Let's save the world from yet another demon invasion while walking very fast!

[Amake]

In other words, let's play Diablo II.


But wait! This is not the D2 you know.

It's Diablo II: Median XL 2012: v.002. It's a whole new ballgame. It starts with picking our character:


(Note to self: Learn to photoshop.)

Of course we could just vote for a character. But if the votes don't show a clear winner within, let's say, one day from this posting (it's 1 AM in Sweden), I'd be more inclined to go with whatever character proposal sounds most interesting/fun/whatever. Oh yes, I'm going to narrate the proceedings in character with extreme dramatosity.

More specifically, our options are:
Amazon: Now comes with specializations that mostly lock you in one of four skill trees. May achieve preposterous amounts of life and defence late in the game, if you're some sort of weirdo who doesn't put everything into damage. Sub-options include:
*Bows: Highlights include summoning an army of archers kind of like the elves in The Two Towers, loosing several hundred arrows per second in random directions and something called Dragonforce that's supposedly "intentionally overpowered as fuck". I have not tried this one.
*Javelins: Can chuck a spear and make it bounce like a pinball between dozens of people, several times per second. Have not tried this path either.
*Spears: This is what the Amazon is famous for in Median, believe it or not. Centers on the Pounce skill, which teleports you on top of a monster and kills the hell out of it and fifteen or twenty of its closest friends.
*Maces: Makes the ol' Zon a spellcasting bloodwitch who a) does more damage the less life she has and b) uses her own life to cast spells. Damn, that sounds badass.

Assassin: Famous for thriving with less life than any other character, largely due to an amazingly powerful "Dodge everything" skill, but it helps if you're actually half awake. That's right, player skill counts here. These subspecies can overlap without much difficulty:
*Melee: Kill stuff at tremendous speed with a combination of skills that add multiple elemental properties to your weapon damage and skills that distribute said damage in creative ways. Can punch people so hard bats come out.
*Psychic Ninja: Teleports around and throws magical shurikens at people with her mind. No, really.
*Bombs and throwings thereof: A variety of colorful trap skills and knife throwing skills meet in some strange synthesis of magic and high-tech. Grenade launchers and artificial black holes made out of pure evil and things.

Necromancer: Just like in the old days, Mr. "I Love Dead People* Frequently" has way too many good skills that you want to use all at once, resulting in many an agonizing decision until you remember it's relatively cheap to craft a Potion of Respec. Strengths include:
*Summons: We don't resurrect dead monsters anymore, we just conjure them up. We've got buffing, debuffing, tanking and spearheading minions plus a dangerous one who raises minions of his own.
*Totems: Okay, we do use dead bodies to make these.Then they stand around and shoot fireballs and stuff at the bad guys. This could theoretically require strategic gameplay.
*Buckshot: The Necromancer uses a crossbow like a shotgun. I think that's all there is to say about it.
*Angel of Death: In case you've ever wondered what the Necromancer would look like flying through the air cutting down mortals with a great big scythe, you have to look careful because this set of melee skills include a defensive buff that changes him into a broad-shouldered warrior type with heavy armor and the scythe into a sword. But it's still badass.

Barbarian: Just when you thought the Necro was a bit of a twist from the original game there's this guy. He can still keep to the basic concept of hitting things with swords, but it's not quite the same:
*Hitting Things With A Sword Until They Stop Moving: There's six different skills for doing this, and two of them are weak attacks that buff you and the other four summon a variety of storms, earthquakes, thunderclaps and landslides to crush your enemies and drive them before you. While you sit back and watch. So you're kind of seeing them driven before you.
*Axe Throwing: Five different skills for this too, from trick shots that bounce off walls to throwing eighty-four axes in one motion. (Eighty-four on level one, anyway.)
*Stances: We also get to look cool while we do stuff using differenct stances. Okay, they're basically Paladin auras, and we have to keep them on all the time to make them do anything. There's a cool one that makes us take more damage while you do more damage, one that heals you up while you do less damage, etc.
*Spirits: We can call on the Protector, Defender and Guardian spirits of the ancestors to kick ass for us as well. If you're thinking it looks like every frickin class has some kind of summon skills, well, I forgot to mention that about the Amazon, because she is the only one that's got just one summon skill with no synergies or anything.

