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I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this. I'm not familiar with most of these mods, so that'll be interesting too (everyone back in the day knew PlugY, though I only ever used it for the Uber Tristram content; I'm kind of surprised to see there's a version for the latest patch, but at the same time I'm not, because Yohann always said each update was the final one and he was done working on it but then inevitably he'd make another anyway...). The Amazon Basin really takes me back, I used to hang out there a fair bit and you can probably find my old posts if you go searching. I used to know way too much about Diablo II (and to a lesser extent Diablo), the majority of which I've long since forgotten; I'll probably chime in if and when something jogs my memory, though who knows if any of it will actually apply to these mods. I played this game obsessively and I definitely still have all my old character files somewhere...
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Oct 4, 2022 00:49
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So, uh, I'm biting my tongue here. I've thought of a lot of things to go all  about, but I'm pretty sure nobody in the thread wants that. (Do you want that? As one example, I could do a reasonably deep dive on melee Sorceress builds in vanilla. I have a bit of experience playing them, and at one time had a friend who'd taken multiple of them through Hell solo.)Also a lot of my old knowledge is going to be utterly useless where these mods are concerned, anyway. I'm kind of surprised at how thoroughly even the mostly-vanilla-flavoured mods here just immediately went "let's completely rebalance the damage formulae". Back when I played D2 a lot of what I enjoyed was finding ways to make unexpected things viable within the original game, while it seems like the general approach of these mods is just "gently caress it, let's change everything". I'm not even going to say that's bad, it just puts me off them because to some extent I enjoyed the jank. (It's still so weird to me that this game has a respec function now, even though I was playing back when they added it. It just doesn't feel like Diablo II to me unless you're saving all your skill points through most of Normal because you have to be at a higher level to spend them optimally for the build you're planning.) Although, speaking of changing damage formulae, I'm really curious. Do any of these mods fix the "Lying Character Screen" (LCS)? One of the things Diablo II was kind of infamous for is how inaccurate the damage numbers on the character screen are, rendering it useless for any practical purposes. The technical explanation is something like they maintained two different damage functions, one which is used when actual damage is dealt and another which calculates the values for the character screen, and they didn't keep them consistent. So you'd get things like the property "Damage +X" being applied before enhanced damage from gear/skills in actual combat, but applied after all other calculations in the character screen, so weapons with it (okay, mostly this applied to the runeword "Grief") would look like piddly awful things on the character screen and then totally annihilate enemies. With certain skills, other skills just wouldn't incorporate it, but the game of course didn't tell you anything like this. Or, like you point out with Median XL, even in the base game many attacks' damage was non-indicative because they'd hit multiple times, or multiple enemies, interact weirdly with resistances, etc. Skill damage numbers were basically only useful for comparison within the same skill. I did not know Eastern Sun was a goon project. I knew it existed but I've never played it, and the same goes for Median XL. These kind of total-conversion mods are very technically impressive and I'm sure they do interesting things (Median in particular just has loads of new bespoke content), but I never had much interest in playing them at least in part because of how different they were. I'm looking forward to seeing what they actually have to offer.
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Oct 7, 2022 23:16
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Fun fact for anyone who might not know, Blood Raven is canonically the Rogue protagonist from the first Diablo. I'm pretty sure they stated this outright at some point (maybe in lore material connected to D3?), though for a long time they left it as just an implication.Simply Simon posted:I once did a proto-LP of a Melee/Poison Amazon all the way through Hell for the German forum I used to post obsessively in. You can play everything in this game, but it might just take forever. I remember those German forums! I never posted on them (I do not know German) but would occasionally read things there when people linked to it from the Basin. They were definitely one of the bigger proponents of the poison Amazon builds, I made a few after reading guides by one of the posters there. (I could never get Impale to work to my satisfaction, though. I usually used Jab or Lightning Fury on mine.) Right. So. Let's talk about melee Sorceresses in vanilla D2.  