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I, too, have been hit with Duriel: Oops All (TP) Scrolls! edition.
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Dec 25, 2022 04:33
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 06:35 |
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I can't believe I haven't noticed the Duriel get out surprise yet. I do however legitimately think I never got hit by it. Fun fact, speaking of Duriel: I have no idea how you get out of Duriel's chamber in Median XL. Town Portal's (which I keep on calling Teleport) a skill, not a scroll, and the map disables teleporting. The game does give you a portal the first time around, but subsequent runs I just softlock and have to restart. DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Dec 25, 2022 |
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Dec 25, 2022 06:43
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Merry Chrimbus. For your support, I prepared a little something for you.
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Dec 25, 2022 08:37
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 I've been waiting for this update. I don't have a whole lot to add, there is an item set that drops exclusively in the cow level. It's balanced for normal difficulty, so it's not great, but it does have a couple useful stats on it - 125% magic find, 30% run/walk and attack speed, and 35% damage to mana on the full set. It also gives you a chance to cast static field when struck, which takes a percentage chunk of the remaining HP of everything nearby. It's a great skill for bosses and uniques, but a chance on being hit is not particularly reliable, especially for ranged characters. One other secret that fueled a massive rumor mill in Diablo 2 is the chat gem that showed up in the multiplayer lobby UI. There was a little blue gem in the middle of the screen that you could click, and clicking it would change the color to purple and display the message "Gem Activated" in the message log. Clicking it would change the color back and show "Gem Deactivated". There was also a very rare chance for it to say "Perfect Gem Activated". There was... a lot of speculation and discussion about just what the hell the chat gem did. As far as I can remember, nothing has ever been conclusively proven, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually do anything at all. 
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Dec 25, 2022 08:55
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I know you did a brief write-up of each mod back in the OP, but now that you've run through all of them side-by-side, did anything change your opinions of any of the mods?quote:Also, I'm pretty sure it did not take long to find the recipe to unlock the Secret Cow Level. Not because gamers are bored, but because cube recipes are easily moddable. By 2000, modders and hackers were starting to really poke and prod at games to do various things to them. This is the only explanation I can believe in because people back then were completely on their own for figuring out how to smash a pegleg and a book together. One particular note about the Cow King is that he is always Lightning Immune, on every difficulty. So one popular tactic to safely farm the Cows over and over without risking accidentally locking yourself out was to bring someone who specialized in lightning damage. Javelin Amazons with Lightning Fury were particularly popular choices to run cows since they can do huge AoE damage very quickly but the AoE effect is pure lightning. Spoggerific posted:I've been waiting for this update. I don't have a whole lot to add, there is an item set that drops exclusively in the cow level. It's balanced for normal difficulty, so it's not great, but it does have a couple useful stats on it - 125% magic find, 30% run/walk and attack speed, and 35% damage to mana on the full set. It also gives you a chance to cast static field when struck, which takes a percentage chunk of the remaining HP of everything nearby. It's a great skill for bosses and uniques, but a chance on being hit is not particularly reliable, especially for ranged characters.
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Dec 25, 2022 13:39
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I don't pretend to know what the circumstances were that made it happen, but the isometric (first two) Fallout games, which were roughly around the same era as Diablos 1 and 2, had a creature that was called a brahmin, and it's a two-headed cow. There's some more or less silly quests associated with brahmin, and if the player character dialogues with a brahmin enough, it will say "Moo, I say!" which I guess is the sort of humour you found in 90's games. And in a very weird tangent, a 90's game called Master of Orion 2, which was a 4X type big strategy game, had one player race called the gnolam, who in Master of Orion 2 were weird star trek type space gnomes. The play mechanic associated with their race was that they had all the money-generating buttons turned up to 11. Anyway, Master of Orion was re-released in 2016 as more or less the same game but with updated graphics, and in that one the gnolams are a race of six-eyed tiny cow creatures.  Moo, I say! indeed.
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Dec 25, 2022 16:09
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Also worth noting that "there is no cow level" is a cheat code in Starcraft.
