Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (Windows)

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Description

After the demonic brothers Diablo and Mephisto were finally defeated, the heroic adventurer who has accomplished that feat returned to the Pandemonium Fortress, summoned by Archangel Tyrael. The third evil brother, Baal, has survived by obtaining his Soulstone. He has raised an army and attacked Mount Arreat in the Barbarian Highlands. The protagonist must venture there and defeat Baal once and for all.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is an expansion to Diablo II. It adds Act V which concludes the overarching story, offers a new area with more powerful enemies and six quests to complete. It also enhances and modifies the base game by adding the following:

• Two new character classes: female Assassin (has access to martial arts, shadow techniques, and traps) and Druid (can shape-shift and summon animals to fight on his side)
• Companions can stay with the player character for the duration of the entire game. They also level up on their own, can be equipped, healed, and resurrected
• Additional weapons and items
• The quest item Horadric Cube allows creation of custom items
• Runes can be placed into sockets and provide further bonuses when arranged in a particular order
• Charms can be found and placed in the inventory for various benefits
• Jewels have random bonuses
• The player can switch between two sets of weapons and armor
• An expanded stash for storing items, two times the size of the original one
• 800x600 resolution is available alongside the former 640x480

Screenshots

Alternate Titles

• "暗黑破壞神2之毀滅之王" -- Chinese title (traditional)
• "暗黑破坏神II：毁灭之王" -- Chinese title (simplified)
• "D2:LoD" -- Informal title

Part of the Following Groups

• Diablo II series
• Diablo series
• Gameplay feature: Armor / Weapon sets
• Gameplay feature: Auto-mapping
• Games made into comics
• Games with randomly generated environments

User Reviews

A great game with amazing re-playability	phorque (141)
Baal is finished....	Chris Martin (1112)
Lord of Destruction improves upon the original D2 in almost every way imaginable and brings a lot more replayability to the game.	Droog (463)
There is nothing like D2:LoD v1.10. Nothing at all.	phlux (4144)
Brilliant!	MAT (66245)
Dungeon Crawl with COOL ITEMS	Evan Peterson (2)
Click Click Click - Simply Boring	The Gay Elf (16)
The Coolness factor.	El-ad Amir (110)
All new adventure; all old gameplay.	JPaterson (9096)

The Press Says

Mana Pool	Apr 19, 2012	9.6 out of 10	96
PC Gameplay (Benelux)	Sep, 2001	89 out of 100	89
GameStar (Germany)	Jul, 2001	89 out of 100	89
PC Action	Jul 06, 2001	88 out of 100	88
JeuxVideoPC.com	Sep 17, 2006	17 out of 20	85
Svenska PC Gamer	Aug, 2001	83 out of 100	83
Power Unlimited	Aug, 2001	82 out of 100	82
Tap-Repeatedly/Four Fat Chicks	Jul, 2002		80
Super Play	Aug, 2001	8 out of 10	80
Game Informer Magazine	Sep, 2001	7.5 out of 10	75

Forums

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Trivia

Comic

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.

Easy Map

A few days after the release of 1.11 patch, players could see Blizzard's new anti-hacking method called Warden in action. Over 30,000 cd-keys and battle.net accounts have been banned for the use of Easy Map - a utility intended to reveal the whole map. Players didn't really care about the bannings as for the last couple of months Blizzard took no action to reduce cheats or fix bugs in Diablo. The creator of Easy Map, a 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 employed by Blizzard, hired to create a flawed map hack and thus detect players who had used it. Blizzard denies any connections though.

Patch

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 only fix bugs, but add many new gameplay features, made the game a lot harder in hell difficulty and made it much more difficult 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). Included were new cube recipes, which enabled the player to upgrade their runes even up 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. The leveling curve was steep; about five months after release, there were only two characters at level 99 on the EU realm with a third on the way.

Another addition was the "World Event" - after vendoring a large number of "Stone of Jordan" rings, there was a chance to spawn "Uber Diablo" - a beefed-up version of the original monster - in a random game. Killing it rewarded the player with the extremely powerful "Annihilus Charm", the only unique Small Charm in the game.

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."

References

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

Thanks

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

Awards

• GameSpy
  • 2001 – Expansion Pack of the Year (Readers' Choice)
  • 2001 – Best CG or Full-Motion Video Cinematics of the Year

Information also contributed by Ajan, phlux, Scott Monster and weregamer

Related Web Sites

• DiabloII.net - The Unofficial Diablo Site (One of the most detailed and comprehensive unofficial Diablo II websites on the internet.)
• Diablo II Tomb of Knowledge (This website provides information on all the special items, skills, characters, horadric cubes recipes, quests, monsters... etc. There are also many useful strategies written by advanced gamers for each character. There is much to learn from this website without being exposed to any kind of spoiler.)
• Diablo Universe (Blizzard's Complete Support Page for the Diablo Series)
• Lord of Destruction Hints & Cheats (Using these hints you'll be nudged along so you can solve the game yourself.)
• Official D2:LoD Promotional Website (Blizzard's official promotional website for Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.)
• Official Web Site (Blizzard's official web site for "Diablo II" add-on, with pretty much everything you'll want to find related to the game.)