Diablo (series)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Deux Hero: Blood Raven appears to be evil out of possession or corruption by evil forces. Izual betrayed heaven and humanity on his own will. Blood Raven's soul is "banished forever" while Izual is "put to rest". Moral Dissonance much?

  • Perhaps it's the same thing. Blood Raven's soul is banished--to the afterlife, just as Izual's is.
  • Or maybe Blood Raven's original soul is already completely gone and replaced by the possessing/corrupting soul is all that's there and that's what's "banished forever".

Kerrah: How can you have a "Cracked Sash"?

  • Do you see anyone doing laundry on Sanctuary?
  • why didn't the angels intervene during the dark exile or baals assault on my arreat
  • Hell. Not the difficulty, the regions. So far, we had the final areas in the first game, and Act 4 in the second that take place in a place called Hell, yet these are clearly physical areas, and not other dimensions. In the first game, it's understandable, because Diablo created them by warping the lowest levels of the labyrinth into a Physical Hell. In the second game, You enter hell through a portal, the same one Diablo took, implying that this IS the actual hell, but then where exactly is he banished when his soul-stone is destroyed? Same goes for Andariel and every single demon that was banished back into Hell.
    • The hell you see in D2 at the end may not be the home plane. It may be a bridge dimension that allows them to move to and from the world, Sanctuary. The soulstones may be what allows them to go back and forth so freely or even use it.
    • Their souls aren't sent back to the Burning Hells but to the Black Abyss which is a distinct place from the Burning Hells.
  • Baal's soul-stone. If he's really trapped in it, why does removing it from Tal Rasha allows him to completely take over his host's body?
    • All There in the Manual, literally. A full soulstone can trap a demon like Diablo or Baal by itself. A fragment can only trap a demon in the body of one human. So, basically, Baal needed the stone removed to have his movement freedom, possess Tal Rasha completely, them put the stone back to achieve full power. Diablo was able to take possession of Diablo I warrior body because he a not as much willpower as Tal Rasha.
  • Grave-robbing for fun and profit. Even the Paladin, a supposedly holy warrior, has no problem with scavenging undefiled graves, urns and catacombs in general. Were this D&D, he'd be stripped of his holy powers faster than you can say "Alignment Violation".
    • Probably an example of "cause justifies one's actions". And D&D is sometimes weird with its alignments, since being good or not is a matter of thoughts and not actions.
    • Or just a matter of differeng standards. Yes, it's against the rules in D&D, but this isn't D&D. These Paladins may simply have different rules.
  • A relatively minor one (and possibly justified in-game), but still bugs me: the Barbarian's comment on entering Tristram:

"The land here is dead and lifeless!"

Department of Redundancy Department much? Also, the fact that you can run into a "ghostly ghost" (in the patched expansion, at least).

