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Simply Simon posted:oh so you ARE interested in how my fanfiction played out I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought along those lines.
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Dec 2, 2022 13:49
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That’s not what I… never mind.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:58
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Dec 2, 2022 17:20
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achtungnight posted:That’s not what I… never mind. I'm amazed you guessed exactly why it stopped. What a psychic. Tarezax posted:At some point in LoD they patched Oblivion Knights to no longer use Iron Maiden iirc. ...You might be right, but then it would help if I remember what half the curses and auras look like. I've been spoiled by buff/debuff icons.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:19
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Oh yeah, that's right, they did remove Iron Maiden from Oblivion Knights in 1.13. I always forget about that. It was an awful mechanic (especially if you played Hardcore), but honestly, I kind of missed it once it was gone. It was horribly unfair but it definitely made you pay attention, which added a certain texture to the gameplay in these areas.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:23
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Explopyro posted:Oh yeah, that's right, they did remove Iron Maiden from Oblivion Knights in 1.13. I always forget about that. It was an awful mechanic (especially if you played Hardcore), but honestly, I kind of missed it once it was gone. It was horribly unfair but it definitely made you pay attention, which added a certain texture to the gameplay in these areas. 20 year old game with 20 years of conflicting research. Oh well, I'll catch it next loop. Cause yep, I realize now I've been to Chaos Sanctuary like 15 times as of recent, and even with melee I have not exploded yet, because I am definitely the sort of person who would have my mind turned off and then forget to feather touch those mobs to avoid explosion.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:25
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The correct question is, how come it was kept that long? Did Blizzard just hate melee characters?
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Dec 2, 2022 20:38
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Xarn posted:The correct question is, how come it was kept that long? Did Blizzard just hate melee characters? Blizzard designed a lot of (bad) challenges around swinging at things and hitting demons with a sword. ...And then when they eventually realized that spells and even ranged to a lesser extent kinda just circumvented all of that they just rolled with it. Iron Maiden's just the worst. (Follow by like, Mana Burn then Spectral Hit) That's my two cents. No idea if that's true, but, accidental game design sounds right. For example: you never see anything really nasty that can slap you from across the screen. Even the red lightning isn't that fast. What's really funny is NetHack and Angband are cited as inspirations for this game, and I've played both, a lot, and this exact same problem happens in both of them. You have a much easier time with those games not getting in a monster's face, because most of the nasty stuff they can do to you requires them to touch you.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:52
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DarkMatt posted:I'm amazed you guessed exactly why it stopped. What a psychic. Hey, I've written enough fanfic to know how it flows. 
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Dec 2, 2022 21:20
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New update. There are demons in the base.
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Dec 5, 2022 22:30
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-There's a second Super-Unique, Eldritch at the very start of the second area guarding the waypoint. He's just as mechanically uninteresting and non-threatening as Shenk, but due to being located near a waypoint, it was a pretty popular farm target. Jump in the waypoint and you could kill Eldritch+Shenk together in like 2 minutes tops. -This very first area, Bloody Foothills was an extremely popular area to run for experience. The monster density is high, the layout is very simple with no back-tracking ever required, the individual monsters aren't too difficult, and the area has a very convenient waypoint right at the end. Hell, there's even free tanks due to the large number of NPC Barbarians. General flow would be to join a Bloody run with a bunch of other players, then everybody basically zerg rushes through, you kill the two Super-Uniques and everybody drops group. -Outside of right when the expansion was released, I don't think I ever used or saw anyone using a Barbarian merc. Desert Guards were unquestionably superior as tanks/meatshields because of the auras and higher innate defense/resistances. Rogues will always have have Act 1 Normal, where you have no other options. Iron Wolves at least have the argument for being a source of elemental damage in Normal, plus plenty of usage in pre-expansion games since they're your only Act 3 option. -The Red Portals are optional dungeons but are at least visually interesting optional dungeons; much more so than the usual "here's another cave" that you see in all the other acts.
