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2-Meet the Team
So last time you may have wondered about this campfire, and the 6 other heroes we kinda left behind. Well, now's a good time to go over who they are and what they do. The mods, mostly, respect the original class designs, so I should be able to explain them across all mods.
Starting with the Amazon, I already said she's the ideal ranged class and she's from Sanct-Hawaii, but what I mean by that is, even in other mods, Amazon has a lot of spell and/or ranged builds, not melee. Across mods you can expect to see that, but there are melee options available for Amazon. I'm not too sure why you would because she gets class-exclusive ranged weapons but the option is there, and I suppose some of those exclusive weapons are melee as well. (It's just none of the good skills in vanilla are melee.) If anything, while every class has their own gear only they can equip, the fact that Amazon has several different types of weapons for herself is honestly kinda wild.
Arty will live in Resurgence, and unfortuantely since there's 7 classes and I have 4 mods that means she will live there alone. Oh well, let's talk about the mod.
You may have noticed I had weird looking rings and gear in my inventory. That's because Resurgence adds in white base item types for jewelry and new off-hand items for extra mods. Amazon in particular, since quivers are largely obsoleted by this mod, get quiver off-hands to use. The ring bases are also new and, for a weapon slinger like Arty, having a Bone Ring drop early is extremely good.
Furthermore, I wanted to cover different-colored items, but miraculously, Arty only got yellow items to drop and not a single blue throughout the Den. She's, annoyingly, lucky.
Blue, or magic, items means they are enchanted with one or two magical properties. (The mana leech, in this case.) This can be anything from added weapon damage to extra stats to added resistances, damage reductions, and beyond.
Yellow or rare items, meanwhile, can have anything from two to six enchantments. (And this one in particular only rolled 2. 2 important ones mind you but still) They're big dumps of extra bonuses and early on they're (supposed to be) hard to find. There are, however, plenty of junk modifiers that we can live without, so early on it's actually smarter to go for gear that has the enchantments you want, as apposed to gear that has six enchantments and none of them are noticeably useful for you. Many mods up the amount of drops and chances of finding magic items, and Resurgence is one of them, which probably explains the bizarre luck.
It's time for Arty to finally use those skill points I've been holding onto. They are what define your character. Each character class has three different skill trees to choose from. I'm only showing this bow and crossbow tree because this will largely be the only relevant tree Arty will use. Each level, we'll get 1 skill point, and we can put that into these skill icons to unlock those skills for use. Which ones we can unlock at what time depends on two factors: where the skill is at in the tree, and what arrows are pointing to the skill. Traditionally, skills at the very top of the tree can be unlocked from the getgo, but each step down from the top means we'll need to be level 6, 12, 18, 24, or 30 for the very bottom, to be able to put points into those skills. Furthermore, if there's any arrows pointing to the skill we want, we'll need to also put 1 point into the skills those arrows originate from. I'll go into the real nitty gritty of choosing skills in the future, but for now, where we don't have enough skill points to max any of these skills out, and they max at 20 out of our 98+ skill points, we really shouldn't think too hard about it.
No, really, you shouldn't. Find a good skill that works and roll with it. That's good advice until later, where you have points to respec and run the more exotic and effective stuff.
Anyway, Resurgence is really hands off with new skills or complete overhauls. It will, however, balance numbers and make tweaks to skills, for example, Fire Arrow used to have a mana cost. Now it doesn't. It also has a new thing called breakpoints which has certain effects if we have certain stats, in this case, 100% total fire resistance. (before any capping or reductions)
There's plenty more Resurgence does as we progress along, but for now, it's time to part this Sanctuary. We got three others to introduce, and we'll be seeing replays of the Den of Evil as I bring these characters in. They all have to catch up, after all.
Here lies Project Diablo II, a mod that is very similar to Resurgence, but differ wildly in developer goals. Resurgence embraces hacks and tweaking numbers instead of making big changes. PD2, does not, and wants you to play it properly while giving you new character choices from the getgo.
As for who lives in this Sanctuary, it's time to talk about one of the original edgelords or antiheroes or god whatever they want to call themselves. One of the ancestors of bone enthusiasts: the Necromancer.
