New Cactus user, RuneWords lover, and Necromancer fan

S

scuti

New member
Joined
May 4, 2025
Messages
27
Points
3
Hi,

As you can probably tell by my first thread, I recently migrated my Diablo installation from D2SE to Cactus.

Other stuff about me:

* my favorite feature of Diablo II: LoD is Rune/Words.
* I mainly play patch 1.13c
* my highest level character is 95
* I play with a few other friends using TCP/IP multiplayer

I also played a lot of Median XL; however, it goes over the engine's sprite limit by spawning too many enemies. So I can't call it a "favorite". Right now, I'm playing with BaseMod soley for the QoL improvements (auto-gold pickup, fps uncap, ctrl+click to send items between inventory and stash). Haven't tested if it'll affect connecting to friends.

Here's my luckiest roll in Diablo II.

If anyone has better ideas on reaching level 99 beyond `/players 8` and killing Baal as fast and often as possible, I'm all ears.
 

Attachments

  • necro-amulet.jpg
    necro-amulet.jpg
    595.8 KB · Views: 175
Welcome to the forum @scuti. I'm glad you were able to complete your migration :devilish:.

If you didn't know, I actually ported a bunch of Median XL versions a few years ago, and can easily be downloaded from the Cactus Ports Collection. So you can essentially "Time Travel" within Brother Laz Era Median XL.
 
Welcome to the forum, @scuti! 🎉

That's a nice amulet! Necros are a lot fun. What's your favorite build? Is that a Bonemancer?

As far as leveling to 99, you pretty much got the right idea, lol. We do have a great leveling guide by @Erayz located here, but that's more tailored towards 1.09b. That being said, now that you have Cactus set-up, you should try to experiment with some older patches. You might find some exciting surprises. We're happy to make recommendations if needed. Or you can just keep having fun with 1.13c - that's cool too. ;)

TTYL :cool:
 
That's a Skelemancer, one of my favorite builds. I can cast Decrepify on Baal, drop a ball of minions on him, then wait for him to die.

I might give older patches a try. Based off the leveling guide, a way to level 99 by playing other maps than Throne of Destruction sounds amazing. Also the Magic Find and drop algo from 1.09 sounds better for single player.

I would, however, miss the RuneWords added in later patches. I definitely like CtC striking or Aura When Equipped effects.
 
@scuti Ah, a Skelemancer! Word. 🤙

TBH 1.09 is the way to go (IMHO) for Single Player! Hell Cows & Blood Runs are a blast. And IIRC after 1.10+ the grind to 99 became exponentially longer... which for me that was a bit of an unwelcome change, and not as fun...

Regarding the lack of runewords, I suppose you could run PlugY to give you ladder only runewords on 1.09 (and some other niceities)?

At any rate, don't mind me though, just play what you enjoy! You are already invested in 1.13c, so no need to reinvent the wheel, unless of course you are genuinely intrigued, and want to experience something different. :)

BTW please feel free to let your buddies know about TMC too!
 
@Manny PlugY won't be able to give him 1.10 runewords at all. 1.10 introduced new runewords (like BotD, Enigma, Hoto) and there where also a chunk of "ladder only runewords" that got introduced in 1.10 season 2 in 2004 IIRC (Spirit/Insight/Infinity are part of that list). The ladder runewords feature of PlugY just unlocks the creation of those in single player. The 1.10f files actually didn't even have the ladder only runeword data because they didn't exist when Peter Hu released 1.10 in October 28, 2003. Thus they were only implemented server side. The Patch_D2.mpq only started having the ladder runewords data when 1.11 came out.

This means that the 1.09 files won't have any of that data, neither the base 1.10 runewords nor the 1.10 ladder runewords. There was actually "ladder runewords" in 1.08 but those were all included (and slightly updated) in the 1.09 files. So the core lod runewords that we know today as the original runewords (pre 1.10) are those runewords. 1.07/1.08 had ancients pledge IIRC but 1.07 also had a few other weird runewords that got cleaned up and removed in 1.08/1.09 (like Bramble).

You can read more about this (with references) on my Singling page when I decided to delete ladder runewords from Singling completely.
 