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Dec 6, 2022 00:21
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Honestly, thinking about it, the Bloody Foothills are one of my favourite areas, even if I wouldn't normally think to put it on a list of the game's high points. It's just really satisfying to hack through the area alongside the Barbarian warriors (you can even support them with any auras or buffs you might have), and feels like your character is part of a bigger war effort in a way the rest of the game doesn't (outside of here and a few named NPCs like Flavie, the only fellow adventurers you see are corpses). And also, the catapults and obstacles etc do at least add a bit of a twist, these areas feel a bit more dynamic than previous ones.MagusofStars posted:-There's a second Super-Unique, Eldritch at the very start of the second area guarding the waypoint. He's just as mechanically uninteresting and non-threatening as Shenk, but due to being located near a waypoint, it was a pretty popular farm target. Jump in the waypoint and you could kill Eldritch+Shenk together in like 2 minutes tops. I was going to say quite a lot of this and then you beat me to it! Though it is worth pointing out that Bloody runs were nerfed heavily after a patch or two, IIRC (I don't remember which one specifically). It's still a fun area to run through, but it's not worth running repeatedly for levels any more. I'm not sure if this was just part of the general nerf to the EXP formula in 1.1x (which added penalties to EXP gain if you were too high or low level relative to the monster you killed), or if it was targeted more specifically at this area on top of that. MagusofStars posted:-Outside of right when the expansion was released, I don't think I ever used or saw anyone using a Barbarian merc. Desert Guards were unquestionably superior as tanks/meatshields because of the auras and higher innate defense/resistances. Rogues will always have have Act 1 Normal, where you have no other options. Iron Wolves at least have the argument for being a source of elemental damage in Normal, plus plenty of usage in pre-expansion games since they're your only Act 3 option. I have a real soft spot for the Barbarian mercenaries, though a lot of that is because I was a big Wind Druid player and they really get along well. Outside of that specific context (and maybe one or two other builds they work almost as well for), they're unfortunately hard to justify using. The barbarians, in my experience, have the best AI of any mercenaries (helped a bit by the fact that what you want them to do is "get up in the enemy's face and hit them", but they don't get stranded nearly as often as Town Guards), as well as the best survivability. I think their use of Bash and Stun is part of why they live longer, because it serves as a minor form of crowd control and makes them get hit less often. They just don't offer much of anything beyond tanking, and it's hard to get respectable damage out of them (especially in comparison to the Town Guards who get auras and have access to some really powerful polearms). The main reason to use a barbarian was the Lawbringer sword runeword, which gave a 20% chance to cast a high level Decrepify. If you were a character who dealt in physical damage (and especially if that was spell-based physical damage that couldn't benefit from auras, like, say, Druid wind spells), giving a Barbarian mercenary that sword was one of the best things you could do to boost your damage, and it also helped with survivability for both you and him. (Town Guards did have access to The Reaper's Toll, a polearm that could cast Decrepify. Having played with both I preferred the Barbarians, they did less damage but they lived longer and were better at spreading the curse thanks to attacking faster.) The other fun option was giving them a Crescent Moon sword, which had a chance to cast Static Field for percentage-based damage that scaled with player count (unlike Crushing Blow), but that was honestly more gimmicky than effective. One thing I will point out is that it was almost always better to give them a two-handed sword; they can't use anything in their off-hand regardless, and their damage formula does use the two-handed damage value. MagusofStars posted:-The Red Portals are optional dungeons but are at least visually interesting optional dungeons; much more so than the usual "here's another cave" that you see in all the other acts. I'll also concur with this. They usually had interesting enemy variety in them, too, I always went out of my way to do them.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:10
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Ah, Act V. It's probably my favorite act in the game, although not by far - I like Acts I and IV a lot too. The socket quest reward is indeed one of the most useful ones in the game, and it's one of the few that can be transferred to other characters in multiplayer. People have already talked about the hellforge, and while you've mentioned imbues, those are based on character level; the socket reward is not. Mule characters that existed only to store extra items on were fairly common, and since this quest reward was so useful, it wasn't unheard of to rush a character you have no intention of actually playing all the way to Act V and this quest just so you could socket another item. The mercenary quest in this act sometimes bugs out in various ways - the barbarians might not go through the portal, the portal might stay open and not close, or you just might not get credit at all for saving a group of them. It was common enough when I was playing that I remember it being an annoyance. Other instances of NPCs opening up town portals for you also occasionally bug out in weird ways, like the portal Cain makes to get back to town in Act I staying open, or the portal you get after killing Duriel in Act II being impossible to use. The ruins littered throughout the middle parts of this act have breakable doors that get in your way, and they're all poison immune like the catapults. Normally not an issue for most characters, but it can be annoying for poison necromancers in particular. Your minions will often avoid attacking them, and even if they do, if you're focusing on poison skills instead of minions they can be kind of weak.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:26
