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Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

I think I might have assumed Baal was attacking Harrogath in an effort to get the relic, until Nihlathak handed it over to him? But that isn't really supported by the text either. It's :moreevil: again.

Weirdly for me, I don't think I have that much to add to the technical discussion of Magic Find and drop formulae. (Although I guess I should mention that the most common slang for this stat was "MF" and hunting items with it was called "MFing"... yes, this makes puerile jokes very easy and I'm sure I've heard them all.)

Although I did attempt to explain "super chests" back when we covered Lower Kurast... it's not that they have a fixed table, exactly, they're just bugged to use only 16 bits of the seed instead of 32, so for each player count there are 65535 possible drop patterns instead of 4294967295. This made it so people could catalogue the possible drops and if there happened to be something good like a high rune in one of them, that made the odds better than other sources. This is how absurd rune drop rates are (even after 1.13 increased the odds of high runes by a factor of ten). Lower Kurast was the most popular place to run for them, because they were very easy to identify there; some people also tried to run them in River of Flame but it was a lot less reliable.

The formulae changed quite a lot over the years with the various patches, or at least they were often buggy in older ones. Famously, in some earlier versions, there were breakpoints you could reach where bosses would drop nothing but sets, or even nothing but uniques. This was obviously very abusable, though it was quite difficult to reach the amount of MF needed. In current versions of the game, there are substantial diminishing returns applied to MF (more specifically, to the "unique find", "set find", and "rare find" stats that are derived from it) to prevent this from happening.

(And, of course, complicating this is that sometimes people wanted to hunt items with no MF. If you were looking for non-magical base items to make runewords in, too much MF was actively detrimental. Some of the optional dungeons people wouldn't otherwise touch ended up being popular for this, because in Hell they have the highest possible area level of 85 and could therefore drop anything; in particular, the Pit in Act 1 and the Ancient Tunnels in Act 2 were most popular.)

One other fun thing: there were ways to get the first time kill bonus ("quest drop") on a boss multiple times. I don't remember exactly how to do it (because it isn't worth it), I think it involved creating the game with a character who hadn't completed the quest, and having another character kill the boss while not in a party with them? (Oh and then on top of this, there was a helpful bug which frequently caused Andariel to get stuck giving the quest drop every time you killed her. I think all you had to do to trigger this was immediately talk to Warriv and go to the next act after killing her, without talking to any other NPCs? Very easy to do this by accident for obvious reasons.)

MF also has no effect on shops or gambling, in case anyone might have been wondering.

I always played on /players8 just because I found it more fun/challenging, the boosted drop rates were just an added bonus. Setting it to anything lower than that just felt like cheating to me even if it might've technically been more optimal.

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DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
New update. Time to finish mountain climbing.

FPzero
Oct 20, 2008

Game Over
Return of Mido

I just fought these guys earlier today in ES playing as a Bowazon and had a relatively easy time pushing through. I think it's because my Magic Arrow skill is level 20 and they don't resist it well. But I do remember being carried through Hell in ES years ago and yeah those guys were not joking around.

Spoggerific
May 28, 2009
The quest reward for defeating the ancients is a free level up. If you're 10% away from the next level and complete the quest, then you'll level up once and still be 10% away from the next level after that.

However, if I remember correctly, it's not actually a direct level up - you just get a huge drop of experience that's capped at one full level's worth. 99% of the time your character will be a low enough level when you finish the quest that you'll hit that cap, but sometimes, mostly in hell difficulty, if you've done a ton of grinding, you won't hit the cap and you'll get less than an entire level's worth. While looking up the details for this on the Arreat Summit (heh), I found something that I had actually never known about the quest.

Arreat Summit posted:

Notes: You cannot get credit for this quest unless your Character Level is at least 20 on Normal difficulty, at least 40 in Nightmare, and at least 60 on Hell difficulty.

I guess this means that it's impossible to beat the game and move on to the next difficulty unless you're a high enough level. Anyone playing through the game normally will almost certainly be at those levels already, but I guess people getting rushed in multiplayer might not be. I don't remember ever running into this when I was playing back then, though.

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

I played through them recently myself as a Paladin using Vengeance with Fanaticism aura without too much trouble, though they did keep me on my toes (playing vanilla with PlugY). I'm not sure it would go so well on higher difficulties, though.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
The ancients on normal did not pose meaningful challenge to my skele army... I got drops that give me +3 to all necro skills, so I have 9 skeleton poo poo kickers and very damaging mercenary.


