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  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • The Summoner. You fight through a reality-bending Escher twister full of demons in search of a power-mad sorcerer, who keels over in two or three hits on Normal difficulty. The weakest super-unique creature in the game, hands down. Only the non-boss uniques in the first act are squishier. On the other hand, be very careful while trying to approach him, as while he's incredibly frail, he can do the same to you in very short order.
    • It is very ironic that in this game, the Three Prime Evils, the biggest of bads amongst those who exist in the Sanctuary, can fall into this trope that you might think that the Super Uniques (and Duriel) in this game could be worse than them:
      • Diablo himself on higher difficulties: he's not easy, but the Super Uniques you fight in the Chaos Sanctuary are much harder. It doesn't help that you can heal up near the seals, since he will never go near them, and ranged characters can even snipe at him while out of range from his attacks.
      • Baal is even worse than Diablo: His attacks aren't all that strong, and the worst he can do is use a pair of curses that give mana burn and half physical resist & speed, respectively. Even worse, the last 2 Super Unique monsters you fight in Baal's throne room before you face him are much stronger.
      • Mephisto uses mainly sorceress spells and even his melee attack does cold damage, meaning if you have max resists (which are pretty easy to get by then as long as you save up some "resist gear") he's pretty easy. The same goes for the two councilor uniques right before him as they almost exclusively use magical attacks as well.
  • Arc Fatigue:
    • The journey through Act 1's Rogue Monastery. After an optional quest to grab the Horadric Malus for the town blacksmith in the monastery barracks, the only objective left in Act I is to kill Andariel. However, the distance you have to cover in order to reach Andariel can be quite long and tedious for some people depending on how much they're willing to explore each area. From the barracks, the journey to Andariel has the player needing to go through three levels of a prison, to the cathedral, and capping off with four levels of catacombs.
    • Traversing the early portions of Act 3 (the Spider Forest, the Great Marsh, and the Flayer Jungle) is met with a similar criticism due to the lengths of having to explore around three large maze-like jungle areas searching for the two dungeons (the Spider Cavern and the Flayer Dungeon) that have the body parts needed for a main quest. It doesn't help that all three regions as well as one of the dungeons are filled with flayers. Fortunately, they stop showing up once you get to Lower Kurast (about half-way through act III). It also helps in later play-throughs once it's realized that the Great Marsh is a completely optional zone that can be ignored since there's always a zone entrance between the Spider Forest and Flayer Jungle.
  • Ass Pull: The second quest in act IV (which takes place in Hell) requires you to go to the Hellforge to destroy Mephisto's (the first of the Prime Evils, who was the act III boss) soulstone. Mephisto drops the soulstone as loot, and, while it has no stats it's a unique item which should make it obvious it's important. Nevertheless, if you forgot it Cain will just happen to have picked it up and give it to you so you can still complete the quest. The ass pull comes in when you realize Cain was nowhere near the place you fought Mephisto. The only plausible explanation is that while he stayed in Kurast the whole time, he picked up the soulstone just before stepping through the portal to the Pandemonium Fortress.
  • Awesome Music:
    • Straight from the first act the game excellently sets the mood of what awaits the player out of the Rogue Encampment, and throws the player straight into action.
    • Near the end of the "Search For Cain" quest, upon entering the ruins of Tristram, the town's iconic theme can be heard in the background. The same theme also briefly returns upon defeating Diablo, which is incredibly satisfying to hear.
    • "Harem", which plays upon entering the palace in Lut Gholein is essentially a middle-eastern spin on the music heard in most levels of the first game. Despite being one of the shorter tracks, it's highly atmospheric, and makes the entire zone feel appropriately tense. Its final portion, which plays in the Arcane Sanctuary while minimalistic, does an amazing job capturing the strange nature of the place.
    • The Spider piece that's used for Act III's dungeons uses a remixed version of a portion of the theme that was used for the starting church levels of the original game. Nostalgia will hit like a ton of bricks.
    • The music in Act V, starting from the theme of Harrogath itself. The music really reminds you that 'this is it', you've defeated two Prime Evils, went To Hell and Back, and fought many difficult battles— and now this is the final struggle. Time to deal the decisive blow to the devils who have brought so many deaths and despair across the Sanctuary. You're not alone, the Barbarians of Harrogath are fighting alongside you. And if you're a Barbarian yourself, this is also a case of It's Personal: for the liberation of your homeland. It is easily one of the best tracks that Blizzard has done for any game, with a very Basil Poledouris style quality to it.
    • "Siege" from Act V.
  • Best Level Ever:
    • The Bloody Foothills of Lord of Destruction began with a town under siege and its residents hating you. As you progress you rescue Barbarians, repel demon hordes, and destroy catapults as you go, ending it all by destroying the commander of the attack and gaining a socket to place in almost any weapon. No other level throughout the game gave you such a specific goal, or immersed the player so well.
    • The Arreat Summit, and, perhaps, the entirety of Act V stands as an awesome level... even before considering the region's Awesome Music.
  • Better Off Sold: The copious amounts of low-quality weapons and armor you find are good for gold.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: There is an odd bit where as soon as you set foot out of the city in act III, you encounter the Dark Wanderer (Diablo in disguise) slowly walking along. You can't target or attack him in any way, and he soon disappears and spawns a bunch of fleshbeasts (which normally don't appear until act IV). The whole thing is never brought up by any other characters, and serves no purpose other than possibly as a Jump Scare the first time you play.