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Oh, right, I wanted to talk about Larzuk's quest reward too. It's good. It's the only way to add sockets to Unique and Set items that don't come with them, and you can do a lot of other cool things with it too. It is worth noting, unfortunately, for magical items you get 1-2 sockets at random (I believe it's even odds). This was really annoying, because it meant even if you managed to find an item with the perfect combination of affixes, you still had a 50% chance to ruin it at the last minute. In some earlier patches, it was even more busted, I know for instance in 1.07 crafted items actually got 3 sockets, and IIRC magicals could too, but they realised pretty quickly this was a mistake. Outside of putting sockets into your endgame stuff to squeeze out that last bit of optimisation, the other good use of Larzuk was on white items to make runeword bases. He guaranteed the maximum number of sockets, so if the runeword you wanted to make required that many, you were in business. (And the maximum sockets for a given item type was actually somewhat affected by ilvl, so if you knew where the item dropped or used certain cube formulae you could get even more control over this to produce some harder-to-find values. Upgrading a low-quality item to normal in the cube set the ilvl to 1, which on elite armour would guarantee you 3 sockets for most of the desirable runewords...) As mentioned, it was really common to rush characters just to get more chances to socket things.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:42
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Explopyro posted:Honestly, thinking about it, the Bloody Foothills are one of my favourite areas, even if I wouldn't normally think to put it on a list of the game's high points. It's just really satisfying to hack through the area alongside the Barbarian warriors (you can even support them with any auras or buffs you might have), and feels like your character is part of a bigger war effort in a way the rest of the game doesn't (outside of here and a few named NPCs like Flavie, the only fellow adventurers you see are corpses). And also, the catapults and obstacles etc do at least add a bit of a twist, these areas feel a bit more dynamic than previous ones. I pretty much have to echo this; it's been quite a long time since I last played Diablo 2, but this was one of, if not the only, areas in the game that actually made you feel like you were part of something larger than yourself. As ineffective as they were at killing demons, I went out of my way to try and keep as many of the Barbs alive as I could whenever I went through this area of the game.
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Dec 6, 2022 03:01
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Did I actually explain that Bloody Foothills is like one of the best areas in the game, if not for experience grinding then just for the experience itself? ...I didn't. ...One job, me. One job. I'm trying to think of an area I like more in terms of "this is fun to just play" and I can't really think of one. Favorite vacation spot by far.
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Dec 6, 2022 03:11
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I played my Necromancer to Act 5, and now I have terrible unplayable stutters when outside the town. Also how the hell is Necromancer supposed to take out bosses without employing ABSURD amount of iron maiden + golem cheese? Both Duriel and Diablo clowned on my skele army (interestingly, Mephisto got murdered like a chump by my exceedingly well geared merc, while the skellies tanked his spells), and I had to kill them by chugging mana pots and cheesing them with iron maiden.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:39
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Xarn posted:I played my Necromancer to Act 5, and now I have terrible unplayable stutters when outside the town. You put like, 1 point in Clay Golem and then the rest into something like Bone Spear. Summonmancers at least in vanilla have this critical problem of bosses just clowning on them. However, if you just bring in one respawnable meat shield to distract the boss while you go to town on them with Necro's really good bone spells you can get over that hump. Alternatively while Iron Maiden is fun, it's limited in application. (Only works against melee and only against physical damage. Also requires taking damage.) Decrepify is considerably more potent, especially against bosses. ...The answer to your question is you found the hard part of using skeletons.
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Dec 6, 2022 23:02
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What version of the game are you playing? Iron Maiden + golem suggests to me you might be on an older patch (if you're taking advantage of the bug, which was fixed long ago), and if so skeletons may not be a viable strategy for you (I seem to recall them being pretty unplayable until they were buffed in a few patches, though I don't remember whether it was 1.09 or 1.1x that finally made them work). That said, if you are talking about the current patch... Decrepify is the thing that makes the biggest difference (especially alongside slow from Clay Golem, and even better if you can chill too, like by giving your mercenary cold damage), but obviously it's not usual to have access to that by Duriel (you might if you're on /players8), and depending on player count it's possible to not even have it by Diablo. Those two are definitely the hardest bosses by far for a summoner (yes, on Normal, they're easier later once you're more powerful) and to a certain extent the strategy is just "keep coming back with new minions and eventually you'll win by attrition with a bit of luck". If you're careful, casting the golem in his face can help keep him off the others, though that only goes so far because the lightning hose and fire nova will just kill all your guys. It only gets easier from this point onward.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:32
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I am at 1.14d with few pretty vanilla mods (larger stash, reset talents, similar QoL stuff). I am not aware of any iron maiden + golem bugs  , I just have the patience to recast golem until the boss eventually iron maidens itself to death. Diablo made this super annoying due to the lightning hose instantly murdering the golem, and the AI really liking the hose over attacking.
