I just have this say to any potential viewers: I highly recommend viewing this at 200%. It makes things much clearer.

Diablo is one of those games where if someone mentions the idea of speed running everyone will point and laugh. Initial estimates hovered around the SDA seven hour limit. I am proud to present to you, a character from scratch, with no tweaking whatsoever, on /players 1, a sub two hour run from creation to Baal's anguish on normal difficulty (although describing it as a difficulty is more of a misnomer; Diablo is unique in the way its difficulties are arranged).

The map spawns in a single player game are set in stone at character creation and thus if you save the character files you can explore ahead, exit, reinsert the files, and play with full knowledge of where to go. Since there are several huge, sprawling areas of the game where a wrong decision can lead you astray this is the main way of cutting down time.

A second way to make the game faster is in the character. In all classes, most of the time sunk will be spent in the first act doing the required leveling. A trap based assassin is the fastest character I have tested due to three reasons:

1. A ranged area of effect spell that is powerful and mana manageable at level 1 allows for quick leveling.

2. Burst of Speed allows a large increase in run speed without the requirement of finding faster run boots.

3. Wake of Fire is an extremely powerful "fire and forget" spell and it only takes level 12 to earn. Each trap spurts five waves of fire and you can lay five traps on the ground at the same time; every wave pierces through all enemies. This can lead to enormous amounts of damage.

Even with fixed maps the game is quite random of course. Item drops, monster locations, monster type combinations, and champion and unique monster locations are the result of chance. However, it appears that with each map spawn there are certain locations where uniques spawn specifically. Going through the same areas over and over again I learned that they tend go spawn in certain locations over and over, which I could abuse. Monster type combos were only an issue in one or two areas which I will discuss in the particular act.

As for items, the only thing that really matters would be either fast run boots, items that grant resistance, and nice shiny things that sell for wads of cash (like heavy armor, rings, wands, and paladin scepters).

Since I have Burst of Speed and faster run items give diminishing returns the more you stack the lack of faster run boots isn't that detrimental...but of course, it would have been useful. I don't know how much it would have cut off but most of the time is spent running.

As for resistances...well...let's just say it was an interesting run. I ended with 75 cold and 6 for the rest. The most important is without a doubt fire and I wanted to get as close to the max 75 as possible. Inferno attacks (fetish shaman, venom lords) melt through health like butter and Diablo and Baal both have devastating burning attacks. More on that later.

I did, however, come upon max cold resistance due to jewelry and the arctic set belt (+40% cold res) found in Act 2. How interesting. Cold is only a serious threat (although being frozen makes a speed run not so speedy) against Duriel, Mephisto, and Baal, where I would have usually relied on thawing potions (with temporarily grant max cold resistance) and trying to avoid Mephisto's cold ball. I guess that saved some money and clicking, but meh...lucky, but not that beneficial, especially since I had 0 res to all other elements until I was ready to tackle Baal (and then only a paltry six).

An embarrassing fact I didn't know after all these years is that if you shift click a potion in your inventory it'll go right to your belt. I know some pretty obscure tidbits about this game but I didn't know that...wow. I manage to do somewhat well by running and dragging potions to my belt anyway, or while my fire traps were killing mobs.

Act One and the Maiden of Anguish:

These are the longest and dullest segments.

There is a shrine right outside the Rogue camp. Every time it was an experience shrine it seems the number of enemies would be cut in half and when it was something else there were many more enemies. However, there was a nifty experience shrine in the cold plains near a huge camp of uniques and imps (And good old Bishibosh) so that was a great boost during this segment.

Originally I aimed to get to level twelve before Andariel but that wasn't going to happen on players one even with the huge amount of champions/uniques I had slain. I tried to get as close as possible, of course.

The fight with Andy, as she is lovingly nicknamed, was fairly uneventful. Poison antidotes and the fact that I pumped health (and 'sins get +3 hp per point) made her infamous poison attack not so bad.

Act Two and the Lord of Pain:

With the acquisition of Wake of Fire I can now level on the run by sprinting around, gathering huge mobs, laying traps, and then running away while watching my bar fill. The fire simply dominates everything in this act with no mercy. The only frustrating areas are the Maggot Lair and the Arcane Sanctuary, hated by many players due to their close, claustrophobic tunnels which can be a huge burden on certain attacks. WoF performs decently but I am slowed.

Many consider Duriel on normal the most difficult boss in the game to solo. His unique unavoidable holy freeze aura and staggering knock back with the potential for critical OHKO's can leave a player running scared in the tiny chamber. Luckily, I can cast the traps and run around while damaging him. Since I had the arctic belt I also had nice cold resistance.

Act Three and the Lord of Hatred:

Of all the areas of the game I would estimate the casual player knows the least about the jungles of the east which hide Mephisto and a portal to Hell itself. This is a critical area -- the jungles can either be short and fast or long and tortuous -- even if you know where to go beforehand! Doing it blind is almost more like work than fun. The worst is when you have to go through the Great Marsh to get to the Flayer area...if I had obtained a truly bad spawn I might have considered restarting from scratch. I found a decent spawn but nothing to jump for joy.

My Sewers and Durance of Hates were rather sweet, though.