I also figured out that clay golem is really good actually :v:

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
New update. Let's take a look at that stone.

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

DarkMatt posted:

Achmel is a mystery. He's still just as much of an rear end in a top hat as other Greater Mummies, but he doesn't get a monster mod. Instead, he gets a unique aura, exclusive to him, that adds a very hefty amount of poison damage to attacks, including his.

As I understand it, technically speaking he actually has a "Poison Enchanted" modifier that is exclusive to him and gives those properties to him and his minions, it just doesn't have associated display text so it's invisible. Under the hood it's just like any other unique monster modifier.

DarkMatt posted:

Finally, he may decide, he's so nice, we're gonna get him twice. Vile Effigy clones Baal, and the only difference is the clone will have half of Baal's current life. The only way to tell them apart is to notice one of them is dropping down much faster than the other, because their visual healthbar will be the exact same until you make a gap. It also gets weaker the less health Baal has, so, again, Baal can be nice and almost never use this or be mean and fire this off really early in the fight. This is bad if he does this, because two Baals with no differences except for Life is especially dangerous, and, takes forever.

Fun fact, there's an interface difference that lets you tell the two Baals apart (at least in vanilla, I'm not sure if the mods kept it since a lot of them mess with the health bars). "Demon" appears centred for the real Baal, while the fake Baal has it off-centre relative to his name (the D aligns with the B iirc). This tip was brought to you courtesy of the official strategy guide that came packaged with many versions of the game, I rarely see people actually talking about it.

Of course, identifying the real Baal only goes so far, because the clone's attacks still do full damage and it dies much faster than the real one, so often you're better off just killing it first anyway.

DarkMatt posted:

Fun fact: The Minions of Destruction are curse immune, so I cannot break them up. Shame. That would've been a good answer to this blob of meat.

This sounds like a change the mod made, maybe? In vanilla they're definitely immune to the AI curses (Terror, Dim Vision, Confuse), but I know other curses like Decrepify worked just fine on them.

Eastern Sun's version of the boss rush is pretty cool, I didn't expect them to do something like that. Of course, I'd imagine slogging through this gets a lot more irritating if you decide you want to do Baal runs or something.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010

Explopyro posted:

In vanilla they're definitely immune to the AI curses (Terror, Dim Vision, Confuse), but I know other curses like Decrepify worked just fine on them.

Do you know how much an edge case like that causes my eye to twitch? Because I can't even prove that in the LP mods because the only curse I use is Terror aaaaaaaa!

MagusofStars
Mar 31, 2012



This is a stellar capstone of the game. You can tell that they used the lessons learned from watching players do the end of Acts 1-4 and applied them right here. The packs are challenging the first couple times, they’re varied, it’s a nice refresher of previous Acts, and it remains fun even when you’re over leveled and face rolling it. Baal himself is mechanically interesting and difficult without feeling unfair.

One important thing not noted: The super-unique and minion packs here are worth an absolute fuckload of experience - especially the Minions of Destruction. The first couple times you did Baal runs, we’re talking multiple levels of experience between the Throne and Baal himself. It was extremely common in Normal Act 5 to do Bloody Foothills Runs till you could get this far, then do a half dozen or more Baal runs before moving on to Nightmare Act 1 because Throne/Baal Normal was way better experience than anything from the first Act or more in Nightmare.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
How do I shore up my resistances for nightmare? I am at -20 cold, and frozen nova from superuniques almost kills me.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

DarkMatt posted:

Do you know how much an edge case like that causes my eye to twitch? Because I can't even prove that in the LP mods because the only curse I use is Terror aaaaaaaa!

Isn't Amp Damage still a thing? Is it just not worth it at one point or is it just not in the same spot on the tree?

MagusofStars
Mar 31, 2012



Xarn posted:

How do I shore up my resistances for nightmare? I am at -20 cold, and frozen nova from superuniques almost kills me.
Basically, you just need to get gear with +resist on it. One easy answer to this if your character uses shields is to just grab a socketed shield and slam some gems into it - sapphires for cold resist specifically or diamonds for everything. But if you don't use shields (and most characters don't), then you need to get it elsewhere on your gear, most likely from mods on rings or amulets. Charms can work do this too of course, but presumably if you already had charms you'd be using them.

Some skills can help too - several classes have things like Fade or Natural Resistance or Salvation Aura which can help patch up holes in your resists.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
Right, obviously the answer is resistance gear, but getting a socketed shrunken head with useful modifiers is basically impossible :v: Thanks to talking about it, I realized I can huge shield with diamonds and switch to it to handle bosses.


