Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
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Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is an expansion pack for the popular hack and slash action role-playing game Diablo II. Unlike the original ''Diablos expansion pack, ', this is an official expansion designed by Blizzard North.
New features
- A fifth act taking place in and around Mount Arreat in the northern Barbarian Highlands, with an additional act boss, Baal.
- Ethereal items: These items do not fully exist in the mortal plane and appear translucent to the human eye. Because of this, they cannot be repaired, but they also have better characteristics and lower requirements than their repairable equivalents.
- Jewels: items serving a similar purpose to gems in that they can be placed in socketed items, but which have random characteristics as opposed to the set characteristics of gems and runes.
- Charms: items giving boosts to character's stats when kept in the inventory of the player.
- Two new character classes: the Assassin and the Druid.
- An expanded private stash (double the Diablo II stash).
- An alternate weapon/shield setup that can be switched between via a hotkey in gameplay.
- Runes: stones that give powerful attributes to a socketed item when placed in it or even more powerful bonuses when placed in a certain order forming a "runeword" (see section below for more information).
- Hirelings (mercenaries) can now follow the player outside of the Act in which they were hired. They can also be equipped with armor, a helm, and a hireling-specific weapon (as well as a shield in some cases). Hirelings also gain experience and can be resurrected (for a price equivalent to their level) when killed.
- Class-specific items: new items that only a specific character class can use. These items often contain class-specific bonuses, often adding additional skill points for that character class.
- Elite items: more powerful versions of items following the Normal and Exceptional items.
- New unique items, including many Exceptional and Elite Uniques.
- New set items, including sets that use Class-specific items (ie. only one character class can complete certain sets).
- The game can now be played at 800x600 resolution, up from the standard 640x480.
Rune words
Rune words are a combination of specific runes that are inserted into a socketed item in a specific order, producing an enhancing effect on the item. Rune words are especially powerful in versions 1.10 and 1.11, although many of the more potent, higher-level rune words are restricted to realm ladder play only. Some rune words are considered by some to be extremely overpowered and therefore overpopular, such as the Enigma, pictured right.
Assassin
The Assassin is primarily a melee class, but she is more subtle than the barbarian and the paladin and does not rely on brute strength. The shuriken related skill tree and the katar give this character a much more East Asian feel than the West Asian/Muslim Hashshashin they are named after.The assassin introduces a very different style of play into Diablo II. Her shadow disciplines consist of Amazon-style passives and barbarian-style masteries, along with a few spells such as Mind Blast which confuse the enemy. Traps are a new way of attacking enemies; she can lay five at a time, and once laid, they fire (or activate) a given number of times at nearby enemies before dissipating.
The Assassin can cast spells from the Martial Arts, Shadow Disciplines, and Traps skill trees.
Druid
The Druid is the second class added to the game with the Lord of Destruction expansion. Druid skills revolve around either an elemental build, shapeshifting build, or a summoning build.A Druid who chooses the path of an elementalist can use skills such as Volcano, Firestorm and Molten Boulder, while the latter choice of Druid focus on lycanthropy and summoned animals (such as ravens, bears and wolves) to slay enemies.
Shapeshifting Druids have the ability to change into either Werewolf or Werebear form, with each form offering unique advantages.
Patch history
The expansion was released in Summer 2001 as version 1.07, the same version as the beta, but the 1.08 patch was available for download on the same day. Within a few months, 1.09 was released. This was the last patch for two years.
The much hyped patch 1.10, released on October 28, 2003, radically changed the game by increasing the difficulty of monsters (especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties). Blizzard also implemented a system of "synergy" bonuses between skills to give players a reason to invest in low level skills, added more high level unique items and rune words, enabled resistance-lowering skills to break immunities, and provided a new hidden Realms-only quest to defeat Uber Diablo and gain a special, powerful unique charm called Annihilus. The patch was preceded by the Rust Storm, a sweeping clean-up of most hacked, duped, and otherwise illegitimate items on the Realms.
The patch also introduced the Ladder, a competitive mode of Realm play that lets you get your name on a list akin to the "High Score" listing in arcade video games. The Ladder is reset periodically – when this happens, all Ladder characters are converted to normal characters. This provides a fresh and equal start for everyone once in a while, even though Blizzard does not reset the Ladder very often. It was reset twice in two years, at which time a batch of new rune words was also released. The last reset was on August 1, 2005, for the release of patch 1.11.
Patch 1.11 was a surprise for many Diablo II players, since many people from the team who made the game (and the patches up to 1.10) had left the company to found Flagship Studios. The patch introduced, among various enhancements and minor bug fixes, another Uber-quest – this time involving all three Prime Evils. The reward is the Hellfire Torch, another unique charm. On face value this charm is more powerful than its predecessor, but some players contest that the 10% bonus to experience gained makes the Annihilus charm more valuable, especially when both the difficulty involved in obtaining it, and the high experience penalties in 1.11 are taken into consideration. But the Annihilus charm is generally rare now, as to obtain it one has to sell a lot of Stones Of Jordan, a ring generally regarded as the best and most expensive ring in the game (and an item that was heavily duplicated by exploiting bugs in earlier patches). The Torch however just requires a player is able to slay certain bosses on Hell difficulty, which is a much cheaper (albeit, harder) method.
In early June 2006 there was a server side patch installed that allow the movement of Gheeds Fortune Grand Charm, Hellfire Torch Large Charms, and the Annihilus Small Charm into the trading window.
Class histories
Trivia
- Some undead enemies, such as Zombies, Ghouls, etc., utter words every once and a while. You usually hear them moan, but sometimes you can hear them saying "Brains," especially the unique zombie "Corpsefire" in the Den of Evil.
- Enemies such as "Carvers" and "Fallen" will utter names of different super unique monsters such as "Rakanishu", "Colenzo"--both of which are super uniques of the general Fallen type--and occasionally the name of the weapon "dagger".
- Fallen (or upper class equivalent) Shamans utter the name "Bishibosh," which is another name of a super unique monster--and again, one of the same base type as the Shamans.
- When fallen shaman die, sometimes you can hear them mutter "coward"
- Fallen Shamans will often say Mephisto and "Rakakishu," a clear pun.
External links
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