Diablo II Act Five and some Thoughts

In my brain Diablo II ends with Act IV.  I mean, you kill Diablo, whose name was on the box, just like in the original, you feel like you’re done.  So once that was done, my arrival in Act V and the town of Harrogath, home of the barbarians, felt a bit strange.

Deckard Cain is always there waiting for me

That isn’t to say I am knocking the Lord of Destruction expansion.  It brought a lot to the table, like new classes and the coveted upgrade from 640×480 to 800×600 video resolution.  But the actual content… it only stuck with me in a very vague way.  Something about being in ice tunnels and catapults… though that latter might have been from Diablo III, which itself is already eight years old at this point.

And you don’t even get an opening quest to send you off into the wild.  I mean, sure, you got the pep talk about Baal, so you know who the final boss is, but beyond that you don’t even get a “good luck storming the castle.”

So I just headed out the gates to see what I could see.

Cain’s words about Harrogath being untouched only apply to inside the town.  Just outside are the armies of hell who have the place under siege.  And there were catapults to destroy, so I did at least remember that bit.

You only get the first quest at the far end of the first zone, once you have cleared enough stuff out.  Then it is back to town for an update and a plea to go into the next area and release captured barbarians.

The next zone is more of the same.

I will say that the zone tiles were all new, so it wasn’t a repeat of any of the last four acts.  And there are new mobs, some new mob mechanics, and all that, but I wasn’t feeling a lot of attachment to it either.  That may be due to the new zones being somewhat sprawling in an aimless sort of way.

I freed the barbarians, the reward for which was the ability to put some sockets in a piece of gear.  I bought the highest armor class piece of chest armor I could find, put sockets on that, then put two runes in it, which ended up being the last item upgrade I did during the game.

My memories of Diablo II don’t include crap itemization and drops, but here I was in Act V and I was still wearing a couple of items from Act I because I had yet to find anything better.  And I think the most recent piece of gear was from Act III.

Basically, there isn’t any feeling of planned gear progression.  Some of the stuff at the vendors gets better as you level up, but not radically so in most cases.  My rogue companion had a very good bow with two sockets that I picked up in Act II and I never once saw anything better drop or show up at a vendor.

My stash was overflowing with gems and runs and whatnot, just waiting for a good item to use them on, and I got nada.  I complained about pre-expansion itemization in Diablo III, where it felt bad, but at least it did progress somewhat regularly and, more important, it got fixed with the expansion.

Anyway, I carried on, found the start of the ice caves.  There I realized how nice the open plains had been to me.

Having spec’d as a Hammerdin, as I mentioned last time, I was pretty dependent on that attack in order to kill things.  You launch the Blessed Hammer and it spins around you in an ever widening spiral, applying damage to any mob it passes through.  A pretty good attack when you’re in the thick of things, though the spiral does open up wide enough between orbits that it does miss mobs at times.  It only stops when the hammer fades after it has traveled its full distance, or it runs into something solid, like a wall.

Caves are nothing but walls, so my Blessed Hammer often faded as soon as I launched it.  So I learned to train things back to open areas to make better use of it.  Eventually I found one of the people I was looking for as a follow up quest.

Really, I only vaguely remember why I came here…

There was a quest update, and then more caves.  I could feel myself starting to lose interest in the cave crawl, something not helped by the fact that waypoints seem poorly scattered.  There were the usual full complement of them, but I somehow managed to miss three of them along the way.

I ended up popping out of the caves into an open area again, where I faced a boss challenge blocking my progress.  Something different at least.

Challenge accepted!

This was at least in a nice, open area, where my Blessed Hammer could be used to full effect.

Beyond them was the Worldstone Keep, another indoor crawl.    The mobs ramped up a bit in there and tended to come in large groups.  I hit a few points where I got overwhelmed and died and wondered if I should really bother carrying on.  The closest I came was when I died trying to get my gear back before I could toss a fresh town portal, so there was going to be a long run back to where I was.  But I persisted.  I felt I was close enough to the end that I should hang on.

And I did come to the throne of Baal.  There he throws five waves of special baddies at you, including some old favorites, as they appear to be a group from each of the previous acts, plus a special new group for Act V.  The most recognizable group was the councilors from Act III, largely because they and Mephisto were the only memorable bits of that act.

There were issues and a couple of deaths and a some regret that I didn’t thoroughly clear the whole level before I started on these event spawns, but I managed to defeat them.  Then Baal disappears through a portal and you get to follow him in for the final fight.

This way to Baal

When you get in, you find you are fighting two Baals.  There is no doubt an endless supply of testicle jokes in that.

