Killing Diablo

This should be a major and very important section, but sadly enough, it's not. Why? Because Diablo isn't anywhere near as difficult as he should be.

Diablo's Stats

Obtained myself by killing him thirty-two times in one game session so his stats would display.  (Thirty to get the stats, two more for Nightmare and Hell.)

Diablo is a bit harder with v1.07, as the AC and hp bugs are fixed, but he's still not too tough.  A mage in battle setup can pretty easily defeat Diablo just by standing and swinging with a shield, (a shield is actually faster for a mage to swing with than a non-haste/speed weapon).

The apocalypse D attacks with is nasty only if you are moving or w/o a shield, as you can almost always block it if you remain stationary. Ways to speed up his death are adding spells that will keep on giving while you are taking the brunt of his affections. Golem, firewalls under Diablo's feet, or many guardians all work nicely. You can also cast a bunch of firewalls and/or guardians in an area and then teleport over the wall or even die. Your guardians or firewalls will live on and keep hurting him, and he's too stupid to run.

But these are the finesse techniques. I used to just take him face to face and treat him like a big blood knight, IE fireball, fireball, fireball, repeat as needed.  If you lack the AC to let him get close and keep casting spells, you can leapfrog him with teleports and always have him advancing on you. It might be more difficult to hit him then however, as he has a bit of the happy feet and will prance around some in the fashion of a Goat man or a Balrog. He also has a knockback attack, so it's important that you choose your place of battle carefully, with your back to a wall and your firewall right in front of you, so he doesn't come in and knock you back and then advance a step, moving right out of the firewall. From the chart you can see that Diablo is vulnerable to lightning as well as fire, but fireballs do so much more damage that they are the way to go, even if you get a very nice background for the chain. I've killed Diablo on normal and nightmare by luring him out of his box with holy bolt, moving over to the side so I had a nice corner shot at his box, and then chaining him with fifteen or more streams going out aimed at the blood knights and advocates in his box and hitting him on the way.  Holy bolt can also be very useful for killing him on normal, as you should be able to stun lock him with it.

One other tip, if you keep a space clear in your inventory, it's not that hard to grab whatever Diablo drops. Get him almost dead, and have him in a firefield or with sufficient guardians, or else have him attacking you while your golem hits him from behind. Then cast telekinesis, so you get the TK cursor up, but don't click it on anything yet. Wait for Diablo to die while you have the TK cursor ready, and you'll have about 5 seconds to grab what he drops (if anything) while he screams and bleeds and the screen fades to black. Diablo has no special ability to drop anything better than any of the other monsters though, so don't get your hopes up too high. (He is a higher monster level than anything else in Hellfire though, so possibly there he could drop something you'd normally have to buy from Wirt.) I did this many many times in Diablo, netting maybe 20 items, and of them about 3 or 4 were magical. My best ever was a magical long battle bow, that ID'ed as platinum of giants, as I recall. Nothing worth the effort, in other words.

One little addendum here. (Thanks and apologies to Thecla from the bnet strat forum.) Make sure to beware a bug in the game.   You can not drink from your belt with the number keys (or a right click) while you have the TK cursor up.  So if you are getting hit badly enough that you need a mana refill, you should click on anything to get the TK cursor to go away, drink a potion, and then quickly recast TK.

There is another technique to go through a town portal back up to town after Diablo dies but before the game ends, and with it you could then come back down and get anything he dropped, but I honestly don't remember quite how to do it, and it didn't work as well as the TK method anyway.

Of course the simplest way is to play with some other player(s) and have one of them on any level besides 16 when you kill Diablo. Everyone on lvl 16 automatically exits from the game and is taken to the ending movie, but if you are not on lvl 16, (In town = not on lvl 16, btw) you can keep playing without interruption. And then go down to 16 to see what if anything Diablo dropped.  The others can rejoin the game after their automatic exit, if they are so inclined.

One last note on Hellfire Diablo.  He's not much tougher, but he's smarter, sort of.  Like all Hellfire monsters, he'll stay out of a fire or lightning wall if he's not immune to it.  You can use this to your advantage, by casting a few to block his advance towards yourself.  He'll get up to the edge of the wall and scoot back and forth and apoc like mad.  Put another wall behind him, so he can't go back, and then put one (or ten) more right on top of him.  He'll stop moving, since any direction brings him more damage, and won't even apoc you anymore.  This is a very useful trick for a rogue, as you can do this and then arrow him to death w/o a thought, but obviously with a mage you can go to work with fireballs and finish him off very quickly, or just keep refreshing the fire/lightning walls and watch him slowly wither.

