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  TABLE OF CONTENTS NORMAL                         MISCELLANY Mechanics Talk 1-Attributes Mehcanics Talk 2-Attack Rating, Defense, and Running Mechanics Talk 3-Blocking and Getting Hit Mechanics Talk 4-How gaining Life/Mana and gaining Resistances work Mechanics Talk 5-Item Affixes and Where to Find Them Mechanics Talk 6-I Can't Hold all this Bling. Mechanics Talk 7-Magicfind and /players 8 Q) Oh I've heard of this game before. Diablo II is timeless. It and its expansion, Lord of Destruction, has been a well crafted game to enjoy even today. And no, I'm not talking about Resurrected, though, if you get past how it looks it's perfectly fine on its own. Released in 2000 and its expansion coming out a year later, Diablo II is the sequel to the original Rogue-inspired action game Diablo. It became a very endearing game with its cutting-edge graphics, voiced dialogue, very deep gameplay mechanics, extremely good music, and the fact that you can do this all online with your buddies. You got to look forward to fighting hordes of demons and finding very powerful treasure as you did so, and with seven classes to play, many different skills to learn and use, three difficulties unlocked as you finish the game, and a 99 level cap, you could be playing this for a while, exponentially so if you go online and go after the most difficult challenges available. That's not to say Diablo II is without fault though: there are MANY gotchas in trying to choose how to build your character, melee sucks rear end even in Resurrected, Attack Rating and Defense are funny mechanics everyone ignores, there's several speedbumps for all characters that will blindside and stonewall unprepared players, and grinding for things you need can take a while. (This is one of the oldest games to teach you that grinding is okay and socially accepted.) Playing this game right is a fun time of slaughtering through hordes of monsters and finding lovely treasures to further slaughter hordes of monsters. Playing it wrong is an inescapable fate of leaving in disgust because it took the game a while to add in resetting your stat and skill allocations. So the main goal of this Let's Play is to take you through the process of playing this game, then playing this game again, then somehow playing this game yet again. But just playing Diablo II is something plenty of people have done in the past 20 years. No, instead, I wanna take you to different Sanctuaries, that fixes some of these faults and has me beat the game in very different ways. Q) Diablo II has mods? Yes. Many of them in fact. Some of them are very good, as well. But for the sake of this Let's Play, we'll be focusing on mods that enhance the core Diablo II experience but not completely replace it. The reason why is to hit the "I just wanna play Diablo II but better" sweetspot, which doesn't actually exist, but if I try four times to hit that target maybe I'll hit it for you. In addition, where applicable, I'll be using some other mods that are meant to be ran in tandem with either vanilla Diablo II or the overhaul mod of your choice. Such mods will also be how I get widescreen images in a game that is normally a 4:3 affair. Q) So which class are you playing? ALL OF THEM. There are many builds in Diablo II, and the mods add even more. While I can't show every single one of them, I can spread out the brand new builds enabled by mods across them all, and then showcase the many ways you can play this game depending on what mods you use. Needless to say each class will have their time in the limelight. As for when and where, I just looked up build guides and then arbitrarily assigned each class to a different mod to showcase it. All classes will beat Hell Baal. That means multiple flavors of Hell. As for any extra content our selection of mods may add, those'll be covered on the side. Most of our mods will have brand new areas at the end, but with some exceptions the mods stay out of the way of basegame, allowing us to make a perfectly normal Let's Play of Diablo II and then remember afterwards oh right, there's more to show off. Q) So you recorded days of you playing this game then and we get to watch that? Nope. Well, yes, but, let's be real: Diablo II is not a game to fill with mindless banter for many, many runs. Even with editing, the game doesn't do much that can't be conveyed with words and pictures. That's what happens when most of your story and dialogue is delivered in in-town lore. As such, to make the very concept of multi-Diablo drifting feasible, we're doing a screenshot LP. The biggest benefit to doing it this way is that I can easily weave the many characters into the same chunk of game they're all on. This should keep things at a brisk, albeit slightly chaotic, pace. Well, you'll see what I mean soon enough. Q) Cool, so you'll be going over immunities and all the different runewords and all the mod additions an- This isn't that informative of a Let's Play. Mechanics that are definitely vital to gameplay will be covered, (like Attack Rating!) but the very nuanced stuff won't be covered. (like how so many things get chances to do extra elemental damage on harder difficulties) I have played quite a fair bit of Diablo II, but not so much that I know everything about every single piece of gear and skill ever. This gets even fuzzier when I throw mods in, so if you're looking for in-depth analyses of builds and what works and what's available, you're going to find that outside the thread. Luckily databases of what gear and options are available exist for each one of our mods, so you won't be left hanging. Q) I want to play [[insert favorite thread mod here]]! Where can I get it? Every mod has, its own webzone to get it and its own install guide to install it. (Unless your name is Eastern Sun.) Follow the guide of your choosing, or just turn your mind off and let the launcher do its thing. Most launchers are very good at giving you something good enough for a modern Diablo II experience. As for adding shinier versions of PlugY and the graphics wrapper of your choice, most of these mods either include their own mods for stash and graphics, or are just not compatible with them. If I don't explain what works, read guides on the internet to see if you even can.
