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1-Fighting Evil

Welcome to Sanctuary, a wonderful place to get away from it all.

This is Diablo II, but resurged. The first mod I'm showcasing, Resurgence, adds its own branding to the title screen. We're starting with this mod first because it has the least immediately noticeable changes to the game, so this will appear like Diablo II...for now.

When you start up the game and let it play out, you get that introduction video (which you should watch) setting up what's happening. Marius is in an insane asylum (they have those) and he is significant because he has firsthand account of a nasty thing going on tour in Sanctuary, henceforth dubbed "The Dark Wanderer".

He's called that because he's possessed by demons, and can't help but set everything and everywhere near him on fire and demons. The mortals of Sanctuary are very afraid of demons for good cause, but luckily for Marius, a man by the name of Tyrael tracks him down. ...Or, unluckily depending on how you view Tyrael's few lines of dialogue here.

Either way, that gets Marius to go on a storytelling binge to explain who he and the Wanderer is. With Marius being unfortunately involved with Tristram, (We'll go there later.) he has taken to doing drugs and staying up all night to cope. Then a Dark Wanderer lights his copehouse on fire and told him to get in the car, loser. We're going east.

You may be asking how this is relevant to us.

Well, it's relevant to us because whoever we're playing is trying to track down that Dark Wanderer, whether it be the Barbarian hailing from the northern steppes, the magic Sorceress of the Zann Esu mage clan, or the Amazon hailing from the Skovos Isles of the Twin Seas. There's four more but I'll go over them later. What I just described are the three most straightforward classes: Barb thwacks things, Sorc uses spells, and Zon uses ranged weaponry like javelins and bows.

We'll start with an Amazon, with the name LadyArty, because I'm going to use bows with this Amazon. If I don't do this there is literally 0 incentive to use bows in this game. Likewise with the other ranged weaponry, one class can build around them and having our classes not use those builds means we never use ranged. I don't want that. Ranged weaponry is an interesting approach to playing Diablo II and Amazon is the ideal ranged class. Bowazon is also a good "middle of the road" build for new players since it doesn't rely entirely on skills to circumvent the gear problem but finding good gear is not hard to do.

Music-The Rogue Encampment

When we start the game, we are immediately approached by a man and a speech bubble with an exclamation point appears above his head. That means he has something important to tell us. This is where the "Exclamation point = Quest" trope began. Welcome to ground zero.

No doubt you've heard about the tragedy that befell the town of Tristram. Some say that Diablo, the Lord of Terror, walks the world again. I don't know if I believe that, but a Dark Wanderer did travel this route a few weeks ago. He was headed east to the mountain pass guarded by the Rogue Monastery.

Maybe it's nothing, but evil seems to have trailed in his wake. You see, shortly after the Wanderer went through, the Monastery's Gates to the pass were closed and strange creatures began ravaging the countryside.

Until it's safer outside the camp and the gates are re-opened, I'll remain here with my caravan. I hope to leave for Lut Gholein before the shadow that fell over Tristram consumes us all. If you're still alive then, I'll take you along.

That's a big infodump. Warriv lays down a bit more about the first game: Tristram was a major human settlement, that has since been reduced to a corpse of a town. You can blame Diablo I for that. I'll go over why that happened later, but the takeaway here is that Tristram is a place ripe with hidden treasures and foul demons, so it's a magnet for adventurers. That's not why we're here though.

The fiery Kashya commands the Rogue archers in battle. I've only spoken to her a few times, though. I get the feeling that she doesn't like outsiders very much.

Also, every NPC has a bunch of banter you can access by choosing "Gossip" when talking to them. There's a lot of gossip and a lot of NPCs. I'll just be showing some, and if anything relevant shows up and I don't cover it, I'll just mention it in passing. There's a lot. A lot. Of gossip. And a lot of it is just everyone talking behind everyone else's back.

As for Kashya and the Rogues, this is another thing we'll cover later. At the start of the game, we should only be interested in running outside and stabbing demons. While we can talk to important NPCs and get told what to do, we can also just do it without anyone telling us to do anything, most of the time. To help you understand what we're doing though, we will go talk to Akara.

Note, however, the shiny blue flames and the pattern on the ground in the top-left corner. These Waypoints all over Sanctuary serve as fast travel, and are only active when we light the fires on the other side. It's fairly important to light them all, especially to serve as stopping points if you wish to take a break, but there's some that can be safely skipped because they don't lead to anything of note.

You see, our ancient Sisterhood has fallen under a strange curse. The mighty Citadel from which we have guarded the gates to the East for generations, has been corrupted by the evil Demoness, Andariel.

I still can't believe it... but she turned many of our sister Rogues against us and drove us from our ancestral home. Now the last defenders of the Sisterhood are either dead or scattered throughout the wilderness.

I implore you, stranger. Please help us. Find a way to lift this terrible curse and we will pledge our loyalty to you for all time.