Mephisto is no push over, especially with 0 lightning resistance, but he's no Duriel. My cold res, however, enabled me to take his cold balls without too much bloodshed. I was able to take him down without running to Ormus for help.

Act Four and the Lord of Terror:

I enter Hell at such a low level that I'm outside the range of getting more than 5% experience and thus I don't level up at all. I run to the Fire River waypoint in less than three minutes, which definitely deserves its own segment due to the randomness of monsters clogging the path. Maggots seem less likely to do so, although it would have been prettier if I was avoiding the big Urdars and Pit Lords more often.

The Chaos Sanctuary is perhaps the peak of the game. If you can take this then you should be able to beat the game. Everything is fire resistant, which prevents a bit of a problem for my poor little assassin. If you wondered why I needed the cold mercenary from Act III then look no further than the fire immune Vizier of Chaos. As for the Infector of Souls...well...let's just say he takes as long as Diablo to take down.

Speaking of Diablo, YOWZA. As per the usual, his pink lightning hose of doom may as well be an instant kill since barely grazing it empties my orb. His fire waves send me into hit recovery. Luckily, I can abuse the traps and the walls and make the Lord of all Terror look like a functional idiot.

Act Five and the Lord of Destruction:

I had to level up to 20 since that's the minimum required by the ancients. I had to use the tried and true method of dropping potions on the ground. Two of them are fire resistant, which of course is fun for the entire family.

Baal's pets worked out decently (Colenzo requires my merc, of course) until Ventaur and Lister, which have to be lured out and parked. I had to kill off a wandering Pit Lord minion, unfortunately.

Finally, Baal himself...definitely the most powerful individual monster in the game (except perhaps the Uber Diablo, but is only an online feature that isn't set into the game's quests). With my bad fire resistance he makes me buy a boatload of the red stuff and his constant streams of mana draining dragon breath is extremely frustrating. Thankfully, the cold waves, although still annoying, don't threaten to kill me (I would have used thawing potions anyway, as I said earlier).

Firstly, a big thanks to Marshmallow, for doing his D2LOD speedrun, which got me into wanting to do it myself. Thanks to everyone on the thread, especially Coriolanus for his tireless number crunching, Dragonwarrior, Stuporman, Gorash, and everyone else who gave their words of advice.

I got the idea for this speedrun when a friend said I should download a sub 2 hour speedrun of LOD. I thought 'it has to be a sorceress', and then saw it was an assassin. I saw why the assassin would have a lot of advantages during a speedrun, but when I saw his fights, especially against act bosses, I become convinced that the sorceress had more potential. For instance, his section of the chaos sanctuary and Diablo is about 17 minutes, while mine is 5.

Diablo 2 is a weird game to speedrun. If you save your character files upon creation, the map is constant, as are spawn points of some monsters. Drops, equipment for sale, and some monster layout is all random though. There are many things to do to get ready for the fight with baal. Level up to 20, work your way through all the acts, have decent equipment, perhaps a decent mercenary, enough gold to buy potions - you always have to be doing lots of things at once. This leads to a lot of hard decisions that have to be constantly made as well, and hesitation is time wasted. A couple times I had to sell stuff that I was using, just to buy enough potions to stay alive.

If you're not familiar with Diablo 2, these are the main differences between speedrunning with the Sorceress and Assassin:

Assassin:
+Great damage area of affect spells
+Good fire and forget leveling method (with traps)
+Increased running speed beginning at level 6
+Lots of health
-Boss fights are slow
-All damage is skill based, but cannot get +skill items (realistically)
-Crowd control is limited, and does not benefit much from a merc

Sorceress:
+Good damage area of affect spells
+Benefits immensely from equipment (faster cast rate, +skill items are very easy to obtain)
+Gains teleport skill at level 18
+Insanely good against bosses (static field reduces an enemies HP by 25% on each cast - bosses included)
+Good crowd control with frozen armor, freezing merc (with teleport)
-Mana intensive - have to buy thousands of potions
-Low HP - hard to stay alive
-Must stand still to cast all spells - leveling is difficult
-No way to increase speed before level 18 without lucky boots

It's a tough call which is better, but given that act 3,4, and 5 all require lots of running and boss fights (chaos sanctuary bosses, Diablo, ancients, Baal), I figured that if I could reach level 18 earlier, I would have a big advantage. The game can be broken into two segments: the first is running through the first three acts and leveling, and the second is running to all the bosses in the last 2 acts and killing them. The sorc would be much weaker in the first part, and much stronger in the second part.

I didn't do everything I had planned, and looking back on it, there's a lot of things I did that I now regret, but a 'perfect' run can't really be defined in this game.

I got kind of lost in the catacombs, which is pretty dumb of me, but whatever.

I wanted to get level 18 before I finish act 2, which I didn't quite do, but the time lost walking through the beginning of act 3 wasn't much time lost.

I have very few regrets with all of the boss fights. For my sorceress, the hardest was Andariel, then Mephisto, then Diablo, then Baal, and Duriel is the easiest. The hardest part of the whole run was Baal's minions. Parking them is so hard without clearing the entire section, but those dual wielding guys take forever to kill, and destroy my health. Parking the last 3 groups was difficult, and took many tries. The first time I even got to baal was the run that I kept, even though I died a couple times. The time spent on bosses is really low - I'd bet I spend 10 times as much time in town than on the bosses.

