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EDIT: DarkMatt posted:Strike of the clock it's day 4 now. New update is now instead of when I go to sleep. What I'm saying is the sooner we escape this jungle the better. I didn't hate Act 3 as much as most people, but yeah, the Great Marsh Detour and the Flayer Dungeon can gently caress off
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Nov 15, 2022 09:51
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Yeah, just more evidence that the best part of Act 3 is that you can just teleport straight to the end and skip the whole damned thing. I've gone through it a few times in full and it's an exercise in tedium and frustration each time. There's too many mazes, and they're all filled with some of the most irritating monsters in the game. Thankfully they're not the Maggot Lair, but they're still awful in their own right.
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Nov 15, 2022 16:11
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DarkMatt posted:Willowisp | CR: **** So, uh, these things. These things are worth talking about. (I'll probably end up referring to them as "Gloams" or "Souls", for whatever reason those tended to be the shorthands we'd use for this monster class back in the day.) These are on a short list of the most terrifying monsters in the game, the ones Hardcore players have nightmares about. It's not just that they're ranged monsters who are practically capable of teleporting, or stacking into big piles and shooting nigh-unavoidable sheets of lightning at you. Oh, no. The lightning they shoot is incredibly loving deadly because of a hilarious bug and they will murder the poo poo out of you in seconds if you're not prepared. See, they're supposed to be able to drain your mana. With the melee attacks they don't use, but never mind that (they might even actually be able to do it, I don't even know). The problem is that there's a bug, and the mana damage they're supposed to do gets added to their lightning bolts instead. As lightning damage, not mana damage. So on Hell, instead of their lightning having a wide damage range (lightning's gimmick, usually, is that it has very low minimum damage, usually 1), it gets something like 250-300 formerly mana damage added. Onto each lightning bolt. In a game where most characters have on the order of ~1k-2k HP, an extremely durable one might hit 4k-6k or so, and squishier characters might not even break 1k at endgame. Now imagine a pack of these things firing a giant sheet of lightning at you, where each of those bolts damages you independently. Souls are single-handedly the reason why lightning was the most important elemental resistance, and the one everyone prioritised. You could get away with skimping on the others (yes, even fire, though you'd need to be careful), but going near these things with minimal lightning resistance (let alone negative) was downright suicidal. And nothing could help you if you were unlucky enough to run into a unique with the Conviction aura.
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Nov 16, 2022 03:14
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New update. Made this one in advance so I could chill. The good news is it worked and the bad news is I can't remember the last 4 days.
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Nov 19, 2022 17:26
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I actually really like the aboveground city sections of Kurast because I think the game shows the scale of the city pretty well here. Plus, I like peeking around the buildings for treasure chests, and, while it's just my bias showing, I feel like I've had a great track record of finding extremely useful items or weapons in these areas, even off random pots or trees or skeletons in the environment. The sewer is not good though, which is why I specified aboveground only.
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Nov 19, 2022 18:49
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DarkMatt posted:New update. Made this one in advance so I could chill. The good news is it worked and the bad news is I can't remember the last 4 days. Memories are a funny thing. I have good clear memories of living through the 1960s, despite having been born in 1979. A hippie once told me- “If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t there!” I guess he’s right. This part of the game does indeed suck. Thankfully you don’t have to spend too much time in it after the first slog. And Mephisto isn’t too difficult.
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Nov 20, 2022 01:22
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And don't forget that the sewers are dark, the little exploding dolls are also dark, and you're basically navigating by minimap, which makes it even harder to see when the little fuckers run up to you to explode. But yeah, Act 3 is just awful. I don't mind the desert as much because at least it's open and well lit. It's also just a bit more sprawling than Act 1's areas, and isn't a maze. Act 3 hides things in buildings, has enemies that are incredibly irritating, makes a bunch of areas dark and hidden behind buildings/foliage, and just generally makes everything somewhere between horrible and godawful. It's telling that I had completely forgotten about the +5 stat points quest because gently caress act 3.
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Nov 20, 2022 01:50
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I do have a criminal negligence of never touching pots and chests unless on a random whim or they're in my way. The way they work you're likely to get either, nothing, gold, or a white item. Very rarely, very rarely however, they can have I dunno things like unique amulets in them. I do feel like it's a large addition to playtime though, breaking through every last pot in your way, and you have to open a lot to get something of interest. Also oh man thanks thread for pointing out the contrast between, say, how I set up Eastern Sun's graphic options for the sewer, and Resurgence's, where I can't see a drat thing at all times.
