@NorthDakota this may be a bit over the top, but after your question, I kinda want to type out how I like to create and pursue my d2 goals. I think about d2 in such a way that I want to maximize the things I can do within it and enjoy. For me this means working on many goals that I think are cool all at the same time. My personal main goals categories boil down to 4 things: magic finding, rune finding, exp farming, and efficiency. Someone else could obviously add other things such as making interesting patmats/septs or playing tournament chars, or achieving other hardcore feats, but at the moment I'm not interested in those. So I have goals in the back of my head for my main categories (again someone else's categories may be different). So for mine seems easy to set the very long term goals: holy grail, runeword grail, 99er (and I also have a goal of each class to lvl 95), and some hall of records goal (for me its <2 adjeff right now). Then I try to think of the most fun, but still productive ways to work on those goals. For me this involves a lot of variety and testing of things.
Also I love this forum and the sense of community and purpose it gives to playing the game so I always make forum participation a goal too. I try to participate in the major tourneys and make myself take to time to do a lot of detailed posts of what I'm doing. This adds a lot of fun for me.
But on in the in-game goals, for example, I want to work on holy grail. Ofc barb is the best, but I would consider many other characters still quite productive for this goal, and I want to play and test a lot of characters. So I made my
1kmw thread, where I'm doing short(ish) projects with most every reasonable mf build I can think of, or at least that's the eventual goal.
I want to work on my runeword grail too. So besides participating in RFL when it comes around, I made this little
runefinding tour project, which I'm finding fun and productive. Additionally back when I wanted to start a 99er, I chose to run a
chaos sorc because she's much better for runes than a baal runner. And now I'm considering starting a twinked 99er hdin attempt to make further progress.
If your exp goal is a 99er ofc that offers the least variety because its a grind. But I find there can be heavy overlap with runefinding goals so I was glad to work on my sorc (not that it wasn't super tough to push thorugh sometimes). And now I'm also considering starting that hdin as I mentioned. But I also have enjoyed having an "exp sept" goal. Again in the interest of variety, I want to play all 7 classes a good bit (though druid makes that tough), so I set a goal to get all 7 classes to 95, and am a couple of weeks away from finishing that goal! This offers a lot more variety since 95 isn't so crazy tough, so you can play in alvl 85 areas on lower psettings if you don't mind taking more time, and ofc just using all 7 classes adds variety.
On the efficiency goal, I can get too caught up in this. Because for me anyways it's a tough goal, and just practicing pitzerker is surely the best way for me to get there. But since I want the variety that I keep talking about I figured I'd just play other characters and make some attempts at sub 2
during MFO and at the end of the year. We'll see how that goes!
So I thought was fun to type out and hopefully is fun to read. But as a takeaway, some suggestions for potential goals for you:
- join the runeword grail thread
- join my runefinding tour to work on previous idea
- get your hdin to 97 to work on it too
- running LK, which you seem to like a lot, will also help that along (also is a part of the runefinding tour)
- join the holy grail thread
- do 1000 (or 500) pits or AT runs with 5 different characters and tell us what you find and which runners you liked the most. Will work toward last idea
- start some other project thread on forum (I get tons of satisfaction from mine)
- get a guardian
- make a sweet signature that includes "Creator of the Anything Goes D2 Lounge"
Good luck!