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Dec 7, 2022 13:02
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Xarn posted:I am at 1.14d with few pretty vanilla mods (larger stash, reset talents, similar QoL stuff). I am not aware of any iron maiden + golem bugs If memory serves, there used to be a bug with how Blood Golem's lifesteal worked when interacting with abilities like Thorns and Iron Maiden. The way Blood Golem is supposed to work is that it leeches health from its target whenever it lands a blow, with some of the health leeched going to the necromancer. With Iron Maiden or Thorns involved though the golem would leech health based off of how much damage the monster dealt to itself instead of how much damage the golem itself had dealt. So, the golem would be effectively immortal as long as it could survive the monster's initial hit, which in turn meant the necromancer could sit back and stay at 100% HP until the monster eventually punched itself to death.
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Dec 7, 2022 14:32
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Diablo's health won't reset while you travel between acts to raise more skeletons. Just use the waypoints to travel back to Act I and kill the easy trash monsters there; repeat as necessary until he's dead. In my experience, Diablo is definitely at his hardest on Normal difficulty, at least for summonmancers. In Nightmare and Hell, by the time you get to him your army should be strong enough to tank everything he has to throw at it.
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Dec 7, 2022 14:38
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Meaty Ore posted:Diablo's health won't reset while you travel between acts to raise more skeletons. Just use the waypoints to travel back to Act I and kill the easy trash monsters there; repeat as necessary until he's dead. Once you're 20/20 in skels + mastery, they are basically untouchable, however. And as soon as you are level 30 and have your one point in Revive, you can just get a stack of fatties to finish any job where the skellies might have issues. Especially Diablo, because he has crushing blow dudes in front of his door. Masterclass, however, is getting a staff with teleport charges and saving your skels like that when Diablo makes a big fire. Won't be easy with the fire ring, however, which on Normal is definitely enough to wipe ya .
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Dec 7, 2022 16:42
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Interesting, I expected my summons to eventually get outscaled. So you are telling me that if I fix the act 5 stutters, the game is gonna keep getting easier? Because apart from act bosses the game already plays itself.
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Dec 8, 2022 01:09
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Xarn posted:Interesting, I expected my summons to eventually get outscaled. So you are telling me that if I fix the act 5 stutters, the game is gonna keep getting easier? Because apart from act bosses the game already plays itself. Pretty much. Summon Necromancer is the only character I've played through Hell with for that reason.
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Dec 8, 2022 04:27
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New update. Ever wanted to go to a Barbarian's house?
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Dec 9, 2022 19:08
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Losers are often traitors and vice versa. Diablo is actually famous for its cow levels, joke areas that are surprisingly dangerous. Wonder what this game’s is like. My bad. There is no cow level. achtungnight fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Dec 10, 2022 |
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Dec 9, 2022 19:46
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Heeey that's still a secret. Spoiler that please. DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Dec 9, 2022 |
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Dec 9, 2022 21:10
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The Succubi here are also the same monster in the first Diablo (though AS describes it as Baal's "personal harem"), and if you weren't convinced being a melee character was a bad idea by the time you meet them, they would do their best to hammer that in. They shoot Bloodstars there too, and enjoyed pelting you with them while you slowly walked up to swing at them a few times before they fly off again, at least if you didn't do the smart thing and played a ranged character. Pain Worms are essentially the Vile Children from Act 4 with a shiny VFX and a more complicated method of spawning. Not much more to say about them given their only method of attack is to bite your ankles. Pooncha fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Dec 9, 2022 |
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Dec 9, 2022 21:20
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I noticed that you don't seem to use skele mages at all. Are they that trash? I kinda like them for the slow, but I have only 1 point in them (+ few from gear) and they definitely aren't keeping up with the skellies (who have the advantage of amplify damage being level 1 curse, lmao).
