/belt & greyform results in 1.6 hp in damage per ice blast with no chill

smite is typically BM in legitimate VLLD. on ladder its been tolerated because most ladders dont drop enough good items to even build out 5 full VLLD chars, so people just deal with it for the competition.

it's been that way since MikeyJD wrote his smite/zeal guide (and it was mass replicated on ladder), which is just crushflange them down to a base then finish them off with shitty dmg sac because you're so far ahead.

classic has some options but nearly all of them involve CB as the real dmg source. then there is the quagmire of classic blocking, so build options drop off markedly.

basically you're left with sigons for a high str option, which sucks given no +str charms and no +life charms, or hsaurus set with a rare boneshield. which can also be socketed for cheap compared to sigons.

maulers and ferals dont exist, jabber have to use white spear = dont exist, all non-pal sac chars dont exist, bash barbs have to deal with KB in melee, no TS sins.

so the field breaks down to sac pallys vs bash barbs vs non-competitive jabbers.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Apr 1 2019 02:30pm

how can a bash barb compare to a sac pally? the +damage doesn't even work, so its just 158% ed / 16% cs and knockback vs 420% ed. And I'm guessing bone armor spam is just as bm, not that a necro can do anything but cb/ow with default gnasher/flange
I theorycrafted for a few seconds about whether inferno could be built. 6.51 damage per frame, 12.5 frames per second with 82/1024 mdr applied. It still comes out to be negated by 14 mdr. Owell, wishful thinking. Even if they were 0 mdr 0 resist it would still be only 14 hp/s

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 1 2019 02:46pm

bash barbs wouldn't really compete in raw dmg, but they're miles better than the other non-sac-pally options from xpac vlld. it would really boil down to only sac pallys the way lvl 12 would boil down to only chargers if they weren't banned.

14 hp/s might not be as bad as one might think. just from INV the char loses 300 HP from no charms. and a lack of reqs jewels means a lot of str going to stats. MDR sources would also be tougher to come by, and you would be locked into needing str ammy/rings most likely. so nagael swap isn't easy.

thank you for all the replies! i definitely have some to read up on but i'll give it a go next ladder reset, or check out nl for more people. some people i spoke to ig ladder us west expressed interest in a couple iron man games which could be fun.