Diablo II: Resurrected – Infernal Edition

Nostalgia level: 99 Gameplay: 10/10 Difficulty: 10/10 Endless farming? 10/10 Note: Hardcore only Great QoL improvements to the gameplay and graphics on point, could use some adjustments to the interface, friendslist, in-game profile, inspect characters/player profiles, statistics like the D3 interface and also an in-game trade platform (like auction house) as the player base and online players is very limited, season or not. Makes trading etc. unbareable. (on hardcore atleast)

I will always have a special place in my heart for Diablo 2. It was the game I played as a kid that made me realize that I not only preferred magic classes, but specifically pet classes/summoners. I would always remember reading up on the Necromancer prior to playing. It was probably the first game I spent years playing and online at that. It was also the game that made me realize that I didn't care for multiplayer. I remember thinking too many were obsessed over rushing/pvp or people thinking they were hot stuff abusing mechanics (I vaguely remember something involving the ITH rune). Thankfully, offline mode has the "players x" code where you can simulate the game world as if there were 1 - 8 players. It made grinding for XP and good loot much easier in the single player. Provided you can handle the stronger enemies alone. I enjoyed it so much that I jumped to buy DIablo II Resurrected when it was released on B.net and then I jumped to buy it again when it was released on Steam with the new Warlock class - a summoner as good, if not better, than the Necromancer. There are some minor nuisances like did I really need to connect to bnet when I was only playing offline. It took me too long to also realize it was seeing my copy of Diablo 2 resurrected from bnet and not steam so I wasn't getting the infernal edition/warlock stuff until I connected my bnet and steam accounts. The new warlock class was fun. I liked summoning the demons and having abilities that let you teleport the demons or the party. I made a summoner build that got through Nightmare Act 4 on players 8 before i dropped it down to players 1 because it got too tedious. I then mostly breezed through the rest of the game including beating the hardest difficulty. The only real problems being fire + physical immune enemies since that was the only types of damage the summons could do, the hirelings are terrible after Normal unless you really grind for good gear, and you get incredibly fragile without good gear yourself because your resistances are highly penalized. Fortunately, a summoner Warlock could spend the majority of stats on vitality because you didn't really need anything else and one of the skills transfers damage to the summons. The game ran mostly fine though I did have an issue in one of the act 5 areas of the hardest difficulty (frozen tundra I think) where the waypoint never showed up. Given that I also encountered doors that didn't appear to exist, they looked open, but I couldn't walk through until my summons destroyed it, I think it was bugged. It probably would've been resolved by exiting and restarting the game.