Paladin: At least this guy has highly optional summons. They're on top of his neutral skill tree, and how much fun is it to be neutral when we can join either the Light or the Shadow? Well, okay,fine, you can use neutral skills either way. We're actually going to use a whole lot of skills all the time that we cast and then forget to cast again and then they run out just when we're standing nose to nose with Diablo.
*Shadow/Wicked: Here we can choose between a melee sort of skill set that involves shooting ice and fire while standing next to the bad guys or a spellcasting direction that includes a spell called Mind Flay. I'm not saying one is more practical and the other is more noble or anything, but I will remind you at this point we're already firmly turned to the Dark Side of the force.
*Light/Honor: Once again we choose between sword and sorcery. Either an ingenious innovative fighter that gives us one of the highest defenses in the game and requires enemies to hit us before we can use our primary skill, or a tactically challenging sort of spellcaster what has to stand in the right spot and switch skills every two seconds and stuff.

Sorceress: Still a firecracker powder keg of a spellcaster, albeit with an arcane fury now tempered by harsh restrictions. We get ultimate firepower even in one additional element than in the old days, but, yeah, once we pick our favorite two the other two are locked out.
*Fire: Always my first choice, just for philosophical reasons. The unique twists here consist of a circle of power you can place on the ground to sort of force yourself to make strategic decisions, and a skill that gives a shitload of life regeneration. (Perfect for cheapskates like me who don't want to use potions.) (Even though the Sorc eventually gains the power to make her own potions.)
*Ice: Comes with an armada of badass snowballs, which ironically is the key to surviving Hell.
*Lightning: Has a defensive skill with the neat name of Warp Armor, and that's about the only interesting thing there.
*Poison: For a brief period the home of a skill that summoned farting cows, now houses such colorful conjurations as a tornado of moldy books and a carpet of spiders. Also a bizarrely twisted version of the cold armors of old, in a skill that gives crushing blows to your attackers.

Druid: Thinkin about werewolf-cheesing it up? Think again.
*Wererat/Weretree: Fairly straightforward stuff. The tree form is so slow, it even slows down things trying to fight it. And it can apparently rub itself vigorously enough to start a fire. The giant quill rat form shoots endless torrents of five-foot spikes everywhere, lays eggs which hatch spikes and casts walls of even more spikes.
*Elemental: For when you just want to shoot some magic spells on some dudes, there's five skills for that in ice and fire flavors.
*Poison: You remember those incredibly annoying frog thingies that would jump at you from everywhere in Act 2, spit poison, fly backwards whenever you tried to hit them and take forever to kill? Now they're on our side, we can get shitloads of them, and we can make them strong.
*Archery: Did you expect the Druid to be an ace sharpshooter with some funky tree-shaped bow? Well he is. His signature shot is a parasitic sporulating arrow that breeds as it jumps from enemy to enemy.

And that's all at this precise moment. Sorry about the lack of screenshots. I don't think anyone wants to look at 217 pictures of skill descriptions any more than I want to take them and that's about all we would have so far.

Once we decide on a character, that's of course not the end of the audience participation segment of the show. You can weigh in on stat and skill point allocation, how to spend our money, what items to craft and what way seems best to die to you. Uh, I mean at what stage and in what order to attempt the dire challenges offered by the mod. Theoretically we could even have a multiplayer event.

Should we play Hardcore? Please say no.

PS. I'm taking up Synk's suggestion to explain a little more generics about how Median works, to save you the trouble of clicking that link. I'm assuming everyone's familiar with Diablo II, or else what would you be doing in this games forum? So try to recall playing that for the very first time. It's a lot like that. So very many things are reworked from the ground up, it's hard to know where to start. We have energy synergy, which is this obvious thing where magic spells do more damage the more energy you have, kind of like weapon attacks benefit from strength and dexterity. We have 120 levels instead of 99. We have 217 new skills just counting the ones the characters have on them. We have slowly scaling max skill levels that reduce the need to hard skill points and also keeps you from maxing out at level 50. We have thousands of nifty new items, not merely the kind with bigger and flashier numbers but ones that do things you've never thought of before, that forces you to reconsider yet again this game you thought you knew inside out since at least five years. And we have a few dozens of new extra-hard quests, dungeons, monsters and frustrating little challenges on top of the old.

You know those boring monsters that walk in a straight line towards you and punch you? Kind of like blood-filled Tetris blocks? There's basically none of those to be found in the game.