If you want some more information, I recommend watching Marshmallow's run and reading his comments. It's very interesting to compare two similar timed runs when the distribution of time is done so differently. I also employ more 'tricks' to save time, then go to waste a lot more time than him on stupid stuff (act 5 merc for example, scrounging for money to by things, rearranging inventory, etc).

Act 1

Act 1 is just a rush to the boss - but you also must be a high enough level by then to fight her.

Act 1 is where the sorceress was expected to be the weakest. And apart from requiring a stupid amount of stamina and mana potions, she does just fine with charged bolt. I still take longer and end at a lower level than marsh, who I was constantly comparing my run to, but I expected as much. The fight with Andy went well, if requiring tons of potions.

Act 2

Act 2 is gathering 3 components, and placing them in the final chamber to unlock a room to the big guy.

Act 2 is rough. Lots of running, and no way to speed it up. I make the decision to go through the sewers first, because I get good exp there, and I will need to go out of my way to level anyways. The +1 skill point radament drops seals the deal. The leveling everywhere is okay, but the arcane sanctuary is especially nice, which is why I go through more than once, with the contraversial act of repopulating the place between segments. It's legal, and I don't see how it can be abused. I kill Duriel in record time. The reason I keep saving in act 1 is because I need to save in the same spot I load from, and it's a shorter run in act 1.

Act 3

Everyone hates act 3, no exceptions. You have to collect 4 components, put them together, then go kill Mephisto. The catch? The place is HUGE!

I made sure to get teleport before the real running begins, and that definitely helped, but I still needed to gain 2 levels here, so I can't just skip everything. I get these levels faster than I had expected, and then proceed to ignore everything else in the act. A funny note, you don't actually have to kill the high council, I just needed the money very badly. Time could have been saved here if I had skipped them though. Mephisto was harder than I had hoped (he is lightning resistant), but I do okay.

Act 4

Act 4 is simply killing Diablo. To summon him, you have to go press 5 seals, 3 of which summon a boss and all his friends. Once the 3 bosses are dead and all 5 seals are pressed, every enemy in the place dies, and Diablo is summoned in a screen shaking scary shout.

I stopped by ol' Izzy (Izual) here for a side quest, because it's right on the way, and he doesn't take TOO long to kill. The reward is two delicious skill points. Diablo's minions go down quickly. Diablo goes down faster than I had expected, and it's off to act 5.

Act 5

Act 5 is unique, in the fact that you NEED to be level 20 to complete it. This paves the way for the entire beginning of the run, forcing every character to level up to 20 eventually, making most of the run an intense powerleveling fest. You kill the ancients (one of which is lightning resistant), kill (or park) Baal's 5 waves of jerks, and take down Baal himself.

Note that potions cost twice as much here than they do in act 4. You'd think they'd want me alive if I'm saving their stupid town. Jerks. The run to the ancients is uneventful, and the fight goes very smoothly. Baal's minions are very hard, however. I park the final 3 groups, and even though they disagree with my methods, Baal enters his portal quick enough. Baal himself is a relative pushover, even though I still die to him a couple times. No biggie. His clone decieves me, but only for an instant. Thank god for static. He dies, cool music starts, Tyrael comes down to say hello, he portals me to DESTRUCTION'S END (?), and for some reason, Cain takes it upon himself to promote me to some arbitrary rank (This part didn't capture for some reason - i think the cutscene killed it). Fame and glory indeed.

I do plan on doing another run, mostly because there are so many places for improvement on this one, and I want to show the sorceress to be the better speedrunner. I hope marsh or someone else tries to improve his assassin speedrun; it would be a fun competition between these two classes to see which is more proficient at speedrunning. I don't think any other class stands a chance at 2 hours. Maybe druid (elemental build), or Paladin (thorns + zeal with a 2h LL maybe), but I doubt it would work for either. I hope somebody tries though.

First off, I highly recommend listening to the audio commentary. It has a lot of information these comments might miss.

Big thanks to everyone at SDA who supported this run - especially Requiem and Pweisger for putting up the bounty that gave me the kick to make this run happen. Zurreco and Lag.com for their knowledge and experience and helpful advice, and g0lem for his insanely thorough knowledge of the game, who corrected me on quite a few points. Adzicents, mr kidd, ShinerCCC, xud9dab2, bimanc, and all the rest on SDA forums and Youtube for their advice and support, and Suga for showing me how a sorc is SUPPOSED to level ;)

Diablo 2: LOD is a good game. The difficulties are rather unique, in that you are expected to go through all 3 difficulties sequentially. Normal is for levels 1-35, Nightmare for 35-65, and the final enemies are in their 80s. There is a hard enforcer to make sure you abide close to this though - the second to last quest in each difficulty has a minimum level needed to complete it - 20 in normal, 40 in nightmare, and 60 in Hell. This makes leveling a large part of the game, even though I go for the minimum level, I still need to spend a decent chunk of time killing bosspacks and champ packs (the most efficient EXP) to level. The game allows for a 2.5-minute or so powerup "Exp Shrine" that doubles all the exp you get during that duration, which is extremely valuable. I spend a lot of effort to make sure I have this on whenever I am leveling.