Thread Info -In-game dialogue will always be in italics. -  When we swap to a character, we'll use their icon.-  If we have something quick to say about a mod though, its banner will be used.-Basegame monsters are covered via a pic, their name, features about them, and an arbitrary Challenge Rating, or CR. Modded monsters are, very plentiful and I don't have easy access to their numbers, so they'll be skipped. -While I know a lot about Diablo 2 and have gotten a good idea of its mechanics, I have little info about the mods and especially about the fun newgame+ difficulty levels. As such, disclaimer, this is a semi-blind LP. I'll know enough to get through, but I don't have 4 Diablo II's worth of knowledge in my brain. -It is my hope and prayer that updates will roll out every 3-4 days. I am basing this on no concrete evidence but I do have a backlog so it should work out.  THREAD RULES-No Blizzard drama here. I am well aware of how bad of a company Blizzard has always been but I still enjoy Diablo II despite that because I'm good at seperating the art from the artist. There's threads where you can dump your grievances with Blizzard in with all the others, but not here. This is a safe spot. A, Sanctuary, if you will.  -That said feel free to take the piss out of these games. There's plenty to make fun of. Just don't drag the companies themselves into it. -Feel free to discuss other DII mods in this thread. However, don't expect me to cover them. I probably won't. I mean I'm already covering 4+ and doing 7 runs that's probably too much already. DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Dec 30, 2022 |
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Oct 2, 2022 21:45
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MAJOR MODS USED: Resurgence: https://old.reddit.com/r/Diablo2Resurgence/ Once known as Slashdiablo, this mod hails from reddit and has since gone from multiplayer only mod to fleshed-out chocolate D2 mod. It is also very old. (2013) Of note is that, in the beginning, extra content is very light, so at least for now it's pretty indistinguishable from vanilla D2. Instead, the Hell run is meant to be a better experience and also a unique experience. It'll have plenty of the things you can expect out of these mods, like extra crafting options and loot filters. Unfortunately this does make it one of the most boring until later but hey, sometimes going with what's largely familiar is a good thing. Also I appreciate the maphacks given and will be using them. Features:
Resources:
 Project Diablo 2: https://projectdiablo2.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page A mod designed to leave Diablo II's gameplay mostly intact but overhaul item and skill balance to open up many more options and give gear more ways to provide power. (For example: Enhanced Damage on EVERYTHING to multiply your weapon damage.) It also has the funny map gimmick from Path of Exile for characters that get all the way through the game and want ever more things to do, and there's a fair bit to do with Maps. Aside from that it's the same D2 flavor, and D2 but with more/enhanced options that keeps the vanilla feel is what makes this a very popular mod. Features:
Resources:  Eastern Sun:It's on this very forum. No, seriously. This is a mod maintained by goons, and if I posted this thread without doing this mod I feel like I'd be doing a massive faux pas. Anyway if you didn't read that thread, Eastern Sun adds a lot of things, from new toys to new sets to new runes to new monsters to new areas to a new 15 minute experience at the start of the game, and HUNDREDS OF NEW CUBE RECIPES. It sits close to MXL in sheer overhaul insanity, but the from-scratch item crafting you can do in that mod? Taken to 11 in ES. Why grind for your build gear when you can just make massively enchanted items using many, many dstones? Better yet, why not craft mods ON your uniques, or layer mods via the use of jewels that have rarity now, that you can also craft mods onto? Sky's the limit when it come to ES crafting. Also, all the plugins and hacks and cheats included with ES? Honestly, they're mandatory. You'll see what I mean. Features:
Resources:
 Median XL:https://www.median-xl.com/ This is too much: the mod. Ever want MORE Diablo II? This is it. More cool artifacts, more cool monsters, more cool skills, more cool things to do, more levels to attain, more post-Hell content, more challenges, more numbers, more loot, more speed, more graphics, more death. Everything you wanted and MORE. MORE MORE MORE There's a lot to keep track of but honestly it's pretty ignorable early on. The true insanity only begins when you start theorycrafting and evaluating gear. For the thread, thankfully, a lot of the extra content can be safely brushed aside since most of its real additions to challenges are within Hell difficulty. The only new maps before that are leveling quests, of which there are only two. Despite the fact that this mod will change so much about character progression that we won't be able to compare it to the other mods or even vanilla Diablo II, it can be played alongside them just fine. Features:
MINOR MODS USED: PlugY: http://plugy.free.fr/en/index.html If you play singleplayer, chances are you use this mod, or should be using this mod. PlugY isn't just the fabled "infinite stash" mod you might've heard in passing. (which is very buggy! Cap your stash pages before using!) PlugY also does a couple things to bring changes you'd only find in multiplayer into singleplayer, allowing you to do stuff like Uber Tristram, repeatable secret levels, and Ladder Runewords. Unless the mod I'm using explicitly doesn't play nice with it, (or has its own PlugY as part of the mod) I'm using it. Shared stash with more than enough space for any and all characters I use is a pretty vital thing. It also grants infinite respeccing of stats and skills where applicable, which I dunno about you, but I live in 2022 and would like to experiment without consequences please thank you. D2DX: https://github.com/bolrog/d2dx A fancy pants custom glide dll that allows Diablo II to run with them fancy pants Glide graphics and still be a nice flexible modern program for modern Windows. It's very simple to use and very effective. We can even get widescreen resolutions using this, so unless my major mod has ideas for the outdated graphics DII runs on, I'll be using this. I reall like widescreen. Widescreen is my friend. OTHER RESOURCES: Diablo II Manual: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/manuals/Diablo%20II/Diablo%20II%20-%20English.pdf The Lord of Destruction Manual: http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/Diablo%20II%20-%20Lord%20of%20Destruction.pdf Manuals for the game. While I, the let's play, will cover the contents of these manuals in said let's play, they are chock full of lore on the settings, people, and monsters you'll find in Sanctuary, so they're worth a read. The Arreat Summit: http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/ Old reliable. Official DII strategy guide. A lot of knowledge on items, monsters, and even just bits and pieces from the manual are kept here. It's the future, the site offers vague hints for character builds, and deeper dissection of the game's mechanics are posted elsewhere, (Heck, one of those sites is linked in Arreat Summit.) but it still has everything you'd need to know about vanilla DII and I still use it to quickly look up things like runewords and some of the simpler mechanics. The Amazon Basin: https://www.theamazonbasin.com/forums/ A long established site of, "Let's play Diablo II, together." It also doubles as my goto for deep looks into game mechanics. (see the wiki) It's a big deal, what with being this sort of site since the dawn of Diablo II, and a lot of the finertries of DII info, and even just the DII community, I go here to find. They also cover several other games as well. DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Dec 21, 2022 |
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Oct 2, 2022 21:45
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This space reserved in case of rapid expansion.
