What is Diablo Clone (commonly abbreviated to dclone)? It is a unique monster that looks like a black version of Diablo. He is very tough, has extremely high resists, moves very fast and has an armageddon style weapon in addition to the usual. Oh, and he regens health VERY quickly. So why kill him? To get the Annihilus, a unique small charm with some very nice stats:
You can see a pic of the Annihlius charm or the Diablo Clone.
You may have noticed when playing the message "x Stones of Jordan Sold To Merchants" appears randomly. The SOJ counter is used to determine when to spawn dclone. Every 70-140 or so SOJ sells will cause a message "Diablo walks the earth". Thus the actual number of the SOJ counter is unimportant, it is the number of sells since the last time he walked. Once you get the message, DClone will appear in the place of the next superunique monster, eg Eldritch, Pindle, Bishibosh, etc for every game running on that server. He will only spawn in Hell games. The SOJs used are non-adder as ladder SOJs are actually valuable.
There are two ways to get him to spawn quicker. You can either sell a few hundred non-ladder SOJs by yourse;f, or go onto a "hot" server where lots of other people are also selling SOJs. These "hot" servers can be found from IRC, Diablo II Forums, etc. Try DCloneIRC as a starting point.
There are two servers you connect to when playing on battle.net: the realm server and the game server. Each game server has it's own SOJ counter. You will need to keep creating games until you happen to randomly land on a "hot" server.
I recommend you use a program called TCPView from sysinternals.com which allows you to monitor what connections each program on your system is making in real-time. Diablo II is called "Game.exe". Run Diablo II, create a game, then Alt+Tab to TCPView. You should see something like this:
Notice under "Remote Address" there are two connections by "Game.exe", one to the realm server and one to the game server (ignore anything that isn't "ESTABLISHED"). The realm server always ends in 6112 and the game server in 4000. In the above picture, I'm connected to game server 63.240.202.165. The last part of that address - 165 - is what is important. You will see advertisements on forums, IRC, etc that "78" is a hot server for example. This means you need to keep exiting and creating games until you end up on game server 63.240.202.78. You will then need to wait, perhaps quite a while while more SOJs are sold. Eventually the SOJ counter will reach the required limit and you'll get a dclone. Be careful though, if you create/exit games too quickly you will be temporarily banned from battle.net for about 15 minutes. Leave about 5 seconds delay between creating new games to avoid getting flagged.
Tip: Running Diablo in windowed mode allows you to watch TCPView update in real time as you make games. To do this, edit your Diablo II shortcut and add -w to the end of the command line.
