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Mechanics Talk 3-Blocking and Getting Hit (All Mechanics Talk assume vanilla Diablo II unless otherwise noted.) You may have thought AR was headache inducing. I didn't talk about shields until now, where very few things about it is actually explained to you by the game. Each time you are hit and you have a shield, you have a chance to, instead, block it, taking no damage but still going into what's termed blockstun. Hitstun and blockstun are different, and item affixes can speed up one or the other. Unfortunately, this does mean faster hit recovery is not faster block recovery, which means you can recover quickly from one, but not the other, unless you get both. This gets worse. If you are in either hitstun or blockstun, you can't block again. This means no, you can't block forever. If anything, if you're not careful, you'll block, then either get hit, or block again, then get hit again, and so on so forth. (blocklock) You can definitely shorten blockstun to the point where you'll have a high chance to block most attacks, but you still don't want to sit there and take many attacks at once. This is why most people will care more about speeding up hitstun, and defense is still relevant even if you're blocking. But, that's not the biggest problem with blocking. No, it's this formula: Chance to Block% = (Shield + Bonus) * (Dex-15) / (clvl*2) Chance to Block is capped at 75% Shield = Shield's base block chance Bonus = Class-specific block bonus, and bonuses from items and skills, all summed together. Dex = your Dexterity clvl = your level Bonus is added to block chance and it depends on what class you are. Paladin obvs has the highest at +30. Druid, Necro, and Sorc all have +20. The rest have +25. Bucklers for example actually have no base block chance so it will be 30% for Paladin. The way you make this block chance higher is by having Dexterity. A lot of Dexterity. They, did not program a floor in this, so your chance to block is actually WORSE if you go several levels without putting points in Dex. The worst part is, you can't really beat this tide unless you dump points in Dex. There's builds that would like decent block chance, or even a max block chance of 75%, for various reasons. Most builds however do not let that trouble them. As before, the higher your level gets, the harder it is to have investment in hitting and dodging matter at all. To have base block chance you need 2 points of Dex per level and 15 more. That number gets much higher if you wish to try to hit the cap through Dex. No, instead, you'll typically use a high grade shield (with high base block chance) and then affixes to get there. It is definitely possible, but Dex has to get a good investment of points, (213 Dex at max level to get normal block chance) which can be unappetizing to some people, because all those points could be in Vitality instead. Some monsters can block as well. Obviously the ones that are shown to have a shield, (like Skeletons) can block, and have their own base chances to do so, but curiously, many monsters have defined block ratings but don't have actual animations for when hey block. What's even funnier is some monsters will have this and still be able to block, all because of a single variable in their stats saying "no it's fine you can block". This means, Greater Mummies, and every act boss, despite not having shields, can and do block. There's a couple others but I think pointing these two out is the most fun. Anyway, hitstun or hit recovery happens when you take significant damage. The more damage you take, the more likely you are to get hitstun, but you need to take at least 1/16th of your health as non-poison damage. This is what makes blocking an investment: any damage blocked will put you in block recovery even if it's just a plink, meaning, for your sanity, you will need faster block recovery to minimize time spent sitting around doing nothing. I'm sure plenty of fresh meat have tried to get max block, and then realize they're sitting ducks most of the time because they're always in blockstun. As for what you can block, typically anything physical. The block check happens after a successful roll to hit, and is affected by nothing but your Dexterity, which means, if you go down this path, you have a 75% chance to just ignore any attack you can block. This is actually really good when paired with enough faster block recovery that you can reliably keep blocking. Spells and elemental damage don't care about silly concepts like hit checks, and if they don't roll to hit you don't roll to block. You, can block things like monster explosions and the explosion from Fire Enchanted uniques, but not block things like Corpse Explosion, Smite, or anything that doesn't deal physical damage. It's not intuitive. Don't ask me for the full list. But I'll share an amusing fact: you can't block anything while holding an item in your cursor. Anyway, the second thing. Remember how you could always get hit when you're running? There's one exception: you can still block. ...Course, keep in mind your block chance is reduced to a third when running so that'll actually be 25% and not 75%...and if you block you are going to stop running because you're in blockstun now, but hey it's something. So, is blocking good? Sure, it can be, later on. Paladins specifically are the best at blocking. If you don't want to use their class-exclusive shields and stack block speed, Holy Shield just makes whatever they're wearing extremely better, to the point where you're blinking and missing you block. Early on you won't have powerful enough gear to support blocking most of your taken attacks, because you won't be A: blocking enough, and B: blocking fast enough. Instead, in most scenarios, more Life will work much better for stopping blows due to how hitstun works. But I do wanna stress: 75% chance to quickly block is a very effective defensive mechanic. Even then shields are always good to have even if you don't get a high block chance because they allow you to stack more item affixes than using a two-handed weapon, but that's a story for another day.  These block chance numbers go waaaaaaayyyyy dooooown in MXL. The formula is the same, but your base block chance is either, 3, 1, or 0%. So shields provide block chance right? ...No. Unless it's a class shield which will give you all of 1 extra percent. To be fair, with how wumbo the numbers can get, you can get a good block chance...except it's capped at 50% instead of 75%....Okay nevermind.