I will write comments here for each segment, but I recommend you watch with audio commentary - it is probably more enjoyable (I have not recorded it as of writing these comments). There are 150 segments.

1- I apologize for the audio issue in here, as some of the louder sounds are messed up. It only exists in this segment though. This segment requires a lot of luck - getting the exp shrine, getting a decent armor, getting an early stamina potion, and having a light monster spawn in the den. Also it's nice to get some valuable items as gold is an important early resource. I got lucky on almost all fronts, although there were enough enemies so that my exp shrine wore off near the end. Unfortunate, but there was a lot of good luck on this segment.

2- The javelins and throwing knives are very handy here. There's still a lot of running in these segments, so I don't worry about getting the exp shrine early. I was rather lucky to get the CB orb, and charged bolt cleans up pretty well. The enemy spawns are rather unpredictable, so when I go up to visit the handful of goat people, I was expecting a much bigger spawn, but there's no way to know until I get there.

3- The run to dark wood. I hit level 6 here and get Frost Nova, which is one of the few spells that just hits EVERYONE in a certain radius. It's not very high damage yet, but it will be.

4- This is all about gold and a +2 frost nova staff. I perform this segment a bit sloppy, but it took many many many tries to get that staff to show up, so I kinda balked when it finally did.

5- Tristram. Everything is just annihilated by my new frost nova, which makes my exp gain ridiculous. The assortment of enemies in trist are nearly perfect. Rather good segment, except near the end where there didn't happen to be a bosspack. Was still the right chance to take though. I lose time on collecting items, but gold is still extremely important for a while.

6- All about the quest reward. Akara has about a 9% chance to give me a 10% faster cast ring, and here it is. Fast cast is extremely important to the sorc - especially with repeat teleporting.

7- Countess - you can see frost nova is pretty valuable here. Unfortunately I don't get a good rune, but since I got two experience shrines, I consider it an even deal. Not too much to say here.

8- Pretty quick run to outer cloister. I don't get TOO much exp, but it's pretty good.

9- I use a TP drop here - at a certain intersection, I have to visit both sides. So I drop a town portal at the fork, work my way to the waypoint, then in town, take the TP back to the intersection and go towards the blacksmith. It saves a good amount of time that I don't have to backtrack at all. Everything goes pretty smoothly here - I spend a lot of time without my EXP shrine up though, but that's just a product of the large amount of running I have to do.

10- I work my way all the way down the catacombs here to Andariel, who is not too hard since I got enough EXP for Fireball in the previous segments. Afterwards I go do Blood Raven. I skipped her earlier because she has such a ridiculous amount of HP, and even with fireball she still takes an annoyingly long time. She is hard to static since my static range is so low, and she's constantly moving around.

11- I have to do a lot of leveling in Act 2 at the far oasis, so I don't bother getting an exp shrine or killing much since the Oasis is much more efficient. There's a shortcut to get to the A2 waypoint that I don't do here, because I need to hit Lyslander for potions.

12- Town segment to prepare for the leveling. I get my merc and okay weapon, and grab everything I need. Nothing special here.

13-21- Leveling to 18. Really nothing too fun here, it's rather repetitive. but necessary. Notice I keep a lot of skill points unspent, I need to save them for some of the prereqs to make sure I get everything I need once I have level 30 (which includes basically the whole cold tree).

22- Countess run - I get Tir+Ral+Tal here. Tir+Ral is for Leaf runeword, which gives me +6 fireball. Tal+Eth is for Stealth, which gives me faster run/walk, and also 25% faster cast rate. Extremely valuable, both of them.

23- Picking up two socket items - shield + chest. Shield is for Ancients Pledge, which comes later - breastplate is for Stealth.

24- Eth rune mentioned above.

25- Getting a 2 socket staff. If I found one that gave +fireball I could have ended up with a +7 fireball staff, but it's not too necessary, and it costs a ton of gold - more than I'm willing to spare here.

26- Sewers - I can't use the Leaf just yet, so the killing speed is not remarkable. Now that I have teleport, it's pretty quick.

27- Getting the cube here. The only problem with my teleport is the mana cost is prohibitive - with these dinky potions, I can't regen mana faster than my rapid-fire teleport spends it. I need to teleport, walk, teleport, walk, which is a bit annoying, but that is for this act only. Next act I get better mana potions.

28- Maggot lair. Killing here is annoying since they're all clumped, but there's not too much danger here, so I can live in those big mobs of enemies.

29- Getting the amulet, last piece I need for Act 2.

30- After a couple chores in town, I get to go down to the Arcane Sanctuary, where leveling is pretty strong. I finally am able to equip Leaf here, which lets me REALLY mow down these guys.

31- Duriel, who's not too rough. Notice I go into the palace, take a TP to town and walk to Meshif, which is a lot faster than walking all the way to Meshif.

32-Housekeeping and grabbing the spider eye. I manage to make almost perfect use of my EXP shrine here, which is nice. Unfortunately, the Act 3 map is set up such that there's no waypoint near me, which means I have to walk out the front door again. Fortunately it's ripe for leveling.