  • Breather Level:
    • After clearing the jungles of Kurast in Act 3 (the Spider Forest, the Great Marsh and the Flayer Jungle), it's a huge relief for all players to arrive at Lower Kurast. Players are rewarded with many chests, much easier monsters to deal with and a very smaller area to explore. Not like the previous locations filled with Demonic Spiders like Flayers, Flayer Shamans, Undead Flayers, Will-o'-the-Wisp, Poisonous Spiders and claustrophobic dungeons. That is, until you explore the confusing maze of the Kurast's sewers.
    • While it's not much different compared to other levels in Normal and Nightmare difficulties, The Secret Cow Level is firmly placed in this category when playing on Hell difficulty, for the sole reason it's the only map (that is not a Boss-Only Level) in all of Hell where there are no regular monsters with immunities to any type of damage (Uniques can still have immunities from their modifiers, as does The Cow King). While it's not a complete breather because the cows still hit like a truck, it's a massive drop in difficulty compared to pretty much every Hell map where you always had to keep an eye on enemies with immunities to all your types of damage. That makes it one of the few zones in Hell where pretty much every class and build can farm without much issue.
  • Broken Base: Over the 1.10 patch: Many fans loved the skill synergies because it meant they didn't have to save skill points for high levels anymore and low-level skills could actually be useful, but some were upset that the accompanying difficulty spike killed creativity: Synergies were basically required to survive higher difficulties, so classes went from having loads of viable builds to maybe 3 or 4 each.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
    • Diablo II 's multiplayer was pretty much this: Log onto multiplayer. Pay people in-game loot to run you through the game, sitting by and absorbing all the experience so you can level up as fast as possible. You look up a stat sheet on the internet and follow it to the tee, with no room for deviation (unless you want to be laughed at by all the Munchkins, unless you're doing something like a "Crazy run") Then when you hit level 80, you run the final act again and again, get nothing but junk 98% of the time in hopes of finding that "perfect loot", until a player bribes you with something that isn't junk and you run them through the game. When Lord of Destruction came out, this practice is known as "Baal runs", in where the struggle isn't the boss anymore but the Loot Drama that happens afterwards.
      • Expanding on what was mentioned above - The game is played in three difficulty levels. When you beat one, you play the same five acts and their quests again. Very few who play on the public servers do anything besides pay other players in-game loot to beat all the bosses for them, skipping sidequests, so that they can sit and leech experience in games run by high-level characters/bots and shoot from level 1 to level 80+ within a few hours. This is justified when making a PvP character to avoid all the grinding, but most do it so they can rush bosses looking for perfect loot or just because they're bored of the repetitive nature of a three-difficulty playthrough.
    • Players have compiled (and nicknamed) several particularly-popular skill builds, known for their effectiveness, some of which include the Hammerdin (Paladin focusing on Blessed Hammer, known for his ridiculous damage output), Meteorb Sorceress (Based around Meteor and Frozen Orb, for countering elemental resistances), or Summoner Necromancer (Based around skeletons, for his crowd control and passive DPS).
    • Due to their easy availability and incredible power for how cheap they are to make, virtually every leveling guide for spellcaster builds will feature the same Rune Words for early and mid-game: Spirit on a sword (more often than not a Crystal Sword, because Larzuk in Act V will always give 4 sockets to a Crystal Sword obtained in The Secret Cow Level, and it has the lowest requirements of any 4-socket sword), Rhyme on a shield, Lore on a helmet, Stealth on body armor, and Insight on the Act II Mercenary's polearm, with the ocassional variation of using Leaf on a staff instead of Spirit. This combination is seen everywhere because of the very large boosts it provides, for a group of Rune Words that can be built without ever setting foot in Nightmare difficulty, only really starting to get competition by the time you reach Hell and the most powerful drops become possible.
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Demonic Spiders: Too many to count, to the point it has its own page.
  • Difficulty Spike:
    • The game has a dramatic change as you go from Nightmare to Hell difficulty. The effectiveness of just about everything is reduced to a quarter, your resistances plummet to a base of -100, and almost every single monster is not only resistant, but entirely immune to a particular element (often when the monster had zero resistance to anything in either of the previous difficulties) while gaining additional resistances to one or nearly all attributes (to the level a single Fire/Cold/Lightning Enchanted or just Stone Skin is enough to add a second immunity). The immunities are a particular problem, as it's very possible for your character's skills to be focused on only one form of damage if you didn't know about the problem beforehand, and even if you do, you can still find Uniques and Super Uniques that are immune to all your types of damage and were practically unkillable.
    • It deserves special mention that some monsters possess immunity to physical damage. I.E, melee attacks don't work. Speaking of bosses, there are three randomly generated per normal level in hell difficulty as opposed to one in normal plus their flock of minions is deadlier too.
    • Less dramatic is Act IV of the game, when you invade Hell, featuring a jump in monster difficulty - suddenly homing, mana draining missiles, etc. Then of course there's Diablo himself.
    • The battle with the Ancients is far harder than the battle with Baal, the final boss of the expansion. The Ancients are also the only bosses to get additional modifiers on Nightmare and Hell difficulty, meaning you are at mercy of RNG potentially giving you a set of Ancients you don't have the means to beat (especially if they spawn with more than one immunity).