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Oct 24, 2022 18:48
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Hey Drognan, you happen to have a wand with +3 Bone Spear for sale? No? 's cool ... How about now? ... How about now?
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Oct 24, 2022 23:38
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Simply Simon posted:Hey Drognan, you happen to have a wand with +3 Bone Spear for sale? No? 's cool That's a really odd way to spell Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery, but to each their own.
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Oct 25, 2022 01:28
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Simply Simon posted:Hey Drognan, you happen to have a wand with +3 Bone Spear for sale? No? 's cool And that's to say nothing about Eastern Sun's, uhh, free included and online-sanctioned plugins to automate shop rolling, which can be pretty mandatory.
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Oct 25, 2022 01:54
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Hey Drognan I rewrote reality so that the town gate is next to you now, just so that I can visit more often! No, no, just about 5 times a minute. I'm still practicing
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Oct 25, 2022 07:08
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New update. Some mods streamline the macguffin gathering process in Act 2 by giving us the Cube already. The other mods? Well,
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Oct 26, 2022 08:52
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Zoltan Kule pops up in Diablo 3 as an Act 2 advisor and later a dungeon boss. Funny you should mention him. Yes, he starts out dead in the game. But the D3 player revives him for advice on how to defeat the demons. Zoltan briefly provides help, then turns on the player and tries to kill them, as psycho evil mages typically do. The person who advised us to revive Kule also turns out to be an enemy later on. You can’t trust anyone in Diablo, especially Diablo 3. Except Cain, as long as he stays alive.
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Oct 26, 2022 10:47
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Good Lord do I ever hate crafting. Of course, modders and especially the people who made Path of Exile think it should be the whole point of the game, so by extension I hate PoE...
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Oct 26, 2022 10:57
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achtungnight posted:Zoltan Kule pops up in Diablo 3 as an Act 2 advisor and later a dungeon boss. Funny you should mention him. And then he's just in your camp because where the gently caress else is he going to go and he attempts to get back at you by littering. It has been a while since I've paid attention to Diablo 3's story, but I think dumbing it down to this is the best case scenario.
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Oct 26, 2022 17:29
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The player character in D3 repeatedly does what an obviously bad guy wants, then upon the inevitable betrayal goes "yeah I saw that coming" and just relies on knowing that they will always be able to just beat up the bad guy because that's how being the protagonist of an ARPG works
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Oct 26, 2022 23:31
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One interesting piece of trivia regarding the cube is how player behavior handled it in multiplayer: The Cube is super useful as extra storage, but it's not available until Act 2 (and it's kind of annoying to get even once you get to Act 2). So when you started an bank alt or even just a new character, it was common practice to have a high level friend give your newbie the Horadric Cube, then that high level guy would just go speedrun the Halls of the Dead in 5 minutes to replace the Cube for themselves.
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Oct 27, 2022 00:06
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Scarabs are awful, even beyond the most obvious reason. The charged bolts trigger whenever you put them into hit recovery, which is bad enough in itself. But if one of them is Fire Enchanted or Cold Enchanted, it's bugged and will also cause invisible death explosions each time that happens. Fun! You die and have no idea why it happened. Even without that, though, the charged bolts could output a lot of damage, especially if you weren't expecting it (they don't look scary at first). The Halls of the Dead are probably the least frequently played "required" area in this game, because you can keep your cube between difficulties, and having the cube in inventory progresses you past that part of the quest. (The Horadric Scroll might still drop, but you can't even pick it up or give it to Cain!) I always cleared them anyway to get the waypoint, but a lot of people were unbothered by leaving that one unactivated. (Why is there a waypoint there, anyway?) There's a lot of weird trivia one could potentially get into about the Cube, and various things it used to be able to do, but I've honestly forgotten a lot of it (I don't remember what patch the "6 gems + sword" recipe is from). For instance: there's a second recipe for rejuvenation potions. 3 health potions + 3 mana potions + 1 chipped gem makes a normal rejuv, and if you use a normal gem you get a full rejuv. Neither of these recipes care what grade of potions you put in. Before patch 1.1x, though, you could make small ones with just 3 health potions + 3 mana potions, no gems required; they changed this at the same time as they added mana potions to vendors. I think it was considered important for game balance that you can't outright buy rejuvenation potions from vendors. A lot of the cube recipes have weird, undocumented secondary effects that can be surprisingly useful if you know how to exploit them. For instance, the "change low quality weapon/armour to normal quality" recipes always set the ilvl of the output to 1; you could use this to make staffmods of low-level skills appear on high-level items they normally wouldn't (of particular interest to summoning necromancers), or restrict the maximum sockets on an item (useful for getting the exact number needed for certain runewords). And there was a time when it was popular to use the "3 gems + weapon = socketed magical weapon" recipe to try to roll affixes like Cruel (200-300% enhanced damage); these have generally been obsoleted by runeword weapons, but it was a viable way to get melee weapons with respectable damage output (though it only worked on certain weapons that had a high enough qlvl for the affix, because the recipe set ilvl to 25/30/35 depending on gem grade). The item reroll recipes were very popular in high-level play. The ones for rare items do degrade the ilvl over time, which means they're more niche than they'd otherwise be, but as I mentioned before, diadems can get any affix at any ilvl so it worked great for them at least. The magic item reroll recipe, however, was fairly easy to do (any 3 perfect gems + the item) and preserved the input ilvl. So you could basically keep pouring perfect gems into an item until you got the affixes you wanted. Of course this took ages and really burned