A trip on the nostalgia lane - Diablo 2 Resurrected

We just got a real nostalgia game to play. I actually met my fiancé in Diablo 2 via a mutual online friend, which makes the game maybe even a bit more special to me.

It's been fun checking out the lobby and see other people's characters there. There also seems to be some conversations, which is nice.

The new front end

The new front end is absolutely gorgeous. And one of the things I did straight away was to compare the new front end with the old one, the game offers the possibility with a single button. There are so many beautiful things added.

The difficulty of boosting new characters

Back in the old days, you could just boost a new character straight to hell difficulty. But at some point, they decided to make things harder and added minimum levels you could complete one boss set at the last act. Now you can't just quickly get a friend to help you create a new character, you have to grind with the tiny level character. That is slightly annoying, and I think that feature should really just have been removed. Especially since you can't just switch the build of your character like you can in Diablo 3, I would think it would be ok to be able to get a new character going faster.

The drop rate of items

The drop rate is ridiculously low compared to newer games. In Diablo 3 you could start a ladder character, and in a couple of days, you would have (not 24 hours a day of gaming!) a pretty ready character to start grinding ultimate gear for. In Diablo 2 you can't probably even get to hell difficulty in a couple of days unless of course, you play eight-player games, which I normally don't do. I do think the most rewarding gaming experience is somewhere between the two games.

But a really positive note, just a couple of days ago I was playing with my fiancé and we got our first-ever drop of Death's Fathom.

My experiences with the game so far

The game has been quite buggy. It has easily crashed multiple times during a few-hour gaming session. Hopefully, Blizzard will do something about that before the first ladder starts.

The town portal is also occasionally a bit buggy. You might get stuck for a while on the loading screen after trying to go to the towns, this seems to happen especially if you are in a hurry to save your mercenary from dying from poison, or are in a rush back to help your teammates with something. Also, there is a bug where you enter a portal, and instead of actually getting through the portal, you end up back in town next to the town portals.

The quest display feels a bit buggy as well. If you are in the middle of a quest completing animation, you cannot view other quests. But this is a quite small inconvenience.

There are also all the old bugs in the game, like teleporting monsters (those that were nowhere near you a moment ago and now just killed you standing next to you).

One mistake I made was to search up my old highly optimized sorceress build. I quickly noticed that making that character without the optimal gear is just not very handy. Now after playing for a week or so, I can actually teleport without constantly drinking mana potions. I can also use both my frozen orb and my chain lightning without it immediately draining all of my mana. Now playing is getting more and more enjoyable. Though soon I will have to start over when the ladder starts... but I do think I will first spec my ladder sorceress as a blizzard one to do some damage.

The thing I know I missed the most, though, is the frozen orb skill. I know it's not the best skill, but it's by far my favorite. Back in the "good old days", I think I had like 8 sorceresses, out of which 6 were orbers. They had a frozen orb also in Diablo 3 but the range is a lot shorter and the skill just always felt off to me. But now I'm back to my old orb skill and I love it.

All in all, I've really enjoyed playing the game. I've mostly now played solo or with my fiancé, but during the ladder season it might be beneficial to actually join some public games as well to get experience easier. And if I really want to get closer to level 99, I'll need to go take part in some Baal runs. Hopefully, they'll get the biggest bugs fixed and the ladder season started soon because otherwise, they are likely to lose many of the players straight at the beginning.