Definitely a different game without mana pots.

Would have been cool if it stayed that way tbh.

I agree it makes it more interesting, although I wouldn't have minded if they dropped a bit more frequently.
Currently I'm burning through mana potions faster than they're dropping, and occasionally I actually portal to town just to get my mana back at an NPC.
Doing "mana potion runs" is actually a thing in these patches.
I've already spent hundreds of thousands of gold gambling for a Wall of the Eyeless. Besides the +20 FCR it provides, it has the very valuable +5 Mana after each Kill, which helps out a ton. No luck so far, though.


Welcome back, Mate!

When Mate was reborn, a new leecher joined him, another brave Paladin!
Why? Well, there is this funny bug in earlier patches that causes Vigor to cling to allies indefinitely.
In the clip below I've showcased the bug (with some throwaway characters on Softcore).
I'm not really utilizing him yet, but without a doubt he'll some day prove to be worthy!





For this new start, it was certainly nice that I could give myself some Waypoints that I had picked up with the leechers.
And conveniently, in earlier patches you can take portals of other characters even when you're not partied with them, so there was no need to party all 7 extra characters.
What's even better is that in earlier patches you can go straight to Durance of Hate if someone opens you a portal to there, allowing you to skip the entire Council quest.
So this time around, I didn't have to get any of the parts for Khalim's Will!

The ring that Ormus rewarded me for the Gidbinn has a very satisfying list of stats!




This dropped in Act 4. Terrible stats.
Keeping it on one of the characters ensures that the next unique Pike will change into a Rare. Sweet.




Gambled. Unfortunately not as good as it is in later patches, but for now it's good enough to use.



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 22 2018 09:49am

As you can see on the (Lying) Character Screen, my fire resistance says MAX.
However, this always happens when a resistance reaches 75. In reality, my fire resistance is 81, while my actual max is 90.
Nice job, Blizzard!




Diablo is down (again)!
Terrible drops, but the War Staff netted me 25,000 gold on Nightmare, which is the maximum an item can sell for in earlier patches.




And finally, Mate has rescued Cain on Nightmare and lived on to go and get his reward!
He avenged himself by killing all uglies in Tristram, and strolled to Akara.

The reward however is garbage because, as always, there was a bug around the corner.
This particular bug causes the inventories, as well as quest rewards, of NPCs to always use the values from Normal difficulty,
meaning the ring Akara gives for rescuing Cain is a Magic ring of ilvl 7 on all difficulties.
Similarly, the ring from Ormus is a Rare ring of ilvl 21 on all difficulties.
And for example the inventory of Akara always caps out at ilvl 12, thus she is never able to offer a wand with a high level skill like Decrepify.



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 22 2018 09:55am

Keep forgetting to take screenshots.
Blessed Hammer turned out to be a poor choice for >p1, simply because the de-sync on TCP/IP is so excessive in earlier patches.
I keep burning mana (potions) because enemies aren't at all where they appear to be.


On my way to Radament, I was glad to have such high fire resistance. These fuckers come in millions, and keep scattering all over the place.




And I'm glad I'm finally seeing some Exceptional items drop, in part because it means I can gamble more frequently now.
Sadly enough, these boots are actually one of the best I've found so far. Rare items rarely drop.
+30 FRW, displayed as Fastest.




They weren't very welcoming in there.
Mate didn't appreciate that, so he created a bunch of corpses, broke their table, stole their jewelry, and moved on to bigger things.




The Summoner was the fourth way in Arcane Sanctuary, it took absolutely forever to get through the damn place.

Mate's still only level 27, and most leechers are even lower, so I'm considering doing some XP runs continuing.
I'm fighting level 44 monsters at this point, and it's possible for Duriel to one-shot me. He's a mean bastard with monstrous damage. Proper dangerous!
In earlier patches, Duriel uses the Paladin skill Charge, and it does nasty damage.
I don't think I have a way to cheese him at this point, unfortunately.

This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 22 2018 09:31pm

Glad to see mate has caught back up. Still loving all the education on these bugs

Keep it up

For Duriel, I always hired a merc, so it will be 50-50 who gets the killing blow.

As for XP runs, I would suggest Canyon of the Magi farming maggots.

Thanks for posting this!

I had forgotten about so many "features" from the early days of this game.

As a kid I used to get so pumped up whenever a gem or skull dropped XD