through gems, but it was something you could do; it was most popular for use on grand charms to try to get ones with +skills. And then there's the socketing recipe, which in 1.11 and later caused the ethereal armour bug. When adding sockets to an ethereal armour item, it'd preserve the item's boosted defence and then apply the 50% bonus for being ethereal on top of that (netting you 2.25x the defence of a non-ethereal item). You could then make armour runewords in these to get utterly absurd defence values (I once saw an armour with more than 4000 defence, which can then get multiplied by any skill-based boosts you might have). There was at least one runeword (Prudence) which conferred self-repair, if you wanted to wear it yourself, and of course ethereal items don't degrade on mercenaries so this was one of the better ways to get them some survivability. And I haven't even gotten into crafting! Oh, crafting. I suspect a lot of players went through the game and had no idea it was even a thing, because the game never tells you how to do it. (What are these weird items with orange names?!?) And even when you do know, it's fairly niche, and you have to know what you're doing to make it really worthwhile. The core idea of crafting is this: each recipe has 3-4 innate affixes, and then rolls another 1-4 affixes depending on ilvl. You choose a recipe with innate affixes you like and then spin the slots for the rest. (Also, crucially, the innate affixes don't block the same affix from being rolled randomly. If you roll lifesteal as a random affix on a Blood recipe, it'll add onto the innate lifesteal affix.) All the recipes take the form "magic base item + specific rune + specific perfect gem + any jewel" and output the same base item you put in, with an output level of 0.5*clvl + 0.5*ilvl of the input item, rounding down each time. (Unless you were targeting specific affixes, you wanted at least ilvl 71 to guarantee 4 affixes.) And the vast majority of the time you'd still get garbage, because it's 4 random affixes and you probably wanted certain ones, it took a lot of fruitless crafting to make something good. One other wrinkle that often came up: crafted items had higher required levels than magical/rare items with the same affixes. Amusingly, this could sometimes cause items to come out with a required level greater than 99 (the highest I personally saw was 104), meaning they could never be equipped at all. I believe they did eventually fix this in a patch and cap it at 99, though it was fairly late (I want to say it might've even been 1.12 or 1.13?). Crafting recipes changed drastically between the early few LoD patches, before finally settling into the form most of us are familiar with (four families of recipes: Hitpower, Blood, Caster, and Safety, each containing one recipe for each equipment slot) in 1.09. In 1.07 there were "Greater" versions of some crafting recipes, requiring higher-tier runes and base items, but offering stronger versions of the innate affixes; there were also fewer restrictions on base item type for weapon recipes, meaning you could craft things like orbs that are no longer possible (and then, in an amusing bug, Charsi could imbue crafted items! This didn't keep any of their affixes, but did let you imbue base items you normally couldn't). Then 1.08 had the enigmatic "Deadly" recipes, which could only be made at certain times of the month. Neither of these patches was live for very long, and "Greater" and "Deadly" crafting recipes never returned. Janky as it was, I enjoyed D2's crafting system, though if you pressed me I couldn't explain why. There are quite a few crafting recipes that could be useful, though a lot (easily the majority) were close to useless. Sometimes this was just "here's a reliable way to get a decent filler item", and other times crafted items actually had irreplaceable effects and were considered best in slot for certain character builds. Caster amulets: these came with 5-10% faster cast rate innately, and could roll "of the Apprentice" for an additional 10% FCR. These were the only way to hit certain cast speed breakpoints, and basically every caster character wanted one, provided it came with skill boosts. Amulets of ilvl 90+ (gamble and craft with a level 93+ character to guarantee this) were eligible for +2 class skills. But this affix also came with a required level of 89, so these were very much endgame gear. I made so many of these, easily hundreds if not thousands. Blood amulets offered some lifesteal, and Safety amulets a very rare off-shield boost to block chance, but I don't think I ever saw anyone make these. There's real potential there but most physical characters wanted other things from the amulet slot. Blood gloves: these came with 5-10% crushing blow, and some innate lifesteal. They're practically the only source of crushing blow in gloves (one unique item, Steelrend, offered it but they were very rare and pretty awful otherwise). You generally wanted to roll "of Alacrity" (20% increased attack speed), and these were eligible for some skill boosts (+1-2 to Assassin Martial Arts, Amazon Javelin & Spear, Amazon Bow & Crossbow, or Amazon Passive & Magic). Most physical combat characters liked these, but of course Amazons and Assassins got the most benefit. Hitpower gloves: these come with innate Knockback. Some people really swore by these on bow-based Amazon builds (especially if you roll the +2 to bow skills!). Basically nobody else wanted them, though. And the rest of the Hitpower recipes were entirely useless. For belts: Caster belts also had 5-10% FCR; there was a unique belt, Arachnid Mesh, that had 20% and was strictly better, but otherwise these were the only way to get FCR in the belt slot. Blood belts had 5-10% chance of Open Wounds, which was nice to have a little of on physical characters (it's a minor damage over time ability, but the damage doesn't matter, it also prevents regeneration which is the useful part). Outside the innate affixes, on belts you generally wanted to roll faster hit recovery, resistances, or boosts to life or mana. For boots: Blood boots came with some lifesteal, and Caster boots came with some mana and mana regeneration. Safety boots had some innate fire resistance and minor damage reduction, if you didn't want either of those. Otherwise, you wanted to roll faster run/walk and resistances or life/mana. Crafted boots weren't anything special, but the boot slot was often a good place to try to shore up resistances and if you had trouble finding a good rare, crafting could help (I liked these recipes a lot when playing self-found). For rings: Blood rings are the ones I saw crafted most frequently, for the innate lifesteal and whatever other affixes happened to show up ("dual leech", where you also got mana steal, was particularly desirable). These very often ended up with impractically high level requirements though. And rings were a crowded slot, it was often hard to fit in even a good one when characters needed other things there. I think 95+% of the crafting I did or saw done was either Caster amulets or Blood gloves. These were by far the most popular recipes, and at least theoretically could produce some really nice items. If you were playing self-found, I think the boot and belt recipes were most likely to produce something you'd end up actually using.
