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I'm surprised to see so much dislike for act 2. I can understand the maggot lair, but overall it was one of the acts I liked more. My experience might be colored by the fact that I played almost exclusively on battle.net with a close group of friends, though; about half the time I was rushing or being rushed, and half the time I was running through the difficulties with similarly leveled characters. The friend group I played with almost universally reviled another act that we have yet to see, although I'll leave that for when we get there. More people means it's easier to find the right dungeons and waypoints in the wide open desert, and you can cover each others' weaknesses. Scarab beetles are a pain as melee, yeah, but it was also a lot of fun to come to the rescue of a barbarian who was running the hell away from a champion pack of them with nasty enchantments, and it was also funny when the sorceress rushing you through the act teleported away and left you to die in the middle of them. I was always really excited to go do the sewers at the start of act 2 on all of my dozens and dozens of playthroughs because it meant a free skill point. I hate sewer levels in games too, but this one never really registered as one to me, so I never disliked it. As far as the plot goes, always playing in multiplayer meant that I usually skipped the dialogue and cutscenes, so while I played through the game enough times to understand the basics of the plot, I never really thought about it or its many issues very much.
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Nov 1, 2022 13:03
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:39 |
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The Arcane Sanctuary may have a lot of narrow paths like the maggot lair, but to me the important difference between it and the maggot lair is that there are no walls. The stuff blocking your path is all empty space, so you can fire over it with ranged skills. Also, the look of the entire place is  Also, something important about it that you seemed to neglect in your update is how all four quadrants have a unique layout. One of them will have a lot of long, straight paths, one of them will have staircases upon staircases in impossible patterns that end up looking like some impossible architecture in an MC Escher painting, one of them will have a bunch of little islands connected by portals, and the last one is mostly normal architecture. Having multiple layouts that are always present means you have an interesting choice to make when deciding which direction to explore in first when you're playing without map hacks; characters with line damage skills like lightning might want to go down the narrow paths, while barbarians with leap might not be bothered by the portals in the island path as much. Spoggerific fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Nov 5, 2022 |
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Nov 5, 2022 09:37
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The arcane sanctuary was one of the few places where I would split up when playing multiplayer. Most of the time it's more fun to clear things together (and exp is only shared with nearby players), but with distinct paths the arcane sanctuary is easy to split up. Also, like you said, the portal area does indeed suck as melee (minus barb with jump), so we always had a ranged character go down that path.
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Nov 5, 2022 12:34
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Explopyro posted:Duriel is also, interestingly, basically the only boss nobody ever did repeat runs of. [...](The false tombs are a thing, too, but nobody ever went into those either, even among players who were inclined to clear optional dungeons. There's a superunique Horadric Mummy in one of them, Ancient Kaa the Soulless, but that's about it. If you've seen the real tomb, the false ones are just more of the same.) Yeah, nobody ever did Duriel runs in particular, but I specifically remember tomb runs being one of the most popular ways to powerlevel characters into the midgame. They were popular enough that people would run public games of them on battle.net, and you could easily find games of them to join on normal difficulty. I think it was something like Tristram runs to level 15 or so, tomb runs to 30, and then later game stuff we haven't seen.
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Nov 8, 2022 02:21
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Mentioning Tristram made me remember another small thing about multiplayer: when you're touching the cairn stones in the circle to open up the portal, they start making a humming noise. Each stone makes its own noise that stacks with the others, and if you touch 4 stones but leave the 5th one one alone, it will start making an awful humming noise at an unreasonable volume until you finally touch the last one and start the event. Only someone who had the quest to open Tristram could activate the stones, so if you were a low level character being escorted by higher level friends, you could just leave that last stone unactivated to torture your friends (and yourself) as a prank.