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Dec 25, 2022 19:42
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I could be wrong about this, but as I understood it, the cow level rumours in the first Diablo just stemmed from players being tickled that the cows were interactable and assuming they had to do something (as people often did in the early days of gaming). The rumours took on a life of their own, and people at Blizzard found it funny and decided to run with it, first by putting "thereisnocowlevel" as a cheat in Starcraft, and then actually making the Cow Level real in D2. (Also, anyone who's never played this, you might enjoy looking up the sound effects. It's literally just a bunch of Blizzard employees saying 'moo' in various weird tones of voice.) I don't remember how players discovered it initially; the version of the game I bought came with the official strategy guide, which told you how to open the portal. And even if I hadn't read it there, one of the first thing the friends who introduced me to the game told me was to stash Wirt's Leg and never get rid of it because I'd need it for this (we didn't know at the time that you could keep going back to get more legs, but we certainly knew what the leg did). I don't remember precisely how the trick worked to repeatedly kill the Cow King; most players I knew would just be careful to leave him alive. I do know that internally the "cow king is dead" flag is basically treated the same as a quest completion, so it uses the party and completion mechanics the same as any other quest progress flag. The Cow Level is just a lot of fun to play through. Amusingly enough, in at least some patches it was more or less the game's "endgame content", in 1.09 the cows in Hell were the highest level enemies in the game and a lot of players literally optimised their builds for cow runs and nothing else. Post 1.10, that's no longer the case, though it's still a decent choice of area to run (I remember it was one of the premier areas to hunt runes and socketed items if you were running with low MF, as every item type can drop there).
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Dec 25, 2022 20:52
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I did forget to mention that clicking the cow in D2's Tristram causes it to explode. Also it's worth posting the other games I found homages to the secret cow level in: Goat Simulator  Marvel Heroes  MagusofStars posted:I know you did a brief write-up of each mod back in the OP, but now that you've run through all of them side-by-side, did anything change your opinions of any of the mods? Not particularly. What I'll add is that every mod felt different. Something as simple as adding in mapreveal, or extra inventory that charms can only work in, or new crafting options, changes how the game plays even if the mod doesn't add any new monsters. I can't even compare Resurgence and PD2 side-by-side. I think the only thing I would change about my takes on the mods is to maybe not play up Median XL's additions, (While there are a lot, it's not that complex.) and bold and highlight that it's not Diablo II. From what I've played and what I've had others tell me about it, going into Median XL thinking it'll be like playing Diablo II is a bad idea. Explopyro posted:I could be wrong about this, but as I understood it, the cow level rumours in the first Diablo just stemmed from players being tickled that the cows were interactable and assuming they had to do something (as people often did in the early days of gaming). You could really torture secret hunters back in the 90s by just putting in something that does something out of the ordinary but doesn't lead to anything. I was sitting here thinking about the cow craze, realizing PC games loved putting in secrets, and going, "...Hmm."
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Dec 25, 2022 23:49
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New update. Cruisin' Sanctuary. And with this update I am going to go on hiatus. Knowing me, this'll be for about a month but I may be faster/slower depending on how things go. Thanks for reading the let's play so far, I do not intend to be done here, and I hope to see you soon.
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Dec 30, 2022 05:41
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Someone created an Undead Cow Level? Wow. Shame they didn’t throw in a Cow Skeleton King. Enjoy your vacation.
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Dec 30, 2022 05:49
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achtungnight posted:Someone created an Undead Cow Level? Wow. Shame they didn’t throw in a Cow Skeleton King. They did actually! Kind of. There's a superunique named Cow King's Ghost in the Lost Farm.
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Dec 30, 2022 07:26
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Almost as good. Moo-phisto would also rock if implemented. 
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Dec 30, 2022 11:04
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I could've sworn there's a superunique in Andariel's Dressing Room as well, but I couldn't find them. At least during the hiatus I can learn how to LP good.
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Dec 30, 2022 11:37
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 06:35 |
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quote:You see, several numbers in this game are not designed with getting really really large in mind. This is programming talk, but the gist of it is, depending on how you define a number to be used by a program, it will have a variable limit to how large or small of a number that can be held. The cap is 83885. 2 byte numbers have 65536 possible values, so if there is no accounting for negative damage, the damage cap is 65535. This would also be why overflow isn't an issue: it wraps up to 0 and goes again. As to saturating ops, they are valuable for some specialized use cases and thus are supported on some platforms. quote:There's some other fun caps as well, like Life for some reason you can have over 8 million of. The life display will glitch if you hit 32,767, but rest assured, you have more than that life. Same with mana. You can probably have up to 2 bil of life (32 bit binary numbers have 4294967296 possible values, for signed numbers this splits into [-2147483648, 2147483647]). The fact that the devs picked 4 bytes for the ground truth, but then decided to only use 2 bytes for the display is pretty amazing. Unless they decided to use fixed point 2-2 numbers, but there is no reason to do that here :facepalm:.
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Dec 30, 2022 12:30
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