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Oct 27, 2022 02:48
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New update. Happy almost Halloween! What better way to celebrate spooky holiday, than to stumble around in the dark?
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Oct 30, 2022 18:33
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Snake demons were major enemies in Diablo 3’s desert too. Not the same snake demons but still…
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Oct 30, 2022 20:38
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Those normal humans at the start are sprites imported from Icewind Dale, in particular generic barbarians from the expansion pack.
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Oct 30, 2022 23:06
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The eclipse quest never made sense to me, because in order to finish the staff, you'll have to go into the snake temple anyway. Them cursing the sun away (which everybody is a bit too chill about) doesn't actually add anything!!
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Oct 30, 2022 23:58
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Sigh. They do this every Tuesday. I will say its getting a little tiring because that's the only evening group is all free for bridge, but what can you do? These idiots are certainly easier to tolerate than the face eating demons everywhere else.
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Oct 31, 2022 00:12
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Okay, we made it here and I can finally   about that god drat maggot lair. That thing is hands down the absolute worst part about Act II, and there is some competition!As you note in the update, the usual experience is a player-wide sphincter-tunnel, where you are constantly beset by enemies that either vomit lightning balls at you, or burrow underground, or there's poison, or some other absolute bullshit. And you have to murder pretty much everything because of the cramped space, one by one, and you can't see where you're going. And it's three levels of this nonsense. I would like to take this opportunity to contrast this miserable slog with the sewer level that opens Act II. Okay, the sewers are several times larger than the town and don't make a lick of sense, but neither does anything about the land of Diablo 2 the way it is presented. As a game section? That dungeon is also dark, but it's comprised of rooms (sort of), tunnels wider than the Sorceress's shoulders, and the only sort of bull-poo poo are the flaming dead archers. Granted they hurt, and are sort of scary, but that's a good thing at that stage of the game. The player is introduced to a new desert locale, so it's different from the English countryside marsh hellscape, and now there's this vague Egyptian desert theme going on, and there's skeletons that are on fire and they want to set you on fire, too. It's a party down there!  I feel like the Worm level of Spelunky is a parody of the maggot lair, it's a big ol' intestine filled with gross bugs and gross goo. Yuck yuck yuck.
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Oct 31, 2022 00:42
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Simply Simon posted:The eclipse quest never made sense to me, because in order to finish the staff, you'll have to go into the snake temple anyway. Them cursing the sun away (which everybody is a bit too chill about) doesn't actually add anything!! It does feel weird they didn't at least give it some kind of reward though; even a meaningless triviality like a random rare amulet or something would make it feel a little more like a real 'quest'.
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Oct 31, 2022 01:25
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MagusofStars posted:It does feel weird they didn't at least give it some kind of reward though; even a meaningless triviality like a random rare amulet or something would make it feel a little more like a real 'quest'. To be real I've always assumed the amulet was the reward for that quest, and I'm not too sure why when it's just a piece of a different key to use later in a different quest. It does definitely feel like Tainted Sun has no place in the Act, but well, I do have a hard time trying to figure out what the good quests are and put why they're good in words. Probably just the ones that have you do doing interesting things but are interwoven into you playing the game, like rescuing Cain or killing Radament. Rappaport posted:I would like to take this opportunity to contrast this miserable slog with the sewer level that opens Act II. Okay, the sewers are several times larger than the town and don't make a lick of sense, but neither does anything about the land of Diablo 2 the way it is presented. As a game section? That dungeon is also dark, but it's comprised of rooms (sort of), tunnels wider than the Sorceress's shoulders, and the only sort of bull-poo poo are the flaming dead archers. Granted they hurt, and are sort of scary, but that's a good thing at that stage of the game. The player is introduced to a new desert locale, so it's different from the English countryside marsh hellscape, and now there's this vague Egyptian desert theme going on, and there's skeletons that are on fire and they want to set you on fire, too. It's a party down there! I'm not kind to Lut Gholein because there'll be other locations later in Diablo 2 that do a better job at establishing vastness and scope. But I will say that most of my hate on the Lut Gholein Sewers has to do with the fact that I never liked playing a sewer level in a role playing game. The Sewers do feel like it's just as hard as Catacombs, if not harder, but most of my grievances with this specific sewer level is not its fault. Burning Dead is a rude wake up call though if the signposting the game was doing in the Monastery doesn't hit home. You're not gonna have fire resist unless by pure happenstance, and it won't be a lot. That said, I will agree it's a good thing that we're going to very different locales, and with how pretty they all look, they really help cement an impression if you were playing this in 2000, maybe even today. It's just that, the gameplay might get in the way of that, because we aren't out of act 2 yet. There's still a couple other rough patches. But also, all I've learned really analyzing Diablo so far is that everywhere's a party if you try hard enough. 