    • Duriel is significantly harder than most every other boss in the game considering the level at which players normally have to deal with him at, but it becomes this especially considering players at a high enough level can absolutely breeze through the second acts final dungeon and STILL not be ready for Duriel himself. See That One Boss.
  • Disappointing Last Level: Act 4. Whilst having the final chapter in the pits of Hell is pretty cool, there are far fewer areas in Hell than in any other chapter, only a handful of NPCs in the 'town' of the Pandemonium Fortress, and only three quests, two of which are needed to win the game anyway. Your blacksmith and healer in that town have noticeably been given fewer lines to say, with only two greetings (which are the same for both), no Introduction, no Gossip (not that Cain and Tyrael are much better, only having a single Gossip quote each), and no quest-specific lines. "Hail to you, champion" will be stuck in your head after a while.
  • Even Better Sequel: Diablo was a fun, quirky game that is still an excellent play, but Diablo II and its expansion Lord of Destruction were so huge that many people are still playing it today, nevermind the number of clones it spawned.
  • Evil Is Cool: If this video is of any guideline, Baal counts. His older brother Mephisto also gets this.
  • Fan Nickname:
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Hammerdins (A Paladin that works off spamming blessed hammers), unlike other spellcasters, don't hit a brick wall with immunities (which are incredibly uncommon), and needs no tactics but "spam blessed hammer" and is pretty much the only build good for both PVP and PVM. A Paladin with the Blessed Hammer / Concentration combo can kill virtually everything in the entire game in seconds with no effort. It's even worse if they have the Teleport skill from the equally-overpowered Enigma Runeword. The 1.13 patch removed Blessed Hammer's ability to ignore Resistances from Undead and Demon enemies (which happened to be the types of enemies that can be found as Immune to Magic), which toned the build down from "can effortlessly steamroll over everything" to "extremely powerful, but there are a few areas where it struggles" (most notably at Baal Runs since Blessed Hammer can't damage the Mummies present in the Act 2 wave).
    • The blood golem/iron maiden combo was truly absurd, being a casual gamebreaker rather than requiring players to put 20 points into the same skills to use. The blood golem healed itself and you for some of the damage it dealt. The iron maiden curse caused enemies to damage themselves for a percentage (200% at rank one) of the damage they dealt. The game registered this as the blood golem dealing the damage to them, meaning after just a few ranks it would heal itself and you for much more damage than enemies were dealing. It only worked on physical damage at least, but against that you were both functionally invincible. This was later nerfed by changing how the blood golem heals: only the damage it dealt by itself (not via other means such as iron maiden) is considered for healing.
    • Zoomancers are another rather casual version of this. The only downside to the playstyle is that it can be boring as the Necromancer actually does very little besides summon minions and throw the occasional curse. However, the result is a veritable army of mooks that shield the player from nearly all harm and can quickly rip even Hell level bosses apart. Worse anyone can take advantage of this defensive bulwark just by hiding behind the horde so it even benefits other characters. God forbid a Paladin, Barbarian, or Druid is in the mix to buff it up further with their various auras and shouts.
    • Once obtained (as early as level 18 for Sorceresses and level 24 to get an item with charges of the spell), Teleport removes the maze crawling component of the game. A character with Teleport can potentially spam the spell to their leisure, not only to move through rooms faster, stopping only to kill a Unique, Champion or Super Unique of interest, add new Mana Potions to their belt or restock in town. This is all helped by the fact Teleport has no cooldown, with the speed only depending on the character's Faster Cast Rate stat. Teleport is so useful, the Enigma Rune Word for chest armor is among the best for nearly any class (other than Sorceresses, who get Teleport naturally).
    • In Normal and most of Nightmare, a Fire sorceress is easily one of, if not the strongest class thanks to fire spells growing in power extremely quickly, especially thanks to strong synergies. Probably specifically due to this, in Hell there are many enemies immune to fire, so its usefulness becomes far more situational.
    • Mosaic, a Rune Word for Assassin Claws introduced in Resurrected's Patch 2.6, quickly catapulted Martial Arts Assassins as one of the most powerful builds in the game. In general it's a fairly solid Rune Word, with +2 to Martial Arts Skills, Attack Speed and Life Steal, good all-around damage and Prevent Monster Heal, and it makes Finishing Moves (such as Phoenix Strike) have a 50% chance to refresh your charges instead of consume them. What puts Mosaic in the broken territory is the fact Assassins can dual-wield it, doubling every bonus the Rune Word gets, including the ability to refresh charges - in order words, with two Mosaics, your Finishing Moves will never consume charges, allowing them to be spammed at full power so long as you don't let the charges' duration expire. It's regarded as so overpowered that every other Claw is considered completely outclassed by literally any non-Magic Claws with three sockets (even those without skill bonuses). Dual-wield Mosaic can also be a literal Game-Breaker in that Phoenix Strike is a very flashy skill, and spamming it to your heart's content can actually make lower-end devices struggle.
  • Genius Bonus: The first game featured a type of high-level demonic enemy called the Balrog. That is, there were several palette swapped variants, and the most powerful ones were called Balrogs, but the type they all belonged to were also called Balrogs. That's just an obvious J. R. R. Tolkien reference. But in the next game, while some enemies are still called Balrogs, the broader type they belong to is now "Megademon". Since "bal" in Sindarin means something like "might" (Quenya: "vala", cf. the Valar, Tolkien's "gods"), and "rog" means demon, "Megademon" is a stylistically odd but pretty much direct translation of "Balrog".
