• Diabloii.Net is building their strategy compendium with two quality articles so far: Zenegan's Necromancer Guide and Lanth's tips for Sorceresses against Duriel.  (Hint: Blaze.)
• The Lounge forum continues with great posts.  I'd like to thank all the regs there for making it such a great place!  First up is Jherek's Sorceress guide, a work in development.  He lists equipment you should look for, how to survive during her weaker early development, and which skills are the most effective.
• Are throwing mastery Barbarians any good?  Sirian has set to find out and details his chronicle through the game with this little-used playing style.

If you see a good strategy guide somewhere on the web, let me know so I can share it with everyone here on this page.  I define a "good" guide as one which has accurate information and is more than just a skill point distribution.  Preferably one which focuses on long-term development or a specific style of play, tip, or trick - a guide written by someone who has only completed normal difficulty doesn't cover all facets of the game.

On another note, files for Guild Halls were found on the retail cds and you can check out some pictures here.  Maybe, just maybe...

• DaShiv strikes again with an superb writeup of his Bowazon's trip through Hell/Hell.  As usual, he includes his strategies and thoughts, this time on what makes a bow-wielding Amazon effective.  A very excellent read, don't skip it.
• On the lighter side, Yurup challenges anyone to come up with a more useless rare item.  I think he wins, but...
• WarLocke crunches some numbers to see HOW high a Defense Rating you can really get.  Prepare to be shocked.

• A discussion on the inconsistency with Static Field here.
• Is there a cap on the amount of blocking you can have?  Possibly.
• Want in on the Lurker Lounge forum breakdown?  Mirajj is collecting again...
• A hilarious (and kinda cheesy, but...) tactic for getting more storage space for your character by Skandranon.
• Monsters which fly over non-ground or unwalkable areas seem to be invincible, Lochnar reports.
• Holy Shield on a Paladin increases Smite damage, but by how much?
• Jarulf reveals details on inconsistencies found with enhanced Mauls that weren't reporting the correct damage.  Why don't they deal the correct damage?  It turns out that the enhancements are applied to the one-handed damage of weapons and then added to the two-handed damage, and Mauls do a one-handed damage of 1-1!  Read more in his post here, including a list of the damages of all weapons in the game.  This is serious news for mace-mastered Barbarians.
• Over on the RBD forum, Charis has developed his prototype rules for the "Amazon" variant (cough).  Kind of timely, though, right after his interview.  Read up on it and tell him what you think.
• Finally, the "ARGH!" list!  If there's some small tidbit of the game that's getting on your nerves, preventing what you think would be a perfect game, give it a post here.  If we can get a quality list of game suggestions together, perhaps we can do some good.

Some of you have noticed the new strategy pages over there to the left, which are conspicuously empty right now.  They shall remain so for some time yet, as the game is learned, examined, picked apart, dug through, bludgeoned, and compressed in order to obtain top quality strategy guides, things which are more than just mere skill point distributions.  :)  Quality strategy is on the way and will be hosted here by those authors kind enough to submit it.  Thank you for your patience.

• Paladins seem to be the hotly debated class lately, with large threads here and here about the usefulness of their skills.  Charis also then clears up some confusion on how Sacrifice works on a post here - the 8% damage to self IS based on damage done, but there's a catch if the blow kills a monster.
• Lissa explores the viability of a pierce-based Bowazon in a thread here.
• Spoilers abound in this thread about Natalya, an Act III NPC who disappears during the game without explanation.  Jarulf has found that explanation, with huge spoiler information, so read at your own peril.  :)
• Mods?  Already?  Khan reveals that the V&K team (you just can't keep them down) have been toying with mod ideas here.  Ondo has actually developed a small mod which adds exceptional base item uniques to the game - check out the details here.

But the biggest news of the day is the unveiling of Blizzard's official Diablo II strategy guide, the Chaos Sanctuary.  There is a LOT of information in there to dig through, and you can spend quite some time just seeing it all.  It's more of an information guide than a strategy guide, but it's worth a look over.

• Varaya posts details on the strange "ghosts" which appear in the lair of the Act III boss.
• DaShiv provides an excellent writeup of his Sorceress' solo run through Hell/Hell along with the tactics and skills he used (nice job, DaShiv!).
• Ashock comes up with some Imbuing strategies, although not everything is yet known about how imbuing works.  Good thread.
• Armin gets the ball rolling on some early variant concepts (oh no, not again! :-).
• What determines how fast you recover mana?  Energy or max mana?  Lissa attempts to ascertain the truth in a thread here.

Jarulf has a very useful document up for download on how experience points work.  It explains how to calculate the experience points you receive for killing a monster, and you can download two versions - regular and sorted by level.  You need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view these files.

• All the authors of hosted strategy on the Lounge (you guys make the site!)
• Omega for the Lurker Lounge logo I used for many months
• Van Damned for the site name inspiration
• All the submitters of funny screenshots for the STSI section, which has become much more popular than I ever imagined it would
• The DSF Buglist contributors
• Peter Hu for being such a great guy
• The forum regs who make the Lounge forum such a nice place for strategy discussion
• Meshuggah for lots of early HTML advice, to help me get out of when this site was uglier than dung
• Flux of Diabloii.Net for actually getting me interested in doing my own HTML
• FSGS for just now hosting this site
• Jarulf for his amazing guide which shows how thorough the DSF community is
• The Diablo 1 community of strategy sites
• Blizzard for making such addictive games
• Everyone else who has helped out just for the sake of it

Here's looking forward to another great year of strategy.  Thanks, all!

Meanwhile, the realms are going to be down again today for a long period of time.  What's being fixed is anyone's guess right now, but I'm eagerly anticipating a better lag-free environment when they open up again.  More skill tree layouts to come later today.

Update: Blizzard has come forth with some information as to the cause of the downtime.  Read it all here.

Also, all of the Battle.Net realms are down for a good long time today for a large server update.  Hopefully this will nail down the fluctuating lag problems and the game merges...*hopes*

Update: with the realms down, I had some spare time and dumped up the Barbarian skills page as well.  Enjoy!

• Pope's initial Paladin guide starts an enormous discussion on the skills of the class and which are superior - as usual, DSF'ers never agree! :)
• A small discussion on the current massive lag in realm games yields a response from Peter Hu on why the lag exists.  I never thought of it.  *slaps forehead*
• Is the Sorceress too weak?  Perhaps we've been playing her the wrong way, suggests Gillias in part of a thread here.  He had 13 skill points unallocated in Act IV normal difficulty and was doing fine!
• Are classic variants, such as the Beyond Naked Mage, possible in Diablo II?
• A strategy many players aren't trying - being versatile by spreading out skills.  Charis reports his findings on characters developed this way.
• And finally - the MEGA THREAD, character balance.  While it may still be a little too early for it, as I don't know of anyone who has played all five characters through hell/hell, it makes for a quality thread on the strengths and weaknesses of the characters.  You can get lost in this thread, be careful.

Two good reads over at Realms Beyond Diablo include a neat trick LemmingofGlory reveals on using Find Potion as an offensive weapon, and Morgane's Diary of a Necromancer, detailing how effective Bone Spirit and Revive can be.

So, to sum up: stop posting so much, I can't keep up with all the quality strategy discussion!  Argh!  :)