Necromancer is the original a lot of things: I think of Necros when I think using minions to solve all your problems while you pass out in the corner. Really powerful curses to debilitate monsters? Necromancers. Bones? Necros. Poison? I keep on forgetting Necros can poison. They are a top-tier class pick for plenty of reasons, mechanically and in the lore. Necromancers are also edgy antisocials who speak in the most awkward way possible and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of edgelords back then took after how dumb the dark brooding teen Necro is.
And who else would pilot the LP's Necromancer but an edgelord, who thinks liking violence and rebellion is being cool? He'll be named xX_ZoulZlayerZack_Xx...except there's a limit on how long character names can be so he's actually called xX_ZoulZlayerZa. I'll just call him Zoul for short.
Necro's specialty is being able to field massive armies of NPC minions, as should the name "necromancer" imply. Make a corpse, cast the spell, and then those bones will go make more corpses, so you can make more bones.
All Necros (last I checked, mods might disagree) start with a stick, called a wand, and it gives +1 to Raise Skeleton Warrior, which allows us to use this skill at level 1. The biggest draw for class-exclusive gear is their ability to have level boosts to skills from that class. (intrinsically at that, so they don't count towards the mod limit for blue and yellow items) If we pick a "caster" build, or a build that does most of its damage off using skills that deal no damage based on our weapon and all damage based on the skill's level, then items like the wand become the item to focus on, as they'll be the primary way we get extra damage off our gear. Few item modifiers affect skills otherwise, because they'll affect the weapon damage, which unless the skill explicitly says it uses, outright ignores. Mods will attempt to fix this at their discretion, but this is generally why caster builds are safe picks in vanilla: your gear considerations begin and end at "does it improve my skill rate of damage?" and "does it keep me alive?".
Given enough messing around and enough levels, we have a small army of 3 skeletons playing the game for us. Project Diablo 2 normalizes the power level of these skeletons, so while they are hitting fairly harder than they would in basegame, they're still a bit lackluster and tied to skill level, which we don't have ways to really improve. It's still more than enough for the Den though, with Zoul helping occasionally by also thonking evil from time to time.
Joining him will be a Paladin from the Zakarum religion of light lovers. They're holy men from the eastern jungles, (necros hail from there as well) and the game describing them as "party leaders" is almost correct. They're more party backbones, because their claim to fame is using auras.
Auras are skills that a Paladin can put on their mouse buttons to give a buff to himself and all nearby allies, including minions, and minions of other players. It can get very nutty when paired with a Necro or another class that can summon allies, because while one Paladin can only give one aura from their skills, any number of auras can be applied to one person. I hope you like that because two of their three skill trees is nothing but auras.
But, they do have options for fighting demons themselves. Several of the basegame skills are just top tier builds for Paladin because they're that good. Most mods are going to keep the two aura trees one combat tree design, but PD2 specifically adds in new holy-related stuff to Paladin, so that's what we'll be working towards.
So welcome VanirTheRichous to the team. Vanir, cannot spell. Who knows where that name came from as well. Vanir will mainly be here to demonstrate one of the major changes in PD2: if you are using a weapon that isn't a tiny stick, it will have the "Melee attacks deal splash damage" modifier.
It works exactly as said, and even better, it works with any skill that's a melee attack. This includes Vanir's starting skill choice of Sacrifice, which is a highly increased attack rating and damage swing at the cost of a percentage of his max life, which will shrink as we dump more skill points into it. Whether or not I'll use melee with Vanir is another thing entirely, but this change helps fix one of the biggest problems with trying to solve problems by swinging a sword: you solve one problem at a time, at best, with most melee options. Here, we touch a part of the blob on us, the entire blob falls down. 
If mods that are dedicated to the vanilla experience don't tickle your fancy, boy do I have the mod for you.
And I'll describe this mod by trip reporting our next character: the Barbarian.
SSJGreg13, translated to XIII because Diablo II can't do numerals, is going to load up this mod and play it like any other. He's going to run outside because you never need to talk to anyone and you never need to do any inventory management at the beginning.
He's going to run into Corrupted Rogues and Skeletons from the getgo.