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Flayers, Maggot Young, Flesh Beasts, Leapers and Imps. Flayers, Fallen, and Carvers all tend to swarm and can be resurrected by their respective Shamans (except for the undead Bone Flayers, which explode for a nasty chunk of damage when they die). Sand Maggots and Flesh Beasts spawn Maggot Young and Flesh Spawn, respectively. Imps teleport and are spawned by huts. Leapers move very fast and jump all the time which makes them difficult to kill due more to being hard to click on, rather than having lots of armor or HP.
    • Swarms of enemy Archers.
    • Blood Hawks are literal Goddamned Bats spawned by nests. There are also mummies spawned by sarcophogi, greater mummies that can resurrect almost any type of undead, and Putrid Defilers, which enchant other monsters to spawn Pain Worms upon death. Oh, and all those monsters that can be resurrected? You don't get more experience for killing them again.
    • Plenty of them, but the Leapers most definitely qualify. They attack by jumping, and are knocked away every time you hit them. They are also fast enough to dodge ranged attacks, and always attack in large numbers. The pygmies in Act III swarm you in large numbers or attack with their blowpipes from a long distance, and their shamans can revive them. Their undead versions are even stronger and explode when killed. Then there are the imps from Act V. They teleport, shoot fire from a long distance, and mount towers or war beasts where they're even harder to touch. And finally, the suicide bombers. They charge you at high speed and explode, knocking you back taking out a large chunk of your life and possibly freezing you.
    • The Druid can summon these to his side in the form of ravens. They barely do any damage, but they are fast, cannot be attacked in any way, and can blind anything they attack.
    • The mummies, who spew clouds of poison in death and can be produced by a Mook Maker, the saber cats and slingers, who come in swarms, can throw exploding or poison potions, and move really fast, but die quickly, and anything that can poison you in Hell.
  • Goddamned Boss:
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • Although both have been fixed, there were a couple of fun ones for a while. The big one was the homing/pierce bug, which let Amazons with the Buriza-Do Kyanon unique crossbow and the Guided Arrow skill strike an enemy up to 4 times with one shot. The other one was the Marrowwalk glitch. Said item gives charges of Bone Prison at level 33 (when the skill level cap is 20 without items). If a Necromancer, who can learn the skill naturally, equipped the boots but had yet to put an actual point into the skill, the game used the 33 given by the boots for synergy purposes. That means over a 150% increase in synergy power compared to actually leveling the skill, which meant a lot considering how all the bone skills tend to synergize with each other.
    • Early in Resurrected, the Sorceress' Hydras, who are normally stationary spells, would teleport with her everywhere she goes. Same with the Assassin's traps. This was patched so it would remain the same as it was in D2.
    • A visual bug exists when the Necromancer uses Revive on slain monsters in Resurrected's graphics. Certain monsters whose models change after death will still remain that way, resulting in instances like the succubi coming back as skeletons and wendigos still having blood splatters all over them among other visual oddities. It's purely visual and rather fitting for the Necromancer's abilities.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The conversation between the Sorceress and Akara is this. She cautions her of the dangers of pursuing power and knowledge without the proper wisdom. Fast forward to Diablo III, the Sorceress caused a magical accident that resulted in the destruction of a village. This lead to her death at hand of an Assassin sent to slay her.
    • On the way out of the Pandemonium Fortress, Deckard Cain says that he hopes to never see Heaven's gates "for many, many years". Come Diablo III twenty in-verse years later, he dies midway through the first act.
  • Inferred Holocaust: Although you've defeated the three Prime Evils, the world is still basically overrun by possessed critters that have wiped out most of the world's population. Not to mention that in Diablo III, we find out that Tyrael's destruction of the Worldstone blew up Mount Arreat and corrupted the lands around it. Most of the barbarians you were helping throughout Act V were killed, with only a handful of survivors, most of whom were driven insane, seen when you visit The Ruins of Sescheron in Adventure Mode in Diablo III. Tyrael destroying the Worldstone was to save the rest of the world and he probably knew what the consequences would be, but talk about a Pyrrhic Victory.
  • Limited Animation: As with the first game, doors, chests and other containers just go straight from closed to open or vice versa with no intermediate frames, likely due to technical limitations.
  • Loot Drama: Diablo II had an extreme problem with this because every item, bar none, dropped straight on the ground; if your group didn't have strict looting discipline (hint: few if any groups actually did), they subsequently went to whoever was fastest at snatching them up.
    • One rare item, the Stone of Jordan, which gives + 1 to every skill. This was actually used as currency in the online aspect of the game for rare goods. Before any crackdown on selling in-game items for real money, an eBay auction was selling about 50 of these for $300. Since the crackdown, perfect gems are used as the surrogate currency.
    • Diablo II in general is notorious for this. The expansion added runes and runewords; runes are special socketable items with a range of abilities, depending on the rune. Rune drops aren't determined by magic find so the probability of finding any (much less the one you want) is very low. Runewords are specific combinations of runes in a specific item which when created, imbue the item with increased stats, ranging from useful to GameBreaking. Runes have supplanted the Stone of Jordan as the ingame with its own exchange and pricing system to boot. Rampant duping of runes has actually caused inflation.