    • The "dead and lifeless" one actually isn't that redundant - "dead" refers to land itself, and "lifeless" refers to creatures, so it's more like "the land here is crappy and there aren't many humans and animals left". That's how this troper perceives it, at least.
    • It's not lifeless if there is a massive demon horde running around.
    • The Barbarian is not the most cultured person, so goofs like this are expected.
  • Skeletons. Not only can the Necromancer raise (humanoid!) skeletons from the corpses of invertebrates like sand maggots (presumably legally different from sediment annelids of any other kind) but also the remains of insect swarms. The manual Hand Waves this, explaining that that a necromancer does not actually raise one skeleton at a time. Bone shards from many skeletons/sources are stuck together into one skeleton. This does not explain how creating skeletons from skeleton monsters results in blood, or how they form from a ghost's corpse (or why ghosts even have corpses).
    • I'm kind of surprised they would try to explain something like that, as it seems a perfect example of Gameplay and Story Segregation. Obviously, swarms and big insects wouldn't have human style skeletons, but the game would probably be a lot more annoying for necromancers who would have to go somewhere else to replace their skeletons when fighting these creatures. (Not that this doesn't prevent the game from having a lot of other issues.)
    • Diablo 3 tries to Handwave this by saying that Skeletons are not always the bones of one person, and in a pinch they can be assembled from bone chips and dust. It also assumes that since Sanctuary is such a violent place there should always be some material available wherever you are.
  • And then there's named insect swarm villains, as if a swarm of locusts had an individual identity. Sorry, Pox Blister the Destroyer, but I just can't take a villain consisting of tiny black flecks seriously, no matter how lightning enchanted it is. Especially if it's somehow able to drop a suit of armour when you kill it.
  • If you travel from act 2 to act 3 on Meshif's ship, and then teleport back to act 2 with the waypoint, somehow Meshif has already sailed back in the presumably-negligible time it took you to return. (They had a slow teleport?)
  • You know, you gotta wonder if having shelves of town portal scrolls in the jail under the monastery was a bright idea.
    • Why not? Those daemons seem to be mostly illiterate so they don't have much use from them.
    • I'm just assuming, but I do believe the first Troper was meaning that it was a daft idea to keep what are basically Instant Escape scrolls in a jail. Where, you know, prisoners are imprisoned.
  • The Waypoints in the game are ostensibly teleport-systems left behind by the Horadrim to aid in fast travel. This does not explain why the Horadrim felt the need to build a teleporter in the Absurdly Spacious Sewer underneath Lut Gholein. The one in the Palace Cellar may have a reasonable explanation, though - the Harem is just upstairs.
    • Test waypoint perhaps? (To see if the system actually works, they'd choose a nearby location.) I never actually thought of this before, it is kind of strange. (Though does make the game easier. :) )
    • Maybe the sewers were once an Elaborate Underground Base that has since been repurposed.
  • Just...*ahem*...where did that helmet come from on that Decapitated Body...?
    • Ass Shove?
      • If so, my character isn't wearing it.
    • Maybe it was used as a weapon, or said body's owner kept it in his other hand as a memento. But is it really that important?
    • If the helmet was on their head then they wouldn't have been decapitated, see?
    • Perhaps this is the body of the Nearly Headless Nick?
  • I just had a thought. Since the current Diablo series resembles the late Middle Ages/Renaissance, and the Sin War Trilogy is the prequel, does that mean that the setting of the aforementioned trilogy resembles ancient Greece/Rome?
  • In Act II Decard Cain tells you that you'll have to kill Tal-Rasha in order to destroy Baal. If that was an option why didn't the Horadrim do it?
    • That would banish Baal back into hell, and he may end up escaping sooner or later. As long as Tal Rasha holds out, they can be sure Baal isn't going anywhere. They did leave the Horadric Scroll behind with instructions on what to do should Tal Rasha lose control of him (assemble the staff, open the chamber, kill Tal Rasha), which is exactly what happened when the player came along.
  • Regarding the playable beta of Diablo III, the Skeleton King Leoric's deaths. In D3 it is said that he is killed a total of three times. First, when he became corrupted and was killed by his lieutenant. The second time, as the Skeleton King, he was killed by his son, and the third time, he appears in a bossfight in Act I of Diablo 3. But how does his appearance in Diablo 1 fit into this?
    • Leoric's first son, Aidan, is also the Warrior of Diablo 1, and subsequently the Dark Wanderer/Diablo's host in Diablo 2.
  • What's this I hear about Diablo 2 having customization? When I played Diablo 2, your customization pretty much stopped at what character you picked - your build was just "dump as much stats into Vitality as possible, only deviating so you can have enough of a different stat to wear the gear". What version of Diablo 2 had more than a few feasible builds? Because I wanna play that!
  • So yes, I wanted to play Diablo 3 like anyone else...but am I the only one who was face palming at launch? No, I don't mean because Blizzard's servers couldn't handle the load...but it's moreso at the players. Come on, given the track record of online games, especially really hyped ones, do people forget this? Diablo 3 is one of the most hyped games this year...what did you think was going to happen?
    • I don't know, that by the time the game they spent at least 60 USD on was made publicly available, they would actually be able to play it? This wouldn't be such an issue if the DRM the company was using didn't mandate you be logged onto the server to run single player mode. This is in no way the fault of the paying customers--Blizzard knew how anticipated the game was, and they shot themselves once in each foot by 1) rigging it up so you can't play the game offline at all and 2) not keeping in mind the number of copies they sold (or were expecting to sell) when they put together the server.
      • Maybe it's just me but I see it as a lack of foresight on both parts - Blizzard didn't expect it and two, players have learned nothing from Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, or how many times online-ticket services were sent down by snipers flooding it the second sales go live. I don't see why the players are all completely harmless here...maybe it's just weird becuase I can see the players being just as bad as the developers they so claim to hate.
      • The reaction was pretty much to be expected. If someone has an internet connection to bitch about the "online-only" thing, they have an internet connection to play the game. We live in the age of knee-jerk complaints and rampant gamer self-entitlement.
  • Is Diablo III really that easy on Nightmare mode? Because one common complaint I'm hearing is that the game's "too easy" or "simplified". Really? I've not played Nightmare or Hardcore at all.
    • Most of them found some way to do something like perma-stun bosses or are using the four-monk party to end up with nigh invulnerability, bitching that the game is "too easy" and are surprised that it's nerfed. And most of the simplified stuff...really, I didn't find it any more Simplified than Diablo II was. Oh, before oyu say "Why can't I arrange my stats then", one word: Vitality.

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  • Where exactly did the labyrinth come from anyways? Is Tristram on top of a giant cave or did Diablo did it out?
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