Last edited:
@fearedbliss Oh, I see! I wrongly assumed that PlugY made the modern runewords accessible for all supported versions. Hmm, that's very interesting. Thanks for the correction and information, my dude. 💪

And yeah, I believe the choice to remove the ladder runewords from Singling was a great one. I like how in 1.09 (the greatest patch of all time), there are some useful runewords for questing/leveling, but they don't overshadow the elite uniques, or come even close to the godliness of some nice rare items. That itemization IMHO is more aligned with the original vision of Diablo II, and therefore a big part of why I personally prefer the earlier patches. :cool:
 
It's also not really possible to have the 1.10 runewords in 1.09 because they added many new stats, like auras on equip, non class skills etc. many of these stats were planned as early as 1.07, as can be seen in those unused crafting recipes which reference a few of them (minus enemy lightning resist on gloves, how cool!). It's fairly possible to make 1.10 work like 1.09 but not the other way around since 1.10 soft coded and added many things to the engine which can't be done in 1.09. If you like the challenge of 1.10 but hate the endless baal grind to get to 99, what you can do is either edit experience.txt to reduce the penalty back to 1.09 standards, or increase monster levels on hell to be 90-93 like it was from 1.07-1.09. Both of those things made leveling a chore in 1.10, since monsters capped out at level 85 and the +-5 penalty makes it much worse than the additional XP degrading penalty. Plus, with monsters being level 90-95, 1.10 becomes much more challenging and nearly all items drop everywhere, giving you a good variety of areas to run. With 1.09, it's endless stupidly easy cow runs because the best items in the game only drop from baal/pindleskin/cow level. Just my opinion though :P 1.07 is also fun for the crafts, but can feel a bit cheesy with some of its OP bugs and items.
 
Great to see you, @galaxyhaxz!!
galaxyhaxz said:
With 1.09, it's endless stupidly easy cow runs because the best items in the game only drop from baal/pindleskin/cow level. Just my opinion though :P 1.07 is also fun for the crafts, but can feel a bit cheesy with some of its OP bugs and items.
Click to expand...
Ahhh! EMOTIONAL DAMAGE 😵

Pretty much though... 😓 -- lol 😂

Well, actually I've been leveling my Pole Barb in 1.09 (whilst simultaneously farming The Grandfather) by doing Baal runs, BUT I've recently started doing full clears of Ancient's Way and all the levels of WSK before entering the Throne of Destruction. I'm finding that style of gameplay to be super refreshing. Also I discovered (thanks to Atma's Drop Calculator) that GF can drop from Tresh Socket. So I've been farming him also, and then clearing Abaddon afterwards.

Adding those two runs have been a lot of fun! D2 for life!
 
One argument you can make for 1.09 is that only a few elite uniques exist, so if you just want to target exceptional uniques instead (since they are much better in 1.09 than 1.10+ due to the game being easier) you can just play anywhere you want. I personally love cow runs and did many cow runs in 1.07/1.09 years ago, but it does get boring after a bit. I wish 1.10 had kept the uber cow runs but also opened up more areas of the game for running. 1.09 was the last patch for many things to still work properly--like thorns, which don't work at all in 1.10 due to monsters having insane life but doing low damage, so I don't agree with many of the changes 1.10 made, even if I tend to prefer the challenge. But all patches can be enjoyable, 1.09 is the most stable polished version of the original D2 design before 1.10 turned it into WoW-lite.

As a side note, back when I did play 1.08/1.09 for the elite uniques, I also farmed the ancients way/drifer cavern/icy cellar, as I found it to be more varied and fun than just doing baal runs. So you aren't *entirely* stuck to the cows or pindle, your options are just a bit more limited as there's no level 85 areas.
 
A lot of 1.10 RWs are definitely powerful and expensive enough to be like a "shift" in design. However, granting skills from other classes (Beast, Chaos RWs), CtCs, Auras, and some wacky stuff like Delirium is defnitely unique to Diablo II: LoD.

There isn't anything like RuneWords in other iso cRPGs. (Torchlight and Path of Exile at least do not have them in any form.) So runes are strongly a "Diablo" thing.

@galaxyhaxz I play very close to vanilla besides PlugY and BaseMod. Between the two I'd go with bumping monster levels, but I also don't want any changes that would interfere with connecting to friends.
 
Last edited:
Yeah while I think they got carried away a bit with the runeword balance, it was largely my favorite aspect of the game for many years. It's what got me so into the game, the fact you could get these insanely OP items if you got super lucky. With how rare high runes used to be, I never got one. Then 1.13 hit and with pretty hardcore lower kurast runs you can get them all so quickly. I think Peter's intention was that they'd be so rare only a few people would have them per realm, thus being a trophy item you were specifically not meant to have so a few would show up from time to time.