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Nov 20, 2022 09:14
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FPzero posted:I actually really like the aboveground city sections of Kurast because I think the game shows the scale of the city pretty well here. Plus, I like peeking around the buildings for treasure chests, and, while it's just my bias showing, I feel like I've had a great track record of finding extremely useful items or weapons in these areas, even off random pots or trees or skeletons in the environment. The sewer is not good though, which is why I specified aboveground only. I was waiting until this update to mention this, but, the aboveground sections of Kurast are the parts of the act I actually like. They're big and full of pointless houses, yeah, but the layout is always very similar - keep going to the northeast to progress - and there are no god drat rivers or bridges to block your way from exploring for waypoints. The monsters are also a lot less annoying. Though, yes, the Kurast sewers are absolutely one of the worst areas of the game. I think the Gibdinn quest would give you a free mercenary... if you didn't already have one. Most people will do the blood raven quest in Act 1 and get a free rogue, and even if someone didn't they'd almost certainly hire an Act 2 mercenary for the aura. The game won't replace your mercenary if you already have one, though, since that could delete gear, and there's probably no mechanic to make the first hire free after completing the quest. The amount of gold mercenaries cost is trivial anyway, even in the vanilla game. Speaking of the near-worthless stat point reward, I was browsing through the arreat summit the other day and came across a page that explained a mechanic I had forgotten existed. I don't think you explained it in your mechanics post on stat points, and I don't think anyone's talked about it in the thread yet, but points in vitality and energy have a chance to double the restoration received from healing and mana potions, respectively. quote:Chance of Double Heal The amount of health and mana restored by their respective potions is also affected by your class, with barbarians getting the most health and least mana, and casters the opposite, with other classes in the middle. This can actually be quite annoying in Eastern Sun, I've found, since there's a barbarian build that basically turns them into a full caster and it goes through mana like no tomorrow.
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Nov 20, 2022 10:43
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I spent most of my late teens on a D2 forum theorycrafting like a mofo, but I also never heard of double heal chance, wow! Personally as far as Act 3 is concerned, I always kinda like initially going into the jungle, because I do like how it looks and it's a good contrast after a lot of beige n brown to have some (if muted) green. My enthusiasm for the new area quickly wanes halfway through the second jungle area, of course. Reaching Kurast is always a big sigh of relief, and I always anxiously look for the first waypoint in Lower to never have to do the jungle again. Then I have to do the sewer -.- The end of Act 3 is great, though. I like Travincal a lot and the final dungeon is also o.k.
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Nov 20, 2022 10:55
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I want to say that in very early Diablo 2 mercs died permanently, so the free merc as a quest reward was somewhat more meaningful.
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Nov 20, 2022 11:14
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Tarezax posted:I want to say that in very early Diablo 2 mercs died permanently, so the free merc as a quest reward was somewhat more meaningful. I looked it up, and apparently reviving mercenaries, bringing them outside of the act you hired them in, and their inventories were all added in the expansion.
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Nov 20, 2022 11:24
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I think you will get the free Iron Wolf if you don't have a mercenary already (i.e., never claim the Rogue from Kashya), but this almost never happens. As others have said, this is a holdover from the pre-expansion days, when mercenaries were expendable, couldn't travel between acts, and couldn't be healed or equipped. (Also, yes, hiring costs are negligible. The really big fees are for resurrecting them after they die.) In the post-expansion world, your mercenary was part of your character file, and you couldn't get rid of them once you had one (though of course you could hire a new one to overwrite). Well, barring a few strange bugs that have long since been fixed. In earlier patches, mercenaries could die permanently if their corpse was destroyed. The only method I know for sure was a thing was being eaten by Corpse Spitters in Act 4; some say they also couldn't be revived if they shattered while frozen but I don't know this for sure. Rogues having Vigor in PD2 is a neat touch, considering it was actually kind of a thing in Vanilla too. There was a bow runeword called Harmony that granted Vigor when equipped, and it was pretty decent otherwise (as well as being easy to make) so it was a popular choice for those who wanted to use Rogues. Giving them the aura innately in the mod is a nice nod to this while still giving you the freedom to equip them how you want. The jungles and sewer are awful but I always liked the big square areas of Kurast proper, they were fun to clear out and you always had a good idea where you were going because the overall layout was pretty consistent. I'm also pretty fond of the ruined temples (even the optional ones), they're short and have interesting guest monsters in them, in variants that aren't seen anywhere else. (Including one of the only places the infamous Wailing Beasts appear, which are immune to magic and neither undead nor demons, and as such were one of the few monsters the popular Hammerdin build couldn't deal with.) Also, Lower Kurast specifically is kind of an interesting area. Did you know "Lower Kurast runs" were a thing? (on Hell difficulty only) It's a bit complicated to explain why but I'll give it a go. This discovery and the later datamining research were all done by the DiabloII.net Single Player Forum. Turns out, some of the huts in Lower Kurast contain chests that use a weird variant of the drop formula. These ended up being referred to as "super chests", not to be confused with "special chests" (the golden sparkly ones at the end of optional dungeons). They look just like normal chests, but tend to drop big piles of stuff. I can't give the full technical explanation, but these super chests were bugged and used a truncated random number for the drops instead of the whole thing, so had only 65535 (2^16) possible drop patterns instead of 2^32. And when people dug into this (they eventually datamined all the possible patterns), they found that some of these patterns contained "high runes", several of the extremely rare runes that were otherwise nigh impossible to get. The drop patterns were different depending on player count, I remember /players3 and /players8 being the most popular but not specifically which runes were available on each (some combination of Vex, Lo, Sur, Ber, I think, but not all four on either count). I genuinely don't remember if I ever actually found runes here, I think I may have once or twice? But once I knew about this I got into the habit of always hitting Lower Kurast as the first thing I did on entering a game, regardless of what runs I was actually doing. It's really quick to check for the chests, you just look for the campfires and they're in the larger huts adjacent to them (there's either one or two campfires, for 3 or 6 chests per run respectively). So, yeah. Lower Kurast runs. The fact that 3-6 shots at a 1/65535 chance was considered the best possible odds to find some of these extremely desirable crafting materials definitely gives a good impression of how dire drop rates can be in D2. (IIRC, super chests also appeared in a few other areas; the other place people would sometimes target was in the River of Flame, where I think they could go up to Zod, but they were much harder to find, the location wasn't nearly as predictable and I think they didn't spawn on every map.)
