INTRODUCTION

The Warrior was my favorite class in Diablo 1. Felgar was my best warrior. The most satisfying moments I had in D1 came while playing this character.

The only King's Sword of Haste I ever obtained was bought from Griswold by Fel himself, at clvl 33 no less. I made a pledge to myself the moment I acquired that bit of gear. I would use it only in Hell Caves and Hell Hell. It was very low end for a King's weapon, in terms of the bonuses. It came in on the lower end of the scale in bonus to hit and bonus damage. I didn't care. It was the ultimate weapon anyway, and I would achieve much with its use over time.

I honored my pledge. I never did use that sword anywhere but Hell dlvls 9-16. I would never allow myself to get so fat and lazy as to ever consider that restriction a handicap. All a warrior needed to play and to dominate was any King's weapon, high stats, a shield, any decent resist rings, and armor class sufficient to thin out the enemy hits (220 was enough, 240 was solid, over 250 was pure gravy). Fel found or bought all his own gear. I played him pure, end to end. About half his game time was spent solo, most of the other half with my guild mates of the day. I did play him a few times in public games, late in his career, but I always scanned anybody in the game, and would not play with obvious or even suspected cheaters.

Fel's gear was solid but far short of perfect. To go along with his KSOH bastard sword, I had a Champion's broad sword of Haste I bought from Wirt, that I used in Nightmare (which was not often -- only when guild mates insisted on Nightmare for whatever reason, as I was completely comfortable in Hell). And I had a plain King's bastard sword I used in Hell dlvls 1-8. I had an Awesome full plate, plain, a Godly tower shield of the Tiger (AC 58, +48 Life -- but before that I had numerous incarnations of similar shields, always looking for that slightly more perfect one), an Awesome Crown of the Mammoth (Fel never did find better), and a bunch of solid jewelry: a Jade of the Heavens ring I always wore, and a plethora of Ruby/Diamond/Sapphire pieces, always evolving, looking for better and better. I'd mix and match them depending on which two elements were in play. (It was NEVER necessary in PvM to max all your resists. You'd only come under fire from two attack types at a time, ever. It was never my privilege to find ANY Zodiac items with any prefix at all, much less Jade or Obsidian. In all my playing days, I found lots of Zods, but all plain. All of them. And I played a lot of D1. I was renowned for playing full clears: start in Hell at level 1 and kill everything that moves. For a Warrior, Hell truly was the hard part. For rogues and mages, Caves were tougher, more dangerous. Everything in Hell was slow as $#!+ and easy to maintain distance from. In the Caves, you could get surprises, and there were fast monsters like doggers that could pop out of anywhere, plus the invisible Illusion Weavers. Love those Weavers! The Warrior just ate up the caves, though. So I spent more time in Hell Hell with Felgar, relatively speaking, than I did any other char I ever played. It was a joy to do, and the full clears sprinkled in there on occasion would relieve the sameness of it all.

The Telekill move, teleporting onto targets and swiping them with Haste weapons, was coined by somebody else (from Woody's variant movement?) and never part of my playing circles. We wouldn't have used it anyway. When we wanted to play mages, we played mages. Warriors were for the pure tatical joy of the footwork. Every step had to count, and there was a fine art to the timing of it all. Not even the highest level warrior decked in the best gear could tank endlessly in Hell. The game was about frontage, how many targets you engaged at a time, what kind of cover you took from ranged attackers while the meleers closed in on you, how much space you needed to force the issue on the runners. A skilled warrior could trap a witch at any wall, and took pride in not needing to corner them. Mages were easily dispatched if you had Haste, but there was a fine art to cornering them too. A little patience and a lot of skill, you could kill the mages with any weapon, long as you had the To-Hit factor high enough. Chaos was the reward of the warrior. I played to push the limits, to stir up chaos and then to manage it. Charge into whole rooms full of witches and not stop until they all lay dead. The only monster in the entire game that Felgar never truly owned was Blackskull. I beat him many times, and he never did kill me, but it was always, ALWAYS a fight I had to respect, a battle to be taken seriously. Those who know, who remember Blackskull, who deciphered why he differed from any other boss, will understand. None of the rest compared. Not even Diablo was in his league, threat-wise.

Other than deaths incurred in pursuit of extreme exercises, like jumping into Diablo's chamber with standard light radius, or playing with highly restricted gear, Felgar only died once when I was soloing, three times in multi (twice aided by compatratiot Rogues sticking pins in my backside). I got PKed by friendly fireballs twice, but never by Chain Lightning because that skill was taboo in multiplayer games, among civilized players.

My finest moment came when I tanked Felgar against eight Blood Knights on level 14 in Hell. I let them surround me on all sides and I stood my ground and downed them all. It was a Whole Belt Fight, four reds and four golds, and astounded even the one player whom I considered more expert with the Warrior in PvM than myself (at the time, and that I knew of). I'll never forget the certainty I had that I would survive that. I was in a zone, for sure. You might think that I would concentrate on the enemy one at a time, but that wasn't the way. I picked each target with great care, as stunning them would take them out of the fight long enough to get a swing or two in at other targets before that one could swing again. It was a round-robin exercise, and I prevailed by reducing my frontage by way of keeping as many stunned at once as possible. It was just a beautiful piece of execution, inspired in the moment by a refusal to get chased out of there when even my most-skilled guild comrades were turning tail. These were guys that had no fear, but they knew their limits, and I knew mine. I passed those limits that time, and having done so once, I was never tempted to try that again. And yes, even back then I had a stubborn streak and would go into "These chits are going DOWN" mode -- Skandranon calls it my "Hell or High Water" mode, while my friend Cyrene just sighs and shakes his head. :)

The warrior was never free of danger, but the danger was always manageable with skill and preparation. That's what made him exciting to play, knowing the risks that were incurred and defying death anyway.