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Dec 10, 2022 12:00
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I always kind of liked Nihlathak, honestly. I think it's because of the way the voice actor handled him (I always enjoyed going out of the way to see his optional dialogue); you really do get the impression that he might be a bit slimy and unpleasant, but he's conflicted/depressed/resigned about something. And at the time it was pretty novel to have a human villain in this game with an actual motivation other than  . Of course what the game actually has him do is pretty much utter nonsense (and he's had a gigantic evil temple all along? okay then) and squanders any potential he may have had, just like everything else.As a boss, Nihlathak is also interesting, because it's the game giving a nod to the idea that pvp might theoretically exist, a trend we'll see again a bit later in this act. It's not all that similar to an actual pvp fight, but he does use a lot of moves player characters have access to. (And, of course, he can actually be difficult but in a way you can counteract with strategy! Corpse Explosion is extremely dangerous, to the point a lot of characters can be one-shot by it, but you can use various tactics to mitigate it, whether it's using the corpses for your own purposes first, luring the enemies away and killing them far from where you plan to fight him, etc.) We should also talk about Tomb Vipers. These are one of the most infamous enemies in the game, though I'm not actually sure if they can spawn on Normal. They appear only in the Halls of Vaught (the level where Nihlathak is), and they have a buggy poison cloud attack that deals their physical attack damage every frame. (Whenever it checks collision. So if you or any minion move within the poison clouds, you will die very fast, but if you stand still you might be fine.) Nobody really cared until a patch added a special drop to Nihlathak that made him worth running, and all of a sudden it was a huge problem. The best way to mitigate it was stacking integer physical damage reduction (PDR), but not every character could or wanted to do this. Speaking of enemies, several of the enemy types we saw in this update can be quite difficult to deal with. Blood Lords and their analogues (I remember people calling them "Frenzytaurs") may not seem like much now, but especially on higher difficulties it's easy to get mobbed by them, they can hit quite hard and they're durable enough you need to approach them with a plan. And one variant of them is physical immune in Hell, which is a nightmare for any weapon-based character. And then there are the succubi, which deal physical damage with their Blood Stars and can cast Amplify Damage on you; in numbers, especially in areas like Frozen River that have water impassable to you but which they can fire over, they can fill the screen with projectiles while being too far away for you to interact with. (And one variant of these can be physical immune, too!) I don't think it matters what type of character you're playing, at least some of the enemies in Act 5 are going to be very tricky to deal with. DarkMatt posted:...Don't die anymore by the way because it's bugged so that while the permanent resists will still show as active, you lose it on death and only get it back when you start a new game. Fun! No idea if they ever patched this and it's not easy to tell if it's still a bug. I love this game. This is less onerous than it sounds, what you probably saw referred to as "start a new game" effectively just means when it loads your character in for the first time at the beginning of a play session. It's still not as amazing a reward as it sounds once you factor in the resistance penalties from higher difficulties, but we can discuss those once they come up. Unless you're dying frequently and continuing to play long sessions afterward, you can benefit from the scroll more often than not. (And hey, if you play Hardcore, the reward works as intended! Um. Probably not the best fix.) As mentioned, at least in vanilla, the decision of whether to claim the Halls waypoint is a real one. If you don't get it, you have easy access to Pindleskin, as well as a way to effortlessly reroll Anya's shop inventory (mainly useful for traps-based Assassins, in Nightmare and Hell you could very easily shop for claws with +3 to traps or +3 to shadow disciplines). While there were a lot of high-end things he couldn't drop, running Pindleskin was one of the more reliable ways to grind for mid/high tier uniques and set pieces. If you do claim the waypoint though, it's much quicker to run Nihlathak himself, which you may want to do because he drops one of the keys to Uber Tristram (where the game's superbosses live). Xarn posted:I noticed that you don't seem to use skele mages at all. Are they that trash? I kinda like them for the slow, but I have only 1 point in them (+ few from gear) and they definitely aren't keeping up with the skellies (who have the advantage of amplify damage being level 1 curse, lmao). The short answer here is, skeleton mages suck and are very difficult to make viable. They look cool and can contribute on occasion (if nothing else, by distracting enemies from the minions you actually care about), so you may as well put in 1 point and summon them, but they're not worth investing in. Having the poison ones around to negate enemy regen can be kind of nice, they have a very high duration but negligible damage. Cold-type ones are a mixed bag too, the slowing can help but they also lead to corpses shattering which makes it harder to do the rest of your necromancy. People used to talk quite a bit about trying to make "Lord of Mages" builds that focused on them, but I'm not convinced it could actually work. I did try once and he was one of the few characters I actually gave up on entirely and couldn't complete Hell with. Even if you go out of your way to aid them, using Lower Resist as your primary curse, etc... they just don't do enough damage to keep up even when fully optimised. (And there are many more boosts available to physical-based minions, like the various auras you can get from Desert Guards.) I wouldn't be surprised if at least one mod tried to fix them, because they were cool and people liked them but in vanilla they just kind of don't work.
