Deux Hero: Blood Raven appears to be evil out of possession or corruption by evil forces. Izual betrayed heaven and humanity on his own will. Blood Raven's soul is "banished forever" while Izual is "put to rest".
Perhaps it's the same thing. Blood Raven's soul is banished — to the afterlife, just as Izual's is.
Or maybe Blood Raven's original soul is already completely gone and replaced by the possessing/corrupting soul is all that's there and that's what's "banished forever."
I don't think it has anything to do with what they deserve; Blood Raven is mortal, Izual is not.
Beep, beebeebeep! News flash! Izual comes back in Diablo III, which means that he either got resurrected or he never died at all!
Izual being put to rest always sounded like a temporary thing. Like he can't go to wherever dead angels normally go thanks to his taint but he was freed from the demon he was imprisoned in. Meanwhile Blood Raven can finally move on and pass on to Trag'Oul or whatever.
Izual is no longer an Angel. He willingly pledged himself to Diablo to save his own skin. He was transformed into a full demon for telling the Prime Evils all they needed to corrupt the Soulstones. When he dies, he admits to all of this in a mocking tone, indicating that he no longer regrets any of it and has embraced his new demonic nature. Given what we know of demons, he will always be revived as long as his master Diablo has need of him.
Baal's soul-stone. If he's really trapped in it, why does removing it from Tal Rasha allows him to completely take over his host's body?
All There in the Manual, literally. A full soulstone can trap a demon like Diablo or Baal by itself. A fragment can only trap a demon in the body of one human. So, basically, Baal needed the stone removed to have his movement freedom, possess Tal Rasha completely, them put the stone back to achieve full power. Diablo was able to take possession of the body of Diablo I's warrior because he did not have as much willpower as Tal Rasha.
It helped Diablo's case that Tal Rasha had the rest of the Horidiram work to seal him up, while Adric had nobody helping him and had to manage alone.
Grave-robbing for fun and profit. Even the Paladin, a supposedly holy warrior, has no problem with scavenging undefiled graves, urns and catacombs in general. Were this Dungeons & Dragons, he'd be stripped of his holy powers faster than you can say "Alignment Violation."
Probably an example of "cause justifies one's actions". And Dungeons & Dragons is sometimes weird with its alignments, since being good or not is a matter of thoughts and not actions.
Or just a matter of differing standards. Yes, it's against the rules in D&D, but this isn't D&D. These Paladins may simply have different rules.
Considering Paladins would have converted people by the sword and torch in this setting when they were part of the Zakarum church I think we can toss the "Lawful Good" stuff right out the window.
It's heavily implied that the Paladin in Diablo II was one of many who left the order when the swording and torching began. It's still odd that he's so willing to loot graves and whatnot, but both the manual and the in-game dialogue make him out to be a decent guy, if a little too serious.
A relatively minor one (and possibly justified in-game), but still bugs me: the Barbarian's comment on entering Tristram:
The "dead and lifeless" one actually isn't that redundant - "dead" refers to land itself, and "lifeless" refers to creatures, so it's more like "the land here is crappy and there aren't many humans and animals left". That's how this troper perceives it, at least.
It's not lifeless if there is a massive demon horde running around.
The Barbarian is not the most cultured person, so goofs like this are expected.
Grammatically speaking one would read that sentence as "The land here is dead" *STOP* "And lifeless." So the land itself is dead and its barren of life. Demons probably don't count since, ya know, they're demons. Kind of not really alive or dead as humans would understand it.
A very useful shield for paladins is The Herald of Zakarum Gilded Shield. When upgraded using the Horadric Cube, the shield becomes The Herald of Zakarum Zakarum Shield.
Skeletons. Not only can the Necromancer raise (humanoid!) skeletons from the corpses of invertebrates like sand maggots (presumably legally different from sediment annelids of any other kind) but also the remains of insect swarms. The manual Hand Waves this, explaining that that a necromancer does not actually raise one skeleton at a time. Bone shards from many skeletons/sources are stuck together into one skeleton. This does not explain how creating skeletons from skeleton monsters results in blood, or how they form from a ghost's corpse (or why ghosts even have corpses).
I'm kind of surprised they would try to explain something like that, as it seems a perfect example of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Obviously, swarms and big insects wouldn't have human style skeletons, but the game would probably be a lot more annoying for necromancers who would have to go somewhere else to replace their skeletons when fighting these creatures. (Not that this doesn't prevent the game from having a lot of other issues.)
Diablo 3 tries to Handwave this by saying that Skeletons are not always the bones of one person, and in a pinch they can be assembled from bone chips and dust. It also assumes that since Sanctuary is such a violent place there should always be some material available wherever you are.