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Nov 20, 2022 15:27
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Yeah, I like Diablo 1 and 2 (never played 3), but I was never interested in the grind for the lategame equipment, so I never played too much.
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Nov 20, 2022 16:58
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Xarn posted:Yeah, I like Diablo 1 and 2 (never played 3), but I was never interested in the grind for the lategame equipment, so I never played too much. This has been my approach when I got into the series more recently. Played through the story on Normal difficulty, but wasn't interested enough to get into the level-grinding and gear-grinding for higher difficulties and higher levels of play.
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Nov 20, 2022 19:56
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New update. Top of the world time, and time to dismantle a bad religion.
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Nov 23, 2022 18:45
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DarkMatt posted:Even if the Angelic Set is pretty bottom tier when it comes to sets, it's still pretty powerful. This is hilarious to me, because while you're not wrong about the complete set (the sword just can't do enough damage to keep up past Normal, and the armour is underwhelming at best), a partial Angelic set was a pretty common endgame choice for certain melee builds, and while perhaps not absolutely top-tier, was extremely good and unmatched in its specific niche. Specifically, this was the thing you used if you ever started struggling with Attack Rating for any reason. There's a partial set bonus for equipping Angelic Halo (ring) + Angelic Wings (amulet) that gives +AR based on character level, and even better, the bonus was associated with the ring, so you could double up on the ring and get twice the bonus if you really needed it. When combined with any skill-based AR boost (which every melee character tends to have by default), this ring + amulet combination would single-handedly ensure you could hit anything you wanted to. (I think I used this combination on every melee character I made; I do think Highlord's Wrath, an amulet which gave Deadly Strike, was better if you could solve your AR issues elsewhere, but that was a lot harder to find and also harder to build around. Angelics were where it was at.) I don't think I have a whole lot to add to the conversation about the Council/Durance/Mephisto. The Durance is pretty reasonable as an area on Normal, but every difficulty makes the map bigger and on Hell it's absolutely enormous (especially level 2, where the waypoint is). I think this was an effort from Blizzard to make it slightly harder to run Mephisto (Meph runs were one of the standard ways to grind for the vast majority of uniques, until you graduated to Baal runs since he could drop literally everything), there was at least one patch (possibly more?) where they specifically changed the map generation for Durance 2.
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Nov 25, 2022 19:47
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New update. Hell. Hell is here.
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Nov 27, 2022 20:54
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Izual comes back in Diablo 3, but I don’t remember him being that tough. Diablo comes back too, naturally. So the game is lying that this is the end for either of them. At least the final act of base Diablo 3 sends you to Heaven, not Hell. You’re doing the expansion too, right?
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Nov 27, 2022 21:32
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achtungnight posted:Izual comes back in Diablo 3, but I don’t remember him being that tough. Diablo comes back too, naturally. So the game is lying that this is the end for either of them. Izual in D3 is also just as spontaneous and insignificant as he was in D2. That doesn't help my opinion of him at all.
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Nov 27, 2022 23:02
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I actually like that the living incarnations of evil in this game act like living incarnations of evil. Fleshing out the story to have something besides CoRrUpTiOn driving the mortal servants of Hell would be good (the entire point of the Sin War in the Diablo I manual was that both the Angels and Demons are basically locked-in archetypes and humans actually have free will - since Heaven and Hell are in a stalemate, drawing the majority of humanity to one side or the other would be enough to give a chance for ultimate victory), but I don't think the big demon bosses need more personality than Satan, Diet Satan, and Satan Cherry.
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Nov 28, 2022 01:53
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Playing in multiplayer with friends, getting to Act IV was always pretty exciting. Ending Act III was a breath of fresh air, Act IV has a good variety of enemies, many of them new and unique to the act, and a few of them have interesting mechanics. The wide open plains of the early parts of hell are easy to traverse. Like you said in the update, since the stairs to the next area are always on the edge, they're also easy to navigate. The quest rewards were also very good. Izual is indeed a tanky fucker who takes forever to kill, but getting two skillpoints at once is worth it. The Hellforge quest also held an interesting place in the multiplayer economy: a very common thing was where a high level character would rush you through the game up to the hellforge by using waypoints and dropping town portals for you to skip almost everything, and in exchange you'd let them take the drops from your hellforge quest. Being a quest, it could only be done once per character, but the perfect gems (and in particular perfect skulls) it could drop had trading value as well as uses in crafting recipes, and especially in higher difficulties it had a good chance of dropping some of the rarer runes. I've been doing a few playthroughs with the Eastern Sun mod, and one thing that I'm not sure if you've mentioned yet is that it has "stockers", items that let you store runes, gems, and more inside of one inventory space, as well as scripts to automate the inventory management of such. Managing stuff like this was always a huge pain in the rear end in vanilla Diablo, especially if you had multiple bank/mule characters in multiplayer. Socketables in general are much more powerful in ES, and I found the drops from the hellforge usually gave me a nice power boost... not that I really needed it, with how overpowered characters in ES are to begin with. Interesting to see that the bugs with missing the compelling orb and hellforge are actually universal. Back when I was playing the game as a teenager, as I've mentioned before, it was always online, so I just assumed it was lag.