If you don't want to modify the game in any way but are ok with time traveling, you could also just rush characters to level 99 in 1.07 or 1.09 and then forward them to 1.10+. 1.07 in particular is great for this as it has no minimum level to complete the ancients quest, and like 1.09, it does not cap the XP to one level gain, so rushing a template from nightmare to hell will put you at level 54, you can then do players 8 cow runs and get to 99 in just a few days vs thousands of baal runs in 1.10.
 
The fastest from my understanding would be doing it in classic (most likely 1.09 due to the issues with 1.07/1.08, but it would be fine in those versions as well) so you can skip A5 completely, then migrate the chars to 1.10, convert to expansion, and finish the forge quest for the chance of getting higher level runes. The highest runes don't drop from forge but you'll still have the chance to get some of the upper mid level runes by doing them in 1.10 (vs doing them in 1.09) from my understanding. So classic still has a critical role in rushing chars for forge. If you are doing this in LAN, then at that point you prolly are gonna maximize the rush by rushing 7 other chars with your main char... Thus 7 forge quests per wave. Doing them in 1.09 also means no blocking quests so you use any difficulty horadric staff to open tal rasha's chamber, and you can go to durance of hate level 2 without doing travincal.

I personally don't forward chars and just enjoy time traveling and keeping chars within the same patch. Fully isolated from each other, but these were some of the tactics used back in the day lol.
 
Last edited:
Yeah I also agree it's best to stay within the same patch and not "cheese" by targeting specific mechanics just to take advantage of them. But I did that a lot back in the day, and it ended up making the game grow stale when you wind up with 40 SoJs and a bunch of template 99'ers in 1.09 or 1.10. By playing 1.05 and staying there, you get easy SoJs but must face its own downsides. By playing 1.09, you get nice cow XP but SoJs are hard to get, etc. etc. so it helps prolong gameplay. Although I've never gotten to level 99 in 1.10+, it was just too much of a grind for me to take on, especially since it's entirely confined to diablo/baal/nithlithak towards the last few levels.

Also maybe a hot take, but if I were making a diablo like game, I'd handle item stats like diablo 1 or pre LoD d2, in that instead of storing stats on the item, it stores meta info and pulls the latest stats from the text files, so if you find some godly OP shako in 1.07 then bring it to 1.09, it becomes the 1.09 version. The whole concept of legacy items was definitely unbalanced and not really fair for online play, either.
 
Hey all,

I’m also a fellow Median enthusiast. To be honest, I’ve been having a tough time with my migration, and I'll eventually start my own topic. However, I’d like to ask scuti how you got plugy and basemod to work together — I could never get basemod to work, unfortunately. And apparently it is possible! I want to play an older version, 1.90 with 1.13c, and would love to hear how you configured your setup. If there’s a specific order I need to follow for installation, etc. I would greatly appreciate it if you could share your insights. Cheers.
 
@BrecMadak I didn't have trouble getting BaseMod and PlugY working together. BaseMod is loaded first, then in BaseMod.ini I have PlugY.dll added like so

[ExtraDll3]
Enabled=1
LoadDll3="PlugY.dll"

(I arbitrarily picked this field. I doubt ExtraDll1 and ExtraDll2 make any difference.)
 
scuti said:
@BrecMadak I didn't have trouble getting BaseMod and PlugY working together. BaseMod is loaded first, then in BaseMod.ini I have PlugY.dll added like so

[ExtraDll3]
Enabled=1
LoadDll3="PlugY.dll"

(I arbitrarily picked this field. I doubt ExtraDll1 and ExtraDll2 make any difference.)
Click to expand...
I already have that in my basemod.ini, and I'm actually using the compatible plugy.ini that came with the v1.13.9 basemod, but something seems to be holding it back. Anything else I might be overlooking?
 
The biggest 'gotcha' I had with setting up platforms was the confusion between the `Platform` folder and the current state of Diablo II folder set by Cactus. Other than that, I had BaseMod set up first, then added PlugY.
 
I just realised I had to hit 'Reset' button for Cactus to inject the basemod. Now it is working!
Also, one question: if you're using D2stats, how did you get it to work? I always keep receiving:
'Failed too many times in a row. Check log for details. Closing D2Stats...'
No matter what fork I have tried. All lead to this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top