Oh no wait I'm sorry, we're not even 30 seconds out of the encampment and we are facing a unique Skeleton, his minions, and some Corrupted Rogues on the side for good measure. (On that note this mod will defy me and spoil incoming monsters. 
) Greg is going to struggle to hit them, because he will have around a 50% chance to hit the easiest monsters in the game, and these AREN'T the easiest monsters. He'll find the corrupted Rogues that are already here to be very difficult to run away from, and everyone's in groups already and he can hit one at a time half of the time.
Welcome to Eastern Sun. Enjoy your stay.
Anyway, when you die, everything you had equipped is attached to your corpse, Death shaves some money off your held gold and drops the rest, and you respawn with no gold and a lost equipment set. If you had weapons in your alt tab and stuff in your inventory, they're still there, but otherwise you are naked. To get it back, you'll have to run back over to your corpse and pick it up. There's another way though: quit the game, restart, and the corpse will be in town. In exchange for doing this however, you don't get your gold back, and there'll be other penalties later on.
As for Greg's class, Barbarian is about hitting things with sticks, something that works alright early on but will soon become a massive liability. He's very tanky, but more life in this game means you can make more oopsies. It's a bandage on the problem of most Barbarians having to get into melee range. There's basegame skills that don't rely on melee like shouting, (the legendary singer Barb, or Bardbarian) but Barb just as a concept is not an easy horse to ride. Luckily, we won't be dealing with any of that, because Eastern Sun has cool new toys for him.
He'll be joined by a friend, called DruidicBob, and Bob is here to show us how to play this mod correctly.
First off, open this gift in your gargantuan inventory. Guess what? The game also spoils that there's a cube in Diablo II. I can't keep anything secret THANKS EASTERN SUN.
It'll unwrap into three things, two of which we care about. The first is a damage charm (the sword) that will enable the changes to stats Eastern Sun does. It causes various stats and even your level to contribute to various damage outputs. That's what most of the blue text does. It also gives Werebear for some reason, that should be dummied out because Druid has a different thing to shapeshift into, but whatever.
The other thing is a Noob's Odd Charm. It will give us +1 to any level 1 skill, and we can cube it to swap what skill it affects. This is fucking genius. It allows you to demo your choices at the very beginning without committing anything to it. (Which is irrelevant here because ES comes with PlugY pre-installed. Matters in multiplayer though!) I wish more games did this, honestly.
The second thing to do is equip our fulminating potions. They're better than most of the things we can do at level 1 and even with the odd charm, we really need levels. Characters can have two sets of weapons/shields/other offhands equipped and then swap between them by pressing W. I use the QWERTY row of keys for additional skill bindings, so I swap this button to X. There's no penalty for swapping weapon sets, it's instant, and what skills you have assigned to your buttons is remembered for each set. Several characters will do this when they find a really good weapon and shield for specific situations, and swap as need be.
Now that we know how to play Eastern Sun, Bob heads out to not get instantly destroyed. As for the skills to be used, we'll be going with shapeshifting, but at the moment we need some levels and some skillpoints to make it function and not be painful and slow.
For now, he's just going to play Gradius. Dodge the volcanos.
We also have a poison vine pet tunneling around the ground and occasionally popping up and biting demons. They do high amounts of poison damage and don't care about silly things like single-targetting, which is very useful this early in the game, and they're hard pressed to actually get hit, so they're a good crutch skill.
In ES, we actually have options on what to do in the beginning. If we go into the den there's a non-zero chance we'll run into unique monsters that can shoot lightning from afar and annihilate us. There's a safer path: it's going into the Cold Plains already.
Flavie stands guard here and tries to dissuade us if we try to pass before clearing out the Den. We can tell her to stuff it though, because I want one specific superunique that shows up here. Also, despite her insisting it's more dangerous, no, it's not.
Now that I have enough skills, I can talk about hotkeys. It's 2000, and hotkeys don't work the way you think they might. Instead, when selecting a skill for a button, you may hit one of the hotkey buttons (Traditionally F1-F8, though you can change these bindings and add in more for up to 16 buttons.) while hovering over the skill to have that button quickly swap to that skill on that button. Which button you do this with matters, because if you set this on the left-click skill pressing the button changes your left-click skill to that. It's more buttons than there should be to cast something, yes. I am however used to it.