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Oct 31, 2022 04:30
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I actually really like the Lut Gholein sewers, they're a good level of difficulty where you have to be a bit careful with your young character, but it's not a huge spike with specific enemies being big outliers. It's open enough and no character build has a big issue there. Maggot Lair...I love summoner Necros. Nuff said
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Oct 31, 2022 09:52
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Expanding the Maggot Lair is a very good quality of life thing to see from these mods. That was always one of the more irritating areas of the game; one might think awkward terrain would be an interesting gameplay twist, but the Maggot Lair just kind of doesn't work for most characters. A lot of the attacking skills are very awkward to use in such tight spaces, some character builds just flat-out don't function in there (hello, Chargers; also anything that relies on minions) and others are very tedious. On the other hand, if you have a piercing or line-based attack (Bone Spear or Lightning, for instance; though a lot of the enemies are lightning-immune on higher difficulties), it's kind of hilarious. Even then, though, it's still not a fun gameplay experience, I don't think I've ever known anyone to go back in there after completing the quest. The Tainted Sun quest never made much sense to me either (both in-universe, and from a design perspective). The lights out effect is atmospheric, and the Viper Temple isn't awful as far as dungeons go, but the actual events are inexplicably disconnected from each other, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why it's a quest in itself as opposed to another stage of the Horadric Staff quest. I'd say it almost feels like they wanted to have six quests per act for aesthetic reasons but ran out of ideas, but then Act 4 probably disproves that. It's interesting that some of these mods decided to put more stats on the quest items. Even when these items were decent in vanilla, it was a bad idea to use them because they get arbitrarily taken away from you as you progress. (In vanilla, the Horadric Staff was actually kind of decent, especially because as a quest item it has no level requirement. I knew people who'd save extras and use them as starter weapons, especially for shapeshifter druids as they really benefit from all the attack speed on it. But unlike some other ways you could twink characters, this had limited utility because there was no way to bring one past Act 2.) Making them worth using makes sense from a lore perspective since these are supposed to be highly magical artefacts or whatever, but from a gameplay standpoint it's kind of counterproductive. Oh, another "fun" bit of trivia about quest items (and maybe another reason not to equip them). What happens if you lose them? So, when you die, all your items end up on your corpse, right? If you decide to try to get your corpse back by equipping some other stuff and die again, the game will generate another corpse with those items on it, and so on up to eight corpses in total. If you save and exit without collecting them, though, the game only saves a single corpse (which appears next to you in town when you next load in): the one whose items have the highest total sell value in gold. Quest items are hard-coded to have basically no value, I think it's 1 gold but you can't actually sell them. Imagine this situation for a moment. Your character dies, and you might think "hey, I've got this cool quest weapon in my stash, let me equip that and try to get my body". It's not enough and you die again. There's now a second corpse with only the quest item on it. As a kid, my first time playing the game, I did this, then got frustrated at my inability to even get back the second corpse, so I saved and quit not knowing what would happen. The first corpse got saved, of course, and the quest item vanished into the aether. Thankfully you aren't completely screwed if you do this... the game's smart enough with its quest progress flags that you can replace it, but you have to go back to the original locations of the pieces. (Child me did not appreciate having to assemble Khalim's Will all over again... that was not fun.) So yeah, maybe try not to lose your quest items?
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Nov 1, 2022 03:01
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I'm surprised to see so much dislike for act 2. I can understand the maggot lair, but overall it was one of the acts I liked more. My experience might be colored by the fact that I played almost exclusively on battle.net with a close group of friends, though; about half the time I was rushing or being rushed, and half the time I was running through the difficulties with similarly leveled characters. The friend group I played with almost universally reviled another act that we have yet to see, although I'll leave that for when we get there. More people means it's easier to find the right dungeons and waypoints in the wide open desert, and you can cover each others' weaknesses. Scarab beetles are a pain as melee, yeah, but it was also a lot of fun to come to the rescue of a barbarian who was running the hell away from a champion pack of them with nasty enchantments, and it was also funny when the sorceress rushing you through the act teleported away and left you to die in the middle of them. I was always really excited to go do the sewers at the start of act 2 on all of my dozens and dozens of playthroughs because it meant a free skill point. I hate sewer levels in games too, but this one never really registered as one to me, so I never disliked it. As far as the plot goes, always playing in multiplayer meant that I usually skipped the dialogue and cutscenes, so while I played through the game enough times to understand the basics of the plot, I never really thought about it or its many issues very much.
