Diablo Hints and Tricks

                     From Bill Commons

When I read the review in SynTax of Diablo by James Judge and he
said that he completed it in eight hours, I thought that I could
possibly finish it in a week and then move on to the next game.

How wrong I was, it took me three weeks and five restarts to kill
the final monster. I played it through another couple of times and
even then I did not get through without loading in from a saved
game.

By this time I had progressed to a level 30 warrior and I was
hooked on the game. I browsed the Internet and looked at the
dozens of Diablo sites and then I found the newsgroup,
Alt.games.diablo - I enjoyed reading all the postings on this each
day and noticed that most of these referred to the multi- player
game played on the site by Blizzard called Battle-net.

I did not like the idea of running up huge telephone bills but I
was envious of the extra difficulty levels that the MP gives.  I
then found out that if you set up the multi-player option and
choose direct connection you can play it as a single player.  This
option is supposed to enable two or more computers to link up via
null modem cables but although I only had it on a single computer
the game still loaded and ran.

With the MP mode selected you no longer have the save game or
pause facility, so starting from scratch, and the game seems
harder, I had many restarts. I wondered if I could transfer my
single player over to the multi player game and after searching
the net I found a program that enabled me to do this.  This is
called Diablo Backup by Kevin Lambert and can be found at
WWW.users.com/~kevin/diablo/

There was still the problem with fact that if you get killed in
the dungeons you have to have back up armour and weapons left in
town or face the monsters naked to try to get your possessions
back. This proved too much for me so I found a program called
Raymond's Trainer which allows you to save and restore your
character and alter anything in the game including the limits
imposed by Blizzard that certain classes such as a warrior can
only have a manna level of 50 and a dexterity limit of 60, a bit
hard when you are surrounded by dozens of acid spitting monsters.
The Kevin Lambert program has this same option but I have not
tried it, the reason for this is the latter only works on the
original CD version and I have recently installed the later patch
to upgrade my version to 1.04.

The multi player option gives three levels of difficulty, called
normal, nightmare and hell, and the difference is that on the
single player you have to fight through the dungeons for groups of
four levels before the entrances from the town open.  In MP all
the doors are open and you can choose which one to go in.

In the normal mode I could complete the four levels in one session
and when you quit Diablo the game is saved in town ready for the
next encounter. I found that this was not the case with the latter
levels of Nightmare and all the levels in Hell mode, I did not
want to start again each time after clearing one or two levels,
taking six or eight hours play, so I started leaving the game
running all the time even when I went to bed exhausted at three or
four in the morning. I did switch the monitor off though.

You can Alt-Tab out of the game leaving it minimised and I can
still use the computer for other purposes while it is still
playing in the background.

Sometimes especially in the caves or hell, the odds against
surviving were too much for me. For instance on level ten I
encountered lots of winged monsters that seemed unaffected by
fire, lightning or magic spells and there were too many to wade in
with a sword. I did not last long and had to restart. I was
surprised to see in the new game that the dungeon lay- out was
different and I could now stand behind a fence and cast a spell
called stone curse. This turns them into stone for a short while,
I then created a golem and while it was punching the stoned ones,
I was freezing the others. Other times it give a complete change
of monsters for the same level.

When in hell and being chased by blood knights it is not a good
idea to run to the exit, this means that every time you go down
the stairs to take them on they will be waiting and attack before
you can cast a defence shield. I found it best to cast a town
portal teleport spell away from the stairs and run into that, then
you can descend via the stairs and try to lure them to you in ones
or twos.

The game has changed for me now from killing monsters to seeing
what new weapons, armour and rings I can collect.  This is what
most of the discussions on the newsgroups are about although
lately the talk is about the new add on called Hellfire.






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