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Dec 10, 2022 18:48
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Xarn posted:I noticed that you don't seem to use skele mages at all. Are they that trash? I kinda like them for the slow, but I have only 1 point in them (+ few from gear) and they definitely aren't keeping up with the skellies (who have the advantage of amplify damage being level 1 curse, lmao). What Explopyro said, but also, Project Diablo 2, the mod my necro is in, adds in a skill to raise skeleton archers as well, which fully benefit from a Might aura the mod adds to the Barbarian mercenaries, so it's a pretty easy 1-2-3 build to focus entirely on physical damage. At least for now. The mage skill is still there but I've never liked using them, even in vanilla. It's much better to make your warriors as strong as possible first instead of splitting your points and power amongst two different minion types. Does PD2 fix them? I dunno. I have a different plan that doesn't involve using skeleton mages. Explopyro posted:I always kind of liked Nihlathak, honestly. I think it's because of the way the voice actor handled him (I always enjoyed going out of the way to see his optional dialogue); you really do get the impression that he might be a bit slimy and unpleasant, but he's conflicted/depressed/resigned about something. And at the time it was pretty novel to have a human villain in this game with an actual motivation other than Ah, yeah that's true. Concept wise the idea of a Barbarian elder who is trying his best to find a better way than "the old way" and is willing to betray as many people as it takes to save his people is a good one. I just find it really hard/grating to sift through his dialogue to find his character because it's extremely hammy, and you're not 3 seconds in before you get the hints that, "Oh. He's a traitor, and his character arc is going to be he's a traitor." Tomb Vipers I'm pretty sure do not spawn in Normal, thankfully. I remember those because most characters are through Nightmare by this point, and yeah their projectiles that leave poison trails are quite buggy.
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Dec 10, 2022 20:02
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Oh well, I don't like mages too much anyway. They keep standing in the doorways, plinking at mobs uselessly, while my skele army + godlike desert guard (seriously, the dude is probably stronger than the rest of my guys together) are stuck behind them.Explopyro posted:
How the hell did diablo get so many patches and keep so much bugged out poo poo in?
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Dec 10, 2022 23:44
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Diablo 2 is a massive ball of individually moving parts, that are difficult to discern which one breaks and didn't. Even if you know the problem, sometimes fixing it could break something else, as well.
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Dec 11, 2022 01:09
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Mechanics Talk 7-Magicfind and /players 8 (All Mechanics Talk assume vanilla Diablo II unless otherwise noted.) So sometimes cool things can drop, and that's a major part of the game, so how do we speed up getting to the good part? There's two solid ways to do it and one of them's a lot more complicated than the other. X% Better Chance to Find Magic Items is misleading. It doesn't mean you get more blues. It means, whenever an item's rarity is rolled, this acts as a multiplier to all probabilities that aren't "keep it a normal/white item". With 100% MF, you'll have twice the chance to get, uhh, every rarity, but most importantly, in theory, your unique drop rate is doubled. In practice though, there's a bit more going on. Any item that drops starts by rolling to see if it's unique, and then checks for set, then rare, then magic, before failing all of those and going down to normal. Because magicfind is a multiplier to all of tose, the actual formula for getting things is simple enough to explain for Uniques, but, not for anything lower because it requires the unique roll and any before it to fail. Again approaching but not daring to try explaining treasure class, certain monsters are more likely to drop the good stuff than others. Like runes in the last Mechanics Talk, when a monster chooses a particular treasure class, it has a chance to actually drop something from that, and each treasure class will list items appropriate for its level. If it fails, it downtiers the treasure class and tries again until it either succeeds or hits the bottom. As you may have also guessed, each higher treasure class is less likely to succeed than the one below it. This makes the highest leveled uniques extremely hard to find, because, in the first place, you must find a monster with the correct treasure class that's high enough to even get a chance. Typically, higher the monster level, better the treasure class. This system has been used to give bosses and superuniques on the highest level maps uniques that are impossible to find anywhere but them, due to a combination of treasure class and monster level reaching the highest it can get. Chests/containers are notoriously hard to get anything out of because even if you open them in an area that's level 85, it tends to just give you garbage. There are, however, some exceptions that do not use treasure classes at all. The one you may have seen is gold chests at the end of optional dungeons. The one I'm interested in are what's dubbed "super chests", which are completely unremarkable except they have a set table of what can drop and don't use treasure classes at all. (I think.) This makes them far more reliable to get loot from than any white monster or normal chest can give you. And yes, some of these combinations is to give you high Runes, which makes specific areas in the game good places to grind. I'll leave it to you to find these yourself, because I have only found conflicting information on which areas are good targets. Also keep in mind gold chests aren't super chests, though some super chests sparkle, just because this is a mechanic they did not set in stone because Diablo II is full of coincidental game design. However, you should grind for these if you want high runes. It's kinda uhh, substantially better than any other way to farm Runes in the game, because super chests cheat. There's no better way to