Abellion, Paladin hunting for runes in Diablo II
As I already explained in the last post Diablo II is perhaps my favorite game ever, and I couldn’t help but use the renewed love (which never disappeared anyway) between me and Blizzard North‘s masterpiece to launch this new series about gaming heroes from any age and game platform. As per tradition, the first character I created after I installed the game again on Windows 10 was a Paladin, Abellion, which has been promoted to “Slayer Abellion” after clearing the game’s first difficulty level. Now Slayer Abellion is a level 63 Paladin facing the Nightmare difficulty level, and one of his main concerns is to hunt for runes useful to create Rune Words of powerful objects.
Rune Words are one of the most frustrating traits of Diablo II, on-line guides take for granted the fact that a player “should” find a particular rune in a particular zone of the game’s world when the character level is right and the stars align. In fact the stars rarely align, and rune drops are generally mediocre or hardly useful to create some gear that’s really competitive with a set item or a good unique item. In Abellion’s case, the stars have unexpectedly aligned themselves this past Friday when at the end of the Hell’s Forge quest (Act IV) he ran across a Um rune, which according to the aforementioned on-line guides would be a “mid” level rune but that I was waiting to recover for weeks now.
Now Abellion’s next target is to recover a good base armor with three sockets, so that I can create Duress – one of the most interesting Rune Words for a character specialized in close combat like the Paladin (Shael+Um+Thul). I hope to reach the target before coming too close to Baal, since Harrogath weather is harsh, Mount Arreat is flooded with minions of the Lord of Destruction and Abellion needs something new to wear and properly clobber this evil in Super VGA pixels (continues…).