Diablo 2 just isn't the same game. It's got a dreadful anti-melee bias to it. Defense was useless to most characters in D2, and even those who specialized in defense-boosting skills got mostly ripped off, as players could just PUT ON A SHIELD and do better in protecting themselves than the most godly defensive setups without a shield. It was... ridiculous. And it still is. Defense is now able to function better, but only for those who can do more than just put on good armors. You need defense boosts. Period.

I tried my hand at melee characters. They fall behind the clvl-mlvl curve in single player, though, and thus suffer artificial penalties of difficulty. That's not a deal-breaker by itself, but it's a start. Most Realms characters enjoy a number of loopholes that very few have the willingness to pass up: waypoint help, trading, muling, twinking, etc, and most of all, faster experience gains by way of farming easier parts of the game solo in large games. That was the one factor that let multiplayer chars get around the otherwise imposing clvl-mlvl penalty.

The real melee-buster, though, is the health potions. The slow-acting health potions SEEM like a cool idea, and they certainly do make the game harder, especially for melee builds. The loophole to get around this has always been leeching in combination with massive damage weapons. Players could leech back high amounts of life and mana per hit, thus reducing, even eliminating the need to drink. Unfortunately, these leech options work even better with the ranged AoE attacks like Strafe, Multishot, and Whirlwind, and with damage-boosted skills like Charge, Guided Arrow and Leap Attack. Thus even there, the melee characters suffered relative to the "mage" builds -- and that's what those WW, MS chars are: weapon mages. Those aren't fighters. They are far more akin, in terms of playing style, to the D1 sorcerer, than they are to either the Rogue or the Warrior. Sadly, the "fix" to reign in the madness of leeching with the highest end mass attack forms has only penalized the true melee build even further. Despite Max Schaefer's claims of success, and of feedback and the free market vindicating his game, the truth is that there are plenty of aspects of Diablo II that have been implemented UNsuccessfully, to various degrees, wherein the options make no sense at all relative to one another, and changes made to fix certain options have had dire impact via side effects on other parts of the game. The slow-acting health potions are one such fix: they take away the blanket of near-complete safety from ranged uberbuilds, but they totally unbalance melee play. You can't stand and tank through even the most modest engagements in Nightmare mode once you fall even a little bit behind the mlvl curve, because you're taking too many hits, it overwhelms the healing rate and you have to back off. This is not "hard", it is just tedious.

The Expansion pack moved back in the right direction. In Hell especially, you get a full rejuv potion from every champ, and two from each boss, plus more gems to cube more if you need them, and now even the chance to cube minor rejuvs into full ones. Since the rejuvenation potions DO work instantly, you can actually play proper melee with those on hand, D1 style. Is that enough to let melee players play freely? I don't know. Maybe. Still, it's a whole lot of tedium to have to cube more and more rejuv potions. Why not just let us buy them? In fact, why not just let them work instantly once again? I'd gladly trade even harder monsters for that benefit. I don't care about realism. Diablo 1 was more fun that D2 in terms of melee because the potions put the control into your hands without a lot of tedium. In D2, you could get around that with the leech loophole, and you still can in D2X most of the time, you just need more/better items to do it. It's all a big mess.

Felgar was fun in D1 because he was a well-balanced mix of strong offense, strong defense, pure melee, and just enough risk to make it lively moment to moment to moment. I looked over all my options in D2 and never did find one that suited, never found a build that could reflect the STYLE of the D1 Warrior at his best.

Until now.

The paladin looked like the best chance, but no. He's all about auras and juiced up combat skills. He's built for melee, but it's definitely NOT the kind of melee I enjoyed in D1. The amazon and necro melee options are just more mage options, frankly. In the expansion, both the druid and assassin have possibilities, but again, both are fighter-mages, and they just won't play like the D1 Warrior.

The barbarian was always the only hope. Master of close quarters combat, they say: then they built into him the most powerful ranged attack skills, Leap Attack and Whirlwind. He's a walking Telekill, and that was never quite good enough. Bash, Stun, Berserk, Double Swing, Frenzy... all of those have features that depart from the way it was in D1. That leaves just one skill, one option that MIGHT play like the Felgar of old, and until now it has been broken, unworkable, because you couldn't drink potions while using it.

Concentrate. Concentrate boosts attack rating and defense rating, and now it also boosts damage. The most vital part of this skill is that you cannot be interrupted: can't be forced into the blocking animation, can't be stunned, can't be knocked around, can't be interrupted at all, except by death. If anything can provide the balanced mix of offensive and defensive strength, using true melee that feels like D1, it will be this skill.

Felgar always used a sword, and so he shall again. I did what was necessary to ensure he had sufficient defense before pressing ahead, and so I shall again (unless I grow so completely bored in the process that I give it up). Felgar teamed often with Rogues, and so he shall again. I'll pick an interesting Rogue in act one and carry her along the whole way. I'll put a few points into cries, max Concentrate, put one point into Leap Attack, some into Sword Mastery, some into Natural Resistance, and the rest into Shout and Iron Skin. I may or may not get find potion/item, but not planning on it for starters. If rejuvs are too scarce in nightmare, and I find myself needing them just to get by, then I'll go for the potion-finding. Time will tell.

I just hope it will be more entertaining than frustrating. Now that Concentrate has been fixed up, and weapon users are all whining on the Realms about the sorceress, perhaps now is the best time to make a run at playing a true Warrior in D2. Wish me luck.

- Sirian

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