My advice is don't play d2r. Stick to the old good stuff. Baalruns are great, i used to like them too in softcore. I play hc now so i usually don't get to that part... i don't buy fg to buy gear, i'm no fool, i play on my own... I used to be so fast to click on drops from baal, that i beat the autobots at times.. great fun it was. You just hold down shift, and gauge your mouse pointer to where you think the gear will appear first pixel, and click extremely fast. Sometimes i even got more than one item. It was great fun. I got a character to level 95 one season... at that point, lol, the exp gain got so slow it was not motivating anymore. These season i play hc, i make more characters for fun, usually stop the progress at level 75-85. Doing goldfind runs only this season, although i've focused mostly on just killing the council members, not that much emphasis on goldfind......... since the gambling aspect has been demotivating, gambled probably around 50 000 000 gold or more, and not found much of value. That is disappointing. So just killing the travincal council members is great for experience, and they drop decent stuff at times too. I started with normal, again remembering hardcore..... doing barbarian this season. From level 22 to about 33. Then went to nightmare ... got some levels and stuff along the way, level 40 about, to about level 63 or something. Then went to hell mode. Found lots of decent stuff in nightmare travi!! Among them was 294% bonesnap, which made the journey easier..... probably one of the first times i also was strong enough as a barbarian, and any character, to actually dominate the journey to a3 travincal in hell. Could tank almost anything and also deal great damage. I twice upgraded the bonesnap... dealing about 1500-4000 damage concentrate.. When i got to travi hell, i tried to foucs on the goldfind aspect, which my merc was a bit underpowered, so i did about 100 runs where i did not partake, focusing on merc and support, which took quite some time. That was a bit of a mistake, so i got a bit demotivated there. So i took a break, playing civilization 2 at the moment. But strongly considering going back to d2 soon. Just perming mules atm, lol. But will go back to the hard-hitting bonesnap build and focus on whacking the council members this time. The thought is motivating, and i hope to find decent stuff. Actually found ik maul from them too, which seems to deal big damage. Hoping to get motivated enough to return to it soon.
Stick to d2 and do the run. Choose an original build. I have one new character set up .. going to be a poison javazon, with dagger + shield on switch. I.e. critical strike dagger as melee fighter.. and poison clouds as ranged. The poison javazon is very op early on.. and can be in nightmare, if you get +skill gear. That's the deal about it, with both at level 20, they do good damage, but when you get +skills from then on, they deal progressively more damage. Which can get ridiculously huge at higher levels. I actually used to do chaos runs in with one an earlier season, it is a hassle to get through the venom lords, which are immune to poison in nightmare.. and the doom+oblivion knights have decent poison resists. So you really have to have a good strategy to deal with them, usually a very strong merc, and lower resist wand on switch. Or you can keep a bow and use that on switch.
But the fun part is diablo ^^ You can throw a javelin, poisoning him (of course after lower resist), then go to town, wait 15-20 seconds, then go back and repeat ^^ He will lose good damage. No more running around like a fool picking him down. Of course also bringing a second character along for quest bugging purposes.
Can be done on baal too, but the minions of destruction have 95% poison resist in all difficulties, so they are a real big problem.
D2:R