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.