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Oct 2, 2022 21:46
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Oh nice, I've been thinking of playing D2 again for a while but I usually start bouncing off in either NM or early Hell when solo play starts running into some gear issues. A vanilla-ish mod review/LP sounds just like the thing to check out.
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Oct 3, 2022 13:39
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I never played modded D2, I'm interested in seeing what the mods will change about the game. Revealing the whole map is a nice start.
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Oct 3, 2022 14:10
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Great start to this LP! I played the poo poo out of D2 back in the day, though I theorycrafted a lot more than I actually played. Definitely the game of my youth. I did try a few mods, but most of what I saw was too much at once, more skills more numbers more monsters. Basically like Path of Exile ended up being, and I hate PoE  . I'll be happily following along here! Great idea for a project, best success!
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Oct 3, 2022 14:16
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Di-AB-LOOOO!
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Oct 3, 2022 14:22
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I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this. I'm not familiar with most of these mods, so that'll be interesting too (everyone back in the day knew PlugY, though I only ever used it for the Uber Tristram content; I'm kind of surprised to see there's a version for the latest patch, but at the same time I'm not, because Yohann always said each update was the final one and he was done working on it but then inevitably he'd make another anyway...). The Amazon Basin really takes me back, I used to hang out there a fair bit and you can probably find my old posts if you go searching. I used to know way too much about Diablo II (and to a lesser extent Diablo), the majority of which I've long since forgotten; I'll probably chime in if and when something jogs my memory, though who knows if any of it will actually apply to these mods. I played this game obsessively and I definitely still have all my old character files somewhere...
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Oct 4, 2022 00:49
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I read through the first update and oh god I can hear every line of dialogue with perfect clarity.
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Oct 4, 2022 07:59
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First off, thanks for the reception everyone.TitanG posted:I read through the first update and oh god I can hear every line of dialogue with perfect clarity. I actually find plenty of the voice acting to be very good, for what it is. I'm not doing the best job showcasing that but Warriv, Akara, basically all the quest-givers did narrate their lines very well. If I had to describe it in a way that makes sense, these are people reading off stories and melding their voices into the characters well. Narrators, basically.
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Oct 4, 2022 08:27
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I've only ever got all the way through Hell difficulty with the Necromancer. I am interested to see what the mods you're using do--I heard a lot about them back in the day, but never used any myself.
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Oct 4, 2022 18:26
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New update. Time to say hi to our neighbors. Also, now that I'm no longer keeping the world's worst secret, the OP has been updated with the rest of the mods. DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Oct 5, 2022 |
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Oct 5, 2022 18:30
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These are some insane mods, I'm actually really tempted to try out Eastern Sun (goon project!) or Median XL. I'm glad that you're showcasing them.
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Oct 6, 2022 14:14
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Looking forward to this! Median in particular is a hell of a mod, I last played it the better part of a decade ago but the amount it's been gussied up since then is insane. Used to be you still had the three skill trees aka vanilla D2, but each tab stuffed 2-3 (often mutually exclusive, thanks to coding wizardry) trees into one screen and the whole thing looked like a hot mess. Curious to see if the special quests that defined the game even pre-Hell are still around.
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Oct 6, 2022 14:27
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I did try Eastern Sun for a bit, but it was too maximalist for my taste. I either also gave Median a shot but didn't like it from the outset, or people in the community did play and talk about it, it is only vaguely familiar to me. The others look great, actually. I really like the idea that equipment thresholds give you bonus to skills that are not just damage! Finally, of course I loved Necromancer, so much that I wrote a full fanfiction (in German, sorry) about one and his Golem.
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Oct 6, 2022 16:52
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Simply Simon posted:I did try Eastern Sun for a bit, but it was too maximalist for my taste. I either also gave Median a shot but didn't like it from the outset, or people in the community did play and talk about it, it is only vaguely familiar to me. Yeaaah, ES and MXL are mods that are known to be gratuitous. Like, somewhere in the huge numbers and moving parts of those mods Diablo II still exists, but they really aren't D2. Trying to play them like D2 is not a great idea, which means you do have to do quite a bit of strategy guide reading and referring to play through them. I think it pays off though, those two can be quite gratuitous fun at times, just in their own way.
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Oct 6, 2022 19:54
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Yeah, I had a boatload of fun with Eastern Sun for a while, but it only reminded me of my countless hours of D2/LoD, not recreated it.
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Oct 6, 2022 20:14
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So, uh, I'm biting my tongue here. I've thought of a lot of things to go all  about, but I'm pretty sure nobody in the thread wants that. (Do you want that? As one example, I could do a reasonably deep dive on melee Sorceress builds in vanilla. I have a bit of experience playing them, and at one time had a friend who'd taken multiple of them through Hell solo.)Also a lot of my old knowledge is going to be utterly useless where these mods are concerned, anyway. I'm kind of surprised at how thoroughly even the mostly-vanilla-flavoured mods here just immediately went "let's completely rebalance the damage formulae". Back when I played D2 a lot of what I enjoyed was finding ways to make unexpected things viable within the original game, while it seems like the general approach of these mods is just "gently caress it, let's change everything". I'm not even going to say that's bad, it just puts me off them because to some extent I enjoyed the jank. (It's still so weird to me that this game has a respec function now, even though I was playing back when they added it. It just doesn't feel like Diablo II to me unless you're saving all your skill points through most of Normal because you have to be at a higher level to spend them optimally for the build you're planning.) Although, speaking of changing damage formulae, I'm really curious. Do any of these mods fix the "Lying Character Screen" (LCS)? One of the things Diablo II was kind of infamous for is how inaccurate the damage numbers on the character screen are, rendering it useless for any practical purposes. The technical explanation is something like they maintained two different damage functions, one which is used when actual damage is dealt and another which calculates the values for the character screen, and they didn't keep them consistent. So you'd get things like the property "Damage +X" being applied before enhanced damage from gear/skills in actual combat, but applied after all other calculations in the character screen, so weapons with it (okay, mostly this applied to the runeword "Grief") would look like piddly awful things on the character screen and then totally annihilate enemies. With certain skills, other skills just wouldn't incorporate it, but the game of course didn't tell you anything like this. Or, like you point out with Median XL, even in the base game many attacks' damage was non-indicative because they'd hit multiple times, or multiple enemies, interact weirdly with resistances, etc. Skill damage numbers were basically only useful for comparison within the same skill. I did not know Eastern Sun was a goon project. I knew it existed but I've never played it, and the same goes for Median XL. These kind of total-conversion mods are very technically impressive and I'm sure they do interesting things (Median in particular just has loads of new bespoke content), but I never had much interest in playing them at least in part because of how different they were. I'm looking forward to seeing what they actually have to offer.