    • For reference: There are 33 runes, and the top 8 are extremely rare, having drop chances of one in tens or hundreds of thousands. To make a runeword, you'll need a specific combination, up to 5 of the "high" ones. And, sometimes, finding an item good enough to put these beasts in is going to be just as difficult.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: Amongst the Hirelings, it's pretty much a universal agreement that Act III's Ironwolves are the worst ones. As single-element attackers, they are the ones that get penalized the most by the increase in enemy Resistances in Nightmare and Hell, plus they have rather low base stats making certain equipment hard to use on them (most notably they cannot equip a Spirit Monarch without it being Ethereal, or other equipment giving them a boost in Strength), and they cannot block at all despite carrying a shield. The improvements they received in Resurrected (Enchant for Fire, Shiver Armor for Ice and Static Field for Lightning) did give them some niche uses but they are still firmly in the bottom of Hireling tier lists, especially with the improvements the Rogue and Barbarian got.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Baal, Lord of Destruction, is the middle brother of the Prime Evils and far more clever than he is typically given credit for. More straightforward than his wantonly sadistic siblings, Baal was the first of them to suspect his niece Lilith's theft of the Worldstone. After following the Dark Exile, Baal emerges thanks to manipulating the wandering patsy to Diablo Marius into freeing him, later appearing to him as the angel Tyrael so that Marius will surrender his Soulstone to him before he executes Marius as a "reward" and proceeding to go on to corrupt the Worldstone to seize control of the world.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • You've found a Horadric Staff! That's quite a treasure you have there in your Horadric Cube! I'M DECKARD CAIN!
    • Diablo 2: DisconnectedExplanation 
  • Moral Event Horizon: There are two of them this time around, and both of them are heinous as Hell:
    • Izual, Tyrael's lieutenant, is revealed to have betrayed his master and the High Heavens in general, not only telling Diablo and his Brothers about the Soulstones and how to corrupt them, but also helping them mastermind the Dark Exile and unleashing the Prime Evils upon Sanctuary — essentially setting the events of the main series into motion. When next we meet him in Diablo III, he is explicitly subtitled "The Betrayer" because of this act of evil.
    • Nihlathak, the last Elder of Harrogath from Act V, is revealed to have made a deal with Baal, handing over the Relic of the Ancients to him in return for him sparing Harrogath, allowing Baal to bypass the three Guardians that he would have otherwise faced and reach the Worldstone in order to corrupt it. He is the only human villain (and the only villain period) in the entire series to get the full Dragged Off to Hell treatment upon his defeat, a fate he very richly deserves.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The shiny "ting" sound alerting you to the presence of a gem fragment. Easily recognizable from across the room, and liable to cause a frantic clicking on treasure.
    • In the Lord of Destruction expansion, this is out-done by that lovely, bearly-audible sound of a pebble being rubbed across another pebble, indicating that a Rune has just been dispensed. Your mouth immediately starts watering as you scan the items to see what kind of Rune it was (the appropriate prayer at this point is "PLEASE GOD GIVE ME ZOD!!!!!").
  • Narm:
    • Baal, in the opening cinematic for Act V. Sure, he's got an army from hell with him, and he blows up the guard in a very evil way, but... he also gestures emphatically with every line, looks like he's wearing makeup, and seems way too happy about being carried on a fashionable throne by his minions. He may be the most intimidating drama queen ever, but he still acts like a drama queen.
    • Due to most of the unique monster names being randomly generated, you will occasionally get ridiculous names like "Star Head" or "Snot Wing".
    • "You have quite a treasure there in that Horadric cube! According to Horadric lore, the cube can restore a Horadric staff!" Cain, are the Horadrim paying you to name-drop the Order?
  • Nausea Fuel: Those worm-caterpillar things that crawl around Duriel's corpse after you kill him.
  • Overshadowed by Controversy: Resurrected on its own was well-reviewed — miles ahead of quality from Warcraft III: Reforged — but discussion on it was entirely swallowed up whole by the terrible publicity surrounding Activision Blizzard in mid-2021 after exposés of toxic workplace culture took the gaming world by storm. It's become pretty difficult to express appreciation of Blizzard making a vested effort to rectify their past mistakes considering even bigger controversies and scandals are on much of the mind of gamers everywhere, not helped by the game experiencing a pretty messy launch due to the high demand creating server issues (which was quickly rectified, but left people much more inclined to dismiss the game on principle).
  • Player Punch:
    • Diablo II packs a Continuity Nod Player Punch. If you've played the first game, you were attached to the town of Tristram (as the game was 5% that town, 95% killing monsters underground) and some of the characters were close to your heart. In the second game, you teleport there to see the whole town burning and infested with monsters. That's the first punch. You see Deckard Cain in a cage, being tortured in every way. That's the second punch. Then... you see Griswold, the kindly blacksmith as an incredibly tough ZOMBIE, a mindless "boss" coming to get you. That right there is a very heavy punch. Just to be extra mean, there are mangled human corpses lying in the spots that every other one of the townspeople occupied in the first game, and you can even find Wirt's wooden leg (but then, nobody liked him much). To make it worse, Griswold is not entirely mindless. You can hear him say "kill me".