You know those skills that no one ever uses unless they can't have anything better yet? (I'm looking at youuu, Fire Bolt.) That are not only merely a stepping stone that you have to grind away with for a while until you can get the bigger, shinier skills that not only are more useful most of the time but actually better in every way, that are in fact pointless wastes of space? There's maybe three or four of those in the game, that the author has given up on.

You know how defense doesn't do anything, because monsters have bugged attack ratings that no one ever bothered to fix? There's none of that neither. In this mod you're supposed to walk and try not to get hit.

I'm probably forgetting something important. I haven't played the game unmodded in so long. . .

PPS. We're probably going to need a name too. It can be fifteen characters, any alphanumeric, including either one hyphen or underscore, but not both, and not as the first character. It's not depressing that I knew all that by heart. But yeah, any suggestions? Who are we kidding, we know it's going to end up being BUTTS anyway.

[Kerensky287]

Originally Posted by Amake

Can punch people so hard bats come out.

I have never really played Diablo 2, and I didn't really read the rest of the entry that thoroughly, but this is all I've ever wanted in life. Do this.

And name your guy Butz.

[Amake]

What a turnout huh. Nonetheless, I live to serve. In Hardcore, no less. (Really just to keep it snappy.)


Enter Butz, the last in a fifteen hundred year old line of assassins, trained from birth to combat the demon plague of Sanctuary and so on and so forth.




These people surely do talk a lot. I kind of tuned out after the first paragraph of their respective introductions and missed out completely on their opinions on current events and gossip.



I woke up somewhere by the end of a speech about the demon queen Andariel, but I don't think the woman noticed me drifting off. Apparently she's been sighted east of the camp. These poor country folks. Probably just a drunk chick someone spotted on a stormy night.


Nonetheless, there's some demon scum running around the countryside who needs killin. And I've got a couple of blades I forged myself for that very purpose.


Mutated, murderous beasts and restless corpses immediately swarm around me, seemingly directed by little airborne imps bobbing around behind the front lines and darting in to peck little bits of flesh when my back is turned.


No big deal. That's what they make magical healing potions for.


I learn more in a couple of minutes of fighting than I did in all those years of daily exercise. Fifteen years I longed for this master skill; honed my mind and body, prepared myself for the day when I would be ready to begin training the bat-summoning strike.

It is glorious. I try to restrain myself and look only at the pure practical value, the strategic purpose of including this skill in my arsenal. But it's impossible to quench the childish glee.




I build up the charge in my body, while still impacting on theirs. One strike, two,


And then release. And my breath mixes with theirs. And my army grows. Just like that.


This den wasn't on my map, but I can easily smell the evil brewing inside, if not breeding. It's way too close to the camp. My bats and I are going to
bluh.

[McTahr]

Median XL takes no prisoners.

You clearly need more oomph in the bat punch. I hear Bruce uses roofies to give his that special zing.

[Gregness]

Since this was a hardcore character, I vote the next one is a summoner Necromancer.

[Amake]

Yeah, Hardcore means she's gone forever. The bat strike takes a bit of micromanagement which I usually dislike, and trying to set up and take screenshots at the same time didn't make it easier. But a Necromancer has no excuse to stay dead, obviously. Also it's more macro gameplay and I'm pretty well used to it. So it should go better. Plus you get to shoot your own minions with shotguns to create homing missiles.

I'll see how the thread looks in 12 hours or so before making any commitments if that sounds tolerable.

[Gregness]

Originally Posted by Amake

...But a Necromancer has no excuse to stay dead, obviously...

Some version of this needs to happen.

[Amake]

In hindsight, I think doing an LP for one person made Butz suicidal from the start. Can we get at least two votes for a Necromancer? Or anything?

Not that I'd mind terribly playing a game just for Greg, too, but based on history I'm going to have this overwhelming feeling the entire time and won't stop thinking, "He could do this better himself".

[Krylo]

No votes, but suggestion: Record video, take screenshots of that. You're playing an action game in hardcore mode, worrying about screenshotting while playing seems like way more of a pain in the ass than you should have to deal with.

[A Zarkin' Frood]

Make a necromancer, call him necrobuttz. I'd totally LP with you, but I'm to addicted to another game right now.

You also might want to make this a video LP.