The Runes Mod is ownage. No monkeys, women, or beer, and yet I love this mod with all of my heart. It adds a sense of the ironman game to Diablo II, while not making it ridiculously challenging. This mod revolves around a new set of runes, which when transmuted with an item in the horadric cube (which is now granted at the game's start) add a set bonus to that item. This allows for 'Item growth' where keeping an item and buffing it over time is rewarded. While the potential to create madly and unfairly powerful items DOES exist, it takes so much time and effort, that it has become less like cheating and much more rewarding. To help balance the rune's item modifying properties, magical and rare items are much more rare so rare they never drop, with normal items dropping much more frequently. Even normal jewelry now drops, allowing for custom rings and amulets.
The great thing about The Runes Mod is that it adds another layer of character customization to Diablo II. And in Diablo II, more customization = more fun, and with mods, more fun = mad props from me. This gameplay enhancement is so good it makes me believe that Blizzard should have included some type of system such as this to increase the reward for sticking with an item.
But the sugar doesn't end there baby. Oh no, not only does this mod bring a beautiful gameplay tweak, it comes with an installer that not only installs the mod painlessly, but also allows you to tweak all aspects of monster difficulty and rewards on the fly. Needless to say, some jokers will bump monster XP rewards to 10x just to do it, but for the people who play fair, being able to tweak this often problematic difficulty is a definite blessing.
Highs: Gameplay is ownage, adds a whole new dimension to Diablo II, oh so tweakable. Lows: A bit buggy, but what the hell, it's worth it.
Most of the new strategy in this mod revolves around the items, and their tweakability.
General: Most of the strategy in this mod involves a little common sense, because of the limit to the number of applicable affixes on an item (Limitation in Diablo II, Not the mod itself) it's impossible to take a weapon that does 1 - 4 damage and make it a super melee item, keep that in mind, if and when you find a rune that grants a percentage bonus to damage, don't blow it on a lowly weapon, save it for something better. The same goes for armor, don't waste a bunch of good runes on an armor that won't take you through the game only use what you must to get by, and save the big stuff for the end, when it really matters.
Get out there and download The Runes Mod already, it's innovative, well done, easy to use, and most importantly, fun as hell.
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