They are humanoid constructs like the golems, but instead of using the Necromancer's own energy to animated and fight they use outside power sources. In this case they made up mostly of dirt and little bits of the corpse they are summoned from, use the energy left in the body of the recently killed foe, and are controlled by a bound spirit. They are basically magical, mass produced robots set on auto-pilot that can be made out of literally anything as long as there is a body around to provide the energy for their animation.
I can allow for the whole, from the body and tiny bone bits explaination, but where does the Sword, Shield and most importantly, the arrows in the shield come from?
One cannot tiptoe through Sanctuary without tripping over loot, and most players (that is, adventurers) wouldn't even pick up the white-name items they DO see. Perhaps there's a lot of unlisted Vendor Trash lying around, which seems to be the case in some set pieces.
And then there's named insect swarm villains, as if a swarm of locusts had an individual identity. Sorry, Pox Blister the Destroyer, but I just can't take a villain consisting of tiny black flecks seriously, no matter how lightning enchanted it is. Especially if it's somehow able to drop a suit of armour when you kill it.
Same thing, Gameplay and Story Segregation. In a game that's very much a loot based game, plus a game with bosses as a big feature, it wouldn't make sense to deliberately design these creatures ot lack these things. (Not that this doesn't prevent the game from having other uneven loot distribution.)
"When the krogan name the thresher maw, you know that you're in trouble."
It's possible that the swarms aren't so much a group of individual insects but a hive mind in miniature that could become self-aware enough to have a full fledged identity. More of a "We are Pox Blister the Destroyer!" and the armor is the leftover remains of their last meal?
If you travel from act 2 to act 3 on Meshif's ship, and then teleport back to act 2 with the waypoint, somehow Meshif has already sailed back in the presumably-negligible time it took you to return. (They had a slow teleport?)
You know, you gotta wonder if having shelves of town portal scrolls in the jail under the monastery was a bright idea.
Why not? Those daemons seem to be mostly illiterate so they don't have much use from them.
I'm just assuming, but I do believe the first Troper was meaning that it was a daft idea to keep what are basically Instant Escape scrolls in a jail. Where, you know, prisoners are imprisoned.
Perhaps they don't work in areas that are still manned by non-evil humans. As long as the Sisterhood held the monastery, it probably functioned like a town. You could create a town portal to it, but not from it.
The Waypoints in the game are ostensibly teleport-systems left behind by the Horadrim to aid in fast travel. This does not explain why the Horadrim felt the need to build a teleporter in the Absurdly Spacious Sewer underneath Lut Gholein. The one in the Palace Cellar may have a reasonable explanation, though - the Harem is just upstairs.
Test waypoint perhaps? (To see if the system actually works, they'd choose a nearby location.) I never actually thought of this before, it is kind of strange. (Though does make the game easier. :) )
It could be that they realized that even sewers require an occasional maintenance and unclogging, something that requires someone to go down there from time to time.
In Act II Deckard Cain tells you that you'll have to kill Tal-Rasha in order to destroy Baal. If that was an option why didn't the Horadrim do it?
That would banish Baal back into Hell, and he may end up escaping sooner or later. As long as Tal Rasha holds out, they can be sure Baal isn't going anywhere. They did leave the Horadric Scroll behind with instructions on what to do should Tal Rasha lose control of him (assemble the staff, open the chamber, kill Tal Rasha), which is exactly what happened when the player came along.
What's this I hear about Diablo 2 having customization? When I played Diablo 2, your customization pretty much stopped at what character you picked - your build was just "dump as much stats into Vitality as possible, only deviating so you can have enough of a different stat to wear the gear". What version of Diablo 2 had more than a few feasible builds? Because I wanna play that!
So I'll gather you never gave much thought to the skill system? That's where the customization comes from.
Yep, skill layout+gear selection. My melee sorceress wielding dual Dreams and a Passion phase blade is built and played rather substantially different from a Blizzard sorceress, which in turn is played and built different from a fireball sorc, and so on. There are actually tons of feasible builds, if you consider "feasible" as builds that can fight and survive just fine even in Hell games, rather than "builds that can wipe out everything on screen in a few seconds".
Or all-in energy if you build an Energy Shield Sorceress. Or invest a smaller amount in energy if you're a teleport-heavy sorceress without an infini-mana optimized build. Or all-in dexterity for numerous Amazon builds. One gets 98*5+3*5 = 505 stat points (assuming you hit level 99; realistically, aim for 70-90), base stats starting at 10-30. Achieving max block percentage with one's shield can require over 150 dexterity; the heaviest armors require 232 strength. Even for the multiple non-conventional builds, non-vitality investments are far from insignificant for non-twinked, singleplayer, and/or non-duped/botted-gear play.
The problem seems to be that there was a large group of people online who only built characters based on whatever template they found online. So Blizzard figured since a particular group of people was going to play their game one way, like the all Vitality crap, then they were just going to excise it completely.
