I have been a long time player of first Diablo I, and now Diablo II and I've enjoyed the games very much. Blizzard, as a gaming company, generally has an excellent reputation for releasing stable, bug free products and the battle.net system has been mostly excellent until recently with the advent of Lord of Destruction.

The Good parts of Lord of Destruction:

1. Numerous new powerful unique and rare items to find. Of course you need this improved equipment to survive in the game, especially at Hell level.

2. An entire new act that is quite challenging. The game no longer ends when Diablo is defeated at the end of act 4.

3. Runes and Horadric Cube recipes that allow you to search for components to create your own good equipment. I for one have never been particularly lucky with having good items fall at my feet. Good stuff falls best in games with large numbers of people and I'm never fast enough to grab anything good that may fall so I mostly survive on the kindness of others or being lucky enough to find something that someone else missed. For me, the crafted and runic items are a wonderful addition and makes component hunting extra fun.

4. More good magic items. Most experienced players never even bother to pick up and identify items that are only magic (as opposed to rare or unique), I've found a number of good magic items that others have ignored because they were blue and not the rare yellow or unique gold color--I like it!

5. Two new character classes. I for one, as a female, have felt completely under represented in this game. The majority of the character classes are male, before Lord of Destruction the only two female classes were either amazon or sorcerer. Lord of Destruction has also added the (female) assassin who has a number of interesting skills. The other new class is the Druid who belongs to the male club but has the interesting ability to change into a werewolf or werebear and many other powerful abilities.

6. The ability to equip an alternate weapon. This is great both because it makes it easy and quick to switch weapons in combat and because the second weapon doesn't take up space in your stash.

7. Battle.net play is still free.

The annoying parts of Lord of Destruction:

1. Anyone who had an existing character from Diablo II really got shafted when patch 1.08 was installed (which was somewhat soothed by 1.09 but not much if you ask me). The patch made the game so hard that you were practically forced into purchasing the expansion package just so you could get equipment good enough to allow your character to survive in the game. Many skills were totally revamped, as a player with an 83rd level amazon, I for one think that blizzard really shafted my character. In the expansion package points need to be allocated totally differently, thus existing characters ended up quite different, and just generally wimpier, after the patch.

2. Physical immune monsters. In hell it's nearly impossible to play solo now. The combination of your immunities being sucked down a hundred points and physical immune monsters means you almost have to play with a group of varying characters (sorcerer, barbarian, paladin, etc.) if you wish to live very long. A physical immune monster takes less damage from physical attacks and can generally only be hurt by magical attacks.

3. Why in the world Blizzard also moved their servers when they just made such major changes to the game is beyond me. Any computer person will tell you that when you change any part of a program or system you must then give time for testing so that you can observe any negative and unpredicted occurences that may happen because of that change. And you most certainly do not try to make three major changes to your system virtually simultaneously!!

There have been two major bugs that affected battle.net characters since Lord of Destruction was activated. One involved a lot of players (myself included) opening up their characters to find them stripped of all equipment (which Blizzard fixed with a rollback to a recent backup thank goodness) and a more recent serious bug was reseting some characters to level one with no equipment or having levels stripped off them when they were kicked out of a game by a lost connection.

Blizzard just up and moved their battle.net servers to AT&T. I have not been at all happy with the service provided by AT&T's servers. If I was paying to play I'd be real hot. At times it's worse than others, but it seems to have nothing to do with the number of people playing. At times I'm constantly presented with "lost connection" messages and "interrupted connection messages" even though I have a high speed DSL account. People on modems don't seem to have as many problems as those with DSL or cable but at times it's impossible to play as you are constantly being booted out of games for no apparent reason.

4. Diablo II classic characters can't mix with Lord of Destruction Characters. Because of major changes to items, skills, stash size, etc. the two can't mix. I suppose you could call this annoying. It's an all or nothing deal, unless you leave a few of your existing characters unconverted to play in classic games.

5. Blizzard needs to make up their minds about some very important issues such as gold sharing, damage of certain skills, magic find, rare/unique item drops, damage of certain weapons and how it's figured, horadric cube recipes and rune words, etc. In two patches they've revamped a number of things AGAIN. Again new characters aren't affected as much as existing characters are. I like the game but heavens let me get used to it before you guys go changing it again!

6. Software bugs. In certain situations in a game with the druid character class playing, an "assertion error" will be generated by the game on your system. This is bad news because it takes battle.net a few seconds to realize that you are no longer there and your character could be killed in just that short time (as he/she's still standing there letting the monsters hit him). At Nightmare and Hell level experience points and gold are lost every time you die, so if this happens repeatedly it gets very annoying, very fast. Patch 1.09 has supposedly fixed the "unhandled exception" and "assertion" errors that were occuring in the game, I haven't seen one yet but I haven't had the patch that long either.

In all, I think if Blizzard stops screwing with the formula, fixes their coding problems and fixes the server problems this game will end up being much better than the original ever was. I won't stop playing my high level character but it's kind of annoying that I wasn't given the opportunity to realocate my skill points due to the differences in the new game. I think that Blizzard should have just gone ahead and done Diablo III instead of what they did here, I think people would have been much happier in the long run. See you on battle.net.

update 9-2001: Blizzard has added a number of servers to battle.net for the USEAST domain. The additional servers have eased the dropped connection problems considerably.

update 8-2002: Blizzard will soon release the next major patch for the game 1.10; although there is no firm date as of this writing. The patch promises to make a number of changes that promise to make the game quite different from what it is now--we'll see won't we.

Blizzard has taken quite a different approach over the last year to hackers that have found ways to hack the closed realm servers to cheat in a number of ways (duplicating items, server crashing hacks, trade hacks to cheat others in trades, chest hacks that cause one chest to disgorge tons of goodies, ITH item runeword silence hacks, etc.). Namely Blizzard has started tracking the cdkeys of people that use hacks and in certain serious types of hacks and cracks they have deleted closed realm accounts--about 27000 accounts were deleted in the past few months. In addition to account deletions, the most offending game keys were also banned making that particular copy of the game unusuable on the realms.

Cheaters never prosper but unfortunately there were some innocents that play at net cafes or on the "friend's computer" who also had their accounts wiped because they play with the same game keys used by a hacker--not fair but I guess there was no real way to separate the wolves from the lambs. Blizzard had to do something and they most definetly did it in a big way.

What finally forced Blizzard's hand was the huge amount of lag being caused on the closed realms by these hacks and cheats; it was making the game unplayable for everyone else. The new patch will supposedly contain many efforts to combat cheating on the realms including hacked/bugged item detectors and dupe detectors that will delete hacked duplicates of some of the more rare unique items (like Windforce bows).

I still enjoy the game very much but I hope they don't mess with the formula too awfully much. I would like to see them fix the extremely wimpy druid by beefing up his skills and correcting some other inequities in character design, but I don't look forward to making new characters again. The new patch promises to have a "isolated" class of character known as a "ladder character." These characters will not be able to mix with existing characters, only other ladder characters. By doing this Blizzard is attempting to keep all of these characters on the same level playing field by limiting them to what they can find and trade for amongst themselves, (no more muling 20 sojs to your new level character to go out and buy the hottest goodies, you get to find it all on your own).

Once the patch comes out I'll post here again.



Recommended: Yes