In classic Diablo 2 games, if The Cow King was killed by any member of your party (I’m almost certain it’s “any member of your party” and not by anyone in the entire level, but I could be wrong), all members of that party could not make a Secret Cow Level on that difficulty again even if they had no hand in actually killing The Cow King. However, I recently learned that this is not the case in Diablo 2: Resurrected, and you can kill The Cow King as many times as you would like — on purpose, by accident, whatever — and it does not affect your ability to make subsequent games. Now you don’t have to worry about someone who didn’t know killing him and screwing up your ability to make Secret Cow Levels on that difficulties in the future, and if someone wants to kill him (or more than one person), they are absolutely free to do so without repercussion. So far, I’ve been mining Normal and Nightmare Cow Levels on our sorceress because she can easily, effortlessly kill cows by herself on those difficulties, and I’ve gotten three Runes and two set pieces for my “troubles” so far, and that’s just with me having enough Magic Find gear on our sorceress to make it worthwhile… for the most part. I’m mainly doing it to farm runes, so any additional set pieces that I get that I don’t need will quite likely be given to my friends, people new to the game, or both of those things. Sweet!

So far I’ve gotten two runes and two set items off of soloing Normal and Nightmare Cow levels.

Sometimes new players to Diablo II: Resurrected, or even people who played classic as infants younger versions of themselves, surprise me with the tactics that they come up with. One such tactic is seen in Secret Cow Level games on Hell difficulty, where… wait for it… everyone separates up and Magic Finds on their own against hordes of strong cows meant to be taken on in groups, which has historically always been the plan…

Yeah.

About that.

For people who play sorceresses, when you run out of mana you become a sitting duck. Playing a ranged character becomes difficult when you are the only one keeping cows off of you — better hope that you don’t run out of arrows, bolts, and to a slightly lesser degree, mana (since you can still fire arrows and bolts even if you are low on mana). You would have to drastically overlevel for Hell Cows to even remotely make this worthwhile, and yet this is still a thing. So this “separate to have better Magic Find” thing really confuses me.

Bub and I have a level sixty-six sorceress outfitted with Magic Find items, but we tend to play in groups.

Admittedly, we’ve spent the most time leveling up our sorceress because sending a freezing orb across the screen is always fun, and she is also equipped with massive Magic Find-boosting equipment, increasing the likelihood that good items will drop for us on kills. This, in turn, has been used to begin to outfit other characters. Now that our sorceress has reached Hell difficulty, this means that we can use Freezing (Frozen? I always forget) Orb and Blizzard once I’ve maxed that out for us to mine Secret Cow levels for drops at varying difficulties… mostly Hell though. It’s getting to the point that we could probably actually solo Normal.