Diablo II

[Kaged]

So, with Diablo III on the horizon I've decided to give Diablo II a go (just installing it now with the expansion).

My question is I've never played a Diablo before (other than this weekends D3 open beta) so is there anything I should know before I start?

Any advice from D2 vets would be welcomed as I'm clueless!

Cheers

[kalniel]

For single player and normal difficulty levels, no. Just read the manual, enjoy yourself and try out different characters/builds. For harder difficulties you might want to look up some character optimisation guides

[Kaged]

Cool sounds straightforward enough then, I shall give it a go

[Bagnaj97]

Enough str/dex/energy to equip gear *only*. *everything* else into vitality! This applies to all classes (energy shield sorceress is a notable exception) - if you don't do this you'll be too squishy for the harder difficulties. You'll get the rest of the stats you need from your gear. Act 2 mercenaries are the best, but I can't remember which auras the different types have.

Even for single player I would play on closed battle.net. Just create a passworded game. This way you can easily go multiplayer if you change your mind, and you get access to the battle.net exclusive runewords. Otherwise to play your char online it's either tcp/ip games (and the requisite firewall fiddling) or open battle.net where the hacking is utterly ridiculous.

Despite the fact it's graphically pretty poor by today's standards it's still an incredibly fun game - have fun!

[Kaged]

I went for an Assassin, been using this as a guide though not following it 100%.

Enjoying it a lot, even with its outdated graphics I can see how people were hooked to this at the time.

[fishchoy]

The fun part in the game is getting uniquie and set items ... so play on battle net as you can trade for items ... you really only start getting good items after you complete the game first time round and go into nightmare difficulty and hell ... try convince a friend to dive in as it's more fun plus you get more drops ^^

[AlexGTR]

The amount of days i spent on this game is ridiculous, reinstalled it last year and had a good blast on it for a bit. I used to have an awesome MF sorceress!!!

Cant wait for Diablo III to come out.

[Pob255]

I don't know about diablo3, the first beta videos showed that it was a very similar game to diablo and diablo2, then they did a major rework of the ui, the combat, controls, loot.
And as much as I hate to say this it does look like it's been simplified for consoles
I do hate that, CD Projekt RED has shown how to do port properly, granted it takes more work to do a major rework of a game for a port but it can be done and done well without compromising ether version.

[Lord Midas]

Before trying the D3 beta I'd only played Torchlight. Which was ace. After Torchlight I tried D2, and found both games very similar (torchlight is underground dungeon crawl only, D2 has overground too). Even the music was very similar.
D2 though apparently has better paced and specced loot drops. e.g. Torchlight can drop you a phenominal weapon early in the game and you never encounter a better weapon, even by level 30. So you are stuck with this weapon and everything else is bound for the shop. And thus you have so much cash you've nothing to spend it on. Whereas D2 paced this kind of thing better.

D2 for me was just play and equip the best and have fun. All htese best equip guides sort of spoil the fun of exploring and equiping your character with what you like.