And yeah, I have few charms that give like 1% to specific resistances. Not really useful.

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

You get as quest rewards runes for the Ancient's Pledge Runeword which give a hefty boost to all resistances and a permanent 10 percent boost to all resistances. I'm pretty sure the programmers put these in explicitly to deal with the Nightmare penalty; IIRC between the two rewards they add up to more than 50% for everything. It's just a matter of finding a suitable shield, which as mentioned can be difficult depending on your class.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
Would help if they told you the order to put the runes in, or just the runeword it made. because the wrong order means you don't get the really good shield runeword.

Xarn posted:

Right, obviously the answer is resistance gear, but getting a socketed shrunken head with useful modifiers is basically impossible :v: Thanks to talking about it, I realized I can huge shield with diamonds and switch to it to handle bosses.


And yeah, I have few charms that give like 1% to specific resistances. Not really useful.

I prioritize gear with resists for a reason. Act 5 is about the point where you'll find gear (and charms) that will roll good enough resists to contribute. I love good sticks and heads, but if I find a really good resist shield and I'm hurtin for resists I'm taking the shield. They did kind of scaled damage around you having maxed resists, so being -20 instead of 75 means you're taking something like 5 times the cold damage you should be taking. It's a good idea to grind at the end of a difficulty, both Normal and Nightmare, to round out and improve gear, especially stuff that will cap your resists. Damage output doesn't mean a lot if you die in a couple of mistakes instead of a number you can react to.

DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Dec 18, 2022

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015

Meaty Ore posted:

You get as quest rewards runes for the Ancient's Pledge Runeword which give a hefty boost to all resistances and a permanent 10 percent boost to all resistances. I'm pretty sure the programmers put these in explicitly to deal with the Nightmare penalty; IIRC between the two rewards they add up to more than 50% for everything. It's just a matter of finding a suitable shield, which as mentioned can be difficult depending on your class.

I actually forgot about that. Guess I am putting that into shield next time I play :v:



I also looked at the wiki for the shield rune words. Spirit looks really good and I could build it from my runes, but apparently getting 4 socket shield is impossible at start of nightmare (if you are not paladin).

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

There are a couple of reasonably easy runewords that can help with resistance if you know about them (one even can go in shrunken heads!).

Qual-Kehk hands you Ancients' Pledge (Ral, Ort, Tal in a 3-socket shield), which on its own should be enough to get you out of negatives for Nightmare. It just doesn't do much of anything else, and is definitely a last resort kind of option, but it'll get the job done.

There's also Smoke (Nef, Lum in a 2-socket armour) which will give 50 resist all and some FHR, it's a really great armour if you can get the runes and honestly I've seen some characters wear this to endgame. The other one you'll want to know about is Rhyme (Shael, Eth in a 2-socket shield), this gives 25% resist all and some boosts to blocking among other things, and most importantly it works in shrunken heads. If you get a non-magical head with decent skill bonuses, you can slot this in and have an endgame-worthy shield.

Truthfully, though, a summoning necromancer probably doesn't need to care as much about resistances as most other characters, since you can just let your minions do the fighting and focus on avoiding getting hit yourself.

Most characters definitely do need to prioritise resistances, though (at least for fire and lightning).

Edit: Spirit shields are really good and best-in-slot for most spellcasters (under most circumstances). But there are some caveats: unless you're a paladin, you'll need to get a Monarch shield to have 4 sockets, which is an elite item you won't be finding until mid-Hell and requires 156 strength to equip. Also, Spirit is one of the "ladder-only" runewords, if you're playing offline you will need a mod to enable it.

Explopyro fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 18, 2022

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
Actually yeah just, runewords in general are ez-bake fixes to gear because all the early ones are super OP for where you can get them. That makes me want to just post the links to the vanilla runewords, or at least do a bit on the good ones.

As always, if you need the runes for said words and they're pretty low tier, that means it's Countess'o'clock. You can get up to tier 8 on Normal, 16 on Nightmare, and all the way up to 24 on Hell. (Provided I read Amazon Basin correctly.) Course, maybe not hope for ones near the tippy top of the difficulty, especially not like, 23 or 24. Those take a while. A long while, and there's still like 10 more.

NGDBSS
Dec 30, 2009






DarkMatt posted:

New update. Let's take a look at that stone.


:eng101: The Mephisto Tamer's sprites are taken from Belhifet, technically a devil and the final boss of Icewind Dale 1.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
New update. It's time to save the world.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
So, that's that. We have finished the game. Sanctuary is...and we can rest easy.