incoming, beware.One of the things complicating this conversation is that, as mentioned, "viable character build" means very different things to different people. What's your patience and/or frustration threshold? Are you playing alone or with a party? (Or are you playing alone and using the /players command to boost enemy stats?) How tolerant are you of survivability issues? Do you have a stockpile of good items already? The OP's comments on melee in general suggest to me they might be thinking primarily from a "self-found" or "untwinked" perspective (when the character uses no items they haven't found themself in the course of gameplay) and, in that context, melee builds in general and especially melee sorceresses are not a good idea. (In Diablo II, most melee characters are very heavily dependent on weapon damage, and the good weapons are hard to come by. The sorceress build is also very equipment dependent, but for different reasons which I'll get into.) This should absolutely not be anyone's first character. But you don't actually need the ludicrously difficult-to-make aura equipment (Dream runewords) to do it either. There are a few quirks that make the melee sorceress interesting. 1. Enchant is amazing. It pretty much single-handedly solves your Attack Rating (chance to hit) problems both for yourself and anyone around you (including your mercenary and any friends you might play with). It lasts an incredibly long time so you don't need to worry about refreshing it. It also, especially as you get up there in +skills, outputs very respectable fire damage. Even better, you can "prebuff" with a higher level, whether just from your weapon switch (e.g. Leaf or Memory runewords in a base staff with decent staffmods, it's not that hard to get +6) or keeping more +skill gear (like a +3 fire skills circlet and/or amulet) in your stash, and that boosted level will stay even after you swap to your combat gear. (For comedy value, you can even go bare-handed and punch things to death with fire, but you're much better off with a weapon.) 2. Elemental Mastery, specifically Fire and Lightning. Mastery skills apply to any melee damage you do, and there's a fun little bug that can make them apply twice and compound multiplicatively. Let's look at Enchant: when you cast Enchant, Fire Mastery applies and multiplies the damage. Then when you hit the enemy, the game goes "dealing fire damage? we have to apply fire mastery!" and multiplies it again. (This is also why the auras are so good. It's not the pulse damage, those auras also add elemental damage to your melee hits, and that melee damage gets the double application of mastery. If you do somehow manage to get a Dream runeword helm and shield, which together give you a level 30 Holy Shock aura, you will output ludicrous amounts of lightning damage each hit.) This double mastery bug does not apply to ranged attacks, although the LCS will display numbers as if it does. 3. You're not stuck using normal attacks even though the Sorceress has no melee skills: you can get access to some Paladin Combat skills via runewords. Specifically, Passion gives +1 to Zeal, and Kingslayer gives +1 to Vengeance. Vengeance is the gimmicky option, its elemental damage is unfortunately never going to be that impressive (since it's based on the weapon damage and you don't have ways to enhance that), but it does get boosted by the mastery skills and it can totally work. Zeal gets you a faster attack and helps deal with groups of enemies faster. For Vengeance you need a base with good weapon damage (see below note on 2H axes), for Zeal you want something fast (a Phase Blade is usually best). Or if you're very lucky to find a 4-socketed sceptre with the right staffmod ("+3 to Zeal (Paladin Only)"), this will actually work just fine for a Sorceress despite what it says, and making it into Passion will get you an instant level 4 Zeal. If you're doing the lightning auras, "Crescent Moon" can give you a big reduction to enemy lightning resistance, but I'm not sure that outweighs Zeal most of the time (you could swap between them though). 4. The sorceress has a surprisingly quick base attack animation with two-handed axes. This is because axes and staves use the same base animation set, and she's meant to be good with staves. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using one unless you're looking for style points, you're still usually better off with a shield and a fast one-hander (phase blade), especially if you're using Zeal. But it's a cool quirk, and you can absolutely make a Kingslayer axe and go to town with it (I think I remember Feral Axe being the best overall choice for this?). 5. You get Static Field, which lets you do massive percentage-based damage to anything not lightning immune. Pretty much every sorceress build uses this, but especially if you're wading into melee anyway there's absolutely no reason not to. Extra skill points only add range, so you can spend a single point and forget about it. (It's the classic boss killer for a reason.) 6. You get Teleport. This is a huge advantage when playing melee because it lets you do all kinds of tactical repositioning, and also gives you control over your mercenary which is very beneficial. Now, don't get me wrong, there are challenges: 1. In Hell, every enemy type has at least one inherent elemental immunity, most Unique/Super-unique enemies have at least two, and even when they aren't immune resistances are everywhere. Fire immunity is going to pose problems, and whatever backup you pick will also not work in every situation. That said, you get a few solutions more or less by default. A mercenary with a high-physical-damage weapon is effective against single enemies, especially since Enchant helps make sure he hits and you can position him with Teleport (every time you teleport him it resets his AI, which avoids the issues that sometimes make mercenaries get lost or hesitate to attack). And, of course, you have Static Field for anything not lightning-immune (you can't kill with it, but you can set up easy kills for your merc). Also, getting Enchant up and running takes roughly 60 skill points (20 in Enchant, 20 in Fire Mastery, and 20 in Warmth for synergy bonus). This leaves you with enough extra points that you can easily dump some in another element (Frozen Orb is the most common off-element backup skill for a Sorceress, I think it comes to 28 points total with the prerequisites and 1 in Cold Mastery; if you're going the aura route, you put 20 in Lightning Mastery instead). 