Welcome to D2 Never Dies Mod (d2nd)

A Diablo II Resurrected Mod
Theme song

The purpose of this mod is to provide sorely needed Quality of Life changes to Diablo 2 Ressurected, and providing a joyful Single Player experience for the casual gamer with only 3-6 hours of game time available during the week.

The mod has been balanced with Single Player Hardcore gaming in mind, and for the player who enjoys playing through the game, creating several characters and builds simultaneously. Most less-used skills and item types have been balanced and buffed to enable new builds and viable play styles.

In this mod you will find powerful rare items and craft even stronger items that can take you to endgame. You can also build and create your own unique items and set items once you venture further into the game and focus on specific builds.

Building an ecosystem of loot

One aspect of D2 is the idea of finding more and better loot. For SP we have drastically improved the drop chances, enough so you will find enough uniquges, but also not enough that you feel showered in loot that fills up the screen.

However, when loot comes in, loot must also come out. We have balanced the game for Hardcore play (you can still have fun with Softcore, though) and introduced higher difficulties in both Nightmare and Hell. While it is never fun to lose a character to a random death, you can also relatively quickly rebuild your character with mid-level gear.

Leveling and trying new builds

One of the best things of D2 is in our opinion to play through the game and level a new character. However, it can also be too easy and boring. We have increased Normal and Nightmare difficulties in a variety of ways to provide more loot, but also more risks. For Normal we have resistance penalties, doubled the density of monsters and tripled the spawn rate of unique monsters. For Nightmare we have increased resistance penalties and tripled unique monster spawns.

You will have to think the first time you play through, and when you have found more loot, you will gradually feel that nice feeling of blazing through monsters and quests until you hit the next difficulty tier.

Increasing build viability

Many types of builds have been made possible, so you can already now start a poison javazon, blade assassin, holy fire paladin, werebear and summoning druid, and many more builds that are now on par with the meta builds.

Enhancing items with risks

A lot of items, especially uniques, in D2 is a one and done deal. While we do not want as much variety of attributes like other mods, we also acknowledge that a large part of playing the game is to swap out items as you go. However, it is not fun to grind for months to find a better Shaftstop, so we have introduced multiple possibilities to attain better items.

You can reroll unique items by using divination orbs and essence charges.

You can forge your own uniques and set items at a cost, and with a chance of receiving penalty stats.

You can also corrupt your items with either crafting corruptions or combat corruptions, with the risk of bricking your item into a rare item.

Making room for loot and configuring the character

Charms have always been a bitter sweet addition to the game. While it is fun to find that skiller with 42 life, or the fine small charm with max damage, those finds happen relatively infrequently in Single Player. For multiplayer the rarity of those drops enhance the incentives to trade, engage and create an economy. For Single Player players not so much.

We have also all tried to do cow runs with our inventory filled and only placing new loot into the Horadric Cube. That is simply not a fun and engaging way of not using your inventory.

As a result we have removed magic charms from the game and replaced them with a single, unique, character-specific "Valor" charm. These charms can be upgraded as you go by finding "Biddings"; scrolls of magical powers that empower your character as you level up. The Valors contain a maximum of upgrades and the level requirements will also increase as you infuse new powers. This is a way to limit the OPness of lower level chars and to reflect that you add on new item-granted powers as you level your character. You can not remove powers from a Valor charm so you will have to make some tough choices moving forward in terms of what your specific build requires.

Biddings can also increase skill trees but they are rare.