Originally Posted by Caelus The Fallen

Its possbiel that he is using things that he has found with previous characters, such as runes of absorbtion. Its even possible that he has run his character ahead to get later game armour, but I dont know why he would be running around Ascalon with that - most people run ahead to skip Ascalon.
Oh, and those attribute quests mentioned earlier dont show up until the desert area of the game, so dont worry about them for quite a while.