So, what's next for the LP?
  • First off, the spoiler rule is gone. Feel free to discuss all the things about Diablo now, including resurrected things and even content much later on.
  • For those who are new, completing the game has unlocked a new difficulty: Nightmare. It's also teased the final difficulty: Hell. I have unfortunate news regarding the LP though: Nightmare's boring as all hell, and the mods don't do a whole lot to make it more interesting. (Median XL does quite a bit of changes, but they all carry into Hell, which has MUCH more going for it than Nightmare.) It's honestly because making this game interesting 3 times over was definitely too hard. Our mods can really only make it interesting twice over. That means, once the last Normal updates go up, I will probably zoom through Nightmare so we can get to the good stuff.
  • So far we haven't seen a lot of mod content in this LP, save for ES and MXL. Thankfully, once Hell starts up, that should change and the later updates should now focus on mod content and how they make the end of Diablo II unique in their own ways.
  • I am likely to take a break after a couple updates to finish up playing the characters and get a backlog set up again. I burned through it all. I don't expect this to take too long but I never know how long it takes me to shake off burnout. I played a lot of Diablo II. Some may say too much, and I'm not done yet.

achtungnight
Oct 5, 2014
I get my fun here. Enjoy!
Tyrael becomes the Archangel of Wisdom at the end of Diablo 3. This should surprise and worry you, considering how much you dislike him.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010

achtungnight posted:

Tyrael becomes the Archangel of Wisdom at the end of Diablo 3. This should surprise and worry you, considering how much you dislike him.

Knowing what I know about 3, and yet not knowing this specifically, I'm just sitting here going "Well those sure are words to just call anyone."

Hey can you call me archangel of wisdom? Thanks.

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

DarkMatt posted:

First off, the spoiler rule is gone. Feel free to discuss all the things about Diablo now, including resurrected things and even content much later on.

This LP has been fun to read, and remember all those hours kid me spent with Diablo 2. Some thoughts in general:

The game has a few specific things that I still remember and go :argh: inside: The maggot lair is annoying to navigate because the corridors are so small, and it's full of enemies on top of that, and you sort of have to go down there. I remember the little dudes (fetishes?) in act 3 being annoying, too, but at least they're sort of fun to kill, right? I'm not exactly a fan of act 1's general aesthetic, either, it's basically England where it just rains all the time, the other acts have more exotic-seeming locales. Duriel is just a dick move all around, game, and playing the game on a crappy not-exactly-2000's-era-computer meant that in some version he just killed you before the level would load.

I have never put in the kind of work that DarkMatt has presented here about the deeper game mechanics, and I never got into the multiplayer scene, so all I personally know of Diablo is running it solo as a dungeon crawler experience. And on the whole, Diablo 2 is pretty good just at that, too. The game has some really creative places, like the M. C. Escher stuff in the Arcane Sanctuary, and while the soggy jungles of act 3 are huge, sprawlingly massive places, they feel like a challenge and also a fun place to just poke around in. Aside from the maggot lair, I also like the desert theme in act 2, I don't really understand what the cat enemies are doing there but the rest of it was interesting and exciting.

What was perhaps most novel to me reading this LP was DarkMatt's critique of the plot of Diablo 2. Playing the game as a dumb kid, I honest to goodness didn't care about the plot. I had a necromancer making skeletons, and the skeletons killed monsters, and I was pretty happy with just that experience. I don't really care about the plot in Doom (1993), either, I just enjoy the experience of having a demon-killing simulator to play with. As we have seen through the LP, though, Diablo 2 does... Sort of try to have a plot, and it's not exactly great. The game wants the player to have a reason for clicking on monster sprites millions of times, or not in the case of a necromancer, and the game also wants to justify the player visiting all these locales, exploring and running through dungeons and so on. For all I cared back then, or even now, it seemed sufficient that we were chasing after the demon lords forever going east and the player following, exploring new places along the way. The story about a great cosmic struggle does not add anything to the experience, I would say, and DarkMatt trying to make sense out of it very clearly shows how frustrating it is. The single-player Diablo 2 world came off to me as a very solitary place. You are playing the hero, you can have a helper buddy but the helper buddies are never really characters at all, and the core game-play loop is fundamentally about killing monsters and getting loot. It's a very much you against the world-scenario, in that sense.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
If I just want to sit back and summon all of the skeletons/golems/whatever and blend my way through enemies with my own horde of minions, what would be the best of these mods to look into?

