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yeah I had a burizazon in the 1.09/1.10 days and it was pretty good but obviously slow as poo poo. only ever got a windforce through botting but it was the best option for bowazons as far as I remember
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May 5, 2021 08:08
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As I understand it once the ladder only runewords came out faith became king poo poo for bowazons.
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May 5, 2021 09:32
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The Lord Bude posted:As I understand it once the ladder only runewords came out faith became king poo poo for bowazons. why would you make a Faith runeword for your amazon instead of making it for your army necro's mercenary?!?!?!? (when were merc equip slots added? LoD?)
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May 6, 2021 05:42
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WITCHCRAFT posted:why would you make a Faith runeword for your amazon instead of making it for your army necro's mercenary?!?!?!? Yes, in LoD, though faith was added in 1.11 And to answer your question, I don't see why it has to be one of the other? Faith would be excellent in either use case although I suppose you'd have to do the math on whether a faith merc is better than a desert merc with might aura and a pride polearm. But since you're only using one character at a time I don't see why you cant just move them around between whatever character you're currently using. That being said I have no desire to ever play an army necro.
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May 6, 2021 06:20
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yeah summon necros have always been really boring to me. they're a little bit more exciting with the addition of blood warp but not by much
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May 6, 2021 07:00
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got plugy finally and started a windy druid, as i've never druided before. completely hilarious in nightmare
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May 7, 2021 02:15
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Hilarious in a good way or hilarious in a bad way?
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May 7, 2021 02:31
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The Lord Bude posted:Hilarious in a good way or hilarious in a bad way? Hilarious as in everything that comes near me dies. Hurricane is silly. Tornado is sort of infuriating sometimes though. I actually died like 10 minutes after posting that, in a doorway in countess tower with a room that had 2 separate archer groups with curses. But now I've just found a 4 socket crystal sword in The Pit for Spirit, so this is about to get even dumber. I assume it'll be fairly easy until I start hitting physical+cold immunes in hell.
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May 7, 2021 04:03
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I've never understood why Armageddon has to be so disappointing when compared to Hurricane. Although it deals more damage, it requires positioning and has a much worse radius. And isn't fire immune the most common immunity on Hell?
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May 7, 2021 07:06
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i think it is yeah. and the weird distribution of the meteors makes it suck pretty hard as an actually useful damage dealer. my friend played a fire druid in season 1 of pd2 and just cast molten Boulder all the time, it worked pretty well
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May 7, 2021 07:09
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Armageddon is caught in this awkward position where it's too unreliable to be a primary skill, but requires too much recasting and investment to be a passive damage aura.
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May 7, 2021 07:13
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I liked how auras worked in D3, where they had a passive and a usable effect. Something that these two skills could benefit from in, say, a remake. Shame that remake'll be made by Blizzard, and I'm not feeding them anymore of my money.
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May 7, 2021 07:16
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oh god please not in this thread
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May 7, 2021 07:17
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My point still stands - I like that they gave passive skills an active as well, and some skills in Diablo 2 could certainly be made like that. E: The Paladin is my favourite class in D2 because of its animations and looks, but it's not exactly the most engaging when two thirds of its skills are completely passive.
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May 7, 2021 07:22
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This is kind of getting broad but I actually disliked the way Blizzard moved into a combat model where things have to be active and triggered/intelligently pressed all the time. My favorite build in D2 was a Defiant Paladin and my favorite spec in WoW was the Prot Paladin specifically because you just crunched the math and it did all the work for you. When they moved to later WoW expansions and Diablo 3 where you're supposed to have a "rotation", and not even a rote one, but something that requires you keep an eye on timers and triggered effects and chained combos, from a design perspective I understood why they thought that was better for player interactivity, but it wasn't really my speed. Anyway, to bring this back to D2, one of the things they did do to make auras less of a purely passive effect was giving Holy Fire and Holy Freeze a direct-damage component, similar to what Holy Shock did. It's my understanding that with synergies, those are even powerful enough to at least carry a character into Nightmare, with Hell being of course more of a problem with all the immunes. I look forward to doing a Holy Fire Zealot in the remaster - you get to play with your main skill very early on, which means you can coast through Normal without having to bank skills until 30+, and even after the dude gets retired you can still use him to farm chippies and low-level runes.
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May 7, 2021 07:52
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Holy Freeze uniquely dealing non-cold damage is satisfyingly abusable.
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May 7, 2021 08:23
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Was it a technical (at the time) limitation or a balance one that you can spam LF, the clearly superior skill, but plague jav you gotta sit around and play with yourself if you don't wanna waste javs and mana on lightning immunes? And if you cast valkyrie, you also can't cast plague jav either! Wow! Sorry, just burns my rear end
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May 7, 2021 16:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is kind of getting broad but I actually disliked the way Blizzard moved into a combat model where things have to be active and triggered/intelligently pressed all the time. My favorite build in D2 was a Defiant Paladin and my favorite spec in WoW was the Prot Paladin specifically because you just crunched the math and it did all the work for you. yeah i agree, i dont like the playstyle of having to hit a bunch of different buttons at appropriate times, especially in an arpg where there's already a ton of poo poo happening on the screen. i think paladin in general is in a pretty good spot
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May 7, 2021 17:03
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It possible at all to do a hybrid jav/bowzon even if it's just 20 in strafe for light/pois immunes? Assuming money was no object. I had the bright idea to try it with a hellrack and respecced for it but it's just too slow even with 2 shaels. Wasted a pul on that piece of crap. I'm still doing 27k with the plague and somehow despite taking a hit to damage LF fucks up mobs surprisingly well; I have no clue how this skill works. I kept getting hung up on gloams in the icy cellar because that's about as far in the game as I can do by myself and while it gives me something to do while my valk/merc die or sometimes kill, it feels definitely like I'm pissing in the wind. Really it's the Hell lords that give me poo poo. The poison's just too slow lasting and they're LI.