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Nov 1, 2022 13:03
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I don't actually dislike Act 2 at all, it's true though that the desert areas all being split in two by that weird cliff with one stairwell means that you often end up backtracking a lot. Secret technique to make it less boring: don't wait for the vultures to come down on the first pass, get them on the runback  .Also, there is an actual sewer level in the game and it DOES suck rear end
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Nov 1, 2022 14:14
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Act 2 is pretty nice, all in all. It has my favourite 'theme', and the place we're going to see next is visually very cool. Act 2 also has a couple of nasty spots, maggot lair definitely being the worst in my personal opinion. It will make more sense to compare the acts after we've gone through the game once, because I think most Diablo 2 players have a tier list! 
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Nov 1, 2022 16:09
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Act 2 of Diablo II will never not have me thinking of Shiva Shidapu's Power Of Celtic, which is a song that was burned into my head while grinding on Battle.net at a friends house, played on a couple of Eltax Terminator T-408:
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Nov 1, 2022 21:02
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To me, Act 2's biggest sins are (as someone who loves to play summoning necro): Maggot Lair. Too small, minions barely work, very frustrating. Giant desert with nothing in it, which makes it irritating to find whatever is relevant Leapers and birds, solely because killing them is annoying. Never really cared about the greater mummies, but that's because it was a race between us to see who could use the corpse first.
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Nov 1, 2022 21:24
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I always liked Act 2 also, for the most part. It's really just the Maggot Lair that's awful.
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Nov 1, 2022 23:24
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Plenty of things about Act 2 are more annoying than actually bad. Sewers are rough, Desert can be confusing, and Tombs can be painful but doable. Though, I will agree that there's no defending Maggot Lair, which brings everything not involving splash damage or piercing projectiles to a grinding halt. It's why I'm happy for the mods that improve it, because I'm still wondering why people thought killling monsters 1 at a time instead of all of them all the time was cool.
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Nov 2, 2022 00:17
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achtungnight posted:Zoltan Kule pops up in Diablo 3 as an Act 2 advisor and later a dungeon boss. Funny you should mention him. From what I remember he doesn't even betray you, he twigs that you are walking into a trap and tries to warn you, and your character just assumes this is the inevitable betrayal and beats the poo poo out of him before he can finish his sentence. And then walks straight into the trap.
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Nov 2, 2022 09:31
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Possible. Memories of game plot hazy. It was very convoluted.
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Nov 2, 2022 09:55
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New update. Today is the day I call the Vizjerei a bunch of idiots. How? Click the image to find out.
DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Nov 2, 2022 |
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Nov 2, 2022 21:35
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DarkMatt posted:Plenty of things about Act 2 are more annoying than actually bad. Sewers are rough, Desert can be confusing, and Tombs can be painful but doable. Though, I will agree that there's no defending Maggot Lair, which brings everything not involving splash damage or piercing projectiles to a grinding halt. It's why I'm happy for the mods that improve it, because I'm still wondering why people thought killling monsters 1 at a time instead of all of them all the time was cool. I don't remember the Maggot Lair, but I do remember that one Diablo 1 quest where there was a room jam packed with skeletons, but you could funnel them through a door and kill them one at a time. Which I did.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:22
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The Arcane Sanctuary was always one of my favourite areas in the game, even if it's often more frustrating than anything else to play through (in some ways it's a bit like the Maggot Lair with all the very narrow pathways, but it's full of enemies who don't have to care, like the flying ghosts, and the vampires with all their ranged magic). It doesn't quite come through from the screenshots (or, quite frankly, doesn't always work that well ingame when objects like monster corpses fall in odd places), but the visual design here is reminiscent of an Escher painting with topologically-impossible staircases and such. It's one of the cooler concepts in the game and a very visually unique area. I won't comment on the lore though, it's kind of a mess as you say. DarkMatt posted:Blunderbore | CR: ** These guys (and their higher-level clones in later acts) are quite interesting as far as enemies go, actually. In addition to their skills, they have a special property that makes all their attacks cause hit recovery regardless of damage, and they have a chance of inflicting Crushing Blow. (Or... well. I looked it up and apparently they don't in Normal, but the chance is 15% in Nightmare and 25% in Hell.) The hit recovery thing can actually be pretty scary if you get surrounded by them, it's not hard to get stunlocked to death if enough of them are swinging at you. But what's Crushing Blow? It deals percentage-based damage, specifically based on current life. Against players it's 10% of your current life; against monsters it deals 25% in a 1-player game (monster life scales with the number of players, gaining 50% life per player up to 8, but Crushing Blow damage is scaled down to be consistent with the players1 life, so it ends up dealing around 5.5% in an 8 player game). It's further halved against bosses and halved again if applied by a ranged attack instead of melee. Despite all these caveats, many bosses in this game have so much life that it was considered a very desirable property by a lot of players. As a player, this isn't much of a thing to worry about; if you're dying to Blunderbores et al the Crushing Blow damage probably isn't what's killing you. So why am I talking about it? Well, Necromancers have a high-level skill called Revive that lets you reanimate enemies as they are, rather than making them into skeletons. If you use Revive on these kind of monsters... well, they keep that Crushing Blow chance. You can raise a whole pack of these things and just destroy bosses. It could be impractical to go find a pack of them for every boss run (especially with the time limits on Revive), but it's still cool, and they were a staple strategy against superboss things like the Diablo Clone and Uber Tristram.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:49
