I have 3 categories of characters. Primary, Secondary and Mules. Primary characters are not rushed through any part of the game and are the characters I play most often. Secondary characters sometimes get a partial rush but usually end up playing most of the game anyway. I don't really care too much about their gear because I generally make them when I have their items, and none are likely to ever wear expensive uniques and runewords, they are for primary characters. My mules take part in rune buses so as to get runes to cube up to the expensive ones (currently working on Ber, 1 Ist and 2 Topaz away from Lo
) and so that I don't need to make a normal game to transfer items.
When playing primary characters I almost always make public games and they are frequently undisturbed by rushers. I recently managed to play all of Normal in a full party that all started at level one together and finished up doing the Ancients at level 35. It was probably the best game I have ever had on bnet with everybody working together(!) and using skills in a party friendly manner. By that I mean we had 2 Barbs that did not override each other's warcries (they even went so far as to coordinate their skill distribution so they had the same levels at the end), and 3 Palas that all used different auras and used Cleanse and Meditation at the right time.
What annoys me is the attitude of some people, often duelers but not always, that have only ever been rushed. They tend to make snide remarks about people that actually play the game the way it was designed, frequently on the grounds that it is boring, and yet have no concept of combat tactics (all their characters use the same tactic regardless of class or build - run attack run attack die squeal for tp run attack run attack die...) and the variable gameplay inherent in D2. This then leads them to the false belief that certain builds are useless and anyone who tries it should be derided.
Sadly I had a friend in 09 that was a little like this, he had 8 lvl 99 characters and couldn't understand why I wanted to waste my time doing quests when I could be lvl 99 so easily. When he was building a new character once I asked him to help me kill Izual and he asked me what an Izual was. So I told him that I wanted the quest reward and he replied that you don't need the quest just do cows. When I told him what the reward was he spent the next while doing the Izual quest on all his characters because he had NEVER (in almost 2 years of playing!!) done it before.
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