Diablo 2 players have discovered a decades-old easter egg is now the single strongest way to find the rarest loot. The changes that came alongside the Reign of the Warlock expansion expanded the late-game loot hunt and opened the door for the easter egg’s one secret benefit to finally have a use.
Known as the “souls dance” or “dance of the ghosts”, the easter egg occurs when you leave four wisp enemies alive in any area and wait for them to start forming letters with their lightning beams. Each letter is a nod to various developers on the game, including lead designers David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, and Max Schaefer. Once the lightshow is over, your character will gain a 19-hour hidden buff that skyrockets their magic find bonus, making it much higher than you can get from regular items.
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Basically, the absurd amount of magic you get from the easter egg substantially increases your odds at seeing powerful items drop. The new latent sunder charms, for example, have a 1 in 1,295 chance to drop with zero magic find and a 1 in 387 chance to drop with the roughly 4,200 magic find buff you get from the easter egg, according to Pavke.
All the strategies players have been using for the last 25 years are now easier and faster to do than ever before because you don’t have to fill your inventory up with magic find items. While you’re searching for heralds in a terrorized act, you can use the buff to kill bosses and watch as some of the rarest items in the game pile up on the floor. And the easter egg, as YouTuber MacroBioBoi shows in his recent video, isn’t that hard to pull off.
Hats off to the original Diablo 2 developers though, because they must’ve predicted that players might actually exploit something like this and gave magic find severe diminishing returns, preventing this new strategy from trivializing the game decades later. Some might argue it’s still a little egregious, but we’ll just have to wait and see if Blizzard agrees enough to nerf it. It’s left the warlock class untouched—despite players finding some nearly game-breaking builds—so I don’t expect it to squash the easter egg anytime soon.
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