2. No matter how hard you try, the sorceress is always going to be fragile. She has the lowest base life and benefit from vitality of any character, and you're going to need to put stat points in strength and dexterity to equip her gear. You also don't have the free skillpoints to invest in Energy Shield (nor the free statpoints to boost your mana enough for it to be good). You also can't use life or mana leech to stay alive the way physical-based melee characters do. A melee sorceress cannot wade into the centre of a pack and expect to survive, you need to use tactical positioning (and teleport) to stay on the fringes and engage enemies a few at a time. I wouldn't want to play one in Hardcore, but then I don't really like Hardcore generally. 3. In the interest of survivability, you need a decent amount of "faster hit recovery", and "faster block rate" on your shield if you use one, so you don't end up dying to stunlock and/or block-lock. Balancing the equipment for a build like this is very tricky, because of course you also want the caster modifiers like +skills for your damage, and "faster cast rate" for teleport (you'll never cast as quickly as a dedicated caster sorc but faster is better for escaping sticky situations). Attack speed boosts also really help if you can get them. I don't remember all the breakpoints for these things any more, but it's best to look them up and take them into account. Some overall thoughts: The lightning aura version is absurdly powerful, dealing potentially hundreds of thousands of damage each hit. But unless you are cheating (either using save editors or trading for duped items online), you are very unlikely to obtain the necessary materials to make Dream runewords that grant the auras. Even post 1.13, when rune drop odds were increased by something like a factor of 4, the highest runes are still absurdly rare. Feel free to cheat and try it out in single player though, I won't judge you; my past self might well have, but I'm older now and don't give a poo poo any more. A more obtainably realistic version can still be quite effective, though you need to be thoughtful about how you play. I would say the bare minimum needed to try it out is a decent switch for prebuffing Enchant (get your +6 Leaf or Memory, +4 from double Spirit, etc), a Passion phase blade (requires no rune higher than Lem, this is reasonable) with a good shield (the runewords Rhyme or Sanctuary are good starting points), and some strong equipment for your mercenary. From there, you want to focus on resistances and the various recovery/attack/cast speed breakpoints, and get +skills if you can (charms help a lot if you have them). If you don't want to melee, the other popular Enchantress variant was the Exploding Arrows one. It may or may not be a bug, but Enchant damage gets added to the splash from Exploding Arrow. If you use a weapon with the "Fires Exploding Arrows" property (Raven Claw, Kuko Shakaku, or Demon Machine), you can take advantage of this. You do less damage without the double Fire Mastery application, but the splash is good against groups, and you can even combine this with piercing shots (either from Razortail belt or, IIRC, Demon Machine itself) to generate a new explosion each time the piercing triggers. And of course fighting at a distance is safer. I easily played as many Sorceress archers as I did Amazons, it was a fun build. I'm not sure if I'm surprised to see Median going out of its way to just give the Sorceress a melee skill tree. I always thought the reason some people found it so compelling in the original game was because it was very consciously going against the grain of the game's design intent. But, on the other hand, it was a thing enough people wanted to do that Median just saying "okay then, you want it? here it is!" has a certain appeal too. I used to be way too obsessive about this drat game, you may be able to tell. I hope that was at least somewhat interesting to someone, and only minimally irritating to the extent that's possible. (OP, if you want me to put anything behind spoiler bars, let me know.)
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Oct 9, 2022 19:14
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...Simon, I think I remember reading that writeup back in the day! It sounds at least somewhat familiar (and incredibly painful  I admire your patience). I'm not sure, though.The closest I came to that level of tedium were my Poison Dagger Necromancer (who did complete Hell on /players8, but oh god that took forever, and I had to rebuild him to incorporate minor skeleton support after the first attempt couldn't do it), and Fist of the Heavens Paladin (it is not fun when your primary attack is single target and has a ~2 second cooldown between shots). I mostly didn't do self-found after my first couple of characters started amassing a huge stockpile, I liked seeing what I could do with the things I'd found. The one big exception was that at one point I challenged myself to complete Hardcore on /players8, self-found and single-pass with no external inventory (I wanted to know I could do it), which I eventually did with a trap Assassin. Looking back, I'm really not sure how I managed it, and it's certainly not a challenge I'd care to do again.