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Nov 28, 2022 02:48
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Act 4's areas are very atmospheric and the enemies are weird, I always liked them. Plot-wise, as you say, nothing really makes a whole lot of sense, and you get a sense they kind of ran out of time (they couldn't even be arsed to make six quests! though as we've seen previously, a lot of the quest log in earlier acts is padding, and they could probably have reduced those down to three quests each to be consistent without actually losing any content). Izual had some vaguely interesting potential, whether he actually was a traitor angel or just a useful idiot, but of course they never did anything with it. (I do like the core idea of this quest that Tyrael thinks he's being merciful, and doesn't go back on that intent even when Izual turns out not to have deserved it, but even that is pretty hollow.) As a boss, Izual is a giant sack of HP and basically nothing else, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense either; I think he's by far the least threatening special enemy in the game. At least his D3 incarnation had more of a moveset, though I remember him being pretty underwhelming even then, and I was annoyed at Blizzard for how obviously he was brought back as a "greatest hits" kind of thing along with the Butcher. I also keep having to remind myself that you're still in Normal when things like Immolation Arrow come up. At least in vanilla, I remember it being basically impossible to make viable in Hell no matter how much you optimised it (at least for /players8, I suspect you might be able to limp along through parts of it on /players1), so it was usually better off neglected. Which is a shame, because it was a cool and visually impressive skill that was fun to use, and you could tear up Normal and Nightmare with it. There are a bunch of skills with this problem, but Immolation Arrow is definitely one of the bigger offenders I recall, and I wonder if these mods made it any more effective to counteract this. Spoggerific posted:Interesting to see that the bugs with missing the compelling orb and hellforge are actually universal. Back when I was playing the game as a teenager, as I've mentioned before, it was always online, so I just assumed it was lag. I don't think it's a bug, they always successfully break with the second swing. I always just assumed that was the design intent.
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Nov 28, 2022 03:03
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Catching up on the last couple episodes: -The Act 3 fix unintentionally turned out to be ideal. It's true that they did the most low effort attempt possible by simply requiring the Council before Meph, but the actual result ended up being fine. The council was super quick and convenient so it didn't really bother players, the Travincal waypoint is one that was always nice to have given the popularity of Trav runs, and it's a fairly interesting mini-boss fight as opposed to the endless drat jungle. So it was an extra step, but not one that people really got too upset over. Almost certainly pure luck rather than a plan, but their half-assed "solution" definitely worked out better than if they'd gone with any stronger alternative (making players smash the orb personally, requiring you to do multiple Act 3 quests, etc). -Mephisto is similar to Andariel in that if you don't know what you're walking into, you'll likely die multiple times while you figure it out, but once you know what you're doing and can set up your resistances properly, it's not too difficult. Because of this and because the waypoint on level 2 of a 3-level dungeon was relatively convenient, he was a very common boss to do loot runs of, on all difficulties. -I assume the explanation for the hero arriving the Pandamonium Fortress is Tyrael interfering. After you beat Meph's rear end, the portal is now up for grabs so Tyrael can tweak it to bring you to a safe place rather than dumping you directly at some random-rear end spot in the middle of Hell where Diablo actually landed. It's never explained in game though so who knows. -Izual's health pool feels especially tanky on Normal difficulty. Your character is at basically the same strength they were when fighting Mephisto (maybe 1-2 levels higher), but Izual's health pool is double Meph's and he's got substantially higher resistances across the board too, so it's effectively much higher. If you're a character who relies mostly on physical damage, it actually gets even more odd because after accounting for Izual's 30% physical resistance, his effective health pool ends up being being significantly higher than the Act 4 boss too. IIRC though, this tankiness only exists on Normal; on higher difficulties his HP is now smaller than Meph but his higher resistance means that he's fairly similar to Meph - still a large health pool of course, but no longer wildly out of range. -The Hellforge guarantees a single Perfect Gem (highest tier of gem, tier 5) on all difficulties, along with a random selection of Normal (T3) and Flawless (T4) gems and various Runes based on difficulty. The gems are a nice convenience rather than having to cube up some lower ones and/or use Gem Shrines, but the runes can potentially be pretty valuable since there's no easy way to upgrade runs like there is with Gem Shrines. On higher difficulties, it wasn't unheard of for players to "sell" their Hellforge quest to someone else (other player gets all the drops in exchange for a pre-agreed upon sum of gold).
