Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Trivia

In the Manual, the developers give thanks to several people you wouldn't expect. Sluggy Freelance, Isaac Asimov, and Scott Kurtz of PVP.

Contributed by Santa (847) on Aug 10, 2006.

Few days after the release of 1.11 patch, players could see Blizzard's new anti-hacking method called Warden in action. Over 30000 cd-keys and battle.net accounts have been banned for the use of Easy Map - utility intended to reveal the whole map. Players didn't really care about bannings as for the last couple of months Blizzard took no action to reduce cheats of fix bugs in Diablo. The creator of Easy Map, German programmer nicknamed Netter, infamous for modifying his meph bot to steal user's cd-keys which were later sold on Netter's site, was suspected by some players to actually be Blizzard's employee, hired to create flawed map hack and thus to detect players which use it. Blizzard denies any connections though.

In the game press enter and type soundchaosdebug and confirm it with another enter. You will see many different sounds from the game at the same moment. Type it again to turn it off.

On official Diablo II site Blizzard Ent. published information of a monster called Reziarfg. This beast cannot be seen neither in Diablo 2 nor Diablo 2: LoD. It is a joke as Reziarfg read backwards is Gfrazier - one of Blizzard employees.

The most important changes in the 1.10 patch were play balance changes. The most powerful character skills were weakened, the least powerful ones strengthened. The concept of "skill synergies" was added, making characters that grew naturally toward specific goal skills more powerful than those who kept their skill points unspent until the best skills were available and spent them all there.

The immediate result was that all the players with the "best" characters custom-built to exploit the imperfect balance of skills became much much weaker. Of course, a new generation of optimizations followed, with a new family of "best builds" coming out. But on the whole, the question "what is the most powerful character" now gets the answer "There are many. Here are some ideas, pick the one you like most" or even "pick the attack skill you like most and max out the skill and its synergies" instead of "Do exactly this." To that extent, the play balance changes are a big success.

On October 28th, 2003, over 2 years after announcing there would be another patch, Blizzard released Patch 1.10 for Diablo II and Lord of Destruction. The patch did not fix bugs, but add many new gameplay features, made the game a lot harder in hell difficulty and made it much harder to achieve level 99 by making it so you could not visit the "Secret Cow Level" more than once and adding penalties to experience gaining. It also added more than 100 new unique items as well as better stats on rare items (such as 400% enhanced damage, which wasn't possible before). It also added new cube recipes, which enabled the player to upgrade their runes even to ZOD runes. The most important change was the addition of the "ladder mode", a special realm which could only be entered by ladder characters - so it was not possible to move the godly items from 1.09 to that realm, giving every player a fair chance to compete on the ladder ranking list. Currently (2004-03-10), there are only 2 chars with level 99 on the Europe realm, a third one could become 99 soon but he did not level for weeks now. This proves that although it is still possible to get level 99, it virtually takes ages.

Another addition was the "World Event" - after selling the much-duped "Stone of Jordan" rings, there was a chance to spawn "Uber Diablo", a beefed-up version of the original monster, which was hard to beat and dropped an unique small charm called "Annihilus" with godly stats. The intention behind this seemed to get rid of all the duped rings, that's the reason why there were a lot of World Events taking place shortly after the patch, another batch was after the discovery on how it worked exactly and after this, there were virtually none.

Contributed by phlux (4157) on Mar 10, 2004.

November 14, 2001, Dark Horse Comics published Diablo: Tales of Sanctuary, a comic book that connects many characters from the game, like barbarian, necromancer, and some more, telling three new stories and setting a new quests in the middle of Baal's invasion.

Contributed by MAT (35262) on Nov 16, 2001.