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Oct 10, 2022 04:17
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I can potentially help fill in some of the gaps there. I, uh, may have written some books on druids back in the day. (As far as I know the information in them is still good, though I can't vouch for the tone or writing style, I was much younger then. And I didn't exactly cover every build.) On Enchant and Attack Rating: IIRC, any skill-based multipliers to AR get added together and then applied in a block, so if you've got +300% from Enchant and +100% from Zeal (made-up numbers) you'd have a total bonus of 400%, and apply that (to get base AR x 5, rather than base AR x 4 x 2). Enchant is still very good, because it gives a very big multiplier for the investment and stacks with everything else, but it doesn't stack multiplicatively with other skills. (One of the old tricks for melee characters was acquiring the unique club "Demon Limb" which has charges of level 23 Enchant, and swapping that in to cast it on yourself. It didn't provide meaningful fire damage because you had no Warmth or Fire Mastery, but if you were having AR issues it helped a lot.)
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Oct 10, 2022 16:34
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I must protest a bit at the statement that only one type of mercenary was ever worth using in vanilla, though I do understand that's common knowledge and maybe 95%+ of the time it is in fact correct. I am all for these mods trying to make the others more viable (especially the Rogues, who I always had the hardest time making a case for, at least in 1.1x; in 1.09 you could glitch them into using Diablo's Lightning Hose attack somehow and that's incredible for myriad reasons). The mercenaries' infamously terrible AI is a real problem, too (and, ironically, the popular Act 2 guys seemed to be the worst). There were some tricks to mitigate it, though. Mainly, if you reset their positioning, it also resets their AI routine (the good old "have you tried turning it off and on again" definitely applies); Town Portal works well enough and every character has access to that, but Teleport is even better, and I tended to carry either a staff or amulet with charges of it on most characters just to move minions around. DarkMatt posted:They also have either the Vigor aura (Life regen) or Meditation aura (Mana regen) depending on the hireling's subtype. I'm confused by this. Vigor was the run-speed and stamina-regen aura in vanilla, did you mean to say Prayer or did Project D2 change what Vigor does? DarkMatt posted:This is all because not only does Rakanishu zip around thanks to Extra Fast, Lightning Enchanted is the bane of melee characters. In addition to bonus lightning damage on hits, each time Rakanishu is hitstunned, he fires off sparks in random directions. These sparks are fun in that they do a fixed amount of damage and scale with monster level. If you're point blank and tap him many times, it's very likely you'll eat multiple of those, and that will drop your life very quickly. Lightning Enchanted is a really fun modifier to talk about, because Blizzard kept trying and failing to fix how much of a problem it was; that said, it used to be much more deadly, or at least deadly for different reasons. Most of the worst involved its interactions when combined with various other modifiers (which isn't really a thing in vanilla until higher difficulties but who knows how soon these mods will start doing that). In early versions, the most infamous thing was the "MSLE", or Multiple Shots Lightning Enchanted. The multiple shots modifier applied to the Charged Bolt projectiles generated by LE, so it'd fill up the screen with them very quickly, and if you went into melee they'd all get generated on top of you (if this happens, you're dead). They eventually fixed that (I think in 1.10), but ended up creating a new issue that's nearly as terrifying. I don't think there was a common nickname for these monsters, but it caused problems in conjunction with Fire Enchanted or Cold Enchanted. See, FE and CE monsters, when killed, generated explosions that deal damage based on the enemy's maximum life... and if you combined this with LE, it would make invisible extra death explosions happen whenever the charged bolts are generated. (I think this is what happened. My memory of this is a bit fuzzy and I never fully understood it, I only knew it was terrifying.) Again, if you went into melee, you were dead, but this time you didn't know why. achtungnight posted:Cain shows up in Diablo 3 too, where he finally dies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes back in 4 though, maybe as a spirit. I think I remember reading that he's made appearances in Diablo Immortal? I wouldn't know, though, I haven't and will not go anywhere near that pile of exploitative rubbish. I was surprised when they killed him off in D3, mainly because I can't imagine them making Diablo games without him in them, for better or worse he's the most iconic character of the series. On the question of why he was so iconic and beloved, I'm not entirely sure, because as OP says his lectures are more tedious than anything else and that never changes. But, at least in this game (and the first), the dialogue is skippable so most of the time you just hear his catchphrases and get items identified (and he's your companion through the whole game, that has to count for something). I always wondered where his Scottish accent from the first game went though. DarkMatt posted:This is what's fascinating about Diablo: the lore looks like it has a lot of thought put into it. Like sure you have things like Cain not dying but there's a timeline you can follow along and get a solid idea of why everything's happening. Normally that's applauded in a setting when you can get a solid grasp of why everything is happening, and honestly, Diablo is no different. I remember being shocked when I played Diablo 3 at what a mess the story and lore were (general consensus was it was pretty terrible, this wasn't just me), but when you take a look back at the earlier games, it turns out they weren't really any better. It's just that Diablo 3, at least at launch, forced you to engage with the story in order to play it, while in the earlier games, most players ignored a lot of the text and just picked up breadcrumbs here and there, and when you're doing that it's a lot easier to make them fit together into something in your head.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:51
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Keldulas posted:I think the fact that his services are free helps to endear him, if he charged for what he does I don’t think he’d be as popular. The really funny thing is that sometimes he did! In the first game, of course, but also in D2. If you skip this quest and finish Act 1 without saving him, he'll show up in town at the beginning of Act 2 with alternate dialogue about how some of the Rogues rescued him, and then he'll charge the same 100 gold per item (for the rest of the game, unless you go back and make up the quest).
