I've got mixed feelings about the Ancestral Recall Mod. On one hand, I see that many tweaks that I have wanted to see have been implemented, along with some truly unique things, such as the ability to hire every hireling in every act of the game, but I've also got a few gripes with the mod. One of my main gripes is the difficulty modification to Ancestral Recall with the players x command, difficulty modding is no longer needed, and many times with the difficulty too high, playing turns into work instead of fun. Nobody likes to work at playing games.
On the upside, there are innumerable new things to fight, and the superunique class characters drop set items that make sense (griswold, natalya, blood raven, etc.) this makes killing these guys very rewarding, almost too rewarding, personally I've always been a fan of having unique and set items be rare, instead of being dropped by specific enemies. Granted, there should be a higher chance to get these items than there is in standard D2, but the chance shouldn't be so overwhelmingly high that they always drop.
Highs: Inventive, Hirelings Everywhere, Logical Drops, Good Skill Tweaks. Lows: Challenge added in a mod is no longer a high, since Blizzard gave the end user a tool to do it themselves, on the fly.
Be Prepared: This mod is no walk in the park. Make sure you've always got a stock of health potions, and try to invest in some vitality. Also, make sure to invest in some damage gear, without it, you'll find yourself pounding on enemies till doomsday, and probably much longer than that. If you are a n00b, resist the temptation to type 'players 8' in that little chat box, because you'll be entering a world of pain.
If you aren't afraid of a challenge visit Teknokyo and download the mod of the week!
PS: Over the past few weeks, I've realized that Diablo II still has quite a few problems that have been overlooked or ignored by Blizzard very consistently. Problems like monsters becoming unhittable, players getting randomly stuck in walls, and very poorly optimized rendering code, these things shouldn't go unfixed, so if everyone who reads this could send blizzard an E-mail, reminding them nicely that some people still play Diablo II, and would like to see the irritating infuriating problems like these fixed, perhaps Blizzard will decide to fix some of them.
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