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Nov 28, 2022 03:32
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Oh, while we're on the subject of the Hellforge, another interesting tidbit: it was strictly better to do this quest solo rather than in a group, because it drops the same gem/rune rewards no matter how many players are in the game and completes the request for everyone in the party at once. Common practice on getting here was to have the player who was completing the quest leave the party before hitting the forge, so the others wouldn't get credit and could come back to get their own rewards later. On Hell difficulty, the Hellforge reward was one of the most reliable ways to get higher-tier runes. There were still limits on how high you could get (in Normal it's El-Sol, in Hell it's Hel-Gul, I don't remember the range in Nightmare), but some people would rush other players in exchange for their Hellforge drop, or make lots of characters and rush them just to get forges; enough Guls and you could theoretically cube up to anything, but you'd still need 256 of them to make a Zod so this method only went so far.
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Nov 28, 2022 03:55
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I think you're a little hard on Izual there. Izual didn't mastermind everything - what he did is get captured and tortured by the prime evils. The prime evils used the knowledge they got from him to get the whole soulstone scheme started so that they'd be able to influence the world outside of hell. I feel like it's a nice twist that the prime evils are more competent than we had thought, and that their imprisonment was what they planned for all along. Izual doesn't matter here - he's just a tool and a means to an end. And that's fine. The game is a saturday morning cartoon where you're romping through hell killing demons and evil things. There's no ambiguity, there's no shades of grey. You're good, the enemies are evil, go splatter them against the walls and steal their poo poo to get stronger. And if the game were story driven, it'd be poo poo, because the story is not strong. But many people, myself included, put hundreds or thousands of hours into the game because the core gameplay loop was amazingly fun. The story is just set dressing and a way to get you to new and interesting locales to kill the locals and take their stuff. I get the frustration - there's a lot of neat potential for the story of the series to be more interesting, more involved, and more well developed. The character backgrounds hint at neat ideas. The corrupting influence of the prime evils has done fascinating things to the world and to its people. Hell, many of the heroes themselves are somewhat non-traditional, especially the necromancer. But in the end, this is Diablo. You hack, you slash, you pillage, and then you reload the area and do it all over again.
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Nov 28, 2022 08:08
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If angels & demons don’t have free will, how did Izual fall? How did Lilith rebel? How come Tyrael helps humans and Imperius hates them? It does not compute.
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Nov 28, 2022 10:57
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Admittedly, I can be critical of this game's story at times. Heck I even figured out what its deal is and I'm still mad about it. But yeah, it is because there's a lot of work and fleshing out of this game's setting that, to me at least, it honestly feels like a waste. That and I'm old and cheating. I've seen quite a bit of stories that actually captivated me and I got real into by now. Diablo's trying to do that and is just falling flat on its face. Works if you let your imagination go wild over it but doesn't work otherwise. It's hard to not react to that, but please, feel free to call me old and bitter over this. I can definitely tell you a lot of the bitterness stems from the fact that I got Diablo 3 at launch day and to me it's only been downhill since. That's storywise though. Gamewise I like act 4 and I like going through it. The end's intense, there's interesting monsters thrown at you, and it does look neat. Dirk the Average posted:I think you're a little hard on Izual there. I think this goes down to the way it's written. It isn't just the Primes captured and got a lot of mileage out of an angel. The way Izual phrases this, you can be lead to believe he's acting like all of this was his idea. It isn't just Izual either, there's a couple other characters that elude my memory at the moment that act like they are the mastermind behind everything. I will say I did miss the possibility that Izual told them everything after getting captured, but the way he's written make it sounds like even him getting captured was on purpose. Not to mention I find the concept of the Primes getting banished into Sanctuary by the Lessers a very cool idea that is shut down completely by Izual. What I'm saying is, I have the hardest time calling Izual a good character without filling in the blanks myself. Doesn't help that he stays on screen for no time. ...What I didn't mention is that demon Izual is trying his best to get you to go away and not waste your time, so I like to think the worst angel is bound to the worst demon as an ironic punishment. Gnoman posted:I actually like that the living incarnations of evil in this game act like living incarnations of evil. Fleshing out the story to have something besides CoRrUpTiOn driving the mortal servants of Hell would be good (the entire point of the Sin War in the Diablo I manual was that both the Angels and Demons are basically locked-in archetypes and humans actually have free will - since Heaven and Hell are in a stalemate, drawing the majority of humanity to one side or the other would be enough to give a chance for ultimate victory), but I don't think the big demon bosses need more personality than Satan, Diet Satan, and Satan Cherry. Can't disagree with that. I think I just want it to not feel like a cartoon and have characters actually emote. It doesn't have to be the Primes. Just, anyone, please. You can still have it be a cartoon I just want characters to not feel hollow on the inside.