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Oct 12, 2022 12:53
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I am not at all surprised that a lot of these mods choose to play around in the space of what the stat points do. The original game's system had some obvious glaring flaws, as you point out; the most I can say in its defence is that it made it easier to make optimal choices because they tended to be so obvious (and I won't exactly complain about something that lowers the cognitive load, with how complicated character builds could get). That said, it was definitely possible to do some interesting things within that system if you wanted to, and some people did (as Simon's already alluded to). "Titan" builds (all strength) were a challenge/gimmick thing that I've definitely seen people do. I can't defend it from a practical perspective, unless you were doing something really off-the-wall, because the amount of damage strength actually gets you is very marginal. Damage boosts from strength are treated the same way as off-weapon (i.e., skill or gear based) "% Enhanced Damage", which all gets added together to produce a single multiplier that modifies your weapon damage. So if, for example, you put 100 points in strength thinking you're going to get 100% more damage... well, that 100% stacks additively with the probably 200% or more that you're getting from your skills (e.g. in the case of those arbitrary numbers you'd go from 3x to 4x weapon damage, or a net 33% increase). Those same points give a much better return on investment in vitality for survivability. But if you just want the biggest possible damage numbers, well, marginal increase or not, it's still an increase. You can be a glass cannon if you want to, you're just going to die a lot unless you play so cautiously you end up killing slower anyway. Pumping dexterity on ranged characters was a bit more of a thing; "glass cannon amazons" were decently popular. (For a variety of reasons: dexterity boosts AR in addition to damage, so you get other benefits as well, and then bow skills have less %ED than melee skills so you'd get more of a return from it proportionally.) I personally found these frustrating to play, as the end result was usually too much glass and not enough cannon, so to speak; Amazons definitely benefit from putting more points into Dexterity than equipment requires, but most of mine ended up prioritising Vitality a bit more. And then, of course, there's blocking. "Max block" (75% chance to block) variants of most builds existed; I never much liked them, but as I understand it they were a popular choice for people who liked PvP, and some people used them in normal gameplay too. The really weird thing is that the block chance formula includes your level in the denominator, so whenever you level up your block chance goes down and you need to spend dexterity points to get it back up. (From the design perspective, I guess the idea is to make it so low-level characters can have a respectable block chance? But in practice it felt like an arbitrary penalty or tax for levelling up.) I don't remember the exact formula but I think it often worked out to having to spend ~2-3 points per level in dexterity just to maintain your block chance. The only characters I know of that invest in Energy are Sorceresses using Energy Shield, and those were very rare in my experience (Energy Shield is a lot worse in D2 than Mana Shield was in the first game). There are just so many better ways to solve mana problems; even if you do just want to boost the size of your mana pool, gear or charms with +mana modifiers are a lot more efficient at it than stat points are. And literally the only thing Energy does is give you mana. (Okay, I'm lying, there's one other thing Energy does. It's just a bad thing. Certain lategame enemies have access to a curse called "Blood Mana", that makes you spend your life instead of mana to cast spells. They will only cast it on you if you have more maximum mana than life, which a properly built character never does.) The irony here is that in the first Diablo, Magic (that game's counterpart to Energy) was basically the god-stat, and in addition to your mana it determined what spells you could learn and how high you could raise their levels (D1 didn't have skill points, it had consumable spellbooks, and these checked your magic stat), and how much damage your spells did. And having a large mana pool in that game was its own benefit, because Mana Shield was completely busted (reducing all incoming damage by something like 33% and also directing it all to your mana instead of life). The reason the Sorcerer was by far the best class in that game is almost entirely due to the fact he had a much higher maximum Magic stat than the other two classes (one of the ways D1 differentiated classes was by giving them maximum amounts they could invest in each stat, D2 did away with this). It seems like ES and MXL are each trying, in their own way, to turn Energy back into Magic.
