I have found lutris to be helpful and for the most part on a non-optimus system like a pc it works great but
this one has me asking for help. My laptop is an msi ge62 6qd apache pro with 32 gigs of ram (so you know
that shouldn't be a problem. lutris 0.5.13, lutris-ge-proton8-13 has been used along with various other
wine variants. prime render offload is not enabled but use discrete graphics is. What i get is a black screen with music in the background and a gauntlet for a cursor and yes i have dxvk and vkd3d enabled as well. Just out of curiosity i went and installed windows 10 on the old hard drive (the nvme still runs linux
tyvm) and found that the game ran fine so this is a software problem. Now i tried installing hwe stack and that did not seem to help. linux mint victoria is what is running as well.
also:
$ inxi -v
CPU: quad core Intel Core i7-6700HQ (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 2401/800/3500 MHz Kernel: 6.2.0-26-generic x86_64 Up: 3h 13m
Mem: 1944.2/31966.9 MiB (6.1%) Storage: 1.36 TiB (11.9% used) Procs: 282
Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.13

-v from that 18 month old inxi version isn't telling us much. A recent version (3.3.29 is currently available from upstream) used with -GSaz could be much more more useful to helping us help you.

ok if that's how it is anyways hope it helps:
as for a more recent inxi it's what comes with victoria as far as i know
inxi -GSaz
System:
Kernel: 6.2.0-26-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A
parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.2.0-26-generic
root=UUID=a8c73c2a-fb6b-474c-81b7-4df6fdba5578 ro quiet splash
Desktop: Cinnamon 5.8.4 tk: GTK 3.24.33 wm: muffin vt: 7
dm: LightDM 1.30.0 Distro: Linux Mint 21.2 Victoria
base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 530 vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: i915
v: kernel ports: active: eDP-1 empty: DP-1,HDMI-A-1,HDMI-A-2
bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:191b class-ID: 0300
Device-2: NVIDIA GM107M [GeForce GTX 960M] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
driver: nvidia v: 535.86.05 alternate: nvidiafb,nouveau,nvidia_drm pcie:
gen: 2 speed: 5 GT/s lanes: 16 link-max: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s
bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:139b class-ID: 0302
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.4 driver: X:
loaded: modesetting,nvidia unloaded: fbdev,nouveau,vesa gpu: i915
display-ID: :0 screens: 1
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 102 s-size: 480x270mm (18.9x10.6")
s-diag: 551mm (21.7")
Monitor-1: eDP-1-1 mapped: eDP-1 model: LG built: 2014 res: 1920x1080
hz: 60 dpi: 142 gamma: 1.2 size: 344x194mm (13.5x7.6") diag: 395mm (15.5")
ratio: 16:9 modes: 1920x1080
OpenGL: renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M/PCIe/SSE2
v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 535.86.05 direct render: Yes

Did a quick search:
Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-spec...gtx-960m.c2635

It's possible your game defaults to FL 12_0 which your card does not support, but windows driver may have a way to tell the game to use FL 11_0
WINE might have an issue with that, and it may tell the game executable that FL 12.0 is supported when in reality it is not.

Personally, I've quit the game on release because of hardware requirements, even though I was a big fan of D2 back in the day.
Nowdays I just play Grim Dawn, which is fairly close to what D2 used to be, because it's made by D2 fans.

hmm grim dawn ? i may have heard of it in the past, perhaps i shall have look at it. Yeah the hardware requirements are a bit much for a game that is using
the same old mechanics and you can even implement the old graphics by pushing the'g' button. Basically just a reskin with a few quality of life improvements.
Now how would some one implement FL 11_0 i wonder. I had a look at the startup command line like -w or -opengl but these are reportedly for the OLD diablo II
and they are old startup options. It might be an idea for me to login to my old blizzard account and quiz them about this.
In any case solving this problem might just help not only me but others so thanks for any help or suggestions. This also might be a vulkan problem
as it acts as a translation layer of sorts but that will take a bit more digging and work so to say.