    • The identity of Diablo's new host - one of the original player classes in the first game. You conquer 16 levels of dungeon to punch that demon into submission, reimprison it inside yourself by jamming the Soulstone into your head... and the damn thing stays quiet for a few weeks before simply taking over your character's body. And the other two original classes? One was corrupted by Andariel and is the first real boss you face. The other was Driven to Madness by Diablo himself and is fought later on in Act II.
    • In short, nearly everybody from the first game was either killed or corrupted by demons.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: The Diablo franchise does in fact have a story, and there are the hardcore "lore-fans" who spend time debating of it, but most players ignore it completely. The franchise also has loads of supplemental materials. Of course, as a result, Blizzard became savvy enough to know they can get away with Cliché Storm plots (and trailers) and only a few Tropers on this site will actually notice. In Diablo II, multiplayer mode skips cutscenes (if you don't have them installed), which doesn't help.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Before the coming of the Lord of Destruction, hirelings were disliked because of their terrible pathfinding, slowness and uselessness. The expansion gave them improved AI, special abilities and inventory slots, making them far more useful. Not many people will play without them.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Some of the best equipment and rune words were restricted to players on the ladder, a harder version of the game on Battle.net with a finite amount of time to play on the laddernote . Most of the game's best items were only available on the ladder, players who wanted a slower-paced game, preferred single-player, or didn't have reliable Internet access were out of luck. You could trade ladder-only items to other players on paper, but they were so good that most non-ladder players would have nothing a ladder player would want in exchange.
    • Rune words are infamous for having hidden conditions that render hours of playing/looting a waste of time. They must be set in a certain order and have very specific weapon specifications. One mistake and you can kiss your rune word goodbye. On top of this, like gems, you cannot remove runes from sockets once you placed them. Even with internet guides, this still happens a lot more than you think. A common mistake is to put a runeword for polearms (as used for the ever-popular act 2 mercenaries) in a spear class weapon.
    • Keys are required to unlock chests, except for the Assassins. Why do adventurers who can slay demons lords can't even break down a chest's lock is baffling. And why do they only come in stacks of 12?
    • The fact that Charms have to stay in the player's inventory in order to benefit from their effects. The more Charms you have, the less inventory space there will be to pick up monster loot. It's particularly noticeable if you keep finding the larger Charms that take up three spots in the inventory.
    • In the original release of the game, slaying Diablo will start a timer. Once it reaches zero, the game will save and quit automatically. This forced the player to frantically pick up any loot they wanted and discard any items that took up too much inventory space. Thankfully, the expansion removed this.
    • Once you've reach level 70, you get a XP penalty for every monsters that you've kill. It starts at 95.31% gain of XP for every kills. The penalty goes up as you gain more levels and by level 98, you only get 0.59% of XP for every kill. Adding the XP penalty for every time you die and it will be a long painful walk to reach level 99.
    • Your potions collected on the field do not stack together even if they are of the same type, hence the need for four hotkeys just for healing alone. This gets very annoying when your bag and stash becomes overburdened not from loot, but from all the potions that took up their valuable space. The same also applies to your runes, jewels and gems. This issue gets worse the more you play, with entire sets of characters known as "mules" having to be created just to carry all the extra stuff for a single character as a result.
    • The 2023 version of the 22 Nights of Terror event featured, for December 21st, "Snowball's Chance". It gave all players a 100% boost to any damage they deal... in exchange of lowering ALL resistances (even to Physical and Magic) by a whooping 100%, which stacked with all other resistance penalties from Nightmare and Hell! Suddenly, even an innocent Frost Nova from a Cold Enchanted enemy is killing you from full health, and completely new characters found themselves taking double damage from all sources. This modifier was almost instantly reviled by players, especially those with Hardcore characters, to the point some claimed that it effectively shut Diablo II down for an entire day. It's made more egregious by the fact the previous day's modifier was raising all Resistances by 75%, effectively meaning your resistances were dropped by 175% from one day to another.
    • January 1st, 2024, topped the previous event feature with "Hangover" giving a very similar penalty but with a much weaker benefit. It gave all players the advantage of all Sunder Charms combined, which sounds good in practice, were it not for the uninformed part that it also gave all the drawbacks of the Sunder Charms combined. Players are almost never going to attack with more than 2 elements, so in the best of cases you got a 75% Resistance penalty against 4 elements with no positive return whatsoever. Builds using Magic damage such as Hammerdins or Bonemancers got virtually no use of the Sunder effect because there is no "Lower Magic Resistance" effect, so they were only able to deal Scratch Damage at best. Also, characters in Normal and Nightmare difficulties got the shortest end of the stick because there are nearly no immunities present, but still were hit by the Resistance Penalty.
  • Sequel Displacement: Diablo II to the original Diablo.
  • That One Attack:
    • When you see Diablo step back, run like hell because he's about to unleash a brutal stream of red lightning that can take your health down to zero in seconds. Even lightning resistance won't do enough because it's half physical damage. This was nerfed in Lord of Destruction, but it's still very damaging: it can still take most of your health in a single second, if not actually kill you. Diablo's ring of fire, his other attack, hits everything in every direction even when he's not on the screen, making it essentially unavoidable.
    • There are various bugged monsters that can nearly instantly kill you, such as Gloams, who seem to deal 256 times their intended damage.