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Oct 7, 2022 23:16
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By all means, feel free to do buildtalk. I don't have nearly as much experience with Diablo II as everyone else here, (despite me acting like I do) so I am curious for an explanation of how, for example, melee Sorc works. (I've seen it work and believe it does. You just won't catch me calling me melee because the bulk of damage the build does is not done through swinging your weapon, unless it's a single target.) There's many builds that can get through the whole of Diablo II and, I can't cover every last one since there's seven classes, many good skills, and four mods. So if other peeps want to talk about those that'd be fine by me. I don't know builds. I just know how the game works. The more pure mods leave the damage formula mostly alone, but because they will tweak damage on your end the balance will be thrown off and things will change. Like, I cannot really fathom how much of a buff melee gets in PD2 where most every weapon adds splash damage to attacks. I don't know any concrete examples because never been to Hell outside of this LP, but I wouldn't be surprised if some things don't work as well anymore. Still, these mods tend to avoid nerfs, with some exceptions like say PD2 making casting Teleport lower your spell damage for a brief moment. Also unfortunately, even in the mods with an extended character screen for showing advanced stats, you just can't get Diablo II to be honest with you about what you have and how much damage you're actually doing. Even Median XL, on my end, will show detailed weapon damage but then the stats on those pages are broken and don't update correctly. It's telling that that mod tells you to download a separate program (D2Stats) to get an accurate readout for your stats. Kinda makes me think a readout on how much damage you're doing was always an afterthought.
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Oct 8, 2022 02:57
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"Viable" is a tricky thing in D2, because more or less every skill is technically viable if you have infinite patience and a way to apply Prevent Monster Heal or Open Wounds. Unlike, say, Path of Exile or most other modern ARPGs there's no infinite endgame to hit your head against and monster damage doesn't scale into one-shot territory as long as you keep up with resistances. I remember seeing, years ago, a guy who beat Uber Tristram with a Smiter decked out in level 1 cracked gear (it ended with him dropping the charm on the ground and exiting the game ). Stuff like adding splash damage to melee attacks is an attempt to rectify the fact that even in vanilla ranged builds are clearing screens effortlessly while even the most juiced Frenzy Barb is stuck killing one enemy at a time at close range. Frenzy Barbs are good fun, but they are very bad at actually farming and most mods want to add more variety in that aspect. Also Vengeance Sorc is a real and lovely waste of resources in vanilla. One of the few builds where Andariel's Visage can be BiS due to helping you reach one last frame breakpoint with a Glorious Axe, iirc. Yes, Vengeance Sorcs use giant axes, it's part of the charm.
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Oct 8, 2022 04:06
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Big Mad Drongo posted:"Viable" is a tricky thing in D2, because more or less every skill is technically viable if you have infinite patience and a way to apply Prevent Monster Heal or Open Wounds. Unlike, say, Path of Exile or most other modern ARPGs there's no infinite endgame to hit your head against and monster damage doesn't scale into one-shot territory as long as you keep up with resistances. I remember seeing, years ago, a guy who beat Uber Tristram with a Smiter decked out in level 1 cracked gear (it ended with him dropping the charm on the ground and exiting the game Oh yeah, the only concerns of any build/character are speed of killing monsters and, can you stop them from undoing your progress? The "Prevent Monster Heal" and "Slain Monsters Rest in Peace" affixes solve that problem. In fact, a lot of things are viable and you don't need much clear speed if you set your goalpost at "just finish normal". But also, I see people spend long stretches of time trying to get the rarest loot in this game. The need for such optimization gets very real the higher you go.
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Oct 8, 2022 06:01
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I once did a proto-LP of a Melee/Poison Amazon all the way through Hell for the German forum I used to post obsessively in. You can play everything in this game, but it might just take forever. The melee skill? Impale, of course.
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Oct 8, 2022 11:09
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New update. Mortals in Sanctuary love undead. You'll find demons love undead too. Why don't we go to the graveyard, then, and have the undead shared with you?
