After playing Torchlight II with 2 avatars so far I can say that there are more unique item drops then in Torchlight. Some of them might not be for your class though so using the shared stash is a good idea.

Torchlight 2 is $15.00 until November 27 on Torchlight2game.com and Steam.

I'd have paid 3x as much if it were DRM free.

My experience with Torchlight 2 has been... sub-par. I'm experiencing some real buyer's remorse there. My wife and II bought it solely for the multiplayer functionality, and after about 5-10 minutes of playing our games lose sync and we're suddenly playing two single-player games. The problem is so bad - even over LAN - that playing with more than one person is impossible. Forget about four players.

It's been reported in their forums ad nauseum, but the problem has yet to be successfully addressed. Until it is, I've shelved the game. I'd rather play Torchlight 1 with the Emberfiend mod.

Anyone have any luck backing up/restoring their activation without using the finite activations allowed by Runic? I've had to swap out my laptop drive several times requiring re-installs of the game. My save backups work fine but the game always defaults to demo mode forcing me to activate (yet again) even though it's only ever been installed on this notebook.

The original Torchlight (from the Runic site) allowed you to do this provided it was on the same hardware. This workaround no longer works and Runic doesn't provide an iTunes authorize/de-authorize feature.

Any thoughts?

If memory serves Runic resets the activations periodically so as long as you're not burning through them faster than Runic is resetting them you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Torchlight 2 is $10.00 on steam for the next ~44 hours. If you are waiting on a better price you may be waiting a long time.