This week, I have had two different Level ~90+ Median Hardcore characters -- one an Iron Spiral Barbarian (around 6K HP) and one a Lightening Sorceress (4.5K HP) (both characters with at least 76% resists across the board, both characters with max or nearly max minions, both characters with well-geared mercenaries) -- 1-shotted by Nightmare Diablo (on TSW realm).
In both cases it appears that the cause was some combination of both lag and desync. (I have a witness, who is also a very experienced D2 series player, in the case of the Sorceress.)
For example in the case of the sorceress, what the interface showed me was that she was half a screen away from Diablo, and then all of a sudden her life bulb dropped to "zero" in a half-second... AND there was no sign of the Pink Hose of Death or the Flamestrike, anywhere near her.
Yes, in both cases I DID have Town Portals thrown up in the right spots to make Diablo waste his Bone Prison on them (note : this didn't stop him from throwing SEVEN Bone Prisons against my Scorpion Blade Assassin, who managed to Blink out of all of them before the Flamestrike hit). (But a 1-second lag spike would have insta-gibbed her, too. I have a few other characters that did successfully make it past Nightmare Diablo, but any one of them could just as easily have been insta-killed in precisely the same, utterly lame manner.)
Just for fun, I tried going back to fight (now) Softcore Diablo with my (now) Softcore Barbarian. I think I died 4 times before I finally got him. If you fight him up close (melee), apart from his many thousands of hit points, he first freezes you so you can hardly move, then he Bone Prisons you, and then he Flamestrikes and 1-shots you. If you try (for example) to use Fortress, he repeatedly Flamestrikes you, so you keep moving until he Bone Prisons you, and then you try to use Blink to teleport away; but doing the weapon switch costs you a precious half-second, during which you die to the Flamestrike. You can try using Spirit Walk to teleport on top of him, but if you misclick by even 1 foot then you stay in the Bone Prison and he Flamestrikes you. (Of course, your minions and the mercenary all get vaporized in the first fire nova.)
Please do NOT tell me, "you are a Noob who doesn't know how to play the game" (I have been playing D2-variant games since the 1990s) or "you need to respec" (I don't have any Belladonna potions, and even if I did, there is no credible evidence that ANY build can consistently survive against the kinds of network-related issues that I am encountering. I am aware of the A1 character reset, but a game that makes you completely change your build just to survive a specific quest is one that is badly unbalanced for or against certain kinds of builds.)
Please do NOT tell me, "you need a better network". (I have 11 Mb / sec ADSL).
I understand that the Median developers have tried to make the game "challenging" but doing so has had the side-effect of making it completely unplayable in Hardcore (at least over the Internet, and at least past Normal mode). When you have a game where the difference between life and death is made up of half-second decisions and actions, and you are playing it over a non-deterministic network like the Internet, just by the law of averages you are going to get killed sooner or later, through no fault of your own. This makes for a VERY unsatisfying gaming experience.
Of course, I can simply play these characters in Softcore, now. However... what's the point? One can succeed at anything, if one is prepared to <yawn> get killed 870 times to complete a quest. I suppose some people find doing so, diverting. I guess I'm not one of them. I like game quests that are do-able (although they can be difficult). Median as it stands today, at least on TSW Realms, badly fails that test.
Pity, because otherwise it's a pretty good game. Too bad your poor fantasy characters get made into helpless victims of dropped TCP/IP packets.
