the new ladder and a spanking new character!

So the new ladder season for D2E started this week. It meant that my 2 high characters (lvl 92 necromancer and lvl 87 Amazon), one mid level character (lvl 43 mace barbarian) and 12 low level characters all slipped from ladder to non-ladder. All my hard earned items slipped from mildly valuable to completely worthless (because non-ladder is full of duped stuff! and why not? it has been around for ages!!)
But what excites me is the opportunity to start afresh, all spanking new items, totally empty stashes and inventorand no annoying mid level items clogging 8 squares of precious inventory space. No more flawless and perfect gems clogging up loads of space. No more mediocre small charms clogging up space, because you don't want to let go of a 7% LR charm in case you don't find any better, and 7% is anyway better than none :)
I started a summoning necromancer - this time on the Europe server. Already level 22 and way into act4. It's slow going because not a lot of high level players are around to help with a rush. Still, I'm in no hurry and am enjoying going through the motions. Yesterday I soloed Duriel in act2 at character level 21. It was tough... my skellies were dropping quite quickly before him, mainly because of my low level skeleton mastery (not to mention no points in summon resist). But not much longer. At a high level, my skeletons can tank and whittle down even hell Duriel :)
This time, I will also make a blessed hammer paladin... it's a very strong character build, and can be quite useful with a nice spirit shield and spirit crystal sword. Quite cheap set up as well.
At the moment, I'm looking forward to getting to Pindleskin in hell, so I can start running him for awesome items :)