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010

Rappaport posted:

This LP has been fun to read, and remember all those hours kid me spent with Diablo 2. Some thoughts in general:

I somewhat played multiplayer but my brother sold me on the idea of all it doing is introducing you to lag deaths. I stayed in singleplayer.

To be fair Doom's plot can be summed up in a paragraph right outside the game, and it is. ...Heck if we wanna talk about stories of action games Doom's knows to stay out of the way of people who just want to immerse, so it's there for people who like to know who they are and what they're doing, which Doom satisfies pretty well imo. Diablo is an interesting experiment in trying to take that same 90s satanism/demon slaying kink and turn it into an epic. It was pretty barebones in Diablo I, but it also had a mountain of lore behind it. The difference is that what you're doing in Diablo I is far more straightforward than Diablo II, so it's easier to write around. Diablo II tries to introduce so many concepts and stakes to it while still treating the story behind it as poetry instead of an epic, that as you can see, the moment I try to prove it's a good story it trips over itself and I just look like an idiot.

What sucks is that on paper, the Eternal Conflict and the strive to end it, is good writing material. If you frame the actions of angels and demons, even mortals, as trying to end the foreverwar, then a lot of the character motivation makes sense. They almost never write that angle with Diablo though, and I think this is mainly because the people you play are not part of that war whatsoever because everyone in-universe tries to keep you out of it. Yet they wind up being dragged into the war but then they never really side with anyone. Your character in the game is designed to have no stake in the overarching plot, which is why it's never interesting to play a nephalem in Diablo. It's not just that, it's that you're supposed to be the proof of peace despite the war, but they never work that angle as well. Only reason you ever slay a demon is because they want to destroy your house. That's the only angle they ever take with why you fight evil, and you could care less about the reason why demons keep on pouring in and angels look at you sideways.

The true frustration is that there's a good story to be told here; or rather, a good story can be told with what they've got, but that's not something that constitutes the "good Diablo game" stereotype, so they never bother to get the player to care about what they're fighting for.

...I may or may not include these points in a later update.

Dirk the Average posted:

If I just want to sit back and summon all of the skeletons/golems/whatever and blend my way through enemies with my own horde of minions, what would be the best of these mods to look into?

Project Diablo 2 or Resurgence, imo.

PD2 demonstrated quite well how good summons are throughout the game, since you can make as many corpses as you need. To give a bit of insight into later, I've found that respeccing to drop the skeletons in favor of golems the moment you reach Hell difficulty is actually very effective, because with points you can have 5 golems of a blend of whatever you want. You also get a teleport skill at level 24. If you don't mind the lack of mapreveal that's what I would go for.

Resurgence is like PD2, except you don't get mages. You just get skeleton warriors and archers. Still get a teleport skill and, curiously, a skill to raise Zombies. What it doesn't have, however, is the ability to make infinite corpses, so you can't roll through bosses, but to me that's what golems are for. Also Resurgence has mapreveal so you don't have to get lost in the jungle.

Eastern Sun starts you off with Revive. Raise Skeleton Warrior is a level 12 skill instead. Eastern Sun is probably not chill. (At least that Necro gets Hydra and can summon one of each Golem.)

Median XL, uhh, has its 8 skill trees, but they still have summons and something resembling curses. Median XL actually has item mods for improving minion life and damage. Although it's MXL so there's a lot of skill buttons to consider, all the summons don't require any corpses and they're fairly good. Given its nature though, I probably wouldn't recommend this for something to turn your brain off on. You can also decide to instead focus on totems instead of minions, because they have a totem tree.

MagusofStars
Mar 31, 2012



Your last couple paragraphs about Diablo II in the update really nail my overall feeling about Diablo II: The gameplay was (and remains) remarkably fun. There's some flaws, difficulty spikes, quirky systems, ways to unintentionally screw yourself over, and a dumb story...but the actual clicky-clicky is incredibly enjoyable. Back when Diablo II vanilla and then LoD first came out, a lot of gaming media used the phrase "virtual crack" (cocaine) to describe it because the reward cycle fed on itself so well - you could always find time for just a few quick runs because the actual gameplay loop of "fun time killing monsters, see tons of loot, use loot to have even more fun killing monsters" worked so well.

