I tried getting into Ironman for The Hell and The Hell 2, but neither of those mods fancied me. I'd much rather just stick to Classic and Hellfire for traditional Ironman games.

All my old partners, Plague, Baba_nim, IMoto, Carson, LordRage and Attica have moved on, so unless another Fresh Meat tournament comes along, I have no one to do 2 or 3 man games with, and solo gets old after a while, especially when a good run ends to a bad mix of enemies.

Does anyone around here play Ironman?

Hi, we are two veteran players from Gernany. We rediscovered Diablo last year and play ironman quite frequently again as a duo - usually vanilla Diablo/Hellfire with strict rules but also open to mods. Usually my partner is the versatile one playing rogue or bard while I'm playing the tank and going to ruin the game at some point (we can change roles though). If you are happy with that, we can talk.

Sounds interesting. Generally I play Sorcerer in team Ironman. I can play a decent Rogue too, but I prefer not to run Warrior unless the team personally requests it.

I play by the traditional Lock-In ruleset: No going back to previous floors, no stashing items/potions in town, no bringing in mules to hoard unid'd items, etc.

I generally like to play in sets of 4 to make it easy to continue the game at a later date, I.E clear all of Church and start at Catacombs 5, clear all of Cats and start at Caves 9, etc, but any number of floors is fine provided we have a clearing character to get us a safe portal to our next floor.

That's exactly how we envision real ironman. No going to town or upstairs, also shrines and fountains cannot be retrieved or substituted after completing and leaving the respective dungeon level. Obviously no negotiations necessary here. :-)

A sorcerer would make a nice complement, or any other class you'd like to play. No problem with 3 sorcs either if it's fun, however we always play serious and try to do our best.

Clearing character is no problem. Clearing whole sets becomes a bit too time-consuming at a certain point. Just to forewarn you, spending a few hours on one single hell level for example on nightmare is not unusual for us. ;-)

7:30 PST would be a normal starting time for us on workdays (can be later, but not earlier), and I think there is more flexibility on weekends.

I work on the weekends and volunteer on Tuesdays, so Monday and Wed-Fri are the ideal days for me to play. Would that be 7:30 AM or 7:30 PM?

Oh trust me, I'm not at all foreign to slow, extended crawls through tough floors. Baba and I could clean out tougher floors quicker if we wanted, but it was always something we weighed carefully, time spent vs resources expended based on how much of the game was left. We had one floor that took us 6 hours to clear, Hell/Hell 13, which had Dogs, Storms and Witches. Absolutely brutal.

My PC is stationed right next to my PS4 and my SNES, so I can always play something else during extended downtime periods while you guys clean house. It was not uncommon for me to just sit at a set all day and hand out Heal Others while the Warrior worked alone.

Ah sorry, I forgot to clarify, it's 7:30 AM - should be 4:30 PM in Germany then. Mondays and thursdays are best, I have about 6 hours time then, and I think my partner too (not 100% sure about this).

"just sit at a set all day and hand out Heal Others"
No no no, you gotta swing your stick like a nunchaku in order to support and gain exp (and heal at the same time). :-D

6,5 hours is our high score so far. :-)

If I don't respond fast in the next ten days or write like I'm drunk it's because I'm on a vacation and only have my smartphone with me...

Early in the game, yes. Hell, I typically sell my charged bolt staff at the start of the game to fund another ID scroll and use the Warriors Club.

After floor 8, when sets become more perilous and the Sorcerers to-hit really starts to wane, it becomes questionable. I then typically switch to tagging enemies with Fire Bolt or Telekinesis from a safe distance (preferably with a staff, I try to conserve mana for my main spells and Mana Shield), unless I have a to-hit booster or a weapon with innate elemental damage such as Immolator.

Even then, if I don't have Mana Shield by then, I'm uncomfortable putting myself in harms way unless I know our set is safe. After 20-21 I typically let the Warrior (2-man Warrior/Mage games are what I've played most) get all EXP and simply support the team with magic as needed.

The seven essential spells in my book are:

Holy Bolt
Heal Other
Telekinesis
Fire Wall
Lightning
Stone Curse
Mana Shield

Everything else is niche or can be done without, but these seven are non-negotiable, must-have spells at some point.

I should also mention (a bit of high-key bragging, sorry) that I have six Triple Crowns under my belt: Two 2-mans with Warrior/Mage, Three 3-mans with Warr/Mage/Rogue, and one 4-man with Warr/Warr/Rogue/Mage. The second Warrior had Grizzly.

Here's a clip from one of my games with Baba and iMoto, where we had an absolute disaster on Hell 12.
https://www.twitch.tv/baba_nim/video/22134094

We had really bad desync that entire game, and both Baba and iMoto accidentally went back up the stairs, which we think is what caused that bosses premature activation. It was just a really bad spot altogether, honestly.

And another with Baba and iMoto from our Warr/Warr/Mage game on Nightmare 13.
https://www.twitch.tv/baba_nim/video/37479534

We don't even know what happened there.

And another disaster with Baba and another guy:
https://www.twitch.tv/baba_nim/video/262620224

Baba and I had some very...interesting games, to say the least. All three of those games went the distance though, cleared all three difficulties.

No offense, just wanted to tease you a little. Since I already knew you from the DSF forum, I'm confident that you know how the wind blows in ironman.
Nice lag videos, looks so familiar. ;-)
I'd say we figure out how to schedule all of this? We could make a whatsapp group.

Do you guys use hamachi or tunngle or something? Have you guys had any problems with games dropping?

Baba and I used Hamachi to connect, and barring a complete blackout on someones end, it usually held up pretty good.

I'd say a decent schedule for me would be Monday and Thursday at 8:00AM to 12:00PM PST. I could always start a few minutes earlier or go an hour or two later if the game requires it, but twice a week for 4 hours a session is good for me.

I'd say I could start by June 14th.

tunngle is dead and hamachi is trash, I recommend zerotier ;)

Nah, since we use devilutionx those problems don't occur anymore, it's pretty stable.
Monday 14th, 8 PST is fine, we are looking forward to it. :-)

Alright then, I'll have to figure out how to get devilution working with my install. I'm playing on Windows 10 so I might have some issues to work out. I need to figure out how to get this game running Windowed too.

installing devilutionx is dropping diabdat.mpq into the folder ;p and it supports windowed and everything
it's very goal is to work without problems on modern operating systems so I don't expect you to run into any issues

Once I've extracted Devilution to my Diablo folder and copied the Diabdat.mpq file to the Devilution folder, how do I run it?

Nevermind, got it working. Now I just need to get Torch working with it too. That or figure out how to enable the XP/Health bars.

you can't get torch/anything to work with it, they only work with the original exe
you can enable xp/hp bars in config.ini