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Nov 28, 2022 20:57
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I'm with you with the story critique. My fanfiction project almost died in Act 4 because it just gave me nothing to work with. Starting with vast expanses of plain plains really didn't help, it just drained my creativity. I tackled the problem thusly: MagusofStars posted:-I assume the explanation for the hero arriving the Pandamonium Fortress is Tyrael interfering. After you beat Meph's rear end, the portal is now up for grabs so Tyrael can tweak it to bring you to a safe place rather than dumping you directly at some random-rear end spot in the middle of Hell where Diablo actually landed. It's never explained in game though so who knows. - I loving hate fighting Izual as well so I wrote him as the complete jobber that he is - Azmodan and Belial show up (I started writing it before they got speaking roles in D3 so I made them up wholesale) - the former attempts to make the heroes despair by tricking them into thinking that Natalya, who they befriended in Act 3, is being tortured in hell. He spins that into making them question what the entire point of hell even is, if ostensibly good people can end there, who even defines morality? It was a bit unfocused and after they figure out that he uses a Succubus disguised as Nat (swear to God I didn't copy that scene from Symphony of the Night either), I kind of drop him. Also because - Belial tries to also gently caress with the heroes, but he wants to instead corrupt them onto his side. In order for that to work, he actually backstabs Azmodan, removing him from the picture. He portrays himself as a "sensible alternative" to the Prime Evils - promises that if the heroes work for him, he can make a Better Hell with them at his side. The Necromancer is actually kind of tempted, especially because Belial plays into the whole "but you don't really know IF Natalya won't end up here, right?" thing. The Golem is having none of it, he's firmly the moral center at this point of the story. He has to physically fight of Belial at many points, who keeps popping up in the form of various hell knights. It's clear that if Belial manages to take out the Golem, he'll be able to sway the Necromancer, so that's the stakes here even if he clearly is not interested in killing the human - at some point the Necro actually almost falls and allows half a pentagram to be etched into his skin by Belial before the Golem manages to stop him Coming up with Belial as the actual, present villain for the Act was the solution I needed to keep going. He was a lot of fun to write and it was great to have him keep popping up like "have you considered corruption my dear friend? We offer various benefits", completely open about being the lord of lies, "but am I not making sense?". I felt particularly vindicated when Blizzard actually had a villain pop up throughout the part of D3 that mirrors D2 Act 4, but the writing sucked absolute poo poo. Somebody tell me if you want to hear after the relevant update how I ended Act 4 (including Belial), or if this poo poo bores you
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Nov 29, 2022 00:19
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DarkMatt posted:I think this goes down to the way it's written. It isn't just the Primes captured and got a lot of mileage out of an angel. The way Izual phrases this, you can be lead to believe he's acting like all of this was his idea. It isn't just Izual either, there's a couple other characters that elude my memory at the moment that act like they are the mastermind behind everything. I will say I did miss the possibility that Izual told them everything after getting captured, but the way he's written make it sounds like even him getting captured was on purpose. Not to mention I find the concept of the Primes getting banished into Sanctuary by the Lessers a very cool idea that is shut down completely by Izual. Izual definitely isn't a good character - he's just a MacGuffin. He's there to explain how and why the prime evils took what appeared to be a losing position and turned it around into a winning position - they wanted to be imprisoned because that would let them influence the world until they could be free to walk around in it unimpeded. Here's what Tyrael has to say about him: quote:Despite his valor and strength, Izual was captured by the Prime Evils and twisted by their perverse power. They forced him to betray his own kind and give up Heaven's most guarded secrets. And Izual: quote:Tyrael was a fool to have trusted me! And then Tyrael again: quote:Izual helped Diablo and his Brothers trick me into using the Soulstones against them... Now the Stones' powers are corrupted. I don't read this as Izual masterminding the scheme. He "helped," and we know from Tyrael that his "help" was coerced via presumably torture and demonic power. Izual is consumed with guilt for his role in all of this. He's not gloating to the player about his great triumph - he's lamenting his actions, even though he was arguably not responsible for them. And yes, he is trying to get you to go away and not waste time helping him because he feels that he deserves his fate. And to be clear, it's not a good story, it's just not nearly as bad as you seem to think it is.