    • Nihlathak's Corpse Explosion has a huge area of effect and can be a One-Hit KO since damage is based on monster life. To make matters worse, like Diablo's lightning hose, half the damage done is physical, which is hard to resist, and he uses the corpses of his dead Mooks as fuel, meaning you get to choose how you die: Mooks or Corpse Explosion.
  • That One Boss:
    • Formerly (and for some builds, still) Duriel due to some loading issues early in the games life that resulted in him killing you before the game loaded his lair, as back in the day when you played online, he'd usually be active server-side before you'd loaded in on your client. Which meant that by the time you could see and act, depending on your class and build there was a very good chance you were already dead. That was especially painful if you were playing hardcore mode. Before this got a bit of a fix a few months in, something like 90% of all hardcore runs ended at Duriel thanks to a load screen lasting half a second too long. Even now you spawn right on top of him, and if you get close to him, you are slowed heavily (making melee next to impossible without prepping thawing potions, something otherwise unused). The arena is also the smallest of all the bosses, making Hit-and-Run Tactics virtually impossible. Despite being only the mid-game boss, is probably among the most dangerous of them and easily the most frustrating. For some reason, the designers thought it would be great to pit the player against an enormously fast boss, with an aura that irresistably slows the player, in a bare room perhaps eight times his area. This in a game where hit-and-run is god; half the classes are explicitly designed for ranged combat only. Another relies on enemy mooks corpses to summon minions. On top of everything else, you can't escape the room to catch your breath, even though you enter the room through a big hole in the wall. No wonder he is the Lord of Pain.
    • The three Barbarian Ancients are pretty much the hardest encounter in the game, arguably topping Duriel, Baal, and even Diablo himself (who at least gave you ample room to hit and run). What made the Barbarian Ancients so damned difficult is that using Town Portal to escape would heal them back to full health, meaning yes, you had to kill them all in one go. The only thing that may make this easier over the Duriel battle is it takes place in a rather large area. If you lure them to one side, you can escape to the other and get time to heal.
    • The councillors in Act III on higher difficulty modes. They're just superuniques, but on higher difficulties they gain a lot of traits, and sometimes those traits work TOGETHER to create a new definition of pain. Can you imagine Conviction plus Might plus Cursed plus Extra Strong plus Lightning Enchanted plus Multi-Shot together?
    • The Lord de Seis is a mini-boss summoned before you fight Diablo. He is famous for his herd of ultra-powerful Boss In Mook Clothing minions, while his Fanaticism Aura makes his already strong minions hit very hard and fast, with an Attack Rating boost that gives them an extremely high chance to hit.
    • The Infector of Souls in the Chaos Sanctuary and his twin brother, Ventar the Unholy in the Worldstone Keep. Big, strong, and faster than you can ever hope to be. Their minions also share these traits, so you will end up cornered by half a dozen monstrous demons in the matter of seconds with nowhere to run, and beaten down in just a few seconds. Ventar is only made easier because of the nature of the area you fight him in. It's possible to separate his goons and kill them one by one. If you're lucky.
    • Nihlathak (thankfully optional, unthankfully Randomly Drops the item needed to access the 1.11 patch's added bonus boss) in Act V thanks to his Corpse Explosion ability, agreed to be the Necromancer's best skill and one of the best in the game: it does 70-120% of a dead monster's maximum life as mixed fire & physical damage. Since enemy health increases much faster than damage or player health, Corpse Explosion hits very hard, while the mixed damage makes it hard to protect yourself.. He also can summon Mooks to attack you and fuel Corpse Explosion.
    • Lister the Tormentor is a nasty one. It takes forever to kill him, while all he does is move toward you unfazed and land in a nasty punch when close enough. You can't even run away because he follows you everywhere, and he has a huge pack of regular, but still extremely strong, Minions of Destruction accompanying him. One-on-one is the only way to fight Lister and win, but good luck breaking him off from the pack.
    • Coldcrow, a unique dark ranger monster within the first floor of The Cave makes for a very nasty encounter at low level due to being cold enchanted. Coldcrow fires ice arrows that slow down the movement and attack speed of the player, and along with that, she's got around 5 other normal dark rangers supporting her. What makes this fight all the more painful is that because you're very likely to only be around level-5 for this encounter, you're not going to have the necessary skills or items to make this fight any easier. And just for an added kick in the balls, when you do finally manage to kill Coldcrow, she fires off a Frost Nova to try to finish ya off if you survived the fight with extremely low health. Because she's optional, it's very common for players to just skip past the Coldcrow encounter entirely.
    • Rakanishu. A superunique carver that hangs out in the Stony Fields guarding the portal stones to Tristram, Rakanishu's infamous Lightning Enchanted ability, which causes Charged Bolt to emanate from him whenever he's hit, is deceptively deadly for early game. The damage from the Charged Bolts adds up fast, on top of having to contend with regular enemies in the Stony Field and low level players may find themselves dying quickly and often.
  • That One Level:
    • Act II at times provides the player a lot of annoyance.
      • Many portions of this Act could be annoying to play through due to the plethora of Scarab Demons that release Charged Bolts every time they get hit. Players will learn very quickly that they're in for a world of hurt without items that provide Lightning resist.