A note on Apocalypse

Apocalypse is a very useful spell, but it can't be learned in Diablo, so must be cast from staves of scrolls. (In Hellfire it is learnable, but you can only get the books from killing Na Krul, apoc is much weakened in damage, costs ungodly mana, and doesn't work over walls, so it's not really practical there.) Its great benefit in Diablo is that is works over walls, and is a physical attack, along the lines of stone curse and holy bolt, though both of those spells are useless against certain monsters. In other words, nothing is immune or resistant to apocalypse, including your character, though as a physical attack it can be blocked. Only Diablo casts apoc.

A mage with a bountiful or otherwise charge-intensive apoc staff can clear out major portions of the toughest monsters very quickly. My only comment on it is, "Cheap, lame, and wimpy". Mages (or the occasional rogue) who used apoc staves in multi-games I played were almost always those who lacked the skills to kill the monsters for real. Killing tons of stuff over the walls w/o any danger to yourself is not much fun, not very sporting, and not really a tactic I ever saw used much by the higher level chars. Still, for pure speed, a nice charged up apoc staff left in town and retrieved quickly for some especially tough portion of the game, (perhaps item retrieval after death) can be very useful. I would say don't carry it around normally, though, as it takes the place of 6 full mana pots, and you can do a lot more damage with those pots than with even a bountiful apoc staff in almost every situation.

Tips

What to stock in belt and inventory

Blue, blue, and more blue. I usually have 1-6 blue on my belt, with a full yellow in 7 and 8, and maybe 2 or 3 more full yellow in the inventory and a few ID and infravision scrolls. Every other spot should be a full mana potion. One tip for quicker buying at the witch is to use the mouse and return keys. Point the mouse at the 150 blue potion on Adria's list, put your other hand on the return key, and alternate clicks as fast as you can. This will buy them much more quickly than "down, enter, enter". Also, for fast restocking of your belt, rather than picking potions out of the inventory and trying to click them into the small belt spots, I like to just drop 4 or 5 from inventory to the floor, close the "I" window, and then click them up, letting the auto-belt stocking function put them where I wanted them.

Equipment Switches

Possible variations in inventory include carrying a CC or KSOH in Inv for lvl's 15 and 16, (starting with Dreamflange equipped, of course) and maybe an optional jewel or two, depending on how solid your setup is. Often the biggest problem is finding obsidian items with good suffixes, so you might have a crystal/zod, ruby/zod, and cobalt/wiz to go with your emerald shield, and would be switching around depending on what sort of projectile monsters you got on each level. (Dog spit is magic, btw.) Other switching options might be an ob/wiz for a dragon/wiz, where you would use the dragon/wiz on full melee monster levels and ob/wiz for the resistance when needed.

Try to minimize the switching needed, as it slows you down, and certainly don't do so much switching that you need to return to town to get a new shield or armor for every level. Any time savings there gained by the perfect equipment would likely be offset by the time it took to ascend, change gear, then descend again. Not to mention that this would be terribly bad manners in a multi-player game.  Also, expert mages look at trips to town as failures, and hate to go before they are fully dry on blue. The goal on hell difficulty is to get to lvl 16, put a portal somewhere safe, and then fight to the death (or near death, if you consider the no-item drop deaths on lvl 16 to be a sort of cheat) there, taking the shortcut back to town where you can ID the items you have collected and restock on blues enough to finish lvl 16. Frequent trips back to id stuff become quite rare once your base items are good, as you will generally only collect full plate mail, jewelry, crowns/full helms, tower/gothic shields, and bastard/broad swords. And many of those can be ruled out once you have some of the highest quality items already in your possession, unless you are looking for stuff for other classes or other mage characters, of course.

The Overhead Map

One simple trick with this that some people don't know is that you can move it around with the arrow keys. This is most useful when you have completely or mostly finished a level, but don't remember exactly where the exit was. Rather than teleporting all over the place, you can use your left hand (or the one not on the mouse, if you are a lefty) to very quickly scroll the overhead map and pick out the stairs. Of course since you can't tell the up from the down stairs on the hell map, you'll have to at least remember where you started the level. This is also a useful technique for seeing if you have missed any corners or little interior rooms while clearing the rest of the level.

