Various Thoughts

So despite my earlier comments I decided to take another character through the Reign of Terror Mod. An Assassin/Nightblade this time, as Assassin was one of my favorite D2 classes.

My opinion regarding the lack of balance didn’t change in the early game; if anything it hardened due to how much more powerful Dragon Talon was compared to the other starting attack abilities. But then a funny thing happened after unlocking Claws of Thunder… all my memories of blazing through D2 insta-gibbing hoards of enemies with janky abilities came rushing back the moment it triggered.

Like, the unbalanced builds and items are the entire point of the game. Strange how I forgot that.

Just to properly compare, I also ran my Deceiver and Druid builds through Elite (after slightly revising them, different gun/boots for the former and components/devotions for the latter) to avoid looking at unmodded GD through nostalgia glasses. And ultimately I still like base GD a whole lot more: The enemy variety, class/build variety, (semi-) reactive quests, destructive environments, and the extreme amount of work that went into balancing all the various items and abilities against one another.

Not sure now whether I want to drag my remaining six post-Normal builds through Elite, try out the RoT’s Barbarian class (one thing I loved about D2‘s Barbarian was that it could dual-wield 2H weapons), or try something ‘new’.

Basically, I’ve reached the point where I can’t really theorycraft new builds without stepping on the toes of my existing ones. So I thought I might try out a sort of roguelike approach to the game. Essentially start a new Hardcore character, then pick the first class based on whatever abilities the first epic drop has and second class based on the abilities of the first legendary.

Could be interesting… or could be aggravating. I think the most annoying part would be having to wait for level 50 (the point legendaries start dropping) to pick up the 2nd class, but then again it might give me a reason to use abilities and ability combos I normally wouldn’t. I guess we’ll see.

Some time back, either earlier this year or last year, I had the urge to replay Diablo II. So I did… only to find that compared to Grim Dawn there was just too much missing in the quality of life department. Flash-forward to this week where I discovered the Reign of Terror Mod, which aims to re-create the first two Diablo games.

A goal it succeeds at remarkably well. Perhaps a bit too well.

While there is indeed no need to deal with equipment repair, lack of consumable stacking, slow health/mana regen, nor lack of stash space or respec options while playing this Mod, some of D2‘s less pleasant aspects are still faithfully imported. Namely the issues of massively oversized maps full of trash mobs (particularly damning in Acts IV-VI) and Hero monsters being inexplicably surrounded by 6+ ‘Minions’ with 5-10 times the health of other enemies. There’s a damn good reason Maphack was a required utility when playing back in the day and it wouldn’t have hurt anything to scale down the map size by about a quarter.

Annoyances aside I ended up hacking & slashing my way through Normal difficulty (unlike base Grim Dawn the Veteran option here is an actual hard mode option which should be avoided by new players) with a 50/50 Amazon-Arcanist combo. Ended up at level 55 with 33 Devotion points; Wraith, Candle, Quill, Chariot, Widow, and Vulture. Main skills being Lightning Strike, Elemental Exchange, Overload, Mental Alacrity, and Inner Focus, with Inner Sight and Valkyrie at half-max (including item bonuses). Elemental Balance, Sphere of Protection, Conversion, Arcane Will, Star Pact, Critical Strike, Retreat, Elemental Strike, and the Dodge line all at 1 point (pre-item bonuses).

My biggest complaint, aside from the map size issue, ultimately ends up being a notable lack of balance. Once you get the Horadric Cube and can make your first level 20ish runeword weapon, basically every non-set drop becomes worthless; I used the Serenity Spear (a level 22 craftable item) straight through Baal, Diablo, and hoards of level 50+ monsters no problem. Attack/Defense ratings also seem to be out of wack. You basically need 1k in chapter II, 1500 in chapter IV and over 2k by the end of VI. Those are insane numbers for normal difficulty. Particularly considering you don’t have access to equipment augments here.

To have any chance of hitting anything, you’ll have to rush your class’ base Attack-boosting or Defense-reducing skills (for me that was Overload and Inner Sight). That in turn puts a damper on your damage output and defense, making much of the early game a stop-go affair of blazing through most trash mobs only to suddenly get nearly 1HKO’d by a particular monster type or Hero pack (meanwhile main bosses are just massive damage sponges). Which brings me to a couple other legacy issues: Mana Burn and damage-immune enemies.

Diablo II didn’t have an extensive resistance reduction system and featured enemies that were completely immune to particular types of damage. Grim Dawn in comparison does have a complex RR system which let’s you exclusively focus on one damage type above all others along with a ton of conversion abilities to support it. You could even say the entire game’s built around that concept. This Mod disregards that and includes the damage-immunes, which can result in even more momentum-killing tedium.

And then there’s Mana Burn. Why would you faithfully re-create such a massively unbalanced aspect of the game? There’s no rhyme or reason behind which enemies have the ability, the player themselves can’t use it or defend against it, and quite a number of enemies inexplicably being immune to mana leech only compounds the issue. It’s thankfully not present in Act VI (the D1 re-creation), but that only makes the hassle of the previous chapters all the more galling.

At this point I don’t think I’m going to replay it until the apparently intended (based on the ‘to-do’ list) item balance overhaul occurs. Possibly not even then since while it’s certainly better than the base Diablo II experience, it’s notably inferior to the base Grim Dawn experience. Honestly I’d probably like a Mod that balanced the D2 classes and items to match GD‘s content a whole lot more.