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Oct 14, 2022 19:40
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One of the other things that makes ghosts (Wraith et al) so terrifying at times is that their ability to phase through walls also allows them to phase through other enemies (and each other), and they can stack on top of each other. That can get very deadly very quickly. "Jewels are trash" was a very common opinion, and while it's very often the case I think overall it's a misconception. You do find a lot of terrible ones, but that's like every type of magic item, and the good ones are very good. Some of them offer affixes you can't get any other way, and especially when they combine well (a rare jewel can get 3-6 affixes at once), you end up with something unique and powerful. When you're really trying to optimise things to get some wacky build to work, the right jewels can fill in gaps you can't otherwise. (And as you say, there's crafting. Which in vanilla didn't care at all about the properties of the jewel, so a lot of people just kept stashes of garbage jewels to use for this purpose.) And then, Imbuing. Oh god. There's a major rabbit hole there but it's not necessarily worth going down. If you were clever and really knew the item creation formulae (including some special quirks that only applied to imbues) you could make some awesome stuff... sometimes. You'd get a lot of duds even then, because it's ultimately still a randomly-generated item, but imbuing gave you a few different ways to put your thumb on the scale. I have a whole bunch of notes on it somewhere, I'd meant to write a guide at some point back when I was active in the D2 community but I never got around to it. There is a lot of technical bullshit (which I can get into if anyone really wants me to), but the biggest benefit involved much higher chances to get multiple staffmods (those inherent skill bonuses certain items come with), and certain item types would have much higher chances of getting good modifiers when imbuing relative to normal drops. The best candidates for imbuing tended to be class-specific items (especially the Sorceress' orbs), and circlets. These formulae did incorporate the character level, so usually it was better to use a high-level character (although, also, there were some items that benefited from imbuing with a low-level character or didn't care, so some people would rush characters through Normal to this point just for imbuing). If you didn't know all the minutiae necessary to really optimise it, well, imbuing still gets you a rare item where you get to choose the base type, and that's perfectly good in and of itself. It's definitely one of the more distinctive and interesting quest rewards Diablo II has to offer.
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Oct 16, 2022 02:08
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Right. So. Imbuing tips and tricks. Where to start? First, the basics. As DarkMatt said in the update, imbuing takes a non-magical base item (white item name) and uses it to generate a rare (yellow name) item of the same type. Nearly all characteristics of the input item are ignored, and the output item is randomly generated using ilvl=clvl+4. (ilvl is item level/item creation level, clvl is character level, you'll see me using these a lot) Picking a base item type and randomly generating affixes sounds a lot like Gambling, right? (In 1.1x you have a 10% chance to get a rare when gambling, and gold is plentiful while imbues are at most 3 per character.) For certain item types, it's not too different, but they use different formulae. Gambling picks an ilvl randomly in the range clvl-5 to clvl+4, and otherwise generates the item exactly the same as if it dropped with that ilvl. So what are the differences? What cool stuff can you do with imbuing? Staffmods Firstly, let's talk about "staffmods". What are staffmods? This was the most commonly used term for the inherent skill bonuses certain item types (e.g. staves, hence staffmods) have. The Sorceress starts with a staff that has +1 to Firebolt and the Necromancer starts with a wand that has +1 to Raise Skeleton, for instance. Those are staffmods. A staffmod-eligible item can have bonuses of +1-3 to up to three different skills. Normally, the number of staffmods an item gets is determined by generating a random number from 1 to 100, >90 gives 3 staffmods and >70 gives 2 staffmods, otherwise you get 1. When imbuing, the ilvl (clvl+4) is added to this random number before the check, which greatly improves your odds (and also means you can guarantee 3 staffmods by imbuing with a level 86 or higher character). The level of each staffmod uses a similar check. Random number 1-100, >90 is level 3 and >60 is level 2. When imbuing, it instead adds floor(ilvl/2) to the random number before checking. You can't get this to 100% odds even with a level 99 character, but they are significantly better. So the first big benefit of imbuing is Much better (potentially 100%) odds of getting 3 staffmods and