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One other thing about Andy that you didn’t mention: For new players, she’s going to be your first experience with poison that matters. You encounter a few normal mobs use poison (e.g., poison-themed Skeleton Mages), but it’s both rare and also consistently less threatening than a fire-themed Skeleton Mage or fire-enchanted uniques where they die in a high damage burst explosion or etc. So the new player likely walks into this fight with zero antidotes, zero poison resist on your gear, and zero real experience in how to handle it. Then when she poisons you, there’s a moment of “oh poison, fine, whatever” followed immediately by “holy hell, my health bar is just melting, oh poo poo what do I do what do I do…and I’m dead”.
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Oct 19, 2022 03:11
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:33 |
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I actually enjoyed the Lut Gholein sewers. It's weird conceptually if you think about it (just like every sewer level), but as a dungeon, it's pretty solid. Introduces a couple new enemy types, strikes a nice balance between being a bit maze-like but not over-the-top twisty corridors, excellent end boss.
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Oct 22, 2022 20:37
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One interesting piece of trivia regarding the cube is how player behavior handled it in multiplayer: The Cube is super useful as extra storage, but it's not available until Act 2 (and it's kind of annoying to get even once you get to Act 2). So when you started an bank alt or even just a new character, it was common practice to have a high level friend give your newbie the Horadric Cube, then that high level guy would just go speedrun the Halls of the Dead in 5 minutes to replace the Cube for themselves.
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Oct 27, 2022 00:06
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Simply Simon posted:The eclipse quest never made sense to me, because in order to finish the staff, you'll have to go into the snake temple anyway. Them cursing the sun away (which everybody is a bit too chill about) doesn't actually add anything!! It does feel weird they didn't at least give it some kind of reward though; even a meaningless triviality like a random rare amulet or something would make it feel a little more like a real 'quest'.
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Oct 31, 2022 01:25
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Dirk the Average posted:And as with most games of this type, it's the big unexpected hits that kill you much more frequently than sustained damage, even if the sustained damage is more dps (losing 50% of your health all at once after 30 seconds of combat is much scarier than slowly losing 100% of your health over 30 seconds). Mana leech does have some use as a physical fighter though. Their physical attacks which cost Mana typically require so little Mana that even a tiny amount of leech is enough to ensure that you never have to think about Mana, ever.
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Nov 4, 2022 21:32
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Getting your rear end kicked by Normal Duriel was practically a rite of passage for newbies. He's a huge difficulty spike, fought in a tiny arena, high damage, and also hits at a really awkward time in the leveling curve when most builds are just starting to really get off the ground. He also bears an uncanny resemblance to a Hydralisk. No idea if the design team intentionally copied the style, unconsciously modeled it due to playing tons of Starcraft while drawing graphics, or it's purely a coincidence, but it's pretty striking. quote:It was even worse in past versions of Diablo 2, which had the infinite wisdom of processing monsters and updating the game, as you load into the new area. This is extremely difficult to observe now, inbetween the patches fixing this and new computers not even blinking to load this 2000 game, but this lead to ever more infamy with Duriel and new players: you can try to teleport back in and you're already dead before you load in. Programming is hard. Explopyro posted:Duriel is also, interestingly, basically the only boss nobody ever did repeat runs of. He doesn't have any particular draws as far as loot tables go (even Andariel was kind of popular, due to having better odds for rings; I don't remember the technical details of why, but she was often a target for people seeking Stones of Jordan)... and on top of that, you have to find the right tomb again, and once you've completed the quest the log no longer tells you which one is correct. Once your map gets rerolled (e.g. on changing difficulties or entering a multiplayer game), you won't know which tomb to go to. (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.) MagusofStars fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Nov 8, 2022 |
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Nov 8, 2022 01:38
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Cold-aligned Iron Wolves are actually fairly useful in vanilla for melee characters because their ability to freeze enemies can really help even the odds and prevent you getting swarmed. Long-term, yes, they're squishy, so you should dump them as soon as you reach Nightmare Act 2 (for the Desert Guards with actually useful auras), but for the remainder of Normal, they have a clear purpose and benefit. I have no idea why anyone would use the lightning or fire variants though; the damage is higher but still pretty outclassed by your character. I actually like the statue quest. The fact that you can't really guarantee when you get the drop off a corpse feels firmly in line with D2's loot finding ethos - except that the odds are high enough that it doesn't really get frustrating. And the reward is nice given that it lasts forever and is always useful regardless of class. It's also nice to have a quest that you never need to really go out of your way for; it just sort of happens at some point and that's that. Simply Simon posted:The waypoint will never be next to the latter (in spidertown at least), so that's cool if you thought finding the waypoint means you can stop for the day.
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Nov 12, 2022 02:21
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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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-There's a second Super-Unique, Eldritch at the very start of the second area guarding the waypoint. He's just as mechanically uninteresting and non-threatening as Shenk, but due to being located near a waypoint, it was a pretty popular farm target. Jump in the waypoint and you could kill Eldritch+Shenk together in like 2 minutes tops. -This very first area, Bloody Foothills was an extremely popular area to run for experience. The monster density is high, the layout is very simple with no back-tracking ever required, the individual monsters aren't too difficult, and the area has a very convenient waypoint right at the end. Hell, there's even free tanks due to the large number of NPC Barbarians. General flow would be to join a Bloody run with a bunch of other players, then everybody basically zerg rushes through, you kill the two Super-Uniques and everybody drops group. -Outside of right when the expansion was released, I don't think I ever used or saw anyone using a Barbarian merc. Desert Guards were unquestionably superior as tanks/meatshields because of the auras and higher innate defense/resistances. Rogues will always have have Act 1 Normal, where you have no other options. Iron Wolves at least have the argument for being a source of elemental damage in Normal, plus plenty of usage in pre-expansion games since they're your only Act 3 option. -The Red Portals are optional dungeons but are at least visually interesting optional dungeons; much more so than the usual "here's another cave" that you see in all the other acts.
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Dec 6, 2022 00:21
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The personalization quest is odd because it’s such a cool concept but I honestly don’t know if I ever used it or even regularly heard/saw people using it. Oh sure, the very first time, you’d try it out, but then afterwards, it would typically just sit there unused. If the item is replaceable, then you wouldn’t bother because it’s hard to get attached to something you already know you’re dumping in a couple levels. If the item is extremely good, then I wouldn’t want to mark it because of hand-me-down or trade reasons. Magic find (and item generation generally) is interesting. Because of the specific time frame this game came out/was in its prime (early 2000’s), that it could still maintain a bit of mystery . Even a few years later, there would have been some online programmed stuff for you to instantly look up whatever you needed and figure out the drop dates and the best farm location and etc…but at the time, tracking down the best source for ___ was a non-trivial exercise, often requiring you to do a bit of your own cross-referencing of various item levels and monster levels and etc to figure poo poo out. Also, when the expansion first released, Nihl was typically a quest that got entirely skipped. Pindle was a super nice super-unique to run, Nihl himself was a pain in the rear end, and his temple was annoying. So people would basically grab the quest for the red portal and then leave the actual quest undone. His drop was later buffed to help encourage people to do it.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:03
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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.
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Dec 18, 2022 01:03
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Xarn posted:How do I shore up my resistances for nightmare? I am at -20 cold, and frozen nova from superuniques almost kills me. 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.
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Dec 18, 2022 14:52
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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. 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. MagusofStars fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 00:08
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:33 |
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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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