So we started
playing another round of Diablo II. We are using the Nezeramontias mod.
It makes everything harder, adds some new skills, ups the maxium
levels, and adds lots of monsters and items. My brother Chris and a
couple of his friends started with us. Chris and one of his friends is
still playing. Another one of Chris' friends played a session or two.
Fulton has a Sorceress, Woo has a Necromancer, I have a Paladin, Chris
is playing a Barbarian, and the last friend is playing a bow Amazon.
You get lots of space. Maybe 10 times the stash space, cube space, and
about 4 times the personal space. It makes it a lot easier to keep
things around without mules, though there are more things to keep
around. The extra personal space is needed because the resistant
penalties are 10% for Normal, 100% for Nightmare, and 250% for Hell so
you need a lot of charms to make up those penalties.
Character levels now max out at 750 with less experience required per
level. You also get six attribute points per level. But skills cost a
lot more. First off, the minimum levels required for skills now go up
to 45 and skills with higher minimum levels require multiple skill
points (up to 6) to go up a level. Skills also get more expensive as
they go up in levels. You can find or buy skill books to get more skill
points.
Actually, you can buy so much stuff in shops now. Skill books, runes,
key to the sets, key to the uniques, gems up to a level past perfect.
Everything is muy expensive, especially the new items. A skill book is
about 350k, gems are 150k, runes are cheap but you have to buy a lot to
get anything reasonable anyway. It does give you something to actually
do with your money.
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There are a
few more sets and there are now mercenary sets, designed to be used by
mercenaries. Mercenary items are Ethereal so although player characters
can use them the items will break eventually. You can use a key to the
sets to turn a magic item into a corresponding set item. I used several
to eventuall complete Cleglaw's set and the Angelic set.
You can get doll items now. Powerful uniques might leave a doll. There
are three sets of six dolls which can be transformed into extra special
items. The dolls are two or four spaces big and they do take up a bit
of room in your stash. Monsters can also drop a soul. Each soul type
gives different bonuses as a ring item. Coldworm soul is pretty cool
since it gives lots of resistances and you can't be frozen.
You can also add souls to a special amulet given to every starting
character. The amulet gives you bonuses in abilities, spell use, and
can even lower skill and item costs. It takes a lot of souls to get any
bonuses. The lower bonuses start at 32 souls and the lower skill cost
bonus starts at 1024 souls. I only have about 105 souls so far. The
amulet also keeps track of non-magic skills for those of us who like to
keep score.
There are some special areas. A tough dungeon in Act I, the Gauntlet in
Act II, the Infernal Pit in Act V. We did the Infernal Pit in our last
session. Lots of "Treasure" monsters that are awfully tough. But they
dropped huge amounts of unique and rare items, It took us forever to
cart the items back to camp and sort through them. Of course everybody
died several times doing that pit.
All in all it's a challenging mod that makes Diablo II fun again. At
times it's a bit juvenile and at times the game crashes but overall it
really expands the base game.
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