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Mechanics Talk 4-How gaining Life/Mana and gaining Resistances work (All Mechanics Talk assume vanilla Diablo II unless otherwise noted.) There's quite a few ways to recover your red and blue juice without using potions. The reason why I haven't really focused on them, until now when I'm doing a wonky way to recover mana with Greg atm, is because they're a mess of mechanics, which means another mechanics talk. For Life, players have 0 innate regeneration. Everyone else does, this includes your minions and hirelings. Courtesy of D2 FAQtoids, here's the formula: regL/s = Lmax * vreg / 4096 * 25 regL/s = Life regenerated per second Lmax = Max Life Vreg = Unit-specific modifier to life regen So if you say, have 300 Life and a regen rate of 2, you get about 3.6 Life regenerated per second. The formula isn't necessary, I can just use simple English: get more Life on your minions -> they get more Regen. There's no way to change their base regen otherwise. Replenish Life, meanwhile, is an item affix that grants you life regen. There's, uhh, one singular problem with this. Every single source of Replenish Life is pathetically miniscule. It'll say Life Replenish +1. You may think it's 1 life per second. It's 1 life over 10 seconds. It's not exactly 10 seconds but it's a close enough approximation that you actually need Replenish Life +10 to get, all of 1, Life, regenerated per second. (As a quick note, there's a rare Drain Life affix that's just this but in reverse. Like poison it can't kill you. It just makes you really easy to kill.) Diablo 2 is not a game where life regen is a viable way to stay alive. I've only ever used it to heal off damage from encounter to encounter. The mods make the wording much more clearer but I haven't seen any of them try to make it viable to run so far. Life/Mana after each Kill is another affix that may sound good, but it also falls off over time and, you must directly land the killing blow on the enemy to get the recovery. This means builds that rely solely on minions never make use of this affix. That said though, it's better than most item-based ways to recover. Damage Taken Goes to Mana is an affix that sounds like what the Sorceress Energy Shield does, but it's not splitting damage to your Mana. It's returning a portion of damage taken to Life as Mana. It's missing the word "suffered" somewhere in there. There isn't any hoops to go through but if you are taking that much damage to clear content in this game, you're probably not clearing content efficiently. Maybe if you're melee? I dunno, it's hard to sell this affix. Finally, there's X% Life/Mana Stolen Per Hit, or, life/mana leech. It does what it says: deal damage, get a percentage of that as leech back. What it doesn't tell you and what really limits its usefulness is, it must be physical damage. You can't leech off elemental or magic damage. If you use spells, which most people use elemental damage over physical for their primary source, this affix is useless. It gets better: some monsters can be physically vulnerable but you still can't leech off them because they just have resistance or immunity to it. And then there's the fact that each difficulty nerfs how much leech you can get off anyone. It's disgusting. They nerfed it way too hard for it to be useful in most builds. If you are a physical build or you have a good secondary physical damage source, though, it can power your mana hungry spells...in the right build, where you are able to afford the gear and/or skill points to make that happen. Now while Life Regen is barely noticeable, you do innately regenerate Mana over time, quite slowly. No matter your maximum Mana, you will regenerate from 0 to full in 2 minutes. So the higher your maximum Mana is, the more Mana you regenerate per second. Replenish Mana % is an affix that makes little sense at a glance, but what it does is speed up the rate. Replenish Mana 100% means you'll get full mana in 1 minute instead of 2. 300% will turn that to 30 seconds, and so on. Curiously, this means doubling your max Mana has the same effect as getting 100% extra Mana Regen...and at the end of the day, that's probably more useful because you're not just getting more mana regenerated per second, you're also getting a bigger can of juice to cast spells with. At the end of the day, the answer most people will give you is to chug Mana Potions. Levels and gear will also give you more Mana, which will improve how much Mana you regenerate, and allow you to sling more spells before quaffing. All this means skulls are terrible when slotted into anything but your weapon. Anyway, Resistances. Yours is boosted primarily by your gear, whatever socketables you have put in it, and then some skills can provide additional resistance. They work as a modifier to the percentage of damage taken of that element: if you have 75 fire resist, you take a quarter of any fire damage dealt. 75 cold resist also means chill durations are cut to a quarter. Same goes for 75 poison resist and poison duration. There is, curiously, a floor to how low your resistances can get, and it's -100, or double damage. We've already seen some nasty elemental damage and we only see many more flavors of bonus elemental damage, so resistance capping is a must for most builds. Of course, some types are more important than others: poison outside of Andariel can either be avoided or safely ignored. Cold resistance to cut down on chill is important, but there's not that many common sources of cold damage. It's, strangely enough, fire and lightning resist you want. The former because the big sources of fire damage are very lethal, and the latter because of Scarab Demons among other things. But there's a bit more at work here: their resistances. There are a couple skills that can lower those resists and cause them to take more damage of certain types. Amplify Damage works this way by lowering physical resist, which is an actual thing the stat screen never shows. You may hope that these are how you punch through damage immunities, and in certain cases you're right. Immune monsters will have resistances at 100 or more, which will be shorthanded to "take no damage". If you attempt to lower those resistances, your debuff will apply at 1/5th the usual rate. If a monster has 110 Lightning Resistance, you would need to apply over -50 Lightning Resist to break the immunity. Several monsters are nice enough to only have 100, but some will have 150 and be utterly invincible to that element. I will have words about this later, when this becomes the norm. But don't despair. -X Enemy Elemental Resistance doesn't do anything to immunities, but work as normal if you break the Immunity. Meaning a 100 Resist monster, that gets broken down to 90 with your lower resist, will now take the full reduction to resist from that affix. That makes that affix an absolute premium for most builds, since it's one of the most effective ways to multiply your damage output. It's also buggy in that the monster may no longer say it's immune, but it still is. There's a couple other tidbits here, but I'm not known for covering every detail. We're getting to the point where we're looking at very advanced mechanics that the devs have no idea how they work, let alone me, so this is a good time to stop. So, if you are wondering, yes, you should have backup damage types for much later on.
