Please don’t stop or slow down. I love seeing all the OG stats on items and such. It reminds me of being a kid in the basement on my awful Hewlett-Packard that could barely run the game on b.net with 56k dial-up, but I was determined after spending the past year or two playing D1 on b.net just fine, and playing my first ever character, a paladin, and finally getting to level 12 and realizing how cool zeal was after single whacking everything for ages to get to that point. And then hitting level 13, WHAT, I get another hit with each point in zeal? OP but I really love seeing the old school items

Lol, you sound like you have lived my exact same life. I too used an HP tower with dial-up. There was an issue with my dial-up and it could only be detected when using headphones. Out of no where, for not even half a second, the sound would go out and I knew I had about 5 minutes before I would drop out of the game. When I heard the sound go out, I would save, exit and rejoin game to keep from dropping. Then I switched to DSL which was faster and allowed people to call the house. I feel like the dropping issue on dial-up was from people attempting to call while I was playing.

Smith taken down in hell. What level should I use my imbues and on what item?

LOL that’s awesome, you can totally relate. I always knew when someone was trying to call because it would drop me out of bnet even though the call didn’t go through. After my first character, that Paladin I mentioned, completed normal mode, I started playing hardcore since back then it was required to beat normal on softcore first, and not once have I ever played soft core since then. But with a laggy Hewlett-Packard and dial-up, I experienced a lot of unnecessary deaths in my formative D2 years

We lived out in the middle of nowhere, so when DSL became a thing, it wasn’t even available where we lived. So we got a second phone line, the “kids line” for internet and myself and sisters to use. Needless to say, there was a lot of fighting for that second line

I never played online until the expansion came out. My first online character was a zealer as well. He used B Star which was nice, but cleared slow. Next I made a poorly built whirlwind barbarian. I had a friend I met in game and he would do MF runs on his barb and give me whatever he didn't need. The guy was super nice. I remember someone giving me a Stormshield for free and being so excited. After that, I made a bowzon and used some bugged items on her. She used the bugged Arcane Valor that wasn't socketed. The stats were the same as the 4 socket one minus the jewels so I didn't mind.

That reminds me I had a friend back then from school who played open bnet with all the super hacked items like the white gear and stuff, there was a small charm that had a massive list of mods plus adds 1000% exp or something like that, and he gave me several of those, I leveled up so fast but even as a kid I always played D1 legit and then d2 as well, hate hacks dupes etc so I didn’t end up playing open for more than a couple days. Looking back it was a pretty unique time period for the d2 days

I played open for a little bit of time. I remember there was an Amazon you could download and duel with. IIRC the name was StarChaosClone. She used normal style javs, black bone helm, black spiked shield and other black colored items. You could open her on hero editor and change the name to something you preferred. I remember the items didn't have so many stats that it made it hard to read on the item. It had a lot of life, over 1 million I think. She was pretty good versus other hacked characters. It was usually Zon vs Zon and the duels were kind of boring, but then out of nowhere, one hit and the opponent was dead. My Zon on closed had a few bugged items but nothing like Ith weapons/armors or Zephyr bows of the time. I used an 08 WF, 08 Shaft, bugged 08 Valor and I don't remember what else. Now I just play different patches in SP. Hopefully I will find some nice items to bring forward to 1.07. Maybe rack run and craft some cool items and move to 1.09b or 1.09d. Not sure if I want to play 1.10s for the beta runewords like the CTA, Crescent Moon and Bramble. Then finally end up in 1.12, 1.13 or 1.14.