Bishibosh | CR: **
==Superunique
==Fire Enchanted
==Can raise Fallen and Fallen Shamen
Bishibosh is hilariously obsoleted. This is because Bishibosh has the rare power of being able to revive other Fallen Shamans. He's the only one who can. Originally, he would spawn with a pack of other Shamans and you'd be able to really appreciate this, especially on higher difficulties. He's been nerfed to death however, and he now only spawns with other Fallen, meaning you'll be hard pressed to ever see this in action or even care.
We kill him because THIS is what he drops. 
Checking up on Greg, he has refused to give up. He's finally opened up his inventory and got his starter kit unpacked but he ran for his life past Blood Moor and into Den and he's working on it now. It's also an absolute blessing for Greg that he rolled an extremely easy Den. He's using Stun of all skills, but Eastern Sun is just not punishing him for his innocence, because lightning breathers can show up here, and they're just NOT for Greg.
What I'm saying is I think this is a bug. Only when I'm recording for this LP does the Den not blow up this dummy.
They're there for Bob though, but Bob has already equipped what dropped from Bishibosh. You see, several early superuniques in ES are flagged to drop complete sets in this mod. What are set/green items? They're gear that's typically trash if you have only one of in the set, but they get much more potent as you equip more from that set. They're absolute pains in basegame because they only have twice the drop rate of the extremely rare unique items and you must get several of them, more than two as a matter of fact. But that doesn't matter here, where we'll just be handed full sets of gear and told to go wild.
The moment you kill either Bishibosh, or, Corpsefire, the beginning of the game is done and you're allowed to breathe now. Ideally, you'll get your class set as a drop, but there's also sets that anyone can equip and even those provide an absolutely ABSURD power boost. Hell, they're why for the time being we are just going to largely ignore Blue and Yellow items. Eastern Sun doesn't really start until late into Normal. Our mods won't get really interesting until later on, and ES is the only mod that knows this and makes it easier to progress until then. We can worry about silly things like skill and gear choices later. This will do for now.
Greg and Bob, now that they've officially begun Eastern Sun, clear the Den with no issues. That means it's time to move on to...
Media-okay what the hell is this resolution?
What the hell is this main menu?! (click here for the full title loop)
So, right off the bat, Median XL has an internal resolution of 1024x768. For the record, Diablo II and most mods work with an 640x480 or an 800x600 internal resolution. Really puts the XL in Median XL. Also, a whole cinematic plays during the main menu. (it's just a scene from diablo 3 but shh)
ChloeNightmoon the Assassin will enter this world, enticed by how gratuitous the mod is, and also because ninja assassins. Assassins, lorewise, are a secret order of magic police, established when two great mages in the past started fucking around with summoning and the predictable endcase happened. (everyone dying horribly) They hate two things: asshole wizards, and demons, because they kinda just go hand-in-hand.
Gamewise, Assassins can utilize, not magic, but magitek to set up various traps and contraptions. They're one part spamming traps to annihilate everything, (which is a very good vanilla build) one part ninjutsu, (like shadow clones) and one part Monk from Ragnarok Online, in that she'll punch stuff to get charges and then expend them on various other melee skills.
The thing is, though, she's an assassin in Median XL.
THIS is your skill tree instead.
Each tab is not as complicated as you may think and many of these skills are not only (confusingly) level-locked, but they have a maximum level cap based on your level. Any icon in a circle is a passive or augment to a skill instead of a usable skill, which are square icons. There, isn't really variety in each tab. There's different skills to pick and focus on in some of them, but others are very straightforward.
Gold in ES and MXL work extremely differently. In Eastern Sun, you have a starting gold of nothing, most loot sells for nothing, and how you make money early on is just selling very specific items that thankfully aren't very useful besides selling at that point. In Median XL, you get a starting package of Monopoly money and tells you to go wild with it, because most basic gear is going to cost and sell for 1 gold, maybe a bit more. Also, most drops in MXL are still worthless, but monsters drop far, far more gold to compensate, and autopickup for gold is turned on, so you don't really have to think about making money. Just slay hordes like you always do. It'll make itself.