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Nov 29, 2022 04:12
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Dirk the Average posted:And to be clear, it's not a good story, it's just not nearly as bad as you seem to think it is. Also I am ready to admit that it might be me who is dumb and I never realized Izual could've just helped that scheme along until you spelt it out to me. Honestly I'm not afraid to admit that's bias on my part. It just feels complicated because Izual sounds like he is a monumental
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Nov 29, 2022 04:32
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Mechanics Talk 6-I Can't Hold all this Bling. (All Mechanics Talk assume vanilla Diablo II unless otherwise noted.)  There's quite a bit more to charms and socketables than meets the eye. First off, Charms. Charms are an unfortunate mechanic in that, you will want to dedicate your entire inventory space to good ones, (and just use the cube to hold loot) but getting good Charms take a while. A long while. That's because, in the midst of the bad stat mods and bad damage mods there's life and resist charms. Later on you can find charms with magicfind and either faster hit recovery or faster run/walk, and much later on, you can find charms with + to skill tabs. However, funny enough, + to skill tabs can only show up on Grand Charms, which have a qlvl of 24 which makes the alvl of 50 required to roll them far more annoying. Charms only come in magic...unless you're a mod like Eastern Sun where there's rare charms. They also come in unique as well, but exactly one unique drops normally: a unique grand charm called Gheed's Fortune that is a boon of goldfind, magicfind, and even lowers vendor prices which means cheaper gambling. The next best source of magicfind out of your inventory are small charms that rolled the best magicfind affix it can. The other two uniques are only possible to obtain through endgame events, and they're both really good. If and when we ever breach the tippy top of the mountain, I'll go over them then. Finally, the smaller charms roll worse mods, but since Grand Charms fit unevenly into your inventory you'll want to have Small Charms for later when you no longer need inventory space. This is all endgame though. Early on your charms and inventory space will be mainly used to patch up resistances, because each of the high affixes grant like around 8% per space of inventory, or 5% to all resists. It's also easy to reconfigure your charms to patch up new holes in your resistances when you swap out gear. It's much harder to fix holes with gear without creating new holes in resists.   Several mods, these included, do more than just give you a massive amount of extra inventory space. These mods also make that space the only space you can put charms in to have them function. They'll be colored red, and it both allows you to lug more charms around, and still give you good space to pick up stuff, sidestepping this problem entirely.  The other mods simply just remove random charms. Resurgence doesn't expand inventory space at all and both it and Median XL only have unique charms, which are special in that you can only ever have one of a copy of that unique in your inventory. So, good news: every mod on display here makes charms less pain.Next up we got Gems. Gems are fun early on, and Topazes in helmets have a desirable mod for any point in the game: magicfind. The elemental gems are also good for a cheap effective resist patchup shield, that is just a white base with a buncha sockets to get a large volume of resists on it. Outside of those, the worth of gems drop off after, I wanna say Normal, or just, if you get a solid yellow, green, or gold in the slot instead. Yellows can even eclipse what a white with gems can do because it's not like those gems can add in stuff like attack speed or cast speed. There are, however, uses for gems outside of socketing though, and there's quite a few. The first is rune uptiering, and it's probably the most annoying since uptiering beyond the easy-to-find runes requires the right color and tier, with the only exception being skulls and perfects. You don't use skulls for rune uptiering and it's not rude enough to ask you of perfect gems. However, there's no gem downtiering to fix gems that drop too high tier. This is why not a single one of our mods keeps it like this. The gem cost is either removed outright or it's easy to get the exact gem needed. It's worth noting here that Gem Shrines exist in the wild, and will either give you a chipped gem, or, take a random gem out of your inventory and upgrade it. Not the most amazing thing but it does save two flawless gems to get a perfect. The biggest thing to use perfects for is probably to reroll blues. You use up 3 perfects but you can take any blue item you had and reroll the affixes on it, losing no ilvl or alvl off the item. There's one solid application for this: rerolling charms, because it's a lot more of a pain to get enough +tab Grand Charms to fill out your inventory than it is to get the 8 you need and then dump any perfects you get into rerolling them. Chipped gems can also be used with store-bought health and mana potions to get a rejuv potion. You can also make full rejuvs this way by using normal gems instead, but uhh, it's, much, cheaper to make three rejuvs this way and cube those together. Not to mention you can just find regular rejuvs in the wild. The last major use for Gems is perfects and a jewel into making crafted items. I uhh, will get back to you on this, because every mod expanded this and there's different things to want out of those. But for now, basegame allowed you to take blue items of specific types, toss in a rune, perfect gem, and jewel, and then get a crafted item out of it. The item is guaranteed to roll a handful of mods and then you can have 1-4 random affixes with it. Ilvl plays a part in how many can show up, and at certain thresholds, you're guaranteed to get a number of affixes, with at least 2 for ilvl 31, 3 for 51, and all 4 for 71.  This mod not only improves the powerlevel of gems by making them do considerably more, it even adds wild concepts such as an extra tier (blemished) and gemwords, or, runewords but with certain gems instead. The basic ones can be used with any tier of gem. The rest requires perfects. Most of those gemwords are actually just the flag colors of countries to be inserted into your helmet and I tend to ignore them unless I need something now. Then there's crystals, which is functionally the same as gems, but have better effects and are only gotten through ores, which is something that'll be explained in more detail later. There's like, around double the types of gems you can get here and half the tiers for them, (normal to perfect) but that's about it. Since they're quite plentiful and you only need four normals to have a perfect, they are what you put into your sockets to do things like patch up your resistances and get percentage multipliers to your stats, which is important for certain things later on.What's up next? Oh right, Jewels. Basegame I've only ever seen one solid application for jewels: making crafted items. Jewels don't have a wonderful pool of affixes to pick from, and Median XL is unique in that it is generous to allow you to fill excess sockets with jewels before adding in runewords to white items. Basegame does not do this. Blue jewels are rare already but even more rarely you can find yellow jewels. Like Charms, they're torturous to want because somewhere in the mess of bad affixes you can find