Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

Well, the new Lord of Destruction expansion is upon us.

I bought it on Sunday, and installed it on top of my D2 v1.07 - the offline characters seemed unaffected. One thing to note converting your current D2 chars to be expansion chars, means you can't join any vanilla D2 games. Which obviously has implications for Pinwig and me, and our D2 love-ins.

Anyway, I fired up a new character, theres two classes added, Assassin and Druid. I chose the Druid, cos he gets to summon creatures and transform into creatures.

The ability to shift the graphics up a notch (800x600) is nice, you lose a lot of the pixilated edges. The only downside I noticed was a veritable chug, with the automap displayed whilst running. The larger inventory stash is very welcome, along with the two weapon loads configuration and the ability to shift between them with a single keypress during combat.

Not sure whether I was just summon happy or not, but I levelled up my druid pretty swiftly, with my team of 3 summoned ravens - dive-bombing the enemy, pecking at their eyes, whilst I floored them with an arrow or two. If things got too tough for me, and my birds were down, I'd shift into werewolf form and claw the living shit out of everything that moved. Not a bad expansion. Just for the interface enhancements and the new classes.

I did try the assassin but much prefer the druid and his summonings. I didn't feel right playing a charlies angel. Did I mention I can shapeshift into werewolf form..? Oooooh man, now that gets me excited. Basically, my Druid is well hard. Much easier to take on the quests "solo", when you have a pack of wolves and a hired archer, along for the ride. I barely need to hit anything. My whirlwind team, maul and masacre the horde before I get there. I sometimes like to play target practice with my flaming arrows, or perhaps freeze a wandering brute with my cold attack mace. The life of a Druid is a good one.

Anyway, I guess now the servers will be teaming with Druids and Assassins.