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Diablo 2 Player Completed the Impossible Pacifist Run on Hell Difficulty

By Johnson Ge
Aug. 18, 2022 updated 06:50

The Speedrunner MacroBioBoi finally made the world’s first pacifist run in the Hell difficulty of Diablo 2 after over 50 hours and countless retries.

The Diablo series is all about killing monsters and farming equipment. However, there is an interesting category on Speedrun.com called “pacifist run.” To make a pacifist run, the players must kill the final Boss Baal without making any hostile moves. That means no attacks, no damage spells, no summons, and no mercenaries are allowed in the pacifist run. On hell difficulty, this is almost impossible to achieve, only theory suggest there’s a slight chance.

MacroBioBoi introduced several ways to damage the enemies within the pacifist rules. In his run, he chose an armor that automatically cast a Nova spell when an enemy hits the player character. And the tactic is simple: standing there and waiting for the armor effect to kill enemies. But things were not entirely going to plan.  

A screenshot of part of the pacifist rules on Speedrun.com.A screenshot of part of the pacifist rules on Speedrun.com.

A few players previously managed a pacifist run in Normal difficulty. MacroBioBoi himself is the record holder of the Paladin pacifist Normal run on Speedrun.com for 2 hours and 25mutes. But everything goes very differently in Hell, the hardest difficulty.

Lord De Seis, a unique elite enemy in the game’s main quest, became the “final boss” of MacroBioBoi’s run instead of Baal. That enemy’s spell did not count as struck, so it will not trigger the armor effects. MacroBioBoi must lure both Lord De Seis and another minion in the range of Nova. He must be cautious because if he aggros too many minions, his character won’t last long from their attacks.

And that is just a starter; Lord De Seis also has a skill called Bestow which will quickly heal it when not taking damage. After countless failed tries, MacroBioBoi found that the single hit Nova was never able to outpace the healing dealt by Bestow.

A screenshot from MacroBioBoi’s video shows one of his countless failed attempts on Lord De Seis.A screenshot from MacroBioBoi’s video shows one of his countless failed attempts on Lord De Seis.

That is one of many reasons people believed a pacifist run is only theoretically possible in Hell difficulty.

MacroBioBoi had to change the tactic. He must find another way to deal higher or constant damage to Lord De Seis. He chose the Enlightenment, an armor that has a low chance to cast Blaze, a spell that generates a path of flame when struck. If he could lure Lord De Seis into the flame, it would keep taking damages and could not heal itself for a while.

It took MacroBioBoi 8 hours to farm the equipment he needed and another 6 hours to farm the perfect “set up” of Lord De Seis. Finally, he got lucky. For some reason, Lord De Seis did not Bestow itself in the last run, and MacroBioBoi seized the chance to kill his eternal rival.

The armor that saved MacroBioBoi’s run.The armor that saved MacroBioBoi’s run.

The rest of the run was easy compared to this. Both Diablo and Baal fell in a single attempt. At that moment, the journey of 2 months of streams with both fun and suffering was finally ended.

After achieving the almost impossible goal, MacroBioBoi started a new run with another class in the game in no time. He is farming a very specific weapon in this run so that he will stand a chance against his old friend Lord De Seis soon in the future.

Source: Youtube