DarkMatt posted:

I have unfortunate news regarding the LP though: Nightmare's boring as all hell, and the mods don't do a whole lot to make it more interesting. (Median XL does quite a bit of changes, but they all carry into Hell, which has MUCH more going for it than Nightmare.) It's honestly because making this game interesting 3 times over was definitely too hard. Our mods can really only make it interesting twice over. That means, once the last Normal updates go up, I will probably zoom through Nightmare so we can get to the good stuff.
Nightmare difficulty falls in a bit of an awkward spot - the player characters have all their level 30 skills unlocked and you're starting to really rack up points to start maxing out specific key abilities, so you're absolutely rolling...but the enemies aren't that much more powerful than Normal. As long as you have some +resist gear to not take crazy damage from elemental spells, Nightmare can oddly enough be quicker/easier than either Hell OR Normal difficulties. Particularly in Nightmare Act 1 and 2, because the base monster types are so much more simplistic than late game monsters that those acts are legit easier than the nasty monsters from Normal Act 4/5. I mentioned this with regards to XP, but the general multiplayer strategy was to do a bunch of Throne/Baal runs to gain XP before truly moving on to Nightmare, which then meant you were high enough level that you basically cakewalked all the way to late Act 3 (Travincal/Meph), no questions asked.

DarkMatt posted:

To be fair Doom's plot can be summed up in a paragraph right outside the game, and it is. ...Heck if we wanna talk about stories of action games Doom's knows to stay out of the way of people who just want to immerse, so it's there for people who like to know who they are and what they're doing, which Doom satisfies pretty well imo.
I've heard the lead designer for Doom 2016 and Eternal talk about it before and his guiding philosophy was basically "if you paid 60 bucks for a Doom game, you know what you're buying, this is a game about killing a shitload of demons, enough said". And it's why they made various choices like throwing you straight into combat at the very start of Doom 2016, Doomguy ripping a speaker out of the wall rather than listen to an NPC explain the plot, putting almost all the long lore dumps in the optional Codex, etc.

MagusofStars fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Dec 22, 2022

Falconer
Dec 7, 2003

Did you know, I was THE MOON once!

Yes! You see, one night it turned out the moon had been STOLEN!

The animal people asked ME to take its place as I am so WISE and BRILLIANT!!
I'll second that a summon necro is rough starting out in Eastern Sun. On top of what DarkMatt noted, you can't learn Amplify Damage until level 6. This isn't too bad though because Weaken is available at level 1 and reduces physical resist almost as much as Amp does (-60% vs Amp's -80%) on top of reducing enemy damage by 33%. So, you can reroll the odd charm you start with for +1 Weaken to make the journey to level 6 (Amp Damage and Clay Golem) not as painful.

Ideally one of the sets dropped by Corpsefire and/or Bishibosh is the Infernal Set (wand/cap/belt wilth +2 necro skills and +2 summon skills in particular) but any set will do given the kinds of bonuses even a partial set can give.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
PD2 sounds like it was made by someone madly in love with necro. The one weakness to having a summon army just gone. Golems pumped up. Built-in teleport.

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010

Xarn posted:

PD2 sounds like it was made by someone madly in love with necro. The one weakness to having a summon army just gone. Golems pumped up. Built-in teleport.

It's a love relationship with minions and a hate relationship with curses.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
:hmmyes:

To be fair, amplify being level 1 1-point wonder is bonkers.

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
Turns out that on nightmare baal is pretty easy. But I think the drops are more insulting than if he dropped nothing

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

That looks like Duriel, though?

Also lol. Five (sc)rolls of TP. I think that's the worst boss drop I've ever seen.

Meaty Ore fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Dec 23, 2022

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
Duriel's telling you one thing, and that's to get out.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Would it have been better or worse if it were 5 tomes of TP?

Xarn
Jun 26, 2015
Do tomes even drop?


Meaty Ore posted:

That looks like Duriel, though?

Also lol. Five (sc)rolls of TP. I think that's the worst boss drop I've ever seen.

It is Duriel, I just got my wires crossed with the last update chat about Baal :doh:

DarkMatt
Nov 3, 2010
Tomes do not drop.

Also it would be better because that's five free halves of a ticket to ride.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Yeah, but like 5 TP scrolls might just be a mod conflict or oversight with someone leaving a default in place. 5 tomes of TP means someone specifically chose to make 5 tomes of TP drop just as an extra specific gently caress you.

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Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

Even in vanilla, IIRC, Duriel is guaranteed to drop a scroll of TP as a failsafe because there's no other way out of the chamber. I don't think I've ever seen him drop this many, personally, but it's definitely possible for him to drop the scroll and nothing else.

There are many, many reasons nobody ever did Duriel runs.

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