Diablo 2 gaming nostalgia

I think the most memorable parts of Diablo 2 are the elements that Blizzard fixed in interest of "rebalancing" and "user streamlining."
As a hardcore ladder player, I was part of a very tight-knit community on the battle.net servers.
We all knew each other, and although there was rivalry, there was a high level of cooperation with the understanding that we were all climbing the same ladder together.
You would log on, hear that epic music and immediately start scanning the open games looking for your friends and avoiding known player killers.

Image credit http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/02/21/diablo-creator-says-bringing-diablo-2-to-modern-pcs-would-be-extremely-difficult-a-ign-unfiltered

Leveling mechanics made it so that you earned more experience in a full game, so you would have a circle of friends whom you ended up spending most of your game time with.
In Diablo hardcore meant, "death is permanent:" you even had to sign a contract acknowledging this when you created a HC character.
That meant eventually getting the dreaded "Your deeds of valor will be remembered" screen and being stuck in a single angle camera view of your corpse and whatever creature or player who killed you standing above your body.

image credit https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/dealing-with-diablo-3-hardcore-death

And there were so many things that could kill you!
There was server lag, which was lethal in those days (see something running in place, immediate game hard-quit and pray that your character is alive when you log back in)
There was PK (player killers) ...who remembers a full party in Baal's throne room only to hear the dreaded "player gone hostile" warning sound and see a red dot racing across the mini-map towards you?
Immediate action: get to a town portal fast, because PKers were often hackers who could turn a level 1 character into a killing machine that could one-shot an entire party and loved targeting Baal Throne Room farms to thin out their competition on the ladder.
This is a funny video of a pk'er smashing a hardcore game while the players flee and beg for mercy. It was brutal, but you had to see the humor in it or you'd end up hating the game.

There were portal ninjas who would pull an entire map full of monsters to a town portal and laugh at the n00bs who would go through the portal and instantly die.
On hell level, the game mechanics themselves were deadly, and if you hadn't farmed out your BIS (best-in-slot) rune-word armor and weapons, you were playing on borrowed time.
But that was where the HC (hardcore) community was awesome.
When someone in the group died, the game would stop and everyone would help that player level back up, donating gear and gold.
This brings up another quirk that was fun and is not found in Diablo 3.
A sorceress could spec into "enchanting" and cast a spell which would drastically improve the DPS (damage per second) of a brand new baby character.
Then, a barbarian could spec into "battle cries" and give battlecry buffs to a new character that would drastically raise their durability and HP (hit points)
So, when everyone switched to their alts and buffed up this brand new character, you would see a level 1 running around a map one shotting everything, and with the party's help that character could be back to 50+ in half an hour.
It was the grind from there that slowed to a crawl.

That's right, there was also a secret "cow level" that one could open with the right ingredients that was a favorite place to farm experience at lower levels.
This began as a blizzard forum joke but ended up getting included in the game and soon became part of gaming legend. It can also be found in Diablo 3, along with a new hidden level "Whimsyshire."
This is an actual screenshot of the new "Whimsyshire" level. You run through slaughtering unicorns, flowers, clouds, and rainbows, that all burst into piles of gore.

image credit http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Whimsyshire

There was so much in Diablo 2 that made it an unforgettable game.
The soundtrack was amazing, and made every level of gameplay feel epic no matter how long you played.
The graphics, for a while at least, were impressive, especially in the "Lord of Destruction" expansion: probably my favorite spot in game was the peak of the Arreat Summit, where you could stand at a certain spot and watch clouds blow by beneath you and glimpse the faraway valley below as they passed.
You could kill monsters in jungles, deserts, forests, and ice caves.
Everywhere there was interesting gothic art and architecture, and the story line of the Diablo games is actually very engaging and will hopefully make its way into a screenplay.
Each class was a pleasure to play, and because once you chose talents they couldn't be changed, there was a lot of appeal to both making alts and gearing your characters up as high as you could, to get the most out of your game time.
There were special events that you won't find in Diablo 3 either.
There was "uber Tristram" where one could summon beefed up versions of all the game bosses to fight simultaneously for a chance at the coveted "hellfire torch."

The rarest event was the "Diablo Clone," an event triggered by a certain number of "Stone of Jordan" rings being vendored back to the game.
When this happened, the screen would shake in whatever part of the map you were in: if it was your server that this event was unfolding on, you would see orange text saying "Diablo walks the Earth."
If you had a character capable of soloing this hard hitting boss and his massive health pool (the favorite was the smite paladin since the smite mechanic operated on percentages) then you could run around the map trying to figure out where he had spawned, and kill him for a chance at the coveted "Annihilus charm."

There was definitely a big learning curve in Diablo 2, and unless you read your game manual and all the blogs and wikis, you needed a higher level player to take you under their wing and teach you things to protect you from your own n00bishness.
But, once you actually understood the game mechanics, and had a character that could take on the game at the highest levels, the gratification was immense.
Of course, getting killed in HC and losing maybe months of work put into building a character could be crushing: but the higher risk made the game more engaging; the adrenaline rushes were real when you escaped death by the skin of your teeth.
During my combat deployments I actually had to get friends (who barely knew anything about computers let alone gaming) to log into my Diablo 2 accounts since if you went too long without logging in, blizzard would delete your accounts.

image credit http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=6&threadid=77611

Probably one of my saddest gaming moments was replacing the old laptop I had gamed on with a desktop gaming rig, only to discover that I could not install Diablo 2 because by that time the game was too old and couldn't load in the new operating systems with their higher screen resolutions.
Then I had to switch to playing World of Warcraft which felt like betrayal because the die-hard Diablo 2 community hated the WoW players who got the best blizzard servers and developer attention.
However, WoW turned out to be just as much of a thrill ride...

Any of you recovering Diablo 2 addicts out there? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks to Archdruid Gaming and @linnyplant for prodding me to take a trip down memory lane.

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[EDIT] Just downloaded Diablo II and Lord of Destruction off of battle.net and both are fully installed and running flawlessly on Windows 10! So happy! (Hardcore servers are down I don't know if they have been discontinued or if there is a ladder reset in progress)