In the chamber there is a real Baal and a fake Baal.  They look alike.  There is apparently a way to tell them apart by their name tab, but in the end fake Baal is less tanky so it becomes obvious which is which.

It is another fight with a lot of running away, using portals back to town to refill potions, and scrambling about to stay out of the way of Baal’s big attacks.  Keeping on your feet slows things down, but eventually I got the best of him.

Baal down at last

That is the queue for Tyrael to show up for another one of his expositions.

He is always impressed, isn’t he?

After that, you are about done.  You get the victory screen where it announced you have a new title.

Slayer Wilhelm at your service

And then you are tossed back out to the character screen where you can choose to start over again at two of the three difficulties.

Hell remains locked

That is it, I made it through.

Final Thoughts

Despite the low resolution and the distortion caused by the game being rendered at a 4:3 screen ratio, the whole thing was very playable 20 years down the road.

In various ways the experience of playing through was both better and worse than my memories.  A lot of the game is very well tuned and timed.  The waypoints are… mostly… spread out just right to make for nice play sessions in manageable chunks.

The play though showed, once more, that Act I is good and connects you back to the original Diablo.  Act II then takes everything up a notch and gives you a brand new feel and locale.

Then comes Act III, which isn’t bad, but which doesn’t have a lot of flavor to it.  It feels like a bit of a slog just to get to the fight with the council and Mephisto.

Act IV is short, but lively.  And, of course, you face off against Diablo again here.

After which there is Act V, a level that feels like an expansion level, tacked on and perhaps unnecessary.  It wasn’t horrible.  The team clearly had some ideas they wanted to try out.  But the whole act felt like they stretched it out more just to make sure you felt like you got your money’s worth.

Having done a play through, the question becomes what to do next.  I am not particularly keen to run through the same content at Nightmare difficulty.  I am just not that engaged.

I could try another class.  The paladin has been my go-to for ages.  I might try out a druid or an assassin, the expansion classes.  I am not sure I have ever played them at all.

I should/could play each class through at least Act I… maybe Act II… to compare the classes.  We shall see what I feel up to.

But for a 20 year old game, it isn’t so out of date as you might think.  Playing through does make me wonder how a remake or remaster would play.  The temptation to update things that feel “wrong” in 2020, like the respec option, would be strong.

Diablo II Act Four

Having made it through the long and linear third act of the game, I was deposited in the Pandemonium Fortress, the base for the fourth act.

Tyreal is there to greet you

I tend to think of this as “the short act” as well.  There are only three quests, two of which are optional, and three waypoints, including the one you start with.  Feeling a bit of completionist drive, and knowing the act to be short, I took the time to take on all three quests.

The act itself takes starts in a gray hellscape as you follow the path to the final confrontation.  Along the way I found Izual and confronted him.

Izual speaks

Finding him is worth it as the quest reward is two more points for your skill tree.

After that, you keep moving forward… though I ran into a problem in getting to the next zone, The City of the Damned.  The path there are some stairs that are on the edge of the zone and, after having circled the perimeter of the entire zone, I realized that there was one tiny bit off on one side that I had not gotten close enough to, so of course that was where the stairs were.  But I fully explored that zone.

In the city you run into Hephasto the Armorer, who works at the Hellforge.  Fighting him is a bit of a battle, and he drops some gems and runes when you defeat him.

Hephasto the Armorer

But what you really need is the Hellforge on which you destroy Mephisto’s soul stone, which you have left over after defeating him at the end of Act III.  That knocks out the second quest for the act.

From there you hit another NPC who gives you a pep talk about moving forward.

On the path forward

Tyreal has your final goal to hand as well.

The final mission

From The City of the Damned you enter the River of Flame.

That is a lot of flame

From that point you are on the route straight to Diablo.

This is where I started having some problems.  I managed to fight my way through to the five seals that you need to unlock in order to release Diablo, but forgot that clicking them spawns a boss and some minions, so clicking two in quick succession got me in over my head and I died in an awkward spot.

Also, I had not thrown up a town portal.  So it was back to the way point for a naked run to my corpse, where I put up a portal, then started kiting mobs away from my corpse.  Of course, I died a few times doing that… and blew a bunch of gold reviving my mercenary each time as well.

Eventually I got things under control, but it was one of those situations where, after I had several corpses on the floor and my gear as yet not recovered, that I started thinking about calling and end to the run.  I pressed on though, got my stuff and then, carefully, cleared out the area and clicked on the final seals.

And then Diablo himself shows up and the fight is on.