Much higher chance of those each being +2 or +3, especially if your character is high level. (This does get a bit more complicated depending on which skills you care about, because there's a tier system that keeps skills from too far apart on the tree from appearing together, and weights toward higher-level skills as ilvl increases. This mostly means summoning necromancers are screwed here, because Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery will not appear at ilvl 24 or above.) The enigmatic Magic Level Second: There is a special hidden property called "magic level" or "magic_lvl" that makes some specific base item types perform much better. Not every item has this, but the ones that do are very good picks for imbuing. It's a bit tedious to explain everything it does, but here goes: It simplifies the affix level formula, making it easier to get access to high level affixes. (The affix level is normally computed from the item's ilvl and qlvl, qlvl or "quality level" is a hidden value each base item have.) The regular affix level formula is a complicated mess that's hard to explain, and is no higher than the ilvl or qlvl (higher qlvls reduce the affix level in certain ways relative to the ilvl), but if you have a magic-lvl it instead becomes max(ilvl, qlvl)+magic_lvl. This makes a few items turn out very powerful even when imbued at low ilvls. Items with a magic_lvl also change the weighting formula for which affixes appear. Normally, affixes have a "frequency" stat, which works like this: imagine there are affixes A, B, C, and D in the pool, A has a frequency 2 and B, C, D each have 1. The probability of getting the affix is (affix frequency)/(total frequency) so A would appear 2/5 of the time and B, C, D each 1/5 of the time. When there is a magic_lvl, it uses frequency*alvl instead of frequency as the weighting factor, so high-level affixes appear much more frequently. The full list of items with their magic_lvl values is: Circlet-class helms: Circlet 3, Coronet 8, Tiara 13, Diadem 18 Sorceress Orbs: all orbs have magic_lvl 1 Necromancer Wands: normal and exceptional wands have magic_lvl 1, elite wands have 0 Diadems are the obvious stand-out, and probably the most commonly known imbue target. They have qlvl 85, and combined with the magic_lvl 18 this guarantees maximum (99) affix level at any ilvl. You can imbue these with a low-level character and get the same results as a max-level character. You can also reroll them with the 6 perfect skull cube recipe until you get something you like (this cube recipe gives a "low quality rare item", which actually means "output ilvl = floor(input ilvl/2) + floor(clvl/2)", this makes most item types degrade over time but not diadems!). Circlet-class helms in general are a decent imbue target, but you can't do the reroll trick with any other type, so you're better off gambling them instead (and saving imbues for Diadems or other things). The other fun thing about circlets is they have a much wider affix pool, and can carry things like +2 to class skills, faster cast rate, life or mana steal, etc that don't otherwise appear on helmets at all. Better stuff is available and, thanks to magic_lvl, the odds are even weighted toward the good stuff! Orbs and wands are in the sweet spot of having both magic_lvl and being staffmod-eligible, though in practice it's mostly just orbs; the runeword White (Dol Io) exists and is very easy to make, and gives better bonuses for most of the skills necromancers actually use, and it's not that hard to get base wands with good staffmods (e.g. by shopping from Drognan in Normal). Some number crunching: Years ago, I crunched some numbers on the odds to get desirable affixes on certain item types, if you want to see how much of a difference this makes. I didn't keep notes, so we'll have to just trust that my maths was good back then... Orbs/wands: +2 class ~7.7%, +2 tree ~9.3%, of the Magus (20% FCR) ~25%, 2os ~1.32% Assassin Claws: +2 class ~1.75%, +2 tree ~2.61%, IAS ~20% (10-40% roughly equal odds), 2os ~1.34% Sceptres: +2 class ~1.57%, +2 tree ~1.57%, 10% FCR ~5.55%, IAS ~20% (10-40% roughly equal odds), 2os ~1.2% Druid Pelt: +2 class ~4.57%, +2 tree ~6.85%, 10% FHR ~20%, 2os ~3.75% Barbarian Helm: +2 class ~4.57%, +2 tree ~6.85%, 10% FHR ~18%, 2os ~3.75% Necromancer Shrunken Heads: +2 class ~3.46%, +2 tree ~5.19%, res all ~30%, +blockchance ~20%, FHR ~13%, 2os ~2.75% You can immediately see the impact of magic_lvl when comparing orbs/wands to claws or sceptres, because these have very similar affix pools otherwise. The other class-specific items come out a little better despite not having a magic_lvl, but this is due to having smaller affix pools. (Orbs and wands weren't that unlikely, comparatively, to turn out with a net +5 to multiple useful skills, and faster cast rate on top of that. It's wonderful.) Note all claws are not staffmod-eligible, there are actually two different item classes for claws: h2h and h2h2. Only the claws in h2h2 can get staffmods, or specifically: Hand Scythe, Greater