      • The Maggot Lair. Three levels of narrow single file tunnels with glitchy unresponsive slime doors, players getting stuck all the time in the narrow passages, then throw in the previous mentioned lightning enchanted Scarab Demons that everybody loves for good measure. And when you meet the boss, it takes so long for the room to load up that by the time you do, everything in the room has killed you during the lag. Oh, and as a final Fuck You, the boss will toss horrific poison all over the place on death, making sure you leave on 1 HP and making it essentially impossible to save your minions/hireling.
      • The Arcane Sanctuary presents you with four paths at the start, only one of which leads to the Summoner and the portal to the Canyon of the Magi; meaning that most of it is unnecessary aside from some treasure at the end of the three false paths. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that it consists of long narrow paths of bridges with floor and lightning traps, one of the paths being a teleport maze, Ghoul Lords that can cast powerful spells across the platforms, and ghosts that can fly over the space. The worst part is that this is mandatory to enter the Canyon of the Magi, and it's often difficult to get a group to go in here.
    • Act III. You have to slog through a jungle with switchbacks and dead ends populated by a) native pygmy men who either swarm and stab you or shoot you from afar with blowguns, which are led by shamen with the ability to revive the pygmies; b) enormous mosquitoes that drain your stamina and poison you; c) literal Demonic Spiders that are larger than you. This is on top of an act-long fetch quest which forces you to fully explore the jungle and the sewers of a nearby city looking for the unusually well-preserved remains (eye, brain, heart) of an old wizard.
      • The Flayer Jungle. Let's see... massive randomly generated maze-like area which you'll probably have to explore every bit of to find both objectives (one being required to beat the game) brings on the tediousness, and the Fetishes that the area is named after bring the pain like none other. And... just read the entry, remember that groups of these monsters are all you're going to be running into. This can be made a little bit more manageable if Winged Nightmares, the only regular monsters that can appear in the level apart from the pygmies and a handful of toads and water monsters, are spawned. These are easy to kill demonic vultures whose presence diminishes the quantity of Flayers and Soul Killers, it is not a bad idea to reload until they show up.
      • Even worse is the Flayer Dungeon. Claustrophobic, ugly, full of traps, poison, exploding Fetishes and giant sea monsters that you can't hit properly. Unfortunately, you need to complete it. There is also the Swampy Pit, a second Flayer Dungeon that is non-mandatory. No one ever goes down there. Ever.
      • Then there's the Durance of Hate. It's not too bad in Normal difficulty but in Nightmare and Hell the level area is greatly increased into a huge sprawling maze of corridors, also inhabited by those exploding Fetish dolls.
    • Act 5 has a few choice areas.
      • The Crystalline Passage if you're unlucky enough to have it spawn Blood Lords (the Frenzying minotaurs).
      • Frozen River if you're unlucky enough for it to spawn Willowisps. If you run across them in Hell difficulty, you're better served just resetting the game and hoping they won't spawn that time.
      • The Throne of Destruction is crawling with both, although at least it has the excuse of being the last area of the final dungeon.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The addition of color was a complaint when Diablo II was first announced (Diablo really was nothing but brown and grey and blue). Of course, no one remembers or even cares anymore, especially after how much criticism Diablo III got for going Lighter and Softer. Suddenly, you had people wishing for a return to II's atmosphere.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Despite looking like a semi-important assassin character, Natalya doesn't really offer much to the player, or even the overall story for that matter, other than just standing around Act III's Kurast Docks and providing a bit of gossip. She then disappears after Mephisto's defeat, but ends up never appearing again. She's basically just there for the player to see an early preview for what eventually became the Assassin class in the Lord of Destruction expansion.
    • Unlike other quest hub NPCs, the residents of Act IV's Pandemonium Fortress, Jamella and Halbu, are basically just there to provide supplies for the player. They don't provide any quests, and even lack basic gossip dialogue, which is really bewildering when Act IV is lacking in the quest department compared to other Acts.
  • Underused Game Mechanic:
    • Providing your mercenaries with some gear could have been so much more than just handing them an extra weapon, helmet, and armor. It also would have been kind of neat if like the player, the gear the mercenary wears actually changes how the mercenary looks in the overworld.
    • You can also assign scrolls of Town Portal to your belt hotkeys instead of your skill hotkeys, in which the latter was how players generally used to get to safety. This fact flew over many players heads unless they came across a guide or read the manual from start to finish. Having them all be shuffled into a tome didn't help things.
  • The Woobie:
    • Marius. Unlike the protagonists, he's just a poor shmuck with no power dragged into the whole mess, scared out of his mind by all the death and destruction happening around him. The only time he tries to do something, he actually makes things worse. In the end, he dies in an asylum, at the hand of Baal, begging for his pathetic life.
    • Holy shit Tal Rasha. The leader of the Horadrim, his selflessness knew no bounds, and when the soulstone meant to imprison Baal was damaged, he plunged into his own body and had his followers bury him in a tomb, despite knowing he would be trapped with Baal inside him, potentially forever. Even worse, in the second act of II Marius pulls the shard out and frees him, and it seems like Baal has completely absorbed him. At least when Baal dies at the end he will presumably have some measure of peace, even if it's just Cessation of Existence.
  • Tough Act to Follow:
    • It's hard to make the Diablo II expansion climactic when the previous game ended with you effectively beating the Devil in Hell, but Lord of Destruction managed to nail it.
    • Diablo II itself is considered as such for the entire series. To the extent that any entry that comes after it is met with scorn for simply not being the same as Diablo II.


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