It's out now (July11
2K1), And so far I have to say its pretty damn cool. It fixed most all of the
bugs that the original had, even though it added a
multitude of new ones. But I'm focussing on the new features.
Runes, all though their stats are often not amazing, make some very cool items when properly combined into
rune words. The
elite items are VERY hard to get... Even plain ones.
Jewels are especially cool because they can be
rare. Some other improvements include rare throwing weapons that can be recharged, charged items that contain skills that anyone can use (eg amulet of teleportation, can you say teleporting baba?), magic only
prefix and
suffixes, the new
char classes, the list goes on. Since the monsters on hell mode are now ilvl 90 max, they are EXTREMELY strong and barbs/amazons/paladins are basically fucked. (not hammerdins) They need really good damage elite weapons to fight in these
zones which virtually no one has yet. Since
sorceresses don't need much
equip to fight, they are DOMINATING the ladder. It was reset shortly after the expansion was released. I have a 76, that I started before ladder reset, then I made a new one and got her to 77 in 2.5 days WITH sleeping. She's 84 now 1 billion
EXP. The main reason why they do so well is fire wall is now 8700 damage with max mastery/wall. That's with a lot of +skill items on too though. The new uniques in the expansion really really own. 500 damage bows... ITD too.
See www.battle.net/diablo2exp and www.diabloii.net for more info.
The game does have a lot of bugs even though they claim its far under the standard for the industry... I suggested that they make a page on their site with a form for bug submission, and then the top ten bugs would be listed so people had a resource to tell if their bug was known about or not. Then users would
vote as to whether or not they had experienced *particular bug* or not. I emailed the idea to the web master at
blizzard (Geoff Frazier web@blizzard.com) And he didn't like my idea very much because he is a RETARD!! Anyway he said I'd have to email it to tech support. Feel free to email him and tell him how fucking dumb he is =) hehe anyway the point of my idea is that the tech support guys (who are fags I've spoken to most of them) get like 20000 bug reports a day and it could be automated by a simple page. They get so many bug reports they have an autoresponse that they just copy and send to anyone who gives a report. What a huge waste of time!!!!!!!!
Back to the real topic here, the expansion. Overall I would reccomend it to anyone who disliked diablo2 anyway because it fixes most of the things that were wrong with d2. And (sofar) it is pretty enjoyable.
Socketing is definitely a BIG part of the game now.
You can buy a copy at www.ebworld.com
btw.
If you have any questions about diablo II or Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, you can email me at thender21@yahoo.com