A wild Diablo appears!

And then things were slow going.  I am honestly surprised that my “seemed like a good idea at the moment” spec actually lasted this far into the game.  But here, at the final fight, it was not cutting it.  I wasn’t doing enough damage and was having to jump out through a portal for more heal potions (and to revive my eternally dead merc) way too often.

But I had planned for this.  Not too long after launch Blizzard added a reward to one of the Act I quests that let you re-spec just once.  I had been waiting until I hit a wall, so I decided now was the time.  If not on the Diablo stage, then when?

Googling paladin builds, I came across the Hammerdin spec, where you go all in on Blessed Hammer, and skills that boost its damage.  Once I had that set, I went back to Act IV and jumped back in to face Diablo.

It took me a bit to figure out how to use the spec… maybe I should have read that bit before jumping in… but I got it down after not too long and managed to bring Diablo down.  Victory was mine.

I went back to the Pandemonium Fortress and got the pat on the back from everybody.  I had defeated Diablo, something I probably last did more than 15 years ago.  But I was not done yet.  I had created my paladin as an expansion character, so there was another portal go jump through, to get to Act V, and another prime evil to slay, Baal

Deckard Cain is always there waiting for me

The first two acts I remember very well.  I’ve gone back and run them many times.  The third act was a bit hazy, while the fourth act is so short that there is little really to forget, save a few details that might get you killed.

But the fifth act, the expansion act… I was having trouble recalling anything at all about that except for being in a frozen tunnel at some point.  So I pressed on.

Diablo II Act Two

Carrying on with my 20th anniversary play through of Diablo II.  I wasn’t sure how far I would get, but I appear to have some momentum.

It has been a long time

The first act of Diablo II sets the player up in an atmosphere that is reminiscent of the original Diablo.  It could be seen as both the act that welcomes the players from the older game into something that feels familiar… everything is dark, and while there is a lot of above ground play, you spend a lot of time in dungeons as well… while introducing them to the mechanics of the new game.

Act Two changes things up.  You run off to Lut Gholein, set in the bright desert wastes.

Welcome to Act Two

This is very different from the darkness of the original and what was in the first act.

But the structure of the act, based on six quests, remains the same.  And, while there is a bright sunny desert to explore, the first quest sends you down below the town, a dark dungeon with a new tile set for the new act.

Down below town

There you fight the first boss, which is where I lost my NPC helper.  I managed to finish the battle, but I was a bit worried about getting her back.  Something in the back of my brain said that you could only revive rogues back in the first act.  But once I found the NPC who does the revives, I saw I did not need to travel.

Available for a price

Then it was back out into the desert sunshine.

Fighting cat people and vultures

But the desert is really just a way to put distance between your objectives.  The major objectives of the act all tend to be deep in some dungeon somewhere.  Somewhere.

Finding the dungeons can take a while as the random desert areas can be somewhat sprawling and you have to eyeball every grid of the map until you find what you are looking for.

The first thing you’re looking for is the Horadric Cube.  Sure, finding it in the Halls of the Dead advances the quest line and Deckard Cain is impressed when you show it to him.

Praise from Deckard

But the real reason I want the cube is that by this point in the game my stash has started to fill up with gems and the cube cans transform three of a kind into a higher quality gem.  So it is time to clean up the stash.

Cube, take me away!

Also, in a pinch, the cube is bigger on the inside than on the outside, so while it takes up four slots in inventory you have a dozen slots to play with when you open it up.

Once done there the Horadric staff is next on the list.  That is further along into the desert in a warren of rather squelchy bugs.

It is in the glowy chest one you wipe off the bug guts

After that, it is the head piece for the staff.  Once you have that and have assembled them with the cube, you are off to the palace where the tale continues.

The intro to the palace levels

Somewhere deep inside is a portal to the arcane sanctuary.  Things came forth from there and slaughtered those in the palace, so you have to clear your way down to it.  This actually went very quickly.  The random factor and the fact that the upper levels have two connections up and down, mean that it is pretty easy to just go a few rooms and find your way to the next level until you hit the cellars.

Down to the cellars

Those are a little more complicated, but I managed to stumble my way down to the bottom level and the portal to the arcane sanctuary.

The portal

The arcane sanctuary is very much its own place in the game.  An Escher-esques series of ramps, stairs, and platforms, it isn’t one of my favorite bits.

In the arcane sanctuary

There are a couple of challenges to this area.  First, a lot of it is made up of narrow paths, so you do not have a lot of room to maneuver.  More narrow than most dungeon hallways, you often find yourself having to plow though a wave of melee mobs to get to those casters in the back that are killing you.

