Anger Barb UT 99er
Born: 4.12.2019
Retirement: 12.11.2021
Born: 4.12.2019
Retirement: 12.11.2021
Hello lovely community and welcome to the write up of Anger the Barbarian.
I have played Diablo 2 on and off for about 15 Years now. The last couple of years I played exclusively Single Player. By coincidence I stumbled across this Forum and the Untwinked 99er thread.
Back then in the old forums. I read through all of the Untwinked 99er thread in the old forums and was really impressed by the dedication and love for the game by the people in this thread.
Even though I was intrigued by this challenging way to play this game I thought I would never try it myself due to the incredible amount of time needed to complete this goal.
But I also wanted to be a part of the Hall of Fame. After watching @Bewitch on twitch playing his barb and other characters without mods and being bored myself by my old characters I decided to give it a go.
So Anger the Barbarian was born on the 4.12.2019.
I picked barb because in all my years playing this game I never really played a barb and I wanted to try something new.
Leveling:
Having no experience playing this class, leveling was actually really hard.
He started doubled swing into frenzy but respected to Whirlwind after having no success with this build and getting cornered by mobs again and again. He lacked a good weapon the whole time and so Whirlwind didn’t work out very well. So he used his 2nd respect before getting to hell.
The 3rd respect was used after getting to hell which was really rough. Looking back the leveling process was the least fun and most frustrating phase of his journey.
Anger rushed to LK where he stayed until he found all the runes he needed. His first endgame item String of ears was picked up while leveling.
Lower Kurast:
Not much to say about this part of his journey.I didn’t count the total number of runs but I estimate it must have been about 2-3k runs. Mabey 4000. Pretty decent luck I would say.
He found 2 Ber, 2 Sur, 2 Lo, 1 vex and Guls. And he even got this Laying on hands gloves there.
Gearing up:
Anger crafted Enigma, 2x Hoto and went to the pits to find two 5 sox Phase blades to make his two Griefs. Didn’t have any luck with that, no Phase Blade that he cubed got 5 sox.
Farming the pits was slow and boring. He used some crappy weapons and dealt hardly any damage. So I got bored of pits and took a break from diablo 2 for almost one year. I was following the thread in the forums the whole time and regained my motivation by reading all the amazing updates by other players and I wanted to get back into this project. So I picked up where I left and farmed the pits to finally get the 2 bases for my griefs. Funny because after the comeback I dropped them in like 2 hours of farming. Both already with 5 sockets. So I crafted the two big missing pieces of my gear and went on.
After getting Enigma, 2x Grief and 2x Hoto he tried to do some Baalruns. I wanted to start grinding for experience as fast as possible. But it didn’t work out very well. The runs were slow, felt clunky and just not fun. Anger still needed some basic gear like Guillaume’s Face, Reapers Toll, Gore Riders, Highlord’s Warth etc. to unlock his true potential.
The next stop was Mephisto in hell until he got the Reapers Toll for his merc and Guillaume’s Face for himself. But he was still missing Gore Riders and Highlord’s Warth. But witj those items from Mephisto, Baalruns where at least doable and he started them at level 90. But the runs still felt slow and clunky and you kind people pointed out that I was still missing a mana leech ring. So I gambled one and now doing Baalruns was much smoother and more enjoyable without having to use mana potions all the time.
He finally picked up Gore riders somewhere in his early 90s. But still no Highlords. He got his endgame amulet much later at level 96 and 65% from Baal himself. Now his gear was finally complete.
Baalruns:
Baalruns where quite okay. Sometimes I enjoyed them, sometimes they were boring and felt like a chore. My motivation was to get to 98 so I could finally run Nihlathak as I have never done this before. So I had something to look forward to. I had a lot of deaths I would say and I got tilted really hard by every single one of them. Losing hours of grinding time because of a small mistake felt absolutely terrible. I would say I died at least 1-2 times per level. Most of the time Wave 5 killed me but a couple of times I got basically one shot by a nasty Wave 2. I put together a body recovery kit way too late in the journey but when I finally did I saved a lot of time. Losing 10% on death or only 2.5% makes a huge difference.
I think at level 97 I realized for the first time what an insane commitment and time investment this whole deal was. Doing the same run for hours and hours just to get a little bit more Experience was mind numbing from time to time. Listening to good music and watching something on my second monitor helped a lot with this..
But at the end of it Anger hit level 98 after all. Finally half way done.
So after hitting 98 at Baal Anger farmed some essences for a respecc. I kinda failed at the skill tree for Nihlathak runs because I didn’t put a point into Battle Commands. But farming essences was a terrible experience so I just stuck with my botched skill tree. And I also just used the first map I got with no Exp Shrine and just started the last grind.
Nihlathak:
Getting used to running Nihlathak took quite a while. I had no experience with it, so I wasn’t aware of how dangerous those vipers really are. This resulted in 2 deaths early on. Back to back. Back to 0%. Luckily I made it through the rest of the level without any deaths but a lot of close calls. I lost my map at 40% by accidently creating a nightmare game and so I decided to try and roll for a better map with an exp shrine on the way. I got one and stuck with this map for the rest of the level. I ditched my rejuvs potions since I ran out of them all the time anyways. My best bet was to hit the ESC as fast as I could whenever I saw some vipers and the nasty green poison cloud. I had to abandon a lot of runs because of this but I was rather save then sorry.
