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.