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Oct 8, 2022 17:23
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Fun fact for anyone who might not know, Blood Raven is canonically the Rogue protagonist from the first Diablo. I'm pretty sure they stated this outright at some point (maybe in lore material connected to D3?), though for a long time they left it as just an implication.Simply Simon posted:I once did a proto-LP of a Melee/Poison Amazon all the way through Hell for the German forum I used to post obsessively in. You can play everything in this game, but it might just take forever. I remember those German forums! I never posted on them (I do not know German) but would occasionally read things there when people linked to it from the Basin. They were definitely one of the bigger proponents of the poison Amazon builds, I made a few after reading guides by one of the posters there. (I could never get Impale to work to my satisfaction, though. I usually used Jab or Lightning Fury on mine.) Right. So. Let's talk about melee Sorceresses in vanilla D2.  incoming, beware.One of the things complicating this conversation is that, as mentioned, "viable character build" means very different things to different people. What's your patience and/or frustration threshold? Are you playing alone or with a party? (Or are you playing alone and using the /players command to boost enemy stats?) How tolerant are you of survivability issues? Do you have a stockpile of good items already? The OP's comments on melee in general suggest to me they might be thinking primarily from a "self-found" or "untwinked" perspective (when the character uses no items they haven't found themself in the course of gameplay) and, in that context, melee builds in general and especially melee sorceresses are not a good idea. (In Diablo II, most melee characters are very heavily dependent on weapon damage, and the good weapons are hard to come by. The sorceress build is also very equipment dependent, but for different reasons which I'll get into.) This should absolutely not be anyone's first character. But you don't actually need the ludicrously difficult-to-make aura equipment (Dream runewords) to do it either. There are a few quirks that make the melee sorceress interesting. 1. Enchant is amazing. It pretty much single-handedly solves your Attack Rating (chance to hit) problems both for yourself and anyone around you (including your mercenary and any friends you might play with). It lasts an incredibly long time so you don't need to worry about refreshing it. It also, especially as you get up there in +skills, outputs very respectable fire damage. Even better, you can "prebuff" with a higher level, whether just from your weapon switch (e.g. Leaf or Memory runewords in a base staff with decent staffmods, it's not that hard to get +6) or keeping more +skill gear (like a +3 fire skills circlet and/or amulet) in your stash, and that boosted level will stay even after you swap to your combat gear. (For comedy value, you can even go bare-handed and punch things to death with fire, but you're much better off with a weapon.) 2. Elemental Mastery, specifically Fire and Lightning. Mastery skills apply to any melee damage you do, and there's a fun little bug that can make them apply twice and compound multiplicatively. Let's look at Enchant: when you cast Enchant, Fire Mastery applies and multiplies the damage. Then when you hit the enemy, the game goes "dealing fire damage? we have to apply fire mastery!" and multiplies it again. (This is also why the auras are so good. It's not the pulse damage, those auras also add elemental damage to your melee hits, and that melee damage gets the double application of mastery. If you do somehow manage to get a Dream runeword helm and shield, which together give you a level 30 Holy Shock aura, you will output ludicrous amounts of lightning damage each hit.) This double mastery bug does not apply to ranged attacks, although the LCS will display numbers as if it does. 3. You're not stuck using normal attacks even though the Sorceress has no melee skills: you can get access to some Paladin Combat skills via runewords. Specifically, Passion gives +1 to Zeal, and Kingslayer gives +1 to Vengeance. Vengeance is the gimmicky option, its elemental damage is unfortunately never going to be that impressive (since it's based on the weapon damage and you don't have ways to enhance that), but it does get boosted by the mastery skills and it can totally work. Zeal gets you a faster attack and helps deal with groups of enemies faster. For Vengeance you need a base with good weapon damage (see below note on 2H axes), for Zeal you want something fast (a Phase Blade is usually best). Or if you're very lucky to find a 4-socketed sceptre with the right staffmod ("+3 to Zeal (Paladin Only)"), this will actually work just fine for a Sorceress despite what it says, and making it into Passion will get you an instant level 4 Zeal. If you're doing the lightning auras, "Crescent Moon" can give you a big reduction to enemy lightning resistance, but I'm not sure that outweighs Zeal most of the time (you could swap between them though). 4. The sorceress has a surprisingly quick base attack animation with two-handed axes. This is because axes and staves use the same base animation set, and she's meant to be good with staves. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using one unless you're looking for style points, you're still usually better off with a shield and a fast one-hander (phase blade), especially if you're using Zeal. But it's a cool quirk, and you can absolutely make a Kingslayer axe and go to town with it (I think I remember Feral Axe being the best overall choice for this?). 5. You get Static Field, which lets you do massive percentage-based damage to anything not lightning immune. Pretty much every sorceress build uses this, but especially if you're wading into melee anyway there's absolutely no reason not to. Extra skill points only add range, so you can spend a single point and forget about it. (It's the classic boss killer for a reason.) 6. You get Teleport. This is a huge advantage when playing melee because it lets you do all kinds of tactical repositioning, and also gives you control over your mercenary which is very beneficial. Now, don't get me wrong, there are challenges: 1. In Hell, every enemy type has at least one inherent elemental immunity, most Unique/Super-unique enemies have at least two, and even when they aren't immune resistances are everywhere. Fire immunity is going to pose problems, and whatever backup you pick will also not work in every situation. That said, you get a few solutions more or less by default. A mercenary with a high-physical-damage weapon is effective against single enemies, especially since Enchant helps make sure he hits and you can position him with Teleport (every time you teleport him it resets his AI, which avoids the issues that sometimes make mercenaries get lost or hesitate to attack). And, of course, you have Static Field for anything not lightning-immune (you can't kill with it, but you can set up easy kills for your merc). Also, getting Enchant up and running takes roughly 60 skill points (20 in Enchant, 20 in Fire Mastery, and 20 in Warmth for synergy bonus). This leaves you with enough extra points that you can easily dump some in another element (Frozen Orb is the most common off-element backup skill for a Sorceress, I think it comes to 28 points total with the prerequisites and 1 in Cold Mastery; if you're going the aura route, you put 20 in Lightning Mastery instead). 