Problem with inventory increasing mods is of course that you could stack many more of them and breaking compatibility with external stash tools.

And as for charms, they start off weak, but scale very well with levels. The grand charms at very high levels (70, 80+), could have affixes like "+1 to X skill tree" for example. All Resistances, high life rolls etc. There was even a strategy of filling your entire inventory with posion damage charms (which was apparently OP).

I am kinda neutral about them. Out of all the new things they introduced, charms are probably the one I have the least problems with. At least you had to decide if the lost inventory space was worth the benefit.

True. Initially, they were not as bad (about on par with the good uniques/sets). But in later patches once everyone and their grandma started running around in Enigma, teleporting everywhere like mad while their Act 2 merc with mana regen aura runeword killed any and all mana management is where the game really lost its spell with me.

Runewords completely broke the game. They dominated the entire metagame. From giving every character "Teleport" to other things.

Charms did more than that. There were even unique ones that gave +1 to all skills. Tons of sources of resists, meta-stats [meta-stats: like item find, etc, should NEVER be in any game!], movement speed [you could get enough charm-sourced move speed to break the game's asset loading rate and reach black edges and not go further].

A doc: [url=https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Guide:Charms_v1.10,_by_Kronos]https://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Guide:Charms_v1.10,_by_Kronos[/url]

I wish GoG could get D2!

HARD agreed and one of the main reasons Titan Quest (and Grim Dawn to a lesser extent) is my favorite game of the genre. If a Diablo-like game has a stat like magic find, I usually quit immediately because it just means "you won't find shit if you don't wear a ton of MF gear".

Having never looked up the runewords or used then, they had no effect for me. The 'in the right order, try again and again until you get something' type of thing was annoying. I'm sure without the internet or hacking the runeword csv it would have taken decades to find the full list.

Aye. (Random experimentation is also one of the things that ruined Graveyard Keeper for me, too). But they later rebalanced the assumption of using them. (And rune drop rates were one of the lowest things in the game to get some of the higher ones for certain runewords.) It was overall a bad mechanic that harmed the game.

Google "Diablo 2 Plugy" and you'll be able to keep D2 forever. And if you want to have a bit more fun, look for the Hero Editor program. If you need more details, let me know.

I ended up buying a digital copy of D2 + Exp. directly from Blizzard site so I wouldn't feel guilty about using the Plugy version. I was so paranoid, I installed it on a separate SSD with Windows 10 Pro installing only D2 Plugy, just in case something was fishy with the files lol.

Thank goodness it all worked out and now it's my most expensive game since it's the only one installed on the drive and nothing else except OS haha. The crazy things we do for nostalgia!
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If you add them to your Battle.net account by syncing your serial numbers off the cases they give you a standalone installer that runs without a CD all patched up to the latest version