33- I grab the Gidbinn here, as well as the Flayer WP. Nothing too special.

34- For the Gidbinn quest reward, I manip a good ring here that also has 10% Fast Cast rate. I am up to 45 now (25 chest, 10 ring, 10 ring), which is still 20 away from my goal.

35- Leveling in the jungle (love watching all these flayers evaporate), and grabbing the heart. The boss here is immune to fire, but he's good enough EXP that he's still worth killing.

36- After ID'ing the surprisingly good amulet, I go get the Las Esem Tomb, as well as the brain from the sewers.

37- High council. A point of interest is the boots - they seriously help me, and it's pure luck that I got them, and then pretty lucky that I didn't die after finding them (which would have forced me to redo the segment and lose the boots).

38- I have to break the orb that I didn't do last segment, and kill Mephisto. No notable drops, just a lot of stuff to sell.

39- Leveling. I want 25 before I start act 4 due to the way the experience is calculated. If I was 24 when I did act 4, I'd get almost zero exp. The formula to calculate experience changes at level 25.

40- The orb I find here is good as a switch, since it gives me good resists and Leaf is good for nothing but fireball killing. I plan on using it during teleport segments (and once I get my ancients pledge shield, it makes a good mainhand).

41-42- Leveling. I change where I level based on where my exp is the most valuable - but these levels are always notoriously slow.

43- Leveling + Izual. Again, as I rise in levels, I get more exp from higher level mobs, so the act 4 monsters become nice and profitable.

44- Hellforge + Waypoint. Also more leveling.

45- Even more leveling in Act 4. I finally hit level 25.

46- Town segment to prepare for the Chaos Sanctuary, which is pretty hard.

47- Chaos Sanctuary. I get VERY light spawns all over this map, which is nice, and a pretty standard Diablo fight. He decides to melee me for quite a while, which is very convenient, since it does crap damage compared to his spells.

48- Shank and the bloody WP. I don't need to make much effort to level, since I'm high enough for ancients, and everything gets better once I hit Baal. The orb I got last segment is better than my resist switch because it gives a LOT of mana, which is GREAT for teleporting. I put it on my switch.

49- That stupid act 5 rescue quest, and the waypoint. Now that I have greater mana potions. I can blaze through with teleports.

50- Rescuing Anya. She's kinda out of the way, which is inconvenient, but who can argue with the reward of a permanent +10 all resists? I also socket my tarnhelm to put the amethyst in, put the amethyst in for the strength, grab the strength large charm, and I can finally equip my shield. A point of interest is that I use my Leaf staff when teleporting instead of the mana one I got explicitly for teleporting. This was very intentional. The curse the birds cast on me has a meaningless effect if I have more life than mana, but if I have more mana than life, then I take damage every time I cast a spell. This would annihilate me while teleporting, and the orb gives me enough mana to push my mana over my life. Leaf staff it is.

51- Ancients. A pretty difficult fight, but in Normal it's not bad at all, since there's no immunities and I can static the crap out of them. I also get the Worldstone Keep 2 waypoint.

52- I give myself just enough strength to use those boots I got back at HC. The rest is just a town segment in preparation for Baal.

53-56- I do some Baal runs for the exp. The only point of interest is that I get an EXP shrine between the third and fourth packs. These packs gives a lot more exp, and it's hard to keep the shrine the whole fight. If I get too close to Baal (on the same screen as him), I get hit with Decrepify curse, which knocks off my shrine. I also get Frozen Orb here, which helps out a lot. The skill points I saved let me pump up Orb + Cold Mastery at the same time, giving me a very powerful orb very quickly.

57- I manip the quest reward from Anya here - 20% faster cast rate, and +1 sorc skills, as well as healthy energy+life. The fast cast puts me up to 75% (which is no better than 65%), but it means I can replace one of my rings or amulet without any harm to my casting speed. It wasn't intentional, but it's a nice little perk.

58- Nihlathak and Baal.

59- Cows seals up Normal difficulty. Nothing interesting here.

60- I start nightmare here. Nightmare for a frozen orb sorc is extremely easy - almost everything falls apart to one or more orbs. Act 1 is where it's the most obvious - I may as well be fighting Normal mobs here. I clear out the den pretty easily, and we're on. Also the exp here is awesome.

61- My method of leveling is pretty solid throughout nightmare - I basically frozen orb every boss pack a couple times, then keep teleporting to my destination. Every time I get to a boss pack, I stop briefly to kill them all, then resume. Leveling is extremely efficient here. It's about 2 minutes per level INCLUDING doing quests, which is MUCH better than what I did in normal dedicated leveling segments. It's just a byproduct of being in Nightmare as well as Frozen Orb.

62- I tag both the Stony and Dark Wood waypoints here. Another level.

63- I get the scroll and hit up Tristram. I make sure to remember to get Wirt's Leg here, so I don't have to run back to Tristram when I have to do cows.

64- Quick run to Countess. Nothing special here.