Release of D2R:
With the release of Diablo 2 Resurrected I wasn’t sure if I should make the transition. After creating another character and playing a little bit I made the move. There was no going back to the old graphics for me. Boy oh boy. This decision came with a lot of unpleasant surprises. First of all the loading times. They almost made me quit this game. I went from instant loading times to 7 seconds. This meant about 35 hours longer to get to 99. A huge difference. Also not being able to save the player setting at first was really annoying. And the game was and is still crashing a lot.
Additionally I had to get used to the new graphics. It was much harder to spot Nihlathak and the vipers. Also namelocking bugs if you tab out of the game. This was annoying as well.
But I had come too far to give up now so I just stuck to it and grinded it out.
The first thing I did was selling a Stone of Jordan and get an Annihilus. Uber diablo was easy and he gave a 19/11/9 Anni. The 9% at least made up for a little bit of the time lost due to the loading times. I wanted to do a one 1 hour test session. During this periode of time my game crashed two times and managed to get 2.4kk experience. So even with Anni it was about 500k less exp per hour. But yea it was just one hour of testing. At this point I didnt care about the increase of time needed to much. I just wanted to get it done.
Even though leveling takes longer due to loading times, it felt much quicker than in old diablo 2. I was enjoying d2r a lot and the remastered version together with the influx in forum activity especially in the Ut 99er thread motivated me a lot so I grinded a lot more and progressed much faster than before.
Stats:
Skills for Baal:
20 Whirlwind
20 Sword Mastery
20 Battle Orderss
20 War Cry
1 Battle Commands
1 Berserk for Physical Immune Lister
1 Iron Skin
1 Natural Resistance
1 Double Swing (for mana burn Lister but I couldn’t pull it off)
Rest into Shout
Skills for Nihlathak:
20 Bash
20 Concentrate
20 Sword Mastery
20 Howl
20 Battle Orders
1 Increased Stamina
1 Increased Speed
1 Iron Skin
1 Natural Resistance
Gear:
For Baal:
Head: Guillaume’s Face with 39% ED Jool
Armor: Enigma Mp
Weapon 1: Grief Pb 387/37
Weapon 2: Grief Pb
Switch: Hoto 34 + Hoto 37
Amulet: Highlord’s Wrath (before that I used a random rare Amulet with +1 to barb skills, some stats and resists)
Ring 1: Rare Ring with Mana Leech and Resists
Ring 2: Raven 228/18
Gloves: Laying on Hands
Belt: String of Ears 7/14/15
Boots: Gore Riders
Inventory: Grand Charms and Small Charms with Max Damage, Ar, Life, Resists
Merc: Reapers Toll with Shael, Kiras with 15 Ias Jool, Treachery
For Nihlathak:
Head: Guillaume’s Face with 39% ED Jool
Armor: Enigma Mp
Weapon 1: Grief Pb 387/37
Weapon 2: Beast BA 267/28
Switch: 2x Wizardspike
Amulet: Highlord’s Wrath
Ring 1: Rare Ring with Fcr and Resists
Ring 2: Raven 228/18
Gloves: Blood crafted Gloves with 20 Ias, 3% life leech, 10% CB
Belt: String of Ears 7/14/15
Boots: Gore Riders
Inventory: Changed the Inventory a bit to get more life and Ar and less Max Damage.
Plus I got a 19/14/9 Annihilus with the release of D2R.
Merc: Reapers Toll with Shael, Delirium, Treashery
Drops:
Runes:
Overall iam quite disappointed with the rune drops. I still didn’t drop a Cham or a Zod runes. Still missing those too.
Also there was no rune drop higher than Ber and those came from LK. So outside of LK I only got Vex – Sur.
But at least I got every rune that I really needed quite fast.
Overall:
2 Vex
4 Lo
5 Sur
2 Ber
1 Ohm
From Lower Kurast: Vex, 2 Ber, 2 Lo, 2 Sur
From Baalruns: Vex, Sur
From Nihlathak: Lo, Ohm, Sur, Vex, Lo
Rainbow Factes:
I dont know why I include them into this write up. I guess I just like them and I think its funny that I didnt drop a single poison facet.
6x Fire, 8x Cold, 5x Light, 0x Poison
5/5 Fire
5/5 Cold
2x 5/5 Light
I picked these drops according to my own opinion. There are some drops that a lot of people wouldn’t call amazing but for me they are.
Mostly because I have never found them before like the 4Sox Eth Thresher or some Grailers.
I won’t list every Skiller I found. There were so many and a lot of them I didn’t even pick up. I listed the two best I have found.
Best drops overall:
Steel Rend
Maras 29 from nihla. 5 Maras total
Very Highrune
3/20/17 sc
3/20/11 sc
Cold sk 35l
Pc sk 38l
4x soj
3x nightwingss
Eth 4sox thresher
Azurewrath
2x Boneflame
2x Shadow Dancers
Darkforce Spawn
Stormlash
The Cranium Basher
Well I guess that’s it.
Last but not least I want to thank the whole community for making this possible. Without the forum I would have never attempted to get to level 99.
In all my years of playing this game, this is my biggest accomplishment by far.
Thanks for all the input, the endless knowledge and especially for the positive words of encouragement whenever I was tilted because of a death. You guys kept me going.
And also thanks to every single runner. I also look forward to read new updates. It’s so amazing to see everyone’s character grow.
Special shout out to @ulof for watch every single of my terrible streams!
Thanks for reading!
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