But mostly the layout is such that your helper ends up getting hooked up trying to follow you because the pathing algorithm isn’t up to the complexity of the level.  So I end up losing my rogue friend over and over.  Sometimes the game decides to teleport her to me, sometimes I just have to do without.  But you have to keep plowing through until you find the summoner, read his book, then jump through the portal that appears.

Summoner down, time for the portal

The symbols in that screen shot are all the ones that mark the false tomb.  The real tomb is marked with the missing symbol, which is recorded in your quest log.

Though the portal puts you into the Valley of the Kings, right at the waypoint, which I always click immediately so I do not have to go through the arcane sanctuary again.  It is visually interesting, but not a place I like to linger.

The it is off to Tal Rasha’s tomb.

The tomb awaits

There are six fake tombs and one real one.  Back in the day I would run them all, just on the off chance of getting some good drops.  This time I just went for the correctly marked one.  The plinth with the symbol, the triangle, is just barely visible in the dark in the upper left of the screen shot.

From there it is another fun dungeon crawl to the room where you use the assembled Horadric staff.

Staff goes here

At that point a passage is broken open in the wall, you can see it in the upper left, which leads to the final boss.  I took the precaution of opening up a town portal in the staff room, just in case things went badly.

Fortunately, the fight went pretty well.  I remembered, from past experience, that I needed to skill up cold resist aura for this fight.  I also had saved a couple a couple of pieces of cold resist gear to wear for the fight, so I was able to do it in one go.

Fighting Duriel, the Act Two final boss

After that, the fighting is over.  In the back of the chamber you will find the angel Tyrael who has a speech for you.

Due to the fact that we had a power blip before I saved some of my screen shots… Diablo II doesn’t do the screen shot thing so all I do is press Print Screen, then tab out to paste the captured image into Paint.net, which I then crop and save… I lost all of my original screen shots from Tal Rasha’s tomb.  I was able to go back and recreate some… I fought Duriel twice… by Tyrael is gone after you speak to him.  But I have a video i took back in late 2011 of that speech.

 

After that the act is pretty much done.  You get comments from the main NPCs and are set for Act Three.

For whatever reason, I always seem to miss a couple of waypoints in this act.  ITt happened back in the day, and it happened again now.

Missed some

The Lost City is out in the desert, and once you find your destination and finish, you don’t need it ever again.  Likewise, the palace can run so fast that you end up in the arcane sanctuary pretty quickly and can live with just the waypoint there.

So now I have made it through the first two acts and have been deposited in Kurast for Act Three.

On the dock in Kurast

Now to see if I get through that.

Diablo II Act One

As I mentioned, for the 20th anniversary of the game last month I downloaded it and set up to play a bit, just to remind myself of what it was back in the day.

It has been a long time

I did try to run down mods that were alleged to help with screen resolution.  The problem with Diablo II is that the base game runs at 640×480, with the Lord of Destruction expansion boosting that to a big 800×600.  However, I did not have much luck on that front.  A lot of stuff I ran across was out of date.  20 years will do that.  So I opted to just go with 800×600 and rough it.

Which, honestly, wasn’t all that bad.  When you first get into the game things look blocky and distorted as the 4:3 aspect ration maps itself onto a 16:10 screen.  Everything is a bit wider than one might like.  But I found that I got used to it pretty quickly and only really noticed it when I was looking at screen shots, which show up as 800×600 4:3 images.

The main problem with getting 800×600 is that the expansion added some things that were not in the base game.  While gems were always there, charms and jewels were expansion items, and I started getting those as drops pretty early on.  So not a real run at the experience of 20 years ago, but close enough I guess.

I went with a Paladin, which is sort of my default class in the game.  I like the aura and the tanky nature of the class.

You start out in the rogues camp and there is a quest waiting for you.

Oh look, a quest!

You can see how that quest marker might have evolved into the yellow exclamation point we know in WoW.

Diablo II drives the plot via quests, but it is not at all quest obsessed.  The quest UI only has space for 6 quests per act, and if I recall right, a couple of them are optional and the final act doesn’t even have the full six.

Quests are more central to the game than in the original Diablo, but not as rampant as they are in Diablo III, and they seem almost rare relative to how most MMORPGs in the last 15 years have handled them.

Things start off slow… though the pacing is never frantic save for in a few boss fights… as you are sent forth from the camp to find some bads in a den.  You need to slay them all, which starts you on what is my own obsession, exploring all corners of the map.  Eventually you’ll find that last little demon in a side path you missed and then return to camp for a reward… and a new task.