65- The ancient armor I grabbed last round is not special, but I hang onto it in case I get lucky with runes and can make a nice runeword for my merc. Otherwise, I know it will sell for a lot. Into the stash it goes. I don't care about whats-her-face's quest reward of the ring, because both of my rings are very good, and she can't offer much better. I grab the OC waypoint and get the hammer. I don't HAVE to kill the blacksmith here, but I do for the exp. I am almost dead though, so I end the segment before I have a chance to look at his drops. Shame, but it was probably nothing good.

66- I grab the inner cloister waypoint, and kill the enemies in the cathedral for the EXP. I don't move forward into the catacombs yet.

67- I need to burn my imbue, and I don't have any white items handy (only non-magical items can be imbued), so I go ahead and imbue the Wirt's Leg. It's kinda funny that it lets you do that, but it doesn't really make a difference, I can still use it for the cow portal. Andariel dies - you'll notice I don't static her - I'm still extremely low level for this area - look how much damage the fallen do to me. I kill her conventionally and move on to the next act.

68- Here is the type of merc that will stay with me forever. I choose the one that gives frozen aura - it's very handy when folks are trying to kill me and I can't get frozen orb off, and it also freezes mobs who normally cannot be frozen - including cold immune. It was a tough decision between this merc and the one that gives Might aura, but I think it was the right decision. I also grab a lower resist wand - which lets me cast the necromancer curse Lower Resist, which reduces the enemies resistance to elemental attacks. This gives me significantly more damage, but has limited charges. I use it pretty often though, anytime something takes a while to kill, it's nice to have the extra oomph.

69- I go through sewers here. Nothing special, although you can see the difference between A1 and A2 mobs - my frozen orb is not the kill-all it was last act.

70- Just getting the waypoint. I miss it a few times with telekinesis because I'm retarded.

71- Maggot lair. Orb is a real pain to use in these corridors, especially since they all take multiple hits, and the beetles would destroy me if I ate enough of their lightning, so I don't kill anything. It's a rare moment of the sorc's humanity showing, but it is short lived.

72- And the amulet. I should note that normal is the only difficulty I have to get the cube - I keep the cube from last difficulty and only need the staff + amulet to make the horadric staff.

73- Palace and arcane. Seriously, all these segments look the same (not that they didn't take many tries).

74- Duriel goes down pretty peacefully. Nice of him. Onto act 3.

75- Act 3 starts out uneventful. I get the eye, as well as the jade figurine.

76- I trade in the figure for the potion, and do some more town chores. Segments like this are frustrating because if I had gone to the stony and there was no EXP shrine, I would have had to start over and do that whole town nonsense again. I kill all the flayers for quite good exp, make my way through the dungeon, and get the brain.

77- Manipulate a decent ring out of Ormus, and other town foolishness.

78- Tome and heart. I get an ethereal Iceblink here, which is not too great, but it's decent on the merc.

79- I keep the Darkglow because of its resists, but it's not too big of a deal. I move on to kill HC - it was heartbreaking passing those two bosspacks without an exp shrine, but it's pointless to shrine for this segment, since it's impossible to avoid getting cursed by the HC. I make the effort to get the Durance2 WP before ending the segment this time.

80- This is a short segment preparing for Mephisto. I fully intended to do HUNDREDS of attempts at the next segment to get a good drop, and doing it in another segment means I don't have to do that town nonsense along with every single one of my meph attempts. Saves my sanity.

81- Meph for the drop. I get a Kelpie snare here for my merc. I was hoping for an Occulus, but this is equally valuable. It has "slows target by 75%", which makes bosses much much easier. I got it specifically for the hell ancients (even though it ended up not really helping there). If I had to do this run again, I'd probably hold out for an Occulus here, but the kelpie did help at several spots.

82- Gambling for a good amulet. This one gives me +1 sorc skills and good resists, so I'm happy. It does not have 10% FCR, which means I'm back down to 65, which doesn't affect my cast speed, but means I can't lose any more.

83- Equipping the amulet and a couple town things. Nothing major here.

84- I get a ludicrous amount of exp this segment. Act 4 mobs give a lot of exp, and I run into a ton of them.

85- Fast hellforge segment. I had to do this many times to get the um rune and get a good time. Very clean here, although no shrine and I don't get the followup waypoint. That's okay, since I need to get exp anyways, I don't mind travelling the river again.

86- The ol' chaos sanctuary. I looked at my Normal CS run when I did this one, and I lost a lot of time due to standing around putting potions in my belt and stuff. I told myself I wouldn't stop to breathe during this run, and I think I did well.

87- Gambling for a good circlet. This one ends up with +1 sorc skills, faster runwalk, and not much else. That's fine with me.

88- Did you know Shenk was named after Phil Shenk, the Lead Artist on Diablo II? Apparently he is a pretty nice guy and does not whip his employees into a blind rage like this Shenk does. This one dies though.

89- Stupid town stuff and giving my circlet an Um rune.

90- Just getting the waypoint here, and the rescue quest. Also, some monsters die.

91- Did you know you don't need to kill Frozenstien to do the quest? And you can talk to Anya using Telekinesis. Handy.

92- I load up a couple potions here because I put several hundred attempts into the next segment, and I have to reorganize my inventory for it. This just saves me the hassle of also arranging my inventory several hundred times with each segment. Sanity saver.