It's not spelt out here, but the Sisterhood of the Sightless Eye and the Rogue archers are one and the same. It is, for the most part, a group of religious archers whose main purpose is to guard against demons. There's a lot of these groups floating around, but this one right now has just recently been overcame by a lovely lady called Andariel. Now she's here asking random strangers to get revenge. The reward ain't much since that Sisterhood is but, well, this encampment, but it should be a good start in tracking down the Dark Wanderer if we get this demoness off our lawn.

But wait, she's not done.

I fear that these creatures are massing for an attack against our encampment. If you are sincere about helping us, find the dark labyrinth and destroy the foul beasts.

May the Great Eye watch over you.

She has a good first test for us. There's a Den of Evil. Get in there and make it not Evil. It'll be a good warmup for us, and hopefully it'll lead into the captain of the Rogue archers trusting us enough to work with us.

There's three more NPCs to talk to but one of them's Kashya, and the other two are merchants. We'll talk to Kashya later once we prove ourselves, but we have a problem regarding the merchants:

We're dirt poor.

We start with some starting gear, four minor health potions, and two scrolls: one's identify, the other's town portal. Those are the only types of scrolls in the game and it's the important ones. These items, because we started with them, all sell for 1 gold; they are not meant to be sold. So we have effectively no money to shop. Once we get out there and get some good loot, however, this will change and we'll go say hi to the rest of the encampment.

Of note with our Amazon though, look at the Javelin she starts with. It has mediocre one-handed damage but much better damage when thrown. There's 500 of these as well, so we can throw them willy nilly. But how do we do that?

You'll notice these two red icons in the bottom corners, these are our action buttons. The bottom-left one is for left click, and the bottom-right one is for right click. We can use more than two attacks but I'll explain the finagling you have to do later. For now, all we can do is attack, which is not throwing. We need to fix this.

And we can by clicking on the buttons to pull up a grid of attacks we can do. We want the one for throw, (the five circles) and now our right-click throws our javelin. Left click, by the way, is how you move around, and if you're clicking on the ground and not a monster you'll move instead of attack. Right clicking is the opposite: we will attack unless we're using a melee action.

But we've put off our quest long enough. Out we go.

Music-The Wilderness

I shall purge this land of the shadow.

Certain events will have our character say a quip about it, but that's not important. It's time to explain what the mod Resurgence does, because immediately we're going to notice something that is not a luxury in Diablo II: our map is fully revealed. While it didn't spawn in range, the Den of Evil is going to be southeast and it'll be marked on the map. Normally the map only reveals anything close to us and only reveals landmarks. Resurgence does not want you to waste time. It'll also draw lines to things and places of your interest, but I have that turned off, which you can do with the "BH 1.9.8" menu you see below. (Hold control and click on it to open. right click to close. It's weird.)

Resurgence also sports a built-in item filter/notification system, because we don't need to see a stack of 10 pieces of trash, and it's faster to just look at a symbol, letter, and number for our consumables. This really shrinks down the amount of space massive amounts of loot can take trying to process it and pick apart what you want, so I'm thankful for it.

Anyway, if we follow the road, the Den of Evil will always be near it. Just following the road, killing any monsters in the way, and directly going to the Den is a normal thing to do in this game; and by design, Blizzard wanted you to do exactly that.

I'm gonna not follow the road and mess around outside a bit though just to get a level. Blood Moor is incredibly safe and poking around for some starter gear is a good way to make the Den easiest instead of easier.

The Blood Moor introduces us to three monsters, of which we see two right now. Each new monster type will be introduced when they first show up and I'll give them a relative challenge rating (out of 5 stars) and list any quirks they might have.

Zombie | CR: *

Zombies are laughably slow and have a very hard time noticing you. The exchange here is that if you get into melee with them they will swing at you and they are capable of doing damage. Not a lot, mind you, but,

Fallen | CR: *
==Flees when near heroes killing allies.

Fallen aren't much better. They have strength in numbers, but they will attempt to break away and flee for a bit if they're near a character who just killed someone. On the one hand this makes their numbers completely pointless because you kill one Fallen and the rest scatter. On the other it makes Fallen really hard to kill, especially with just melee, because you'll attempt to swing at a fleeing Fallen and by the time you make the swing, the runt's out of range.

But that's nothing compared to these funny little guys.

Spike Fiend | CR:
==Shoots spines.
==Stands around being useless.

These animals are ranged monsters: they prefer to keep away and fire projectiles. Also, while they're called Quill Rats here, internally they're called Spike Fiends because most monsters have recolors of themselves with bigger numbers. Quill Rats especially tend to never shoot at you anyway unless you get close to them or hit them. Even then, the Quill Rats here do a whopping 0 damage with their spines. They literally cannot hurt you at range.

I think they're the only monsters that have a 0 damage attack that still has to roll to hit, and it doesn't have high attack rating either, so it can't reliably hit or damage us up close either. We can be a Sorceress and still give no damns about this thing. Poor Quill Rat.

Scattered across Sanctuary are Shrines that will confer beneficial effects. Stamina Shrines are very good things to find because not only do they refill our stamina, they give us infinite stamina and allow us to move faster as long as it's in effect. All shrines have a limited time before their effects expire, but they do refresh themselves after a while.