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May 12, 2021 03:32
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Milo and POTUS posted:Was it a technical (at the time) limitation or a balance one that you can spam LF, the clearly superior skill, but plague jav you gotta sit around and play with yourself if you don't wanna waste javs and mana on lightning immunes? And if you cast valkyrie, you also can't cast plague jav either! Wow! All cooldown skills sharing a cooldown is an engine limitation, but as to why plague jav has a cooldown at all in the first place...  maybe if you could spam it freely all the clouds on the screen would be laggy for computers back in the day?
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May 19, 2021 04:55
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The 29th is going to mark the 21st anniversary of this game's release. Holy poo poo where did all that time go? I wonder if Blizzard will try to release the Remake on the same day.
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Jun 7, 2021 17:33
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Jimbot posted:The 29th is going to mark the 21st anniversary of this game's release. Holy poo poo where did all that time go? Without a beta being released yet I'd imagine we won't see it then, but an announcement of some sort makes sense.
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Jun 7, 2021 17:43
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they're too busy sending C&Ds to the people who cracked and modded the alpha
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Jun 7, 2021 17:45
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So I've been reading Book II of David L Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen (which is very good, and you should read it and the first book if you haven't), and he talks about how Blizzard North almost lost the whole game when one of the servers crashed.quote:One evening in the late spring of 2000, a developer rushed to Huang's desk, panicked. One of the new hires had pulled out a drive in Blizzard North's network—the drive that contained the crucial files. Huang got hold of the drive and reinserted it, only to discover it had been fried. To make things worse, the drive had also contained the server's operating system. Has Blizzard said how they managed to get Diablo II Resurrected working? Did they recover the original source code somehow, or did they just reverse-engineer the whole thing?
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Jun 9, 2021 02:26
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Max Wilco posted:So I've been reading Book II of David L Craddock's Stay Awhile and Listen (which is very good, and you should read it and the first book if you haven't), and he talks about how Blizzard North almost lost the whole game when one of the servers crashed. Code isn't the problem. It's not having original high res assets to use, so all the art in the remaster is completely new.
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Jun 9, 2021 08:19
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Yeah exactly. Even with those issues, they still have the source code to the final build of D2 that released. They can build the remaster off that; lacking the earlier development builds isn't really a huge problem. But as dis astranagant said, they lost the art so they can't just create easy up-res versions of the original assets.
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Jun 9, 2021 08:24
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah exactly. Even with those issues, they still have the source code to the final build of D2 that released. They can build the remaster off that; lacking the earlier development builds isn't really a huge problem. Which to be honest is probably the ideal situation here, because making them create new art has ended up with incredible results. I do hope that soon after they release this they actually release a version where they fix a lot of the major bugs (because I know the initial release they won't, due to shrieking and wailing from people). It'd be nice to, say, actually have the AR bonus from arrow skills work. And not have certain skills become useless because of NextDelay fuckery. Etc. Etc. Etc.
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Jun 11, 2021 09:11
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lol nothing will change
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Jun 11, 2021 21:41
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I am willing to buy d2:r for the simple fact that 4:3 aspect, 800x600 res gives me a drat headache on a 16:9 screen after playing for any reasonable amount of time. If they were even capable of modding the aspect of the base game to be non-stretched 16:9 I'd buy that by itself. I guess I'll have to take a decently faithful 3d render.
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Jun 12, 2021 03:10
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Kazvall posted:I am willing to buy d2:r for the simple fact that 4:3 aspect, 800x600 res gives me a drat headache on a 16:9 screen after playing for any reasonable amount of time. If they were even capable of modding the aspect of the base game to be non-stretched 16:9 I'd buy that by itself. I guess I'll have to take a decently faithful 3d render. Isn't there also a fan-made mod/patch that lets you play Diablo 2 in HD? (From a quick search, I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZKVVAtDHo) Regardless, I might do the same thing, because on top of the visual changes, it seems like there's some nice QoL changes, the biggest stand-out to me is a larger storage chest. Plus, the remaster I assume ties in with modern Battle.Net, as opposed to the original, which (from what I was told) uses a different system/login. dis astranagant posted:Code isn't the problem. It's not having original high res assets to use, so all the art in the remaster is completely new. I see. The book made it sound like maybe the source-code was sort of 'lost', so I thought it was a matter of getting the game running properly on modern OSs (which in retrospect, was pretty dumb of me, considering I tried playing it yesterday, and it ran fine, and I'm using Windows 10  ) Thought maybe it was going to be like Diablo 1, where someone would have to reverse-engineer the code.Honestly, I don't particularly care for the new visuals. I don't think they look bad, mind you. Looking at the comparison images on the D2: Respawned site, the updated visuals look sort of bland or murky, maybe because of the lighting. The originals graphics have a bit more definition to them, but then that's probably because it's sprite art versus 3D render. The enemies also sort of blend into the background, instead of popping out, maybe because of the overall color palette. The lack of interpolation in the original's animations also added to the creepy vibe. Again, it doesn't look bad, and knowing the original art assets were lost, it makes sense they couldn't get it to look 1:1. It seems like they replicated things pretty well overall. I just have some quibbles with it. From what I saw (briefly) in a stream, it looks like you can toggle between the old new visuals on the fly.
