I wanted to go for Platinum Trophy, since I have this on PS5.
And one of the trophies requires Level 99 AND in Hardcore mode!
It was not easy and definitely not fun once I beat Hell difficulty and started endlessly farming and leveling. I figured I had a couple choices.
#1- Single player. I can adjust player levels & ALL drops are mine.
Or
#2- Online. Less player level increase & trading available.
I decided to go for Single Player for the reasons I mentioned. And I’m less likely to die cuz of random lag or something.
So I decided to start with the tried and true Hammerdin. Easy to play, safe to use, great Shields for Runewords with +all Res. Respec for a Smiter if needed.
And so my journey began. I figured I’d start and stick with P8 so I can level quickly ASAP. I made a couple exceptions and went to P1, such as when I was going into Dangerous territories such any place where there was a chance to be Souls or Dolls.
It started out extremely slow.
Once beating Nightmare, I farmed NM TZ Andy for ages looking for Shako and other useful things. No luck. Couldn’t even find ViperMagi armor. I found Travs Merc armor/helm upgrades though. Finally once I found a Que-Hegan armor I went to Hell.
My next upgrade was finding a +2 Seraph Amulet while running Countess.
That was my only upgrade till I started running CS. LUCKILY I learned I could abuse the console clock for infinite TZ.
Eventually found an Arach around level 94? Did some crafting, but no good rings. Got a +2 pally FCR amulet though I used most my grinding.
Finally broke down and used 1 socket quest on a +1 Pally, 14 All Res 20 FCR circlet I somehow Imbued. Gave it an Ist rune for MF I was using since Nightmare.
Then as time went on found ZOD, 2 Bers, Lo, Ohm, 2 Sur, Vex and a few other runes while running TZ Chaos / LK.
FINALLY found a Shako around 95-96 while doing a Nihlathak D-Key run. And ofc as my luck would have it, it’s Eth..
So I used second socket quest for a Zod Shako (lol..)
Decided to run Hell TZ Andy & picked up a HoZ shield & used my last Socket quest for that.
Managed to make my Enigma/HOTO/FORT/CTA (happy days it was 6/6/1 (or something like that).
Finally decided I needed a Torch and saved up TONS of keys and Respecced to a Smiter mid 90s since I got enough reasonable gear/budget items.
First Torch was Zon or Barb I think. Then Asn. Then I wasted 1 org set because accidentally aggro all 3 Ubers at once & forced to leave game. Then Druid torch.
Finally got a Low/Mid PTorch and respec back to Hammerdin.
Overall. After I hit level 90s I REALLY wanted to give up because 99 seemed so far out of reach so I started turning Spotify on & listening to some music while farming. (Thank you Lazee: Stronger) for giving me hours of music on repeat for incentive to keep pushing 99!
I tried TZ P8 Tomb runs using Ondals staff but after I saw how dangerous that was I threw that idea out the window. I decided to just endlessly TZ P8 CS & use Ondals weapon swap for the finishing blow on Diablo. I did maybe 5 TZ P8 Baals but it was too slow, especially with wave 2 being magic immune. Even on P1.
Maybe 3 Tomb runs max, using Natures Peace ring to negate Mummy revives and running from them.
97-98 was slow. And 98-99 I could feel turning me into a Zombie. I noticed that every 2 hours was about 1 Notch checkpoint on the exp bar at bottom. So a minimum of 20 hours from 98-99.
Once I hit 95-96, I stopped picking up anything except Unqiue Rings/ Amulets/Runes and potions/TP Scrolls.. Never found my Mara or SOJ though..
Anyways..
I just had to let my excitement out!
This post was edited by Matty0289 on Dec 17 2025 09:29pm