93- Manipulating a good orb here. 20% fast cast rate is mandatory to keep 65% FCR, and this also has 14 life, +30 fire resist, and a delicious +2 sorc skills. It is possible to get better, but the odds become astronomical as I build odds for getting the 'perfect' orb.

94- Ancients and the worldstone keep waypoint. Not much to say here.

There's a story behind these next few segments, so let me tell it here.

I did segment 95 and 96, and posted them to the internet. I decided they weren't good enough, and went back to redo them. I got much better segments, with nice drops, so I replaced the old segments. HOWEVER, I made a GIANT boner and didn't correctly replace the save files. My segments afterwards used the save files of the videos I deleted (the 'not good enough' run), which means there was a striking inconsistency between segments 96 and 97 (inventory was totally different, among other things).

Nobody (including me) noticed this, which means I went through and finished the run with this gap between 96-97. Only when I was timing the run did I notice the problem.

The only way I could fix this was to redo these segments, and end up EXACTLY where I was. I recorded four segments (now 95-98) that bring me to the EXACT state of my old run. The difference is exp - I have a bit amount more exp at the end of 98 than I do at the beginning of 99. Other than that, everything is identical. This is the best I can do to repair the problem.

95- Baal. Die, man.

96- Nihlathak. Die, dude.

97- Cows. Die, folks.

98- Inventory repair. I get a lot of gold here, and then drop enough so I end with the correct amount. I arrange my inventory to how it has to be for the next segment, so if you're not reading these comments (but you are!), it looks like I'm wasting a lot of time this segment. However, I have to bring my character to the same state that it was when the next segment starts, so here I go.

99- I start Hell here. The mobs die pretty easily, but everyone is immune to something. The cold immunes are the biggest problem, since my fire is still pretty weak. Because of this, I delay the den (the only place I HAVE to kill all the mobs), because it has a lot of cold immune zombies and those big ape-monkey-things. I save that for the end of Act 1, so I can have some more points in fire.

100- Trudging my way through Act 1. Each of these hell segments that look the same took a LOT of manipulation - I have to get an EXP shrine, get a lot of bosspacks that AREN'T immune to cold, NOT get cursed (very easy to do in Hell), and not die. Very hard, but not too much thinking involved. I'm pretty sure most of these segments were done with reruns of Seinfeld running in the background.

101- Clearing the way to Dark Wood, and getting that scroll.

102- Tristram.

103- Annoying town segment - hell really eats up a lot of potions, so I have to take more town segments than I'd like.

104- Notice when I get the stony EXP shrine, I make sure there's bosspacks there and I kill them. It's nearly free EXP, since I'm going to be stopping there anyways. I try to do this every single hell segment. I grab the marsh WP and end it.

105- Countess. She's both cold and fire immune, so it's on my merc to kill her. I grab a String of Ears here, which has 13% Physical Damage Reduction. This doesn't help me too much, but I put it in the stash in case I ever need it.

106- Town.

107- Outer cloister waypoint grab. Nothing special...

108- I'm almost 60, so I don't have to level everywhere. Since the Jail run has a lot of cold immune mobs, I decide it's not worth it to try to level on this run, so I just make a dash for the Malus and waypoint.

109- Andariel.

110- Quick town segment where nothing happens.

111- Finally I do the den. You can see why I waited to increase my fireball skill, and I even go as far to get a +2 skill armor shrine here. The last mob grabs a Sharktooth Armor, which I wisely grab before ending the segment.

112- I imbue the armor for something my merc likes. Lightning+fire resistance, and +life. I take the stupid wagon to act 2 and end it.

113- I like the fact that it's faster to take the wagon across the desert, then take this teleporting... whatever... back to act 2 than it is to just walk from one side of town to the other. Then I kill radament.

114- Maggot lair, and again, I kill nobody. What can I say, this lady likes maggots.

115- CV temple. I think this is one of my favorite segments - everything just happens so fast.

116- Arcane and getting the waypoint for Canyon.

117- Duriel's time to die. Note the teleport I do out of his chamber - because you're not supposed to advance through the crumbling wall until he's dead, this room restricts your ability to teleport. The teleport I do out of this room is VERY difficult - most places in this room, teleport just simply does not work. Anyway, it saves me a few tenths of a second, and I move on to act 3.

118- Waypoint and eye.

119- Town segment is nothing special. I go back to act 1 because running through town at the beginning of segments where I start in act 3 takes a lot of time.

120- I do the ol' flayer dungeon.

121- Ormus has nothing to offer me with his rings - my rings are fine. I grab the ol' tome.

122- I grab the Trav WP, and hit up the ol' sewers. I'll stop that now.

123- Oh boy, this is annoying. Toorc is immune to fire and cold, which means I need to let my merc hit him. There's a couple spells I have that do lightning damage, but mostly I use telekinesis to keep him stunned and to stop him from killing my merc. This... is a pretty boring segment.

124- Town nonsense.

125- Mephisto, with no real drops. Really just cranking it through to the end here.

126- Another town segment.

127-131- Leveling to 60. I'll admit I got about a half level too much here. I could have saved a minute or so with better planning - I didn't expect to get as much exp from chaos sanctuary as I did.