some good stuff late in the game for them. From my experience, yellow jewels are extremely rare and you still need to roll good on them, so if I had to think of a use case for the rare affix reroll recipe that lowers the item's level, it's with those jewels. I think I have only ever gotten 1 unique jewel over all my playthroughs up to writing this: it's in Median XL and it adds a meager but relevant chance to Crushing Blow. Sure it can be used to fill up space for a runeword but do keep in mind that a limitation of MXL makes it so that you can't get it back if you use it this way.And that's my segway into Runes. Oh there's a lot to talk about here. First off, plenty of Runes are just good socketables by themselves: outclassing gems in what they do, some of them having really nice modifiers for either your weapon or armor/shield, and you get the right ones and you can make Runewords to turn white socketed items and bump them up to the power level of uniques, maybe even higher. You just need to first get a hold of the runes, and this is the start of madness. There's 33 of them of the game, and they're vaguely seperated into "low runes", or the first 14; "medium runes", the next 11; and "high runes", the last 8. You see, what can show up depends mainly on either treasure class (the unspeakable) or area level. (for things that aren't monsters) "High runes" are notoriously hard to roll for because each rune has a worse chance to drop than the last. You may find a monster that can drop a tier 33 or Zod rune, but if it fails, and it probably will, then it downtiers and rolls to drop that rune, repeating until it either hits the lowest tier or it finally succeeds. They are stupid rare. Magicfind does nothing to improve drop chances either, only /players 8, which squashes nodrops down to a minimum, will improve your rune gain. Those two concepts are the next mechanics talk by the way. You may think the answer is just farm Countess, but Countess does have a problem in that she has a cap on how high of a Rune she can drop and it caps at...Ist, which is the last middle rune. Sorry! On the bright side, if you just need the lower tier runes for a runeword, then Countess grinding works. Shoutouts to and who introduce way more runes. Median XL does funny things with runewords in that all of them are gone and are replaced with two types of rune-words: ez-bake oven runewords that are typically just 1 to 3 runes, and then the ones that want like 6 of the "greater runes" they've added in. I'll get back to you on this if and when I ever get the bigger runes to drop. This mod especially adds a lot of runewords because all the runes are Japanese characters now, including way more runes for kanji characters. Sky's the limit. You may think all the runewords are new, but if you really want a Dream or Enigma, you can apply decals to certain runes to turn them into vanilla runes and then make the old runewords. This is the only way to get basegame runewords in Eastern Sun. ...I'm not too sure why you would either because they're not buffed and ES's additions tend to eclipse them in power. You also have to, get the decals in the first place, in addition to the runes, and there's no uptiering the decals. I think at this point you would only ever make a swag vanillla Runeword in ES just for brag rights.
DarkMatt fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Nov 30, 2022 |
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Nov 30, 2022 03:05
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This kind of stuff is why I loved playing Eastern Sun. I didn't even get super heavily into the endgame or grinding aspects of ES, but my brain synapses fire perfectly in sync with the kind of ridiculous breadth of options and customization that the mod offers. D2 in general did that for me as a teen, and I think it's why I loved playing it so much. I just really enjoyed collecting all kinds of things and then using them in fun ways. Efficiency? Nah, I'm just playing Normal, time to create a lightning damage Maul for my Barbarian just because.
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Nov 30, 2022 03:32
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 Happy holidays. Let's celebrate today's update by going to santa's house. 
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Dec 1, 2022 21:30
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IIRC prior to the expansion Lord De Seis would spawn with an entire cohort of Oblivion Knights, making him the spiciest gate guard around.
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Dec 1, 2022 22:16
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Something I forgot to mention but will point out later is that Lord de Seis was also the only superunique to have the Thief monster mod. (Might be wrong, this is the superpast we're talking about.) Does what it says: he baps you your equipment may fly off you. It was nerfed to just be potions...then it was just removed outright because that monster mod caused a myriad of game crashes.
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Dec 1, 2022 22:20
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Oblivion Knights are among the most terrifying enemies in the game. Especially for melee characters, because Iron Maiden is basically a death sentence (player characters output a lot more damage than they have health, so having a percentage damage returned is nearly always lethal). "What's your Iron Maiden solution" was a very common question people would ask when building melee characters. Unique Oblivion Knights also used to be scarier, they're one of a few "leader" enemy types that have been patched to spawn with lesser minions (in this case Doom Knights) instead of a whole pack of Oblivion Knight minions, like Fallen Shamans and the suchlike before them. On the other hand, as it stands now they can hang back and play support for their melee minions, cursing you to take extra damage while the minions keep you off them, so it was a bit of a tradeoff. I only ever knew about Lord De Seis stealing potions out of your belt, not any other sort of items, and even that as a thing from the mythical past (early patches of D2 Classic, it was removed well before I started playing). So, fun thing, Diablo is much harder on Normal than on higher difficulties! (Normal Duriel and Normal Diablo are almost certainly the hardest two bosses). This is partially due to how the damage numbers work out proportionally to player health, and how strong a player character is likely to be at this point in the game... but also, there's a quirk that makes it worse: the Lightning Hose has a larger deadzone on higher difficulties, so if you stand right up in his face (such as meleeing him) he'll shoot it harmlessly past you. But not on Normal. Overall, though, Diablo is one of the more fun bosses to fight, and the Chaos Sanctuary is a unique and cool area.
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Dec 2, 2022 05:37
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At some point in LoD they patched Oblivion Knights to no longer use Iron Maiden iirc.
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Dec 2, 2022 08:59
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Diablo is down. Now let’s see how/if Baal tops him.
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Dec 2, 2022 13:24
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achtungnight posted:Diablo is down. Now let’s see how/if Baal tops him.
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Dec 2, 2022 13:27
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