You gain the esteem of the rogues and get one to follow you around and assist.  I had forgotten about that, but quickly came up to speed.  The rogue assistant, who is a ranged player, is the best in the game.  I recall that in Act Two you get a melee helper who jumps in and gets themselves killed a lot, compare to the rogue who hangs back, pelts mobs with arrows, and lights them up with a target marking ability.

Lighting them up is important because the game is dark, and the play of light and dark and the shadows in between is still amazing 20 years down the road.  I have said this before, but I don’t think any game I have played has done this better.  I always use this video from Act Two as a sample.

But it is everywhere in the dark underground or indoor places in the game.  I was wandering around places just to see how the shadows moved around my light source, how places remained dark until I got up close.

(Also, you can see I have the Act One rogue helper there in Act Two.)

Eventually though you have to go find the narrative voice of the series, Deckard Cain of “Stay awhile and listen…” quote fame.  He is locked away on old Tristram, the setting of original Diablo, which has fallen to the forces of evil.

Cain locked up in Tristram

Once he is freed he portals back to the rogue camp… not sure how he knew where to go, but sure… and then he starts in on what he believes is really going on.

There is another quest along the way, but it takes you along the path to where you need to be.

Charsi lost her hammer

That gets you into the final area and gives you another preliminary boss to fight.

The Smith has the hammer, or course

This is where I want to point out how much I like the map system in the game.  It is an overlay, which has its pros and cons.  You can have it up while still seeing what is going on, which is a big plus.

The map in the barracks

I do find that it can be a distraction when up though.  I find myself looking at the map and not the tactical situation if I leave it up.  And, of course, it isn’t mapped to the M key by default.  The Tab key isn’t a bad choice, but habit keeps me pressing M over and over.

Once you have fulfilled Charsi’s quest, which has an excellent reward, you’re on to Cain’s mission.

Cain and his working theory

This is where the pacing of the game shows its patience.

One of the key features of the game is the waypoint system, little teleport pads that you find as you move further into each act.  There is one in the starting base, then eight more through each of the first three acts, and they allow you to basically pick up where you left off rather than having to camp in place or walk all the way back to the start of the act to turn in quests and get updates.

My general play style is to play through to the next waypoint.  They are good ways to dice up the content into more manageable pieces.

In Act One, Charsi’s quest gets you to the Outer Cloister.  The barracks is just beyond that.

The waypoint list

That done, the final battle, where you face Andariel, is a good three waypoints down the line.  In between are levels to explore, loot to find, and mini-bosses to slay, but nothing to advance the final quest, save getting closer to it.  I am not sure a more modern game would let you wander that far without a quest update cookie or, if it did, it would likely be accused of padding out the game needlessly.

Here, it is just a nice, extended dungeon crawl, part of the experience you’ve paid for.  It isn’t in the way of the game, it is the game.

Loot is, of course, everywhere.  Some named bosses along the way almost explode in a shower of loot.

Gold spilled everywhere in the tower

But inventory space keeps you honest.  You need to carry potions and keys and scrolls and those charms you may have picked up that need to be in your inventory to work.  You cannot pick up everything, and anything good needs to be identified.  Once Cain shows up he will do it for free, but you have to portal or waypoint back to town for that.  Otherwise you have to keep identify scrolls on hand to asses the value of something.

And it often feels like feast or famine when you’re deep in a dungeon.  I will go from walking past some healing potions because I have too many in my bag and on my belt already, then get in a tough fight and suddenly I am scrambling to grab every healing potion I spot because I am running dry.

I did reach Andariel and defeated her without dying myself.  I made it through the whole of Act One without dying.  But it was a tough fight and I had run in and out of the area a lot.  I long ago learned to pull a fight like that back to the zone line so I could flee at need.  I lost my rogue helper at one point, so had to portal back to town to revive her.  But I always keep a town portal up for those fights as well.  And, after a few retreats to heal up, Andariel exploded as nicely as an ship in New Eden.

The loot fairy says yes!

Then there was the sorting through the drops.  There was a set item, which I think were also expansion things.  The problem is that once you get a piece of gold level gear, it is hard to find a replacement that scratches all the same itches.  I got a gold scepter early on, have to level up into it, and then used it for the full first act as nothing else I found came close.

And so Act One was done.  I moved on to Act II, arriving to the welcome in Lut Gholein.

Welcome to Act Two

Act Two is out in the desert, a bright and sunny landscape unlike that of Act One.  But there are still many dark, underground places to explore.  We shall see how far I get on that.