First of all, let me start off by saying if you played the original Diablo 2 and thought it was too easy, then this is definitely for you. While the original Diablo 2 was innovative and exciting, the expansion really adds a lot of enhancements and improvements as well as more difficulty to it. In fact, you might say the creators may have gone overboard with making the game more difficult.
Assassinate This!
As far as the assassin goes, her main 3 skill tabs are martial arts, Shadow disciplines, and traps. Martial arts are your standard melee attacks but with a slight twist. There are charge up moves and finishing moves. Charge ups are attacks that build in power, and are released with a finishing move. This brings a little more action involved in melee combat because you have to quick to switch between the different skills, not just click and hold. Also you can have two active charge ups at once before finishing, which amounts to massive damage. Shadow disciplines are much like the passive tab for amazons. There are passives such as claw mastery and weapon blocking which make the assassin more durable, as well as casting spells which temporarily improve various statistics, as well as a few attack spells. Lastly traps are more just as the name implies. Traps. Set them in place, and lead enemies toward them for devastating effects.
Lord of the Flies
The druid is a fairly versatile class as well. Think of him sort of like an upgraded necromancer. He can be played as a spell caster, melee fighter or even a minion commander. The skills in his shape shifting tab allow him to assume either werebear or werewolf form. As a passive bonus, shape shifting also allows a greater life capacity, as well as enhanced damage. While the thought of attacking with great fury in a morphed form, as well as casting disastrous elemental spells sound, it's quite impossible as the two trees are mutually exclusive. The druid's elemental tree focus mainly on cold and fire damage, as some of the best spells in the tree are volcano, tornado, Armageddon, and hurricane. Last the summoning tab summons various "pets" to aid you in your quest. Unlike a necromancer, who needs corpses for his minions, the druid can just summon them at will. Ravens, spirits, wolves and vines are some of the various creatures that will aid the druid.
In Hot Pursuit
Act five holds many new demons and challenges for players. Players must battle through the war torn barbarian highlands to find Baal. Fortunately, it's not an act that you really want to skip. Some of the various rewards for completing the quests are free items, approximately twenty million experience, adding an additional socket to any item, and personalizing your own item. As far as Baal is concerned, the programmers have managed to make him much more formidable than Diablo. Normally where sorceress can just static a few times and take care of the end boss, Baal life exceedingly difficult. Anyone who has been through the chaos sanctuary knows how much of a nuisance those oblivion knights and various curses such as iron maiden can be. Baal casts a form of "magical" iron maiden, so any spell cast on him will also inflict damage on the caster. Add in a touch of various destructive spells, and you're caught in a corner constantly trying to get your body. As if that wasn't bad enough, Baal casts a clone of himself, which you can't tell the difference.
They Did What?
Overall, I'm pleased with all the various improvements and enhancements with the expansion. The new 800x600 resolution is such a joy to view, as it's sharper and a little more detailed. At first everything looks so small, but you quickly adjust. There are also many more improvements that make the game more playable and enjoyable. Here's a short list of current improvements:
Hundreds of new magical properties - Items of all levels can now possess greater and more diverse magical powers. Some magical properties appear only on Magic Items while others appear on both Rare and Magic Items.
New Horadric Cube recipes: Numerous additional recipes for the Horadric Cube are just waiting to be discovered.
Weapon Swapping: quickly alternate between two sets of weapon/shield configurations (equipment outfitted in the left and right hands) with a click of the mouse or through a convenient keyboard shortcut.
The Stash size has been increased.
Normal set items now gain additional magical bonuses and partial set bonuses.
Holding down SHIFT and RIGHT-Clicking, when buying health potions, auto-fills any empty slots in the belt. This applies to buying scrolls of Town Portal and Identify scrolls too.
Holding down SHIFT and LEFT-Clicking on health potions in inventory, will auto-move them to the appropriate column in your belt.
Added a new 'Repair All' button for equipped items at the armorers in each Act.
Options" menu, switching to the new "Mini-Map".
8 more "Hot keys" are available to assign skills to now.
Improved the displays for character status screens:
Wells now heal hirelings.
Removed collisions for players with Minions.
Minion's health will scale up accordingly in Nightmare and Hell difficulty.
Ignore via the Party Member now ignores multiple party invite/cancel messages.
Multiple Sets can now be used at the same time.
Gems, Runes, and Jewels can now be inserted into Socketed Items while the character is wearing them.
Socketed Items can now have up to 6 Sockets.
Throwing Weapons can be replenished by repairing them.
Chests now have better drops.
Enhanced Damage and Defense now show a percentage of Enhanced Damage and Defense.
As for the balances, the developers at Blizzard have done a great job. As a matter of fact, you may say they've gotten a bit overzealous with their work. Among some of the new challenges that players must overcome, are resistances cut to 50% in nightmare and 100% in hell, various elemental immune monsters, and leeching abilities cut in half in harder difficulty levels. Teamwork becomes an absolute must, as unlike the classic Diablo 2, single players in multiple people games will find their life much, much harder. Thank god for hirelings. Hirelings become much more interactive in the expansion. Rather than the cannon fodder they were, they gain levels at their own pace, and can also be equipped with various items to improve their effectiveness. In fact, with the proper equipment, you can make them even more powerful than yourself.
The Finale
So much to do, so little time. There's so much more to the expansion but unfortunately there's only so much I can say. It's definitely going to breathe new life into the existing Diablo II and give it a whole new perspective. No more anti-social eight people hell games that end in five minutes, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction proves to be hours of endless battles and challenges.
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