2. No matter how hard you try, the sorceress is always going to be fragile. She has the lowest base life and benefit from vitality of any character, and you're going to need to put stat points in strength and dexterity to equip her gear. You also don't have the free skillpoints to invest in Energy Shield (nor the free statpoints to boost your mana enough for it to be good). You also can't use life or mana leech to stay alive the way physical-based melee characters do. A melee sorceress cannot wade into the centre of a pack and expect to survive, you need to use tactical positioning (and teleport) to stay on the fringes and engage enemies a few at a time. I wouldn't want to play one in Hardcore, but then I don't really like Hardcore generally. 3. In the interest of survivability, you need a decent amount of "faster hit recovery", and "faster block rate" on your shield if you use one, so you don't end up dying to stunlock and/or block-lock. Balancing the equipment for a build like this is very tricky, because of course you also want the caster modifiers like +skills for your damage, and "faster cast rate" for teleport (you'll never cast as quickly as a dedicated caster sorc but faster is better for escaping sticky situations). Attack speed boosts also really help if you can get them. I don't remember all the breakpoints for these things any more, but it's best to look them up and take them into account. Some overall thoughts: The lightning aura version is absurdly powerful, dealing potentially hundreds of thousands of damage each hit. But unless you are cheating (either using save editors or trading for duped items online), you are very unlikely to obtain the necessary materials to make Dream runewords that grant the auras. Even post 1.13, when rune drop odds were increased by something like a factor of 4, the highest runes are still absurdly rare. Feel free to cheat and try it out in single player though, I won't judge you; my past self might well have, but I'm older now and don't give a poo poo any more. A more obtainably realistic version can still be quite effective, though you need to be thoughtful about how you play. I would say the bare minimum needed to try it out is a decent switch for prebuffing Enchant (get your +6 Leaf or Memory, +4 from double Spirit, etc), a Passion phase blade (requires no rune higher than Lem, this is reasonable) with a good shield (the runewords Rhyme or Sanctuary are good starting points), and some strong equipment for your mercenary. From there, you want to focus on resistances and the various recovery/attack/cast speed breakpoints, and get +skills if you can (charms help a lot if you have them). If you don't want to melee, the other popular Enchantress variant was the Exploding Arrows one. It may or may not be a bug, but Enchant damage gets added to the splash from Exploding Arrow. If you use a weapon with the "Fires Exploding Arrows" property (Raven Claw, Kuko Shakaku, or Demon Machine), you can take advantage of this. You do less damage without the double Fire Mastery application, but the splash is good against groups, and you can even combine this with piercing shots (either from Razortail belt or, IIRC, Demon Machine itself) to generate a new explosion each time the piercing triggers. And of course fighting at a distance is safer. I easily played as many Sorceress archers as I did Amazons, it was a fun build. I'm not sure if I'm surprised to see Median going out of its way to just give the Sorceress a melee skill tree. I always thought the reason some people found it so compelling in the original game was because it was very consciously going against the grain of the game's design intent. But, on the other hand, it was a thing enough people wanted to do that Median just saying "okay then, you want it? here it is!" has a certain appeal too. I used to be way too obsessive about this drat game, you may be able to tell. I hope that was at least somewhat interesting to someone, and only minimally irritating to the extent that's possible. (OP, if you want me to put anything behind spoiler bars, let me know.)
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Oct 9, 2022 19:14
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This was a great write-up, really reminds me of spending hours theorycrafting builds on the indiablo.de forums. Really cool that you know of them! I'd link the poison Amazon playthrough, but all the image links are looong dead ;( I can give you a good summary tho: it loving sucked lol. I don't think there were any proponents beyond "you can make this if you really want to but it's going to be agony waiting for enemies to die", and most of the first page of my thread were "but...why?" variants. There's two poison spear skills: one that leaves poison clouds in a line, and one that makes a big cloud on impact. The first has super high damage...over a super long amount of time. The second, other way round. Its DPS ends up being insanely better though, so it's the skill of choice, and it's rightfully lower in the skill tree. However, because the first skill's poison lasts so insanely long (I remember something like 10 minutes maxed out), you can just poison big bosses once, then hide in a corner forever, assisted by your Decoy skill which if maxed (and it's not like you got anything better to do) has bazillions of HP. I remember kill Hell Baal while talking to my dad on the phone for about 45 minutes. On the melee side of things, I specifically chose Impale because it might be the single worst skill in D2 that is not obviously useless (like grim ward). Its claim to fame is very high physical damage. Its "balancing" factor is that it has the slowest melee attack animation in the game. It literally takes over a second for an attack to go through. You cannot ever kill a Fallen with it. Most enemies can just walk away. Special fun in the CS: getting decrepd makes the animation take about three years, then while you're s l o w l y stabbing, you get IM'd, and you got a while to contemplate your life choices as certain doom awaits you at the end of the animation. It was a lot of fun . Oh, and solo selffound, of course!
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Oct 9, 2022 19:30
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...Simon, I think I remember reading that writeup back in the day! It sounds at least somewhat familiar (and incredibly painful I admire your patience). I'm not sure, though. The closest I came to that level of tedium were my Poison Dagger Necromancer (who did complete Hell on /players8, but oh god that took forever, and I had to rebuild him to incorporate minor skeleton support after the first attempt couldn't do it), and Fist of the Heavens Paladin (it is not fun when your primary attack is single target and has a ~2 second cooldown between shots). I mostly didn't do self-found after my first couple of characters started amassing a huge stockpile, I liked seeing what I could do with the things I'd found. The one big exception was that at one point I challenged myself to complete Hardcore on /players8, self-found and single-pass with no external inventory (I wanted to know I could do it), which I eventually did with a trap Assassin. Looking back, I'm really not sure how I managed it, and it's certainly not a challenge I'd care to do again.
