This looks like the kind of thing I was looking for. I appreciate the purism. At first I played straight up Ladder, but I started to feel put-off by my adjacence to the notorious bot activity -- and how it made literally everything I did feel pointless.
Then I tried to mentally separate myself, still on ladder, with a new 'pure' solo account, but it's hard to fully mentally implement that boundary. I think the only reason I wasn't single player with that, is that I couldn't manage to get the ladder runewords hax working, and I generally distrusted anything third-party to be flaky compared to simply having an actual ladder character. But in the end I also ended up shunting my 'pure' MF'ed gear to my tainted account characters, and I was playing them as well just so I could at least mess around with other people a bit (and gave in to bot-run XP runs to skip to higher levels for special builds).
Anyway I'm looking forward to building up my progression of gearing with different specialized farming characters that I can bounce back and forth on. Like a 1.07 Hell Cows Javazon for ethereal weapons, for a pure Trav MF Barb, with a Hell Meph Sorc on the side, and a Skelemancer with Poison Nova for fun. I think it will be fun to mess around in older, harsher versions too, maybe classic.
It gives me optimism for D2R as well, after hearing that it will probably be just as marred by bot nonsense on ladder; though I really hope they'll make the characters just look more on-model. I don't like the creative liberties they took there. I just want my conventionally attractive, sexy young Amazon, Sorceress, and Assassin in my Diablo 2, is that so much to ask? And the Necromancer's face is too wide. They all have flumpy potato-face, honestly. That's not dark and gritty, it's just weird and sad. Reality is sad enough, just make my silly game pretty like it was.
Are there many opportunities to join up with someone in a game kind of impromptu? I can't find much mechanism for that kind of thing.
Then I tried to mentally separate myself, still on ladder, with a new 'pure' solo account, but it's hard to fully mentally implement that boundary. I think the only reason I wasn't single player with that, is that I couldn't manage to get the ladder runewords hax working, and I generally distrusted anything third-party to be flaky compared to simply having an actual ladder character. But in the end I also ended up shunting my 'pure' MF'ed gear to my tainted account characters, and I was playing them as well just so I could at least mess around with other people a bit (and gave in to bot-run XP runs to skip to higher levels for special builds).
Anyway I'm looking forward to building up my progression of gearing with different specialized farming characters that I can bounce back and forth on. Like a 1.07 Hell Cows Javazon for ethereal weapons, for a pure Trav MF Barb, with a Hell Meph Sorc on the side, and a Skelemancer with Poison Nova for fun. I think it will be fun to mess around in older, harsher versions too, maybe classic.
It gives me optimism for D2R as well, after hearing that it will probably be just as marred by bot nonsense on ladder; though I really hope they'll make the characters just look more on-model. I don't like the creative liberties they took there. I just want my conventionally attractive, sexy young Amazon, Sorceress, and Assassin in my Diablo 2, is that so much to ask? And the Necromancer's face is too wide. They all have flumpy potato-face, honestly. That's not dark and gritty, it's just weird and sad. Reality is sad enough, just make my silly game pretty like it was.
Are there many opportunities to join up with someone in a game kind of impromptu? I can't find much mechanism for that kind of thing.
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