Anyway, we spend a bit of time stabbing these monsters to get enough experience for our level. While we did this, they also dropped some items for us, like this armor.

Things like armor boost our Defense. In order from biggest boost to smallest: armor, shield/helmet, gloves/boots, and belts will contribute to our Defense and, in turn, our ability to avoid physical attacks. There's different tiers of each type of armor, and also different tiers of weapons. There's also jewelry to care about but they take a bit of playing to drop and they are particularly uncommon.

Items can also come in inferior or superior quality. Inferior (like our crude armor) lowers its maximum durability, which means you have to repair it more often, and it also lowers either its base damage if it's a weapon, or its defense if it's armor. Superior, meanwhile, might give a boost to damage, attack rating, defense, or durability. Nothing else comes in different qualities.

Anywho, I'm gonna go over what levels do later because, while I said I needed one, I really just wanted the extra chance to hit and dodge you get as your level goes up. I don't need stats, nor do I need skills right now.

But now that I have my second level...

Music-Caves

I hear foul creatures about.

It's time to clean house. This is the only quest where we have to wipe out all monsters in an area. This is good because it is remarkably easy to miss a spot in this game. Resurgence makes this a triviality because it also reveals nearby monsters, but other mods I may have to do a traditional clear. Luckily the Den of Evil is not a particularly complex dungeon. It's just a Fallen can run away elsewhere and I lose track of it because I was killing all of his friends.

The monsters from the Blood Moor are here as well, sans Quill Rat cause they're bad, but we get a couple of additions:

Wendigo | CR: **

These monsters, don't faff around and will walk up and hit us once they come on screen. They have similar damage output to Zombies but they are distinct in that they have considerably more health. Not enough to be a real wall, but enough to cause us to actually interact with them if they're in melee. We are not a melee character though, and we can just throw javelins at them from range.

No, instead these are the monsters to care about:

Fallen Shaman | CR: **
==Casts Fireball.
==Can revive dead Fallen.

Fallen Shamans are more proper ranged monsters. They're also support monsters, being able to bring dead Fallen back up. Which means, while Fallen are still really easy to deal with, their shamans will do their best to keep them coming. We'll have to dodge the Fallen and throw a javelin at the Shamans to cut through the masses, because each Shaman has a group of Fallen, and several Shaman can spawn together to create a sizable horde with no off switch so long as the Shamans live.

That means this is the first map where we can deal with a lot of monsters. Course, a lot of monsters that really aren't motivated to stick around and fight, but, well, let's just say I've seen people get overwhelmed by Fallen.

Beyond that, there's only one other thing of note:

this blue Zombie.

Corpsefire | CR: *
==Superunique
==Spectral Hit

Uniques are monsters with extra bonuses, modifiers to their attacks, and they come with a posse of stronger than usual monsters. Superuniques like Corpsefire are uniques but they're consistently the same in location and bonuses. Spectral Hit can be a nasty modifier, because not only does it add anywhere between 2/3rds to 1 times its damage as a random non-physical element, but which one it is is random every time. You may think just have high elemental resistances, but one of those types can be Magic, which has very few ways to resist. This means the monster has a 1 in 5 chance to just do shy of double damage to you, and otherwise do extra damage, more if you're lacking in resistances. There's some other fun things about Spectral Hit that's only relevant later.

But don't worry, it's a Zombie, and twice of ~2 damage is just ~4 damage. I bring him up, mainly because uniques like Corpsefire consistently drop packs of loot, and are worth way more experience than killing normal monsters. Later when we're out of this den we'll be meeting more like Corpsefire, and they'll be monsters where I'll drop everything and sit them down for their goodies.

(There's items that are yellow here but I'll cover those next update shh)

With Corpsefire dead all that's left is to finish clearing the Den. When we kill the final monster,

Music-Den of Evil Complete

the den lights up.

Perhaps now the sisters will trust me.

Now, we could just walk back to the encampment, but do you remember that town portal scroll we started with?

Now's a good time to use it. Scrolls of TP will open up a portal back to town, and so long as we don't enter our own portal from town, it'll stay up. We can only have one at a time, but if you're playing multiplayer, it's easy to make a persistant portal network, so long as you don't take yours from town.

Music-The Rogue Encampment

Akara, thankful for thwarting an incoming attack, gives us an extra skill point, which is always good to have. In the past, that was all she gave.

Now though, she is also our one-time use of resetting our stats and skills. We get it early. We get it once per difficulty. We have three difficulties, so we are afforded three resets per character.

There are ways in the current game to get additional resets, but it assumes you can grind Hell bosses. Trust me. Assume you have three and don't expect more. Luckily, though, I won't really need them in Normal unless I really mess up.

And even then, PlugY thinks that's stupid and most of my mods allow me to do unlimited resets anyway.

And that's Lady Arty taking the first step in fighting evil and getting to be more friendly with a bunch of rogue ladies.

Next time: We're ignoring this next quest. We'll begin our mod jumping proper, and introduce the other six heroes.