Can I Beat Diablo II When The "/players 8" Command is ALWAYS ON? | Part 1
6Oh boy, tonight begins what I already know will be the longest series I will ever make, and I'm making it even harder this time. This is a challenge I've tried in years prior, but have never successfully finished, due to its sheer absurdity and length. Keep reading if you're interested in the details on what exactly this challenge is.
"So, what exactly is this challenge?" I hear you ask.
The /Players 8 SP Challenge is an idea I had years ago one night. I wanted to find out "is it possible to beat all three difficulties of Diablo II on single player, with the /players 8 command always active?" For the uninitiated, this is a chat command that adjusts the number of players the game thinks are in your active session, even in the offline single player mode. For reference on why exactly I chose 8, it's because 8 is the highest number of players you can have in an online lobby on Diablo II, and you can't go higher.
"How does this command make the game harder?"
This command has an enormous effect on gameplay. As previously stated, this command makes the game think there are eight players in our single player lobby, and because of this, the game will behave as such, increasing the strength of all enemies we come across by a significant margin, because it believes we are playing with seven other allied players. Having to face an entire game's worth of enemies at their 8 player strength solo, especially when starting from scratch, without any previously obtained gear from higher leveled characters to help us, is a daunting task, since key decisions about your build will have to be made sooner than normal, and upgrades to your gear will have to be made much earlier than normal, before reasonably farming for what you need is even feasible in some cases, in order to keep up with the ever increasing strength of the enemies we will have to face down in order to progress.
As a side note, this command also affects experience gain and the rate at which loot drops drastically, although in the grand scheme of things, with regards to the boosted experience gain, it isn't going to matter that much. Overleveling won't be a catch-all answer to our problems in the higher difficulties, since the game actually starts reducing your experience gain beyond level 70, giving you only a percentage of the actual experience you should be getting, so we actually have to craft our build strategically in order to be strong enough to handle the toughest enemies waiting for us in the higher difficulties, especially the final one, fitting called "Hell."
"What are the rules of this challenge?"
The rules are as follows;
1. The golden rule for this challenge is that the /players 8 command must ALWAYS be active, even during level grinding and gear farming. I will probably regret this decision.
2. The use of mods to enable ladder only runewords in SP & the transfer of items between additional characters for storage via GoMule is permitted. Yes, I know there are mods for infinite storage on a single character, I just prefer this method, as it alters the vanilla game less.
Ladder only runewords refers to runeword items that, for some baffling reason, can only be legitimately crafted in the game's online ladder mode. These include some of the most powerful options available in the game, and some of these are going to be crucial to building my character, plus these specific runewords were made available to ALL players in the recent Diablo II remake, so I am VERY justified in using this mod.
3. The Hero Editor program will ONLY be used to acquire the otherwise unobtainable Hellfire Torch and Annihilus charms, only found in online play on Hell difficulty during the post game or with the use of single player mods to enable the events. These charms require the player to be level 75 and 70 respectively in order to be used, and they are high level charms with great benefits that I want to take advantage of. I cannot use these until I reach Hell, however, even if I reach the required levels to use them beforehand, which DID HAPPEN on one of my attempts that made it to the end of Nightmare, and each of their random stats will be rolled using a random number generator, in order to make it as though I acquired them from a legitimate drop, as this will guarantee that they don't have perfect stats, as I can quite easily give them maxed out stats if I wanted to.
Potential Rule: Abusing character saves to try random events more than once. Certain quests and Horadric Cube recipes have huge luck components that can only be used once, and can yield results ranging from fantastic to worthless. One specific quest in Act 4 is great for farming runes, and can be a great source of otherwise VERY hard to find runes. Trouble is, the quest can only be completed once per difficulty. Should I be allowed to abuse GoMule and my character saves to farm this quest for runes, and abuse saves for important random events in general? This will be decided by you viewers.
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