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Oct 10, 2022 04:17
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Thanks a bunch for the breakdown on melee Sorc and also showcasing some of the lovely skills available. I do have an addendum in that, Enchant is a good skill. A very good skill. (Off the top of my head I can't think of another way to get a multiplier to your AR you can then use with anything else that has its own AR multiplier.) The issue comes from the fact that it's a buff, not a melee skill, and you'll have to go provide your own via gear. (which thankfully there are options available to get something better than basic melee.) I do hope to, in the future, write up posts giving more of an idea on what the basegame classes do and what's available for them. Whether or not I can depends on whether or not I can do the comprehensive research on them, since I'd have to do quite a bit of reading and making sure I'm reading correctly and getting a solid idea. I think the only classes I haven't played before the LP are Amazon and Druid, and the ones I've finished the game with are Assassin, Necromancer, and Paladin. (Minions is just too chill of a way to play diablo 2 what can i say)
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Oct 10, 2022 05:29
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I can potentially help fill in some of the gaps there. I, uh, may have written some books on druids back in the day. (As far as I know the information in them is still good, though I can't vouch for the tone or writing style, I was much younger then. And I didn't exactly cover every build.) On Enchant and Attack Rating: IIRC, any skill-based multipliers to AR get added together and then applied in a block, so if you've got +300% from Enchant and +100% from Zeal (made-up numbers) you'd have a total bonus of 400%, and apply that (to get base AR x 5, rather than base AR x 4 x 2). Enchant is still very good, because it gives a very big multiplier for the investment and stacks with everything else, but it doesn't stack multiplicatively with other skills. (One of the old tricks for melee characters was acquiring the unique club "Demon Limb" which has charges of level 23 Enchant, and swapping that in to cast it on yourself. It didn't provide meaningful fire damage because you had no Warmth or Fire Mastery, but if you were having AR issues it helped a lot.)
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Oct 10, 2022 16:34
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Explopyro posted:The lightning aura version is absurdly powerful, dealing potentially hundreds of thousands of damage each hit. But unless you are cheating (either using save editors or trading for duped items online), you are very unlikely to obtain the necessary materials to make Dream runewords that grant the auras. Even post 1.13, when rune drop odds were increased by something like a factor of 4, the highest runes are still absurdly rare. Feel free to cheat and try it out in single player though, I won't judge you; my past self might well have, but I'm older now and don't give a poo poo any more. Explopyro posted:...Simon, I think I remember reading that writeup back in the day! It sounds at least somewhat familiar (and incredibly painful Explopyro posted:I can potentially help fill in some of the gaps there. I, uh, may have written some books on druids back in the day. (As far as I know the information in them is still good, though I can't vouch for the tone or writing style, I was much younger then. And I didn't exactly cover every build.) weird flex I know I played a shitton of Necro too, but people had already written extensive guides for most builds on that, so I decided to write Druid guides instead
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Oct 10, 2022 23:01
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Well I couldn't sleep well today so new update time. Time to rescue a celebrity.
DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Oct 11, 2022 |
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Oct 11, 2022 15:59
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You're highlighting a constant issue with the story in this update: it doesn't make a lick of sense if you think even for a second about it. When I wrote my big fanfiction thing, I wanted to stick quite close to the story, and I had to twist myself into several knots to explain stuff beyond "well they're evil so they decided to do stupid poo poo for shock value". By the time I wrote Act 5, I had almost burned out during Act 4, taken a long break, matured, and just skipped about two thirds of it because a siege from behind is probably the least of the story's problems at that point.
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Oct 11, 2022 17:27
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Cain shows up in Diablo 3 too, where he finally dies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes back in 4 though, maybe as a spirit.
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Oct 11, 2022 18:48
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Simply Simon posted:You're highlighting a constant issue with the story in this update: it doesn't make a lick of sense if you think even for a second about it. It's just when Diablo opens its big mouth and tries to get its puppets to speak and emote that it all comes crashing down. When I start talking about Hell politics we're going to find that a lot of rationales for many things will be dumbed down to, "because they're angels/mortals/demons." This could've worked, in the hands of better writers who cared more about their characters than "it's a demon". And I may be revealing too much by bashing the writing already but I'm honestly surprised that it took me 4 updates to point out how, uninteresting and forced, character dialogue is. Also I was tempted to spin up some fanfiction to have in the lp, but I realized it's not easy for me and also I would be unable to spin the story in any way other than a comedy. I think it's asking a lot of people to take Diablo's story seriously. achtungnight posted:Cain shows up in Diablo 3 too, where he finally dies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes back in 4 though, maybe as a spirit.
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Oct 11, 2022 19:29
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I must protest a bit at the statement that only one type of mercenary was ever worth using in vanilla, though I do understand that's common knowledge and maybe 95%+ of the time it is in fact correct. I am all for these mods trying to make the others more viable (especially the Rogues, who I always had the hardest time making a case for, at least in 1.1x; in 1.09 you could glitch them into using Diablo's Lightning Hose attack somehow and that's incredible for myriad reasons). The mercenaries' infamously terrible AI is a real problem, too (and, ironically, the popular Act 2 guys seemed to be the worst). There were some tricks to mitigate it, though. Mainly, if you reset their positioning, it also resets their AI routine (the good old "have you tried turning it off and on again" definitely applies); Town Portal works well enough and every character has access to that, but Teleport is even better, and I tended to carry either a staff or amulet with charges of it on most characters just to move minions around. DarkMatt posted:They also have either the Vigor aura (Life regen) or Meditation aura (Mana regen) depending on the hireling's subtype. I'm confused by this. Vigor was the run-speed and stamina-regen aura in vanilla, did you mean to say Prayer or did Project D2 change what Vigor does? DarkMatt posted:This is all because not only does Rakanishu zip around thanks to Extra Fast, Lightning Enchanted is the bane of melee characters. In addition to bonus lightning damage on hits, each time Rakanishu is hitstunned, he fires off sparks in random directions. These sparks are fun in that they do a fixed amount of damage and scale with monster level. If you're point blank and tap him many times, it's very likely you'll eat multiple of those, and that will drop your life very quickly. Lightning Enchanted is a really fun modifier to talk about, because Blizzard kept trying and failing to fix how much of a problem it was; that said, it used to be much more deadly, or at least deadly for different reasons. Most of the worst involved its interactions when combined with various other modifiers (which isn't really a thing in vanilla until higher difficulties but who