I believe if I remember right, I did 8 patriarchs on 1.09, then 1 on 1.10, then quit D2 somewhere around 2008 or 2009. After reinstalling the game last month having not had much else to play, I finally got another one:
Patriarch Strongjaw
Level 86
Strength 187 (238)
Dexterity 55 (100)
Vitality 258
Energy 10
HP: 1436 (2929)
Resists: 33/57/32/26
Defense: 15376 (with Merc and Shout, Concentrate boosts it more)
Skills: 20 Mace Mastery, 20 Whirlwind, 20 Battle Orders, 10 in Concentrate, 5 in Shout, 4 in Natural Resistance, 1 in various others
Gear: IK Maul (2 Shaels), IK Helm (2 PTopazs), IK Gloves, IK Belt, IK Boots, Steel Carapace, Dwarf Star, Safety Amulet (+1 Barb skills, all resist +13), Blood Ring (7% LL, +Life, 28 Poison Res), 2x 2-Shaeled Ali Babas on switch (for finishing bosses and for "hoark"ing)
Merc: Defiance - Pierre Tombale Couant, Guillame's Face, Skin of the Flayed One
My Paladin and Sorceress got to Hell first and did most of the farming for a while, but the Barb was just much tankier and got through the tougher parts of Act 5 much easier. It's really all about the enemy spawns. Just now I figured I'd see what the WSK had for me, and not only did it not have any Burning Souls, it had mostly Flayers which come in huge packs that can't really damage me due to the high base-DR from Steel Carapace and provide a huge amount of bodies to hoark (nothing good this run though besides a 5-socket Thresher, my MF has been relatively low throughout so I already have 4, 5, and 6 socket polearms, crystal swords, phase blades, etc., but no runes to make runewords with). A WW Barb is also pretty awesome for getting through the ice caves which can be extremely hard in Hell, because there usually at least 2 of the 3 types of monsters do Cold damage, which slows down the WW movement but not the attack speed, letting me hit enemies several times more. I've been doing various runs with him, focusing on the Ancient Tunnels mostly, finding decent stuff now and then (found a Tal Rasha's armor and a Stoneraven today).
On a related note, I've been watching more Youtubers and streamers that play Diablo 2 (it seems to have been getting a lot more popular lately), and they pretty much all run PlugY. While the shared stash and summed up stat listing (tells you how much MF/FCR/FHR you have total so you don't have to do math manually) are generally fine, I kinda question the not-so-complete Uber quest inclusion that lets people farm for Annihilus charms and Hellfire Torches without much effort and at a much reduced difficulty. For the sake of your own enjoyment, you can pretty much do whatever you want, but some of the Youtubers put out all sorts of videos showing off their crazy damage on builds that would never work without 10 skill charms plus Hellfire plus Infinity Polearm merc or whatever (plus they use PlugY to instantly respec infinitely, using the same character for every video). Things get a little shadier when showing off your hacked normally-ladder-only runewords with 20 optimized charms and such as though it was earned and offering that build as an example for new players (who can't use those runewords, or likely won't have that gear for months or years). I watched about 5 different "Budget Build" videos from 5 different people and all of them included ridiculously rare stuff that I haven't found yet. I mean, who really cares at this point, though I guess I just remember the integrity we tried to uphold in the SPF days, so people that are actually making money off of generally terrible advice and shadiness bugs me a bit (not all of the Youtubers/streamers are bad though).