Tables

Both of these tables are taken directly from Bolty's Warrior Guide, and are known to be accurate for warriors as of v1.05. They are believed to be accurate for rogues and mages, but to my knowledge, extensive testing has not yet been done to confirm this.

Max AC needed per Character Level

The way this works is that you can certainly have more AC than this, but this is the most you will have any use for. Essentially any more than this is wasted. At this point the monsters will only be hitting you only with their automatic to/hit (around 25% of the time they swing at you, and you can certainly block a good percentage of those swings: see next table).  This setting varies slightly between monsters and difficulty levels, but this is a good general guide.

Max dexterity needed for blocking

What this table means is that you need at least this much dexterity at the listed levels to block every hit you can. You will still get hit (and not block) if the monster swings at you more quickly than you can recover from your block (see discussion of fast block about SS in the shields section). This possibility obviously increases if there are multiple monsters swinging at you at once, as you will block one and not be ready to block the others while you are recovering from the last block. Also note that it is impossible to block most of the time as a mage. You will either be walking or casting a spell, two activites that prohibit blocking.

Bugs

There were a lot of bugs in v1.0-1.5 Diablo. Diablo v1.07 fixed quite a few of them, so this section of my mage guide has shrunk quite a bit in this version.

Exploiting Spell Levels

This is generally considered a cheat, as it involves a game exploit/bug. However, since it's easy to do by accident, I will describe it here. Basically, you can cast a spell, then quickly click on another spell and cast it before your char finishes their spell-casting animation and casts the spell.  You will hear the sound and see the casting animation of the first selected spell (say chain lightning) but the 2nd spell you selected will be executed (say fireball). Besides being interesting graphically, you can get into trouble with this by trying to quickly switch from an attack spell to teleport, and end up standing in the middle of a pack, right where you had aimed that last fireball. The way the exploit comes into play is that you can cast a spell at an artificially high level. If you have lvl 15 charged bolt and lvl 4 fireball, you can initiate casting charged bolt, quickly switch to fireball, and issue forth a lvl 15 fireball, since the game is casting lvl 15 charged bolt and you are tricking it into casting fireball.  The spell cast is the spell you have most recently clicked since the spell-casting animation began.  The level the spell is cast at is determined by the level of the spell you were casting when you began the spell-casting animation.  Your character will usually shoot out two of the second spell when you do this trick or accident.

In v1.00-1.05, there was another trick you could use where you cast your skill (staff recharge with a mage) then another spell, and that spell would cast at lvl 1.  This was used to get a lvl 1 mana shield, which provided the most (33%) damage absorption or any level of mana shield.  This is still possible, but is pointless, since all levels of mana shield now provide 33% damage absorption.

Monster hit point bug

Monsters in nightmare and hell difficulties are supposed to have a 100 and 200 hp bonus. They actually have a 1.5 and 3 hp bonus.  This was "fixed" in v1.07 by simply making their hp's display correctly.  So they appear to have fewer hp's in v1.07 than in earlier versions, when they actually have the same as they always had.

Thanks

Bolty, for his excellent Warrior Strategy Guide which largely inspired this guide, and gave me a rough idea of the format I was going to use. Also for some nits and reminders on the rough draft version of this guide, and for compiling the dex and ac tables I blatantly nicked from him.

Milamber, Crazy's mage, the first lvl 50 mage I ever played with, who first showed me (back around March 1997) just how fast and efficient an expert mage could be, even when dealing with full immunes.

Chakra, for trotting out her lvl 2 gay mage Angelique as a mule one game and damn near killing me with laughter.

Khan & Varaya, for their great HF and Diablo patches that add so much to the game and got me playing the game regularly again after over 8 months off.

Bostic for prompting me to make some clarifications to the teleportation tips section.

And all the regular useful posters to the Battle.net Diablo Strategy Forum (you know who you are=) wo have made me more aware of the variety of tactics in mage play and expanded my horizons in technique. And of course brought out all the bugs, flaws, and other little wrinkles and game exploits that have colored this strategy guide.