132- Town segment to prepare for act 4.

133- Izual.

134- Hellforge. I get a pul rune, which is kinda exciting, but really does me no good for this run. It could be used to upgrade the Kelpie snare, but then my merc wouldn't be able to use it.

135- Town segment, selling those gems from the hellforge. Goodbye Pul.

136- This is an important segment - I grab a chipped gem. Chip gem + ort rune + something with charges = refills all of the charges. I was almost out of Lower Resists, so this fills me back up. It also means I don't have to worry about conserving my LR's anymore.

137- Last minute preparation for Chaos Sanctuary. I could have done this at the beginning of the next segment, but I was preparing for another few hundred attempts here.

138- Probably the second hardest segment in the game, maybe third (hell ancients is hardest, hell Baal 2nd or 3rd). I get a VERY light spawn of mobs here, which is convenient. Diablo goes down with not too much of a fight, although I do get stuck on a corner and eat half of a lightning firehose, but I get to eat a juvi right after.

139- Quick town segment to prepare for Shenk. Shenk is extremely hard, as you'll soon see.

140- Shenk AND his mobs are all cold immune. This makes it a HUGE pain to do any damage to him, and killing him takes a lot of work. I have to kite his mobs around a good amount before I can do lethal damage to him.

141- Waypoint run.

142- Socketing my merc's Kelpie snare with a Tal rune. This gives it poison damage, which prevents monster heal. This was mainly for ancients, although again, it didn't really help. There's nothing else I want to socket though, so I have no regrets.

143- Anya. Frozenstien is super pissed, but fortunately I don't have to kill him, and I can just sneak Anya out of there (actually I unfreeze her and then bail, leaving her to fend for herself, but she makes it back to town).

144- Ancients way WP run.

145- Town segment preparing for the ancients.

146- HARDEST segment in the game. The town portal scrolls are to reroll the ancients. They can come up with some really annoying mods. Any 'bad' mod and I'll simply have to reroll the ancients. If it takes too many rerolls, I just have to restart the segment. This one probably took the most tries out of the whole run - it was EXTREMELY difficult.

Madawac- ALWAYS immune to lightning. I would reroll if he was cold immune, because then I'd have to fireball him down from 100% to 0%, which is retarded.

Talic- ALWAYS fire immune (which I don't care about). I would reroll if he was lightning immune OR cold immune, since I both static and frorb him to death.

Korlic- ALWAYS cold immune. This one is the real bastard. If he is either fire immune or lightning immune, I reroll. I need to static him down to 50%, and then fireball him down to 0, which takes a while because FB is nowhere near the power of my orb.

It all goes pretty smoothly. I didn't teleport to the worldstone keep waypoint because I didn't want to die after successfully killing the ancients, and I have about a 50% chance of dying while teleporting through the worldstone keep.

147- Nihlathak. His friends are all cold immune, so I have to do this annoying dance. Not too difficult. I have to be wary of corpse explosion here on the serpents - CE of the suicide bombers won't kill me though (it's based off the hp of the corpse, and the suicide bombers don't have much).

148- Personalizing my stupid boots just to burn out the quest.

149- Town segment to prepare for Baal.

150- Baal. This went REALLY smoothly, despite the ugly parking of the 5th pack. Not only were the random mobs outside the room the vipers (EXTREMELY easy to kill compared to everything else), but the throne room has literally NO enemies - this is very rare and very convenient. After some difficulty, I park those jerkwads, and kill Baal, who is rather easy after all of this. This is the longest segment in the run.

151- The ol' cows. You can tell cow king is dead because he drops like 8 stamina potions.

152- Sucks to end on this segment, but because of the issues above (the segment replacement), I never ended up personalizing my item in nightmare. I do it here to wrap up the final quest in my ledger, and we're done!

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Improvements:

• I think I could have done without the second point in charged bolt.

• I could have handled the fire skills better. I leveled up fireball when it actually increases the damage more to level Fire Bolt. This also avoids increasing the mana cost, so it is a no brainer.

• I should have gotten telekinesis as soon as I hit level 6, and used it more often. I didn't start using it on waypoints and shrines until a bit later than I should have. Oops.

• I think I shouldn't have repeated normal Baal - leveling in act 1 nightmare may have been more profitable.

• A better manipulated map would let me level better to 18 in act 2, and give me a great act 3 area for leveling to 20.

• I shouldn't have leveled to 25 before chaos sanctuary. I should have done ancients slightly before hitting level 24, which means I hit level 25 JUST as I start Baal, and can get the improved exp formula for him and his mobs.

• I shouldn't have hit level 60 DURING the hell leveling segments, I should have hit 59.3 or so.

• I shouldn't have messed up those stupid nightmare Baal save files. That was just dumb.

• I could have gotten a better weapon from Nightmare meph. Occulus, specifically.

• I think I would have been better off with the act 2 Might merc for the extra damage. Hell countess + Hell Toorc both required merc beatdowns. Then I could have also given him a healthy lifeleech weapon, and maybe he would have survived hell ancients (and actually done something useful!)

Can't think of any more.

Thanks for watching!