Diablo LoD - item running

The aspect of Diablo which I find most interesting and rivetting was the awesome items a person can find.
Don't get me wrong - the game itself, the gameplay and all each enough to keep the casual gamer entertained for many many hours. But for the experienced games, when the charm of completing all the quests and experimenting with all the various character types and character builds wears off, the hunt for super-rare items is what keeps the game poised on a razor's edge!
In summary, each monster in the game, when killed, is capable of dropping a number of items including weapons, armour, gold, runes (specially inscribed stones possessing special powers), gems, charms, jewels etc. Weapons, armour, runes and gems can be of varying levels, with higher level items being rarer and being dropped by increasingly powerful monsters and increasing higher difficulty levels of the game.
Items can be normal, magical, rare, belonging to a set or unique. By far the most exciting of these are usually weapons and armour belonging to sets, or which are unique.
When you collect all the items of a set, together they receive several special and oft-times awesome bonuses. Unique items by themselves have awesome bonuses (specially the higher level uniques).
High level runes are awesome too. Not for the powers they themselves possess, but because of their use in "rune word" items.
A note about rune words - each weapon or armour can come with sockets or holes. Gems, jewels or runes can be set into these sockets to convey additional special powers to these weapons or armour. In normal socketed items, a number of runes may be set in a particular pre-specified sequence, to make a rune word. A rune word conveys the item a special name (the runeword) and many more properties than those collectively possessed by the individual runes.

Enough about items - now an intro about item runs.

Like I mentioned before, beating the game at all the 3 difficulty levels (normal, nightmare and hell) is no sweat especially in multiplayer games (it can get tricky for some character builds in single player games). Once you're over the initial playability spike of the game, you're probably ready to create specialized characters with better gear and usually deadly powers.
How do you get better gear? You kill a lot of tough monsters. Some monsters have better odds of dropping better quality items than others. You repeatedly kill these monsters and wait for the good stuff to drop. These games are called item runs.

There are popular monsters which are usually the target of these games. In partucular, the act-end bosses have excellent odds of dropping uniques. But super-unique monsters also have good odds. Especially the super-unique monsters of Act 5 in Hell difficulty are excellent targets for item runs.
The most popular targets for item runs have historically been

1. Mephisto - the act3 end boss. Mephisto has awesome odds of dropping good stuff. But in the latest patch (1.10), Mephisto is really difficult to find. He inhabits the third level of the dungeon called Durance of hate. In patch 1.1, blizzard increased the complexity of durance level 2 insanely. Combine that with the really really tough monsters you find in durance levels 2 and 3, Mephisto doesn't appeal to the item runner that much any more.
Until the last patch, I had a level 91 sword-wielding barbarian character who was awesome at Mephisto runs. I used to complete runs in 2 minutes flat (tops) and used to hardly ever die in the process. But after the new patch, my barbarian does not stand a chance with Mephisto (even getting there). Another drawback in Mephisto is that he can't drop all the high-end unique and set items. His monster-level isn't high enough. But for his monster level, of all the items he can drop, the odds of the item being set or unique are quite high.

2. Baal - Baal is the act5 end boss. Baal can drop every item in the game, and he has excellent chances of dropping unique or set items. But in terms of difficulty in reaching him, Baal is 10 times worst then Mephisto. You'll have to run through the dungeon Worldstone Keep level 2 and 3. Then you'll have to kill 5 super-uniques (called Baal's minions), which is itself extremely difficult. Finally Baal himself is no pushover. He is exceedingly tough to kill unless you have awesome gear (which is the point of killing him in the first place). Also, Baal in hell difficulty can kill you very quickly. So ensure you have excellent resistance to the elemental magics and high hitpoints. Alternatively ensure you can kill him very quickly.

3. Pindleskin - Pindleskin is a super-unique monster found in an area called Nihlathak's temple in Act 5. Pindleskin is the simplest monster to kill of the 3 mentioned here. He is by no means a pushover because he always comes with a motley crew of undead zombies which can pulverize you with their bash attack before you know what hit you. But he is the easiest to find and kill for most characters.
Unfortunately in the latest patch, Blizzard have drastically reduced Pindle's odds of dropping high quality items (sets and uniques). Also in 1.09, Pindle used to be able to drop all the items in the game. In 1.10 he can not drop items from the highest items classes. Rather unfortunate. But combined with the ease of reaching him and the ease of killing him, Pindle's reduced dropped item quality still puts him above all other monsters for item runs in my book.

More on item running in subsequent posts.

the gothic masterpiece - Diablo

A lot has been said, written and spoken about the Diablo games created by Blizzard. Mostly you hear die-hard fans use the word "awesome". And that's precisely what these games are.
Now as a precursor to this post, I'd like to proclaim that I'm really pretty much only into RPGs and beat-em-ups. I have been known to indulge on the occasional other genre, but these 2 are pretty much the genres that float my boat.
That out of the way, back to Diablo. Diablo was a smash hit game that really deserves a place in the games hall of fame. The game has an awesome gothic feel to it. It makes your skin crawl as it sucks you into a dark world where your hero has to slay a multitide of different monsters and get a lot of different stuff in the process (monster drops). Your goal is to travel down into successively lower levels of the labyrinth and in the end, face off with the lord of terror, Diablo. An awesome experience, including the haunting music, realistic sound effects, the awesome graphics (for that time period) and a mind-blowing theme. Character development makes each experience unique, and that combined with different character classed makes for a mindboggling number of gameplay variations.
I didn't dwell much on Diablo, because I got it as a part of a "battlechest", which also contained Diablo2 (aka Diablo2 Classic or D2C) and Diablo2 Expansion - Lord of Destruction (aka LoD).
LoD went where even Diablo hadn't gone. The game is simply mindblowing! What can I say? Amazing graphics, tremendous gameplay variations (and I mean truely truely staggering!), 7 character classes (as compared to 3 in Diablo and 5 in D2C), continuation of the gothic theme, introduction of a host of highly desirable gameplay results (in the form of awesome item drops) and most of all - the ability to be played online in games of 8, with 100s of 1000s of other likeminded players!

It needs to be played to believe how good it is. That's all for this post. Watch out for subsequent posts to find out more about gameplay aspects, character classes, strats I used, awesome items and more...

Intro - all about my (limited) gaming experiences

It gives me great pleasure to finally create a blog about one of my favourite pass-times - gaming. After pouring out my thoughts and theories on my main blog, venting spleen at assholes in my assholes blog and talking about beauty on my beautiful people blog, this is a long awaited development.
In here I'll talk about the few games that have wasted so much of my time, and preserved so much of my sanity. It's too bad blogger is not widely visible via search-engines, because I'd love for my experience to help fledgling gamers on their quests. I know I would have loved to get my hands on the knowledge I now possess.
Have a good read.