Verdungo’s Hearty Cord is a unique mithril coil belt, and is a popular belt choice among Diablo 2 players for its resistance to physical damage and its large bonus to vitality (and thus life). ).
The stats:
Defense: 125-158
Minimum strength: 106
Level requirement: 63
+90-140% Enhanced Defense (varies)
10% faster hit recovery
+30-40 to Vitality (varies)
Replenish Health +10-13 (varies)
+100-120 to max stamina (varies)
Damage reduced by 10-15% (varies)
Minimum strength: 106
Early on, one can see that Verdungo’s Hearty Cord has a high Strength requirement. Plan ahead when using Executioner and see if you can get enough Strength bonuses from items and charms to get to a Strength of 106.
10% faster hit recovery
10% faster hit recovery isn’t much, but it’s nice to have nonetheless. Faster Hit Recovery helps your character recover from being hit by his enemies; the more you have, the faster you can recover from hits and dish out your own damage.
+30-40 to Vitality (varies)
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord offers the largest health bonus among all belts, something that makes it very useful for all characters, regardless of class or build. A perfect Executioner will grant your character an additional 40 vitality points, giving your character 160 hit points if he’s a barbarian, 120 hit points if he’s one of the other melee characters, or 80 hit points if he’s a caster. For any character, that’s a huge hit point gain!
Replenish Health +10-13 (varies)
Verdungo not only offers a huge vitality bonus, but it also offers Replenish Life… not only do you get more hit points, but you also get them back faster.
+100-120 to max stamina (varies)
This is a huge boost to stamina, but no player really looks at this because by level 63, a good player wouldn’t have any stamina issues.
Damage reduced by 10-15% (varies)
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord is one of the few items in the game that provides a % resistance to physical damage. The others are Shaftstop, String of Ears, Vampire’s Gaze, Harlequin Crest, and Stormshield.
Many players try to put on at least one item that has % physical damage resistance, for the very good reason that it reduces the damage taken from successful physical attacks, and thus enough items with % damage resistance physical, you can make your character very resistant to physical damage.
Resume:
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord is a very, very useful belt. It is often compared to String of Ears, which is another unique belt that offers the same range of physical damage resistance (10-15%). String of Ears is a more appealing option for characters who don’t want to spend as many attribute points on Strength, as it only requires a Strength of 20 to use, while Verdungo requires a whopping 106. However, if they meet the Strength, most characters would go for Verdungo’s because even though String of Ears has Life Leech, Verdungo’s huge bonus to Life is hard to resist.