I've been playing this game way too much lately and reading a bunch of online resources on top of it. But I haven't seen any of them mention how to reset Wirt quickly in singleplayer. which is a big deal.

Perhaps it's known but I figured out a "trick" today which made dumping excess gold into items (before moving onto a new game) a lot easier (I already bought all the elixirs and spellbooks I can use).

Steps:
1) Walk up to Wirt and save the game right in front of him for convenience.
2) Buy whatever he is selling. Doesn't matter what it is.
3.1) If you bought what you wanted - Great. You can go back to step 1 if you want (either save now and load or enter a dungeon to get him to spawn another item).
3.2) If you bought what you didn't want, reload the game after the purchase. This will refund your gold BUT Wirt will now be selling a different item - effectively you re rolled him.

I have no idea why this works but it does. This lets you have Wirt cycle different items like every 5 seconds once you get the hang of it.

It's a bit similar but different to rerolling adria through saving and loading. You can probably do something similar with griswold but I haven't experimented with him. When I want to shop Griswold I just keep remaking new games before starting a dungeon run.

Of course it's easy to reset wirt by starting a new game over and over too, but this is the only (legit) method of easily resetting him without leaving the game you're in. This is very useful since you cannot carry much gold in your inventory between games and need to spend the hundreds of thousands on something or leave it all behind before starting a new run.

Just thought to share and hope this helps someone.

Good find. Didn't know that after more than twenty years of playing.
A similar knack for multiplayer would be more appreciated though. ;-)

Hehe cool :)

I'm only playing singleplayer w. hellfire. I generally prefer to play at my own pace and there are a bunch of singleplayer only advantages / features in this game which makes for a funner experience imo.

How active is the multiplayer anyway? In both vanilla and hellfire. I remember playing on bnet like 6 years ago and it was beyond dead. And apparently flooded with all sorts of hacked and duped items which I have no interest in..

How can it be dead and flooded with hacked items at the same time?

My degree of ignorance of today's multiplayer is outstanding. I really don't know about multiplayer, because apparently it's not possible to connect to Bnet and there seems to be no reliable information about this.
What I currently do is play ironman with a friend via TCP because that is the kind of challenge we are into. I do suspect that The Hell 2 and Tchernobog (those two popular mods) have an active community on their respective servers.

that's because diablo only saves griswold's premium items and wirt's item is saved in a global variable, so even if you rerolled the item and loaded the game, it doesn't restore the old item. Same reason why people can save in front of adria and keep loading till they shop that book of firewall/manashield/whatever

Merely saving and loading doesn't reset Wirt. Nor just entering a dungeon. You have to buy the item before reloading for it to work - which was the point of the thread. It's not exactly like Adria who resets all the time.