Seven Lances mod for Diablo II: Lord of Destruction

There is an ancient and powerful race, the Eternals, who waged the War of the Seven Lances. In the aftermath of this war, Hell sought to claim a relatively defenseless world. The mortals of Sanctuary now struggle against the might of the Three with artifacts from this ancient war...

Seven Lances is a rebalance on the excesses of Lord of Destruction in order to increase challenge and improve party play. This rebalance is focused in three areas: items, monsters, and characters. This mod has undergone significant revisions over it's 1 year+ lifespan and will continue to undergo more in the future. You can download the mod, chat on the forums, and learn more about the mod at Sevenlances.com .

All items have been replaced: there is no clear "uber", instead there are many viable options of different equipment, and they don't turn the game into a joke either. Decent usable stuff is easy to find (33% chance of elite!) to diminish the gap between power characters and the player who just uses the items he finds on the way. Affixes are weighted such that higher-level affixes are more likely to appear on higher-level items; no more killing Diablo and getting a +5 AR ring. The affix pool is also much cleaner, no charges or chance-cast mods cluttering up things, especially the rare pool. Most mods have a top blue-only affix, nonetheless harder-to-find rare and crafted affixes stack to become the best items. All uniques, sets, runes, and runewords have been replaced: these are meant to compete with the magics and rares without dominating them. Base items were redone to be more even with each other (useful axes, imagine that...) Overall, the best weapons are weaker to accomodate the reduction of physical resistance in hell and to increase challenge.

There are 40 some new runewords, with many more to be added in over time. Each rune has printed on it a short word: runewords are discovered by finding a combination of runes whose words makes up the meaning of the runeword's title. You have the runeword name, item types, the order, and the final rune. The remaining runes are for you to discover. The higher end rune drops have been much improved so you can experiment.

Monsters: in normal, their HP is nearly double, and from here it scales down to default LoD HPs in hell. This is partly an attempt to help trapassins, elemental druids, and the like. Doubling normal HPs means close to nothing to physical characters, but it allows me to double and more the weaker elemental skills without overpowering them early on. In hell, physical resistance averages at 25%, with some monsters having more or less than that. NM/ Hell monsters give more experience to help people stay on the clvl/mlvl curve, especially in the earlier acts that gave such poor XP compared to the Act 5 in the previous difficulty. Attack rating has been nearly cut in half to make defense meaningful.

Monsters are generally faster, smarter, and more damaging, plus a few have new elemental attacks. The huge gap in power between bosses and normal monsters was reduced. (Heck, bosses are overall less damaging) Since player offense output has been reduced in most cases, monsters last a bit longer too. Their HPs scale up higher as more players join. A highly cooperative and focused party will still be able to tear through the place, but with poor cooperation or leechers it will be difficult going. And don't complain if you can't solo players 8!

Normal monsters have had their drops improved, while act bosses have been lowered. The intent is to encourage full-clears with a boss at the end, as opposed to 3 minute boss-rushes. Teamwork and tactics is more emphasized than MF'ing.

Act 5 monsters were individually redone. The monster spawning is randomized, many new monsters were activated or moved to act 5, and a balance of elemental attacks, resistances, and melee monsters is stressed.

Skills: poor skills were improved, and powerful ones were weakened. The sorceress looks almost like the Barbarian did in the D2X-LoD transition. Other elementalists were overall improved though. (Imagine actually killing things with tornado or poison nova!) There are some new abilities on the weakest skills to make them more useful, as well as bug fixes to other skills such as the assassin's elemental claw attacks.