An
add-on pack for the original
Diablo, by
Blizzard. It added several new
elements to the game, not all of which i totally liked. The Hellfire pack unbalanced the game
slightly, and it did not solve many of the issues that made
Diablo 1 a lacking game (besides the
rampant multiplayer Battle.net cheating).
First it added new
character classes. The only "normal" add-on
class was the
monk. He was good without a
weapon, and
excellent with a
staff. The object of this character i was never sure of, but it was fun from the
perspective that i had played the game many times before, and could use the
change. His power was
Search, which found items that one would have normally
missed. This drawback of the Diablo item system was fixed in
Diablo 2, by making all items of interest available and easy to click on with the
ALT key.
Two other
characters were
included, but they had to be
unlocked. By placing a text file, called
commands.txt with a few switches in the directory with
Hellfire, it would unlock the
bard and the
barbarian. The bard was the most unbalanced, because she (it was a female
character model) could use two weapons that always hit, and had the
identify scroll spell as a
skill (meaning that it took up no
mana to use). The barbarian could use no magic, but had an insane amount of
strength. Fun if you wanted a
challenge.
There were minor
additions to the game system.
Runes (almost identical to
scrolls) were added in as an afterthought. Among spells,
apocolypse was now available as a
book; very handy for those of us who played
wizards in the original
installment.
Oils came out and had some weird permanent effects on
weapons and
armor. (Oils are replaced with "
socketed" items and gems in
D2).
All in all,
Hellfire was good for the
veterans of
hell, who wanted to see a new face on their
characters, however, for the mainstream
populace (ie: those who left their rooms on the
weekends), the add-on did not provide much to what is, overall, a masterfully done
game.