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.

This goes along with this story in the event that you haven’t read it, to alleviate confusion.

After I had met this boyfriend in person, he divulged to me that he was (obviously illegally) obtaining opioids from the brother of a friend of his. This was not something that I had suspected while spending time in person, and I don’t think I would have suspected a thing at all had he not casually told me about it. He must have very been good at hiding, and balancing, what was clearly an addiction, as he was almost completely cavalier about divulging this information to me. Because he actually named the friend, I was able to find her by looking through who he had friended on social media — at the time, this was MySpace. I reached out to her and told her that I had some information about her brother that I thought she should know, and I gave her that information. She confirmed that I had contacted the right person and that the person with the prescription for opioids was indeed her brother. There came up the concern that he was being… for lack of a better way to put it, taken advantage of by who was at the time my boyfriend in vulnerable states, or in a vulnerable state. She thanked me for reaching out to her to tell her this — she’d honestly had no idea that this was even occurring — and told me that she, and his family, would work harder to ensure that he was not put in circumstances where this would happen. I told her that I felt bad that this was even happening and had reached out to her for that reason. And needless to say, this was the end of that relationship.

When he found out that would no longer be able to obtain the opioids that he had freely and regularly been obtaining up until that point, he got mad. And after he got mad, he tried to convince people that I had lied and made all of this up. His friend then pointed out that I knew about her brother (who was not mentioned on her MySpace) and knew what medication he had been prescribed, and she questioned how I would correctly have been able to put all of that together if I were not telling the truth. I would literally have had to guess that she had a brother, that he had a chronic disease that required the use of opioids to decrease pain, and that he was the one who had been supplying the person who, at the time, had been my boyfriend with them. Some time in the immediate aftermath of this, she ended her friendship with who had become my ex-boyfriend over what he had done and how he had responded to it when his access to this drug was cut off.

She also confirmed that his mother had left the state around when her benefits were being investigated.

If I weren’t staunchly opposed to all of J.K. Rowling’s works by now due to her transantagonism, I would definitely say that Hufflepuff might be my second house. In two circumstances I did what was right because it needed to be done, even though it was hard for me to do, and because the circumstances were both far cries from “splitting hairs” on. These were very clear cases of agencies, or people, being taken advantage of.