knows how soon these mods will start doing that). In early versions, the most infamous thing was the "MSLE", or Multiple Shots Lightning Enchanted. The multiple shots modifier applied to the Charged Bolt projectiles generated by LE, so it'd fill up the screen with them very quickly, and if you went into melee they'd all get generated on top of you (if this happens, you're dead). They eventually fixed that (I think in 1.10), but ended up creating a new issue that's nearly as terrifying. I don't think there was a common nickname for these monsters, but it caused problems in conjunction with Fire Enchanted or Cold Enchanted. See, FE and CE monsters, when killed, generated explosions that deal damage based on the enemy's maximum life... and if you combined this with LE, it would make invisible extra death explosions happen whenever the charged bolts are generated. (I think this is what happened. My memory of this is a bit fuzzy and I never fully understood it, I only knew it was terrifying.) Again, if you went into melee, you were dead, but this time you didn't know why. achtungnight posted:Cain shows up in Diablo 3 too, where he finally dies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes back in 4 though, maybe as a spirit. I think I remember reading that he's made appearances in Diablo Immortal? I wouldn't know, though, I haven't and will not go anywhere near that pile of exploitative rubbish. I was surprised when they killed him off in D3, mainly because I can't imagine them making Diablo games without him in them, for better or worse he's the most iconic character of the series. On the question of why he was so iconic and beloved, I'm not entirely sure, because as OP says his lectures are more tedious than anything else and that never changes. But, at least in this game (and the first), the dialogue is skippable so most of the time you just hear his catchphrases and get items identified (and he's your companion through the whole game, that has to count for something). I always wondered where his Scottish accent from the first game went though. DarkMatt posted:This is what's fascinating about Diablo: the lore looks like it has a lot of thought put into it. Like sure you have things like Cain not dying but there's a timeline you can follow along and get a solid idea of why everything's happening. Normally that's applauded in a setting when you can get a solid grasp of why everything is happening, and honestly, Diablo is no different. I remember being shocked when I played Diablo 3 at what a mess the story and lore were (general consensus was it was pretty terrible, this wasn't just me), but when you take a look back at the earlier games, it turns out they weren't really any better. It's just that Diablo 3, at least at launch, forced you to engage with the story in order to play it, while in the earlier games, most players ignored a lot of the text and just picked up breadcrumbs here and there, and when you're doing that it's a lot easier to make them fit together into something in your head.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:51
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Explopyro posted:I'm confused by this. Vigor was the run-speed and stamina-regen aura in vanilla, did you mean to say Prayer or did Project D2 change what Vigor does? It's Vigor. What I got wrong was what it does. I mean when juggling many wikis to keep track of what does what, and when I don't intend to really use auras for the LP, the game does not give you an idea of what aura's what, and what aura's affecting you, so I don't remember what they're all called...or even what they look like. That's fixed though thanks for catching it. Explopyro posted:In early versions, the most infamous thing was the "MSLE", or Multiple Shots Lightning Enchanted. The multiple shots modifier applied to the Charged Bolt projectiles generated by LE, so it'd fill up the screen with them very quickly, and if you went into melee they'd all get generated on top of you (if this happens, you're dead). Ah right, that. Remember reading about it and it's a good thing that got fixed because there are already a lot of things that make melee difficult. They don't also need a unique that's certain death to melee if they thwack it up close. Explopyro posted:I was surprised when they killed him off in D3, mainly because I can't imagine them making Diablo games without him in them, for better or worse he's the most iconic character of the series. Okay, here's the issue with Diablo's story: all you remember is Deckard Cain. I too was in the boat of thinking I liked the story of Diablo II more than III, and then I went back to II and realized I couldn't explain why outside of, "Well they didn't make as many bad ideas." When they axed Cain I'm pretty sure a lot of people had a hard time trying to figure out who else was there that they liked. What's hilarious is they killed him in the middle of act 1, where the only other person they're trying to make you care about is pretty universally reviled for how poorly written she is and what they end up doing with her. You know it's funny because I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Diablo Immortal so if they actually did things with the story in that game, well, someone else can explain it because I don't know nor care, until I feel the urge to see if they took it anywhere at all.
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Oct 12, 2022 00:08
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DarkMatt posted:You know it's funny because I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Diablo Immortal so if they actually did things with the story in that game, well, someone else can explain it because I don't know nor care, until I feel the urge to see if they took it anywhere at all.
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Oct 12, 2022 00:36
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DarkMatt posted:You point this out, I want to say no, but then I realize they've done this before, and what would stop them now? He's going to show up as a spirit, trying to help the player by giving them guidance, but it'll turn out to be an illusion sent by one of Diablo's underlings and you've been led by the nose the entire time to do exactly what she wants you to do. Or his spirit will be working for Diablo because something something CORRUPTION something we'll explain it in an artbook 14 months from now
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Oct 12, 2022 01:50
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Deckard Cain is definitely the only character I remember from D2. The thing with D2 I feel is that while the plot is essentially non-existent, the game does do some good atmosphere. It’s a very lonely place, where it’s just you and the taciturn mercenary you hired vs the hordes. And then during the moment of rest where you go back to civilization (or what passes for it), you come back to talk to Cain first so that he identifies your poo poo for you. Always talk to him first, his sound bite is memorable and goofy enough that it alleviates the repetition of it. Get attached to the bugger because he’s always there to help you and he’s a constant presence. I think the fact that his services are free helps to endear him, if he charged for what he does I don’t think he’d be as popular. And then D3 squanders him by killing him in an inconsequential scene to try to build pathos. Great job.
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Oct 12, 2022 11:46
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Keldulas posted:I think the fact that his services are free helps to endear him, if he charged for what he does I don’t think he’d be as popular. The really funny thing is that sometimes he did! In the first game, of course, but also in D2. If you skip this quest and finish Act 1 without saving him, he'll show up in town at the beginning of Act 2 with alternate dialogue about how some of the Rogues rescued him, and then he'll charge the same 100 gold per item (for the rest of the game, unless you go back and make up the quest).
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Oct 12, 2022 12:53
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I only played D2. For most people playing largely blind, I find the idea that you wouldn’t rescue him to be a bit weird since I remember the quest being fairly signposted. It’s a good point otherwise I forgot about that.
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Oct 13, 2022 01:20
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