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Nov 4, 2022 17:47
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I think the other thing with lightning is that (at least for player spells) it tends to have massive damage ranges, like 1-500 or something silly. I think that ends up being true for enemies as well, and it can result in some hilariously scary damage numbers if you get unlucky. And as with most games of this type, it's the big unexpected hits that kill you much more frequently than sustained damage, even if the sustained damage is more dps (losing 50% of your health all at once after 30 seconds of combat is much scarier than slowly losing 100% of your health over 30 seconds).
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Nov 4, 2022 19:18
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Dirk the Average posted:And as with most games of this type, it's the big unexpected hits that kill you much more frequently than sustained damage, even if the sustained damage is more dps (losing 50% of your health all at once after 30 seconds of combat is much scarier than slowly losing 100% of your health over 30 seconds). Mana leech does have some use as a physical fighter though. Their physical attacks which cost Mana typically require so little Mana that even a tiny amount of leech is enough to ensure that you never have to think about Mana, ever.
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Nov 4, 2022 21:32
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MagusofStars posted:This is also why regen and life-steal are fundamentally pointless. Even if life-steal was buffed, the deaths still occur over such a short time frame that life-steal is rarely going to be enough to tip the scales from dead to "barely survived". And Diablo just isn't built with any real endurance/gauntlet style dungeons, so the fact that steal/regen keeps you topped up between battles isn't particularly meaningful. Yeah, I'm clapping my hands and realizing, "Oh it's really just more life and resists isn't it?" A little disappointing but it does make defenses a simple matter to solve. Which is good. Dying sucks. Like, it's hard to portray, but Eastern Sun does have gratuitous enough lifesteal that you can effectively heal off any damage done to you before they can pile on more, but then there's still all the issues involving physical damage, and just the very act of leeching. It really is just better to slam as much life as possible.
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Nov 5, 2022 06:00
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The Arcane Sanctuary may have a lot of narrow paths like the maggot lair, but to me the important difference between it and the maggot lair is that there are no walls. The stuff blocking your path is all empty space, so you can fire over it with ranged skills. Also, the look of the entire place is  Also, something important about it that you seemed to neglect in your update is how all four quadrants have a unique layout. One of them will have a lot of long, straight paths, one of them will have staircases upon staircases in impossible patterns that end up looking like some impossible architecture in an MC Escher painting, one of them will have a bunch of little islands connected by portals, and the last one is mostly normal architecture. Having multiple layouts that are always present means you have an interesting choice to make when deciding which direction to explore in first when you're playing without map hacks; characters with line damage skills like lightning might want to go down the narrow paths, while barbarians with leap might not be bothered by the portals in the island path as much. Spoggerific fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Nov 5, 2022 |
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Nov 5, 2022 09:37
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Spoggerific posted:The Arcane Sanctuary may have a lot of narrow paths like the maggot lair, but to me the important difference between it and the maggot lair is that there are no walls. The stuff blocking your path is all empty space, so you can fire over it with ranged skills. Also, the look of the entire place is I did kinda underplay the Sanctuary oops. Though, from my experience I was unable to pick out the differences, even during the runs where I had to go through 3 or all 4 of the paths. What I can say about it, is that it is indeed an archer's delight and it can be really "fun" for melee who can see the other side of portals, see it's chock full of enemies, and has to either wait for their Rogue to clear it out or just shrug and go in. There probably is a tier list for each path but man, you'd think I would pick up on that but I honestly didn't. (Not to mention, lightning ghosts in MXL make that pretty difficult.) Oh well, we'll be back to it later. I can gush about space sanctuary then, because I do like it aesthetically.
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Nov 5, 2022 12:16
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