Diablo II is still being updated, but the icons for Berserk and Natural Resistance still weren't switched.
Same goes for the quest icons for The Fallen Angel and Hell's Forge.
How much time passed between Acts 4 and 5, and what were the heroes doing during that time? Were they just resting in Pandemonium? (Baal didn't retrieve his soulstone or rally his army until some time after Diablo's defeat.)
It's very possible that they didn't know what Baal was up to after the events of the main game. So it seems most likely that they headed that way once they heard about the demons rising around Mt. Arreat and then traveled there. By the time they arrived the barbarians were in the state we see them in and nobody was having a good time of it.
Why the hell did Tyrael just leave Marius in the insane asylum? I mean, leave him there, fine: Marius' experiences would have driven anyone nuts, but don't leave him with a world-destroying MacGuffin! Tyrael knew that Marius had Baal's soulstone, and he had to know that even if Marius did get anywhere near Hell, he'd get hacked to bits as he's just an ordinary human with no fighting skills. Marius might be good at sneaking, but he isn't that good, and in any case Tyrael completely failed to follow up despite the fact that Baal was still on the loose. Tyrael's negligence allowed Baal to get his soulstone back, pure and simple.
Perhaps the scenes we see of Marius took place almost immediately after act 4, and Tyrael was involed in cleaning up hell, without enough time to check on Marius, while Baal would have had more time to track Marius down.
True, but sending Marius to destroy the soulstone was a terrible idea from the get-go, as mentioned above. Marius is an ordinary man, and a fairly weak and sleep-deprived one at that. While getting the soulstone away from Baal is a great idea, it's plainly obvious Marius stood zero chance of actually reaching the Hellforge on his lonesome.
How quickly could the news of Diablo's defeat have reached Marius? Marius had gotten the news at least a while before Baal caught up to him. "I heard later that he was defeated..."
It's possible that he was simply unable to return to Sanctuary just yet. Bear in mind his words at the end of Act II: "I am broken and the energies that tie me to this world are diminishing rapidly". He literally couldn't go near Marius before it was too late, and he couldn't tell anyone, as the only humans he was in contact with were all fighting in Hell. We don't know how long they were down there, but it was long enough for Baal to find Marius, retrieve his soulstone and begin his invasion of Mount Arreat.
So, earlier, it is said that by the third game, the original heroes of II has become Ax-Crazy after facing the Prime Evils. But now, such notion seems to be... gone, especially after the reveal that the Sorceress (Isendra) became the mentor of III's Wizard, and even if the Assassin had a Face–Heel Turn, she seemed more lucid and acted because Isendra committed an accident at her cost. And there's also the Retcon that the Barbarian in III is different than the Barbarian in II. So... did that notion get a Retcon or what? Are the rest of the heroes (Paladin, Amazon, Druid and Necromancer (yes, we know he had a student, but we don't know how lucid the original Necro is after the events of II?)) just at least got the notion of 'never heard of again, but still sane'?
It took some time after Diablo's defeat for the news to reach Marius, for Baal to reach Marius, and for Baal to begin his assault on Mount Arreat. What the hell were Cain, Tyrael, and the heroes of Diablo II doing in all that time? As shown under Failure Is the Only Option, defeating Diablo before Baal retrieved his Soulstone and began his assault on Mount Arreat was the only time the heroes actually got ahead of the Prime Evils; why did they squander that lead?
As stated above, no one knew where Baal was. It may not seem that way but Sanctuary is a big place and the cinematics show Baal can pass for human when he wants to. They likely spent the intervening time searching for Baal.
Could the Ancients have actually stopped Baal? Two of the quests are about how Baal bypasses them with Nihlathak's help, but would they have made a difference?
No, but they would have definitely slowed him down, enough for the PC to confront him before he could corrupt the Worldstone. Considering the PC had already defeated Mephisto and Diablo by this point, he was probably wishing to avoid a meeting.
Why did Sescheron extend the bridge to Baal's army when the spokesperson went out? He never crossed it, and it must have made it so much easier to breach the city.
Who says it was Sescheron that extended the bridge? In Baal's very first appearance in the cinematics he is shown to have telekinetic abilities, with which he could have extended the bridge himself.
A more pertinent question is why did they send him out in the first place? Did they honestly believe he could possibly accomplish anything, one unarmed guy trying to scare off an army of demons and their lord?
How did Deckard Cain know that Khalim's remains would have any effect on the Compelling Orb?
How did the Dark Wanderer and Marius get into Tal Rasha's burial chamber? Deckard Cain said you needed a Horadric Staff to get in; did one of them have a Horadric Staff, or did they manage to find a way in without one? And either way... how?
Why is the "Monastery Graveyard" a few days journey over a mountain range needing an underground passageway to cross from the monastery itself?