Anyway, I buy throwing knives for Chloe, because she's going to need a good early skill. I make a mistake here, though: even the most basic of throwing knives require level 4 to use.
I know what I'm doing I swear. 
Like ES, the very beginning can be rough if you don't pick a good level 1 skill. It's not punishing rough though, just tedious.
Once Chloe gets enough levels though, she's going into the Den, and she'll be throwing fans of knives to obliterate everything. Skills in MXL are bizarre: the good ones don't have wumbo numbers, they just hit many times.
because guess what? Median XL ALSO makes most gear ignorable early on. For now we're gonna be hard pressed to find a good piece of gear, even yellow pieces.
Instead of Corpsefire, however, we have this pair: a Corrupted Necromancer with one Enslaved Demon on his side. The demon does normal lightning-breathing and biting things, I'll explain more about what it is when we finally see it in a less gratuitous mod.
The Necromancer is a unique MXL addition and will fire cold bolts at us. If we put our face into the demon without seperating them we'll probably take a lot of damage. We're at range though, and can dodge, so it's no issue for Chloe and she clears the Den with no issue.
That just leaves the Sorceress. Sorcs are exactly what you think they do: they choose an element, they spam spells of that element, they win. In a game where spells don't check for accuracy and the only thing you have to worry about is resistances and level bonuses to your spells, Sorceress is the class everyone uses. There is very little to think of once you know what gear and skills are relevant to her, which is a very short list. It doesn't help that traditionally she can learn Teleport, which is the single best skill in the game because it allows you to skip across any and all mazes and monsters at lightning speed. (which is why it's in the lightning skill tab) Every class wants it despite not being a Sorc, because it dramatically cuts down on having to run around to find more monsters to kill.
Teleport is not in Median XL. The closest approximation is a teleport with a cooldown in the Cold tree, but we're not taking that either.
As a matter of fact, Jane_Croft is not doing anything previously mentioned. We're a hot-looking magic lady and we can use sticks. That means we're going to use sticks.
Melee Sorcs shouldn't exist. I looked at builds for a vanilla melee Sorceress and their main damage output is, not thwacking things, but stacking gear that gives damaging auras that'll regularly ping every monster nearby. Sure at the very end, when they have all the very rare very hard to assemble gear, they can nuke stuff, but without the auras they cannot clear through hordes. Maybe it has to do with the fact that vanilla Sorc has zero melee skills, (Enchant does not count) almost as if she's expected to use spells.
(Future DM sez: Enchant is actually very good for anyone using melee, and Sorceress has passives to multiply elemental damage which also applies to any added elemental damage to your weapon. It can be very good, but as mentioned, for it to really be effective, the specific gear you have to grind for holds it back and makes it a bit of a meme. Sorceress being the squishiest class no matter what you do doesn't help things either.)
Also, if you're very astute and notice we're swinging very fast, that's not your eyes. Median XL runs faster then Diablo II normally does, meaning everything moves and attacks faster. Enjoy! This is mainly why running and stamina is nerfed to the ground so that you can only do it in short bursts: you're moving much faster already.
This is not a good idea normally, but Jane literally has a skill tree called Melee. We're doing it.
MXL wants us to dance a little bit, swapping weapons out and forcing me to pick a crutch Cold spell just to get levels because oh god basic melee is so bad in this game.
Luckily this isn't for long. Not only does Median XL have an increased maximum level (150 instead of 99), it just dumps experience on you. This will change once Jane hits level 5, but I'm in no hurry.
The crutch cold spell is enough for our needs.
Sorceress is also famous for having Energy Shield, or, direct some Life damage taken to Mana instead. MXL's Sorc just has that built in as a level 1 free class skill. Every class has a skill they have for free, can use at all times, and scales with level. Assassin's was a buff to gain life off doing damage and killing monsters for a duration.
Nonetheless she's through, and the entire team has pass their initiation test.
Next time: The team goes beyond the baby zone, and encounter their first real obstacle.