put it. Now, there is no direct downside to stacking as much magicfind as possible, but you are sacrificing functionality to roll better, and there are definitely breakpoints where, if you want this many more uniques, you want this much magicfind and no more. This is because what grinding like a pro entails is a delicate balancing act between magicfind, clearspeed, and the third thing. Whenever a monster rolls to drop something, there is a chance that it just drops nothing. Every monster has this, even bosses. Bosses can roll multiple times but each and every one can just fail and drop nothing. How do you combat this? Simple: you get more players. In multiplayer, it is exactly as I said: join games with more players in it. It's complicated, but the simplest way to put it is get in a band of 8 and be in the same area together. In singleplayer though, this is hitting enter to open up the chat and entering in a specific command: /players 8 There is little use for the chat in singleplayer but that's the biggest one. (/nopickup is a thing as well but ehh.) It acts as if your game has that many players in it, and does its changes based on how many players are in it. Increased players do the following things to monsters per extra player in it: -Gives them more life. -Makes them deal slightly more damage. -Makes them give more experience. -Lowers the chance the monster skips a drop. It's that last part we're interested in, though, the "more experience" part is also useful. If you have the clearspeed for it, increasing player count will give you more experience over time and allow you to completely outpace the game. (It's why I haven't been using it except for off-screen grinding.) As you add in more players, the base chance for a "nodrop" roll goes down. At 7 or 8 it gets as low as it can get. (weird math means dropping to 7 is neglible.) Course, the balancing factor is that the monster take considerably longer to kill per each player. This is normally counter-balanced by the other 7 players dealing damage as well...but in single player you're the only one around. ...And magicfind only cares about who lands the killing blow, so everyone has to bring their own magicfind to improve the quality of drops. There is, however, one exception to this rule: your minions. Your minions get your magicfind, but for whatever reason, magicfind works funny when it's on both you and your merc. If your mercenary gets a kill, it doesn't just use its own magicfind, it adds yours as well, which means if you both have 500% MF, a merc killing something will have 10 times the chance to get a unique. Of course, this has some drawbacks, and the most obvious one is that your merc has to make the kill and not you. Last I checked the best merc builds can clear content fairly well, not on the hardest difficulty, so for certain things this is a good idea, but if what you're looking for is elite uniques or high runes, then this is not worth doing. Oh and, remember that your merc, unless a mod has something to say about it, only has three or four slots for gear, which severely hampers how much MF you can stack. So, all that explained, here's what you, the end-user, do. Deal as much damage as possible, because your clearspeed is the primary factor on how many times you will roll for what you want over a period of time. There's graphs and stuff for finding the optimal rate to grind given how fast you can clear monsters and how much MF you have. You can find those yourself. I'm just gonna say that you should keep the following in mind when trying to grind like a champ: -You must first be able to actually MAKE said rolls at an efficient rate. If you can't cleave through hordes of monsters on /players 1, setting it up to /players 8 is not gonna give you more drops. If anything it gives you less. (You'd have to go veeeery slow for it to not give you more experience though.) Going from 1->2 is a bigger difference than 7->8, but you will definitely want to pick a setting that doesn't grind demon slaying to a halt for where you want to grind. -Magicfind is only relevant for finding uniques, sets, rares, and jewels. If what you're looking for is runes, charms, and even white items, magicfind is either useless or detrimental. Explicitly, if you are looking for a socketed white item to put a runeword into, you want to run 0 magicfind. -Playercount gets you more drops and nothing else. (itemwise) It also has a clear drawback as you raise the count since it asks you to have ever higher damage output to keep pace. It is, however, worth striking a balance between, "You clear it fast enough," and, "You benefit from the lower nodrop chance." Experimentation is key. Finally, there are limits to what magicfind and /players 8 can do, but luckily they aren't the same for both of them, save for one thing: Magicfind: -Does not improve quantity of drops. -Does not affect drops that have no particular rarity. This means dropped charms, gems, and runes do not care about MF. -Does not cause better tiered items to drop. Player count: -Does not improve quality of drops. -Does not cause better tiered items to drop. That last part is what makes this annoying: you can drop as many items as you want but they are all subject to having a chance to just roll as a boring item you'd find on normal instead of an exceptional or elite item where permitted. This is because neither of these mechanics give you a better chance for the treasure class to roll successfully. I bring this up, because sets and uniques are tied to what item base drops, so the best you can do is indirectly improve those drop chances by increasing the amount of spins you make. The Countess is a fun example of treasure class and nodrop insanity as well, because her guaranteed rune drops happen after normal rolls, and most monsters are capped to dropping six items at a time. Once they drop 6 they stop rolling. Potions last I check don't count thankfully, but it does mean the Countess is best ran, by yourself, because with many players you may just get no runes. (It's also better from a grinding perspective online: 8 players grinding Countess gets more runes than 1 party of 8.) One last tidbit before I let you go: bosses, when you kill them the first time on each difficulty, will have a much, much greater chance of dropping magic items. Afterwards, while their drops are still better than most everyone else, you won't be getting constant yellows, greens, and golds from them.
