Diablo 2 Resurrected

Diablo 2 Resurrected has a story that takes maybe fifteen hours, and then it asks you to play it again. Twice. What makes that bearable, and what makes this a game people are still running twenty-five years later, is that the difficulty selector is not a slider on how much health the monsters have. Normal, Nightmare and Hell are three different games built out of the same acts, and almost every system in the game behaves differently in each of them.

That is the thread running through everything on this hub. If you are new, read the next section and then go to the classes guide. If you are returning, the table below is a quick map of what actually changes on the second and third run.

What the three difficulties actually change

Two rows in that table catch most people out. The mercenary row is the one nobody warns you about: the Act 2 mercenary’s aura is decided by the difficulty you hire him on, Normal and Hell offer the identical three, and Nightmare is the only place the good ones live. And the resistance row is why a character that strolled through Nightmare falls apart in the first act of Hell. Nothing about the monsters changed that much. You did, by 60 points, all at once.

Picking something to play

There are seven classes and our classes guide compares them on two things that are genuinely exclusive: the equipment slot only that class can fill, and the level at which its leveling guide tells you to spend a respec and rebuild. That second number ranges from level 18 for the Paladin to level 35 for the Amazon and Assassin, and the Barbarian never rebuilds at all.

When you want a build written up end to end instead of a path to walk, the builds guide sorts nine of them by what they cost, from a Frenzy Barbarian that works on 42 skill points to a Summoner Druid that wants 110. If your goal is loot rather than progress, magic find builds compares the five characters people actually farm with.

Loot, and the systems behind it

Everything valuable in Diablo 2 is assembled rather than found. The items guide covers the raw material, from gems and their 3-for-1 exchange rate up through all 33 runes and the Horadric Cube that converts one into the other. The runewords tier list ranks what you can spell with them, and its most useful lesson is that price and power are not the same thing: Spirit needs nothing rarer than an Amn rune and sits in the top tier.

The mechanics guide covers the rules that decide how fast any of this happens. Magic find, where the honest advice is to stop at around 500%. Experience, where level 85 is the point the curve stops being a line. Resistances, respecs, crafting, mercenaries and the Pandemonium Event all sit there too.

Bosses and places worth returning to

The five act bosses are covered in the bosses guide, ordered by what each kill costs and pays. The short version is that the two we have dedicated farming guides for, Andariel and Mephisto, are the cheapest and third-cheapest on that ladder rather than the richest. Speed beats size when you are killing something a hundred times.

The regions guide covers six areas sorted by what keeps you out of them: a missing waypoint at the Claw Viper Temple, a randomised layout at the Monastery, a locked door at the Palace Cellar, a cube recipe at the Secret Cow Level. That last one is the only place in the game you can lose permanently, and you lose it by killing the wrong cow.

Starting out, and getting it running

Our general tips page is the one to read before your first character. It covers the things the game never explains: put Vitality first and Strength second, carry a Tome of Identify rather than loose scrolls, farm the Countess early, and hold on to your Den of Evil respec instead of spending it the moment you get it. It also makes the case for the Sorceress as a first class, which our other pages keep quietly agreeing with.

If the game will not start, or drops you at a login screen, our PC fixes guide covers the failed to authenticate error, server issues, crashes, black screens and the character creation and missing character errors.

Everything here is written to be read out of order. Pick the difficulty you are stuck on, find the system that is stopping you, and follow the link into the guide that covers it in full.