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Jun 12, 2021 17:25
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I'm sure they have tweaked a lot of stuff based on feedback from the alpha. Graphically speaking. I hate hate hated the quick turn animation.
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Jun 12, 2021 18:57
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Max Wilco posted:Isn't there also a fan-made mod/patch that lets you play Diablo 2 in HD? There's a few. There's one where a guy wrote a glide .dll wrapper to render the game using a custom pipeline and it handles other resolutions. Then there's some mods/patches to the game that just enable other resolutions. Its definitely doable on modern windows, although running at a higher resolution means necessarily zooming out since the art assets are all rendered to the same resolution regardless, so you see much more of the world but everything is smaller. The new art looks so good but I am so loathe to give blizz my money at this stage :/
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Jun 13, 2021 02:08
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Zaphod42 posted:The new art looks so good but I am so loathe to give blizz my money at this stage :/ Then don't. Be strong and don't give in to them.
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Jun 13, 2021 02:46
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the killer feature is running at higher than 20whatever fps -- it's so jarring how the world renders on an lcd the anti-feature for the alpha is load screens between areas in the same act and pretty bad lit & cold effects. Zaphod42 posted:There's a few. There's one where a guy wrote a glide .dll wrapper to render the game using a custom pipeline and it handles other resolutions. Then there's some mods/patches to the game that just enable other resolutions. The widescreen mods that are good don't zoom out. 1068x600, for example, is just 800x600 but you have more horizontal view distance. It looks good scaled to 1440p, 800x600 does too if you play in a 1600x1200 window. "good" being relative because d2 had dated graphics on release 20+ years ago. Khorne fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jun 13, 2021 |
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Jun 13, 2021 04:13
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Sept 23 release, open beta for preorders. Holding preorder access for preorders is kinda lame but given how good the Alpha was, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted.
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Jun 13, 2021 20:38
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Khorne posted:The widescreen mods that are good don't zoom out. 1068x600, for example, is just 800x600 but you have more horizontal view distance. It looks good scaled to 1440p, 800x600 does too if you play in a 1600x1200 window. "good" being relative because d2 had dated graphics on release 20+ years ago. This is an issue of semantics. I thought it would be clear from context with how I explained myself, but "more horizontal view distance" == "zoomed out" I specifically said the resolution of assets remains the same, but their relative size gets smaller with higher resolution screens. I don't know how much else I can explain that dude. Also I strongly disagree, D2's assets look great even today. They have a really strong visual style. The new art is gorgeous though, if only because higher frame rate and real-time lighting.
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Jun 13, 2021 21:11
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I cant do some hd patch because the fun I have is from playing hardcore on ladder. There is no greater thrill in life than d2 hardcore. I hate the idea of systematically collecting items to hoard like a dragon. For hardcore I enjoy every moment of playing, and when I die it is like a wondrous release from material possessions. All about the journey, yo. And being top of the leaderboard, for however long.
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Jun 13, 2021 22:20
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Zaphod42 posted:I specifically said the resolution of assets remains the same, but their relative size gets smaller with higher resolution screens. I don't know how much else I can explain that dude. The HD mods with higher resolutions than that do tend to zoom out and aren't great.
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Jun 13, 2021 22:32
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I dunno on my machine if I run smaller resolutions it stretches it to fill the monitor, it only puts in black bars to fix the aspect ratio being off. So that means things get zoomed out if you use higher resolution by comparison. Lots of games work that way with windows. I mean, yeah I guess running at the lowest possible 16:9 resolution works like you're saying but that's again basically the point. You have to force it, it doesn't handle high native resolutions well. Then its less "the good mods don't zoom out" and more "it doesn't zoom out if you don't increase the resolution" which... yeah dude. That goes without saying. That's not the mod though, that's basically just ignoring half of the problem. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jun 13, 2021 |
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Jun 13, 2021 22:41
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Kazvall posted:I cant do some hd patch because the fun I have is from playing hardcore on ladder. There is no greater thrill in life than d2 hardcore. I cant imagine playing hc in an arpg especially one that can be as ruthlessly cheap as diablo, but I think I might make a character this time around just to try. I think I'm too careless to be cut out for it though, but we'll see how it goes. I wonder how long the novelty of the new version will keep the monotony of the late game grind at bay.
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Jun 14, 2021 00:16
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