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Dec 11, 2022 20:39
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Something that has been bugging me ever since I wrote the story for this act: what the hell is even the point of the siege? There is no reason for Baal to want to attack Harrogath, unless he happens to know in advance that the Hero will be ported there, however in that case the siege is a misnomer: it's then a defensive effort to slow the Hero down. Even so, Harrogath is a tiny backwater village that guards the path up the sacred mountain, so presumably, you'd kind of have to pass through it to get up there? But the siege is spread all over the flanks of the mountain, so Baal just bypassed it: how? Presumably due to Nihlathak's betrayal, which lowered some sort of barrier, but that means Baal set the siege up, on the mountain side of Harrogath, after he had already gotten exactly what he wanted. Again, it only barely makes sense if it's explicitly meant to slow down the Hero's efforts, and again, it's not a siege then. Keep also in mind that Baal effortlessly annihilated the Barbarian capital after the opening cutscene happened, so once the barrier was gone, he should have had no issues smashing Harrogath like an insect. Of course, he was busy scaling the mountain, but does that mean his army is, like, 1% as effective without him around? None of this makes any sense.
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Dec 12, 2022 15:20
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Simply Simon posted:Something that has been bugging me ever since I wrote the story for this act: what the hell is even the point of the siege? To give the children something to play with. A demon horde doesn't go somewhere to just sit around and play pattycake. You gotta give them something to do. ...also you give Baal the idea that he can wreck something he's gonna do it. ...Break-it Baal.
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Dec 12, 2022 20:25
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I believe Harrogath is where the barbarians organize and deploy from rather than physically blocking access as part of the mountain's fortifications. Baal's army somehow blindsided Arreat's standing forces, then occupied their fortifications and sieged the city to prevent reinforcements while Baal detoured to bypass Arreat Summit. In a better story, Baal would have leveraged the siege/prisoners/Anya for the paperweight that let him disable the Ancients after they stonewalled him, but in D2 Nihlathak pointlessly betrays the only thing he seemingly cares about to doom Sanctuary and die alone in a desolate burial temple.
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Dec 12, 2022 22:41
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Baal is the lord of destruction, after all. What is he going to do, leave a city near him unrazed?
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Dec 13, 2022 01:30
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The personalization quest is odd because it’s such a cool concept but I honestly don’t know if I ever used it or even regularly heard/saw people using it. Oh sure, the very first time, you’d try it out, but then afterwards, it would typically just sit there unused. If the item is replaceable, then you wouldn’t bother because it’s hard to get attached to something you already know you’re dumping in a couple levels. If the item is extremely good, then I wouldn’t want to mark it because of hand-me-down or trade reasons. Magic find (and item generation generally) is interesting. Because of the specific time frame this game came out/was in its prime (early 2000’s), that it could still maintain a bit of mystery . Even a few years later, there would have been some online programmed stuff for you to instantly look up whatever you needed and figure out the drop dates and the best farm location and etc…but at the time, tracking down the best source for ___ was a non-trivial exercise, often requiring you to do a bit of your own cross-referencing of various item levels and monster levels and etc to figure poo poo out. Also, when the expansion first released, Nihl was typically a quest that got entirely skipped. Pindle was a super nice super-unique to run, Nihl himself was a pain in the rear end, and his temple was annoying. So people would basically grab the quest for the red portal and then leave the actual quest undone. His drop was later buffed to help encourage people to do it.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:03
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