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Pre-1.09 (or technically, 1.10), Hell was significantly easier. However, when Blizzard introduced Synergies, they felt it was necessary to increase difficulty of Hell mode; in order to survive, one had to take advantage of Synergies.
This was done in an effort to reduce a number of Uber-builds, especially giving use to investing points into lower-grade spells that could be replaced easily: for example, to opt not to use Frozen Orb over Blizzard, or Grizzly over Wolves. The ones that they were concerned with especially, were Whirlwind and Corpse Explosion; and adding synergies, in theory, was to increase the number of viable builds.
How wrong they were! When they increased Hell's diffculty, it was found that only skills using Synergies would survive. Those builds which were found to be able to survive are the ones being used today. Now you can't have a Chain/Orb/Hydra Sorceress, anymore, it's now Meteor/Orb.
Seems like 1.10 was meant to fix things, but it went horribly wrong. They tried to add builds, but wound up reducing them to a bare minimum, even destroying half of the techtrees on current characters. they tried to reduce SoJ duping, in order to get rid of SoJ duping and Nagel/Manald abuses (this order was abolished in 1.08), but SoJs were duped even more so.
They even tried to accomodate mod-maker users, but wound up persecuting them even more fiercely.
And the original makers of the game had left. Things just seemed to go all wrong.
In 1.09, they also added the Ladder, and exponentially decreasing EXP gain past level 80.
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Wow...
That's all I can really say. Do they ever smurfing test what they make/change?
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Well, the makers of the game (original team) left some time before the completion of 1.09. 1.10 was a completely new scab team recruited in order to keep interest in Diablo II high. Suffice it to say, they had no idea what they were doing.
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I see. That would explain the torch... among other things.
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They increased the difficulty of hell by a ton and added synergies. The synergies made some skills capable in hell and others not so much.
For instance, traps used to be completely awful. They did like 200 damage and nobody used them; everybody used Martial sins instead. But when synergies were introduced, traps suddenly did thousands of damage. So when the enemies in hell got harder and the Martial tab was left completely as it was with no boost, the balance was effectively reversed.
So in short Hell just used to be much, much easier, so you could get away with doing silly little builds.
Edit: Yeah, what Tavrobel said.
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Martial Sins are still fairly viable. But traps are indeed far more popular.
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Oh yeah, they're still capable and everything. I only used it as an example because it was the easiest I could think of I guess.
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The two easiest ones are Corpse Explosion and Whirlwind. Those two skills alone made the game broken.
If you'd ever check the old Ladder (1.09), the very top was always Barb/Necro.
I remember old Corpse Explosion. It used to do something close to 1100% of Corpse life in /players 8.
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I remember at one point Corpse Explosion's radius was totally absurd :lol: It hit for like 500 screens in every direction. Ah, that was forever ago though.
I'm still upset they put a timer on Dragon Flight and didn't put one on the Sorc's teleport. :bigsmile:
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That's because Dragon Flight did damage, which made it own.
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It's still a level 24 skill that only hits one person at a time and requires an enemy for it to work. Maybe if she teleported multiple times, like hitting 3-4 enemies at level 20, I could see a timer, but...They just killed it.
...They killed it :whimper:
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Diablo II should learn off the people who did Guild Wars couple hundred skills.