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Nov 8, 2022 02:59
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As I've mentioned before, I played Diablo 2 almost exclusively online with friends. This is the act that the people I played with hated; so much, in fact, that they had a high level character rush us through it every single time. The first time I played through Act 3 normally was probably a year or two after I started playing the game, and... yeah, they were right to skip it every time. The overall atmosphere of the act is great, but the layout of several of the areas, combined with the types of enemies present, makes things a terrible slog, especially for low mobility classes. There are some parts of it I like, and I'll point those out when we get there if OP doesn't, but this is definitely my least favorite act in the game, as it is for lots of people. Regarding Diablo's poor in-game worldbuilding and lackluster NPC dialogue, I think you're doing the game a little bit of a disservice by forgetting to mention how much worldbuilding and lore you could find in the manual and even on the Arreat Summit. You've done a bit of explaining, like when you talked about the Horadrim during the Arcane Sanctuary, but I think all of the out-of-game background information for Diablo was done rather well. As was normal for games of the era, D2 has a fairly extensive manual and a lot of lore and worldbuilding is tucked into it if you bother to read it. For one example, here's the skill description of the first skill in the vanilla Amazon bow skill tree: Diablo 2 manual posted:Far in the ancient past, Amazons found their glorious arboreal city of Tran Athulua under siege by the pirates of the Twin Seas. These cut-throats were determined to turn the Amazon Islands into their base of operations. The conflict lasted many months as the pirates laid in for a long siege. During the battle, supplies ran short, and the Amazon archers found themselves without ammunition. Realizing that their defense rested solely upon the ability of the archers to keep the corsairs at bay, the priests of the city prayed to Athulua to aid them. In answer, Athula infused the minds of the Amazons with the power to harness their natural spiritual energies. One by one the archers melded their determination and will into shards of physical force that they then unleashed from their bows by the thousands, firmly routing the corsairs back to sea. And another example from Arreat Summit, the monster description for corrupted rogues we saw back in Act 1: Corrupted Rogue posted:The corruption of the Sisterhood is perhaps the worst atrocity that the surviving Rogues endure. The sight of their own sisters, marching against them in service of their enemy, drives the Sisterhood into deep despair. The tainted Sisters are seldom caught alone, preferring to attack in groups. Many of the corrupted ones have forgotten their skills with ranged weapons, or are so driven by Hell's rage, that they blindly melee with whatever weapon is at hand. There are little blurbs like this about nearly every monster in the entire game, as well as many of the items, skills, and other miscellaneous features, should you go looking for it. None of this excuses the game for the nonsensical plot and lack of memorable characters, of course, but this was the kind of thing that I absolutely loved to dig through as a teenager when I was playing D2, and it let my imagination run wild and build up the world much more than the developers did in game.
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Nov 12, 2022 03:44
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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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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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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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Ah, Act V. It's probably my favorite act in the game, although not by far - I like Acts I and IV a lot too. The socket quest reward is indeed one of the most useful ones in the game, and it's one of the few that can be transferred to other characters in multiplayer. People have already talked about the hellforge, and while you've mentioned imbues, those are based on character level; the socket reward is not. Mule characters that existed only to store extra items on were fairly common, and since this quest reward was so useful, it wasn't unheard of to rush a character you have no intention of actually playing all the way to Act V and this quest just so you could socket another item. The mercenary quest in this act sometimes bugs out in various ways - the barbarians might not go through the portal, the portal might stay open and not close, or you just might not get credit at all for saving a group of them. It was common enough when I was playing that I remember it being an annoyance. Other instances of NPCs opening up town portals for you also occasionally bug out in weird ways, like the portal Cain makes to get back to town in Act I staying open, or the portal you get after killing Duriel in Act II being impossible to use. The ruins littered throughout the middle parts of this act have breakable doors that get in your way, and they're all poison immune like the catapults. Normally not an issue for most characters, but it can be annoying for poison necromancers in particular. Your minions will often avoid attacking them, and even if they do, if you're focusing on poison skills instead of minions they can be kind of weak.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:26
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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.
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Dec 14, 2022 05:14
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:39 |
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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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