Claws, Greater Talons, Scissors Quhab, Suwayyah, Wrist Sword, War Fist, Battle Cestus, Feral Claws, Runic Talons, Scissors Suwayyah. Or, in other words, a few Exceptional claws and all Elite claws. That said, I don't consider claws particularly good targets for imbuing, because you can shop them from Anya (in Nightmare or Hell), and reset her inventory nigh-instantly by jumping through the portal if you don't close it. You can't get rares this way but you can get magical ones, which are eligible for the +3 skill tree affix (some of the best affixes are magical-only in a mostly vain attempt to not have rares be strictly better), which in theory with a staffmod can get you up to +6. Similarly, sceptres are not as good as they might seem, because you're unlikely to get a good melee damage affix and most paladins prefer that; it could be decent for a caster build using Blessed Hammer or Fist of the Heavens, but both of those builds have better options that are easier to find. Druids' and Barbarians' class specific helms have a lot of competition, especially from the runewords Lore and Delirium, which can be placed into base items that already have staffmods. I never experimented with imbuing them because I had better alternatives, but the numbers always seemed promising. (Unfortunately, circlets/diadems have a much wider affix pool, so those are also competition for these, if on a slightly different axis since they don't get staffmods.) Ethereality Ethereality is the only property that gets carried over from the base item. If you imbue an ethereal item, the item you get back will also be ethereal. Ethereal items have some benefits in return for the obvious drawback: they get either a 50% damage or defence bonus for weapons and armour respectively, and have reduced requirements to equip (a flat -10 each to strength and dexterity requirement if applicable). Items equipped to mercenaries don't lose durability, so they were a popular choice there, they're just strictly better. Also, weapons don't lose durability unless you swing them, so if you're not doing melee you can use an ethereal one for style (or lower requirements) without fear. The odds of getting a self-repair affix alongside desirable melee affixes (like enhanced damage) are very very low; I don't have exact numbers but I don't consider it worth attempting. That said, there's one really interesting trick... Phase Blades are inherently indestructible, but are normally restricted from spawning ethereal. However, you can find ethereal Dimensional Blades. If you imbue an ethereal one, you can then get a rare ethereal Dimensional Blade, and use the exceptional to elite upgrade recipe (for rare weapons it's Fal + Um + Perfect Sapphire + exceptional weapon) to end up with an ethereal indestructible Phase Blade. (I once made a Barbarian who dual-wielded these, it wasn't quite as effective as top-end uniques or runewords but it worked quite well and I thought it was stylish.) Low-level tricks: I already discussed Diadems, but there are a few other tricks you can do with low-level characters (which is nice because it doesn't take that long to rush a low-level character through Act 1). Mainly: items with inherently high qlvl (the highest tier or two of elite items in each category are best here) can get access to useful affixes even at low ilvls. This is mostly impractical, because the odds are low (you don't get the other benefits from high-level imbues, and high-level imbues tend to have a better affix pool anyway), but it's a thing you can do for some item types. There's one specific reason to consider it, and it's because many Necromancers like low-level staffmods. If you imbue a Succubus Skull or Bloodlord Skull with a level 8 character (level 8 is the lowest level you can complete the quest for some reason), you get the best possible odds of staffmods for Raise Skeleton, Skeleton Mastery, and Amplify Damage, and the qlvls are high enough to still give you a chance at the good affixes. These odds, to be clear, are very low; I tried this for a while and never actually got anything worth using (and the actual problem is the base items were too rare to try many times), but it is theoretically possible. And this is the only way to get these staffmods to appear on a late-game base item, outside of using the 6 perfect skull reroll recipe. You can do this on wands too, but between the fact high-qlvl wands don't have the magic_lvl and the fact the White runeword exists, it's really not worth it (unless, again, you're looking for style points). (The more useful trick for Necromancers along these lines was using the "repair low quality item" recipe on shrunken heads and wands, which involves cubing it with an El or Eld rune respectively and any chipped gem. The resulting item always has its ilvl set to 1 and gets its staffmods rerolled, and these could later be socketed and have runewords put in.) To conclude: I think these are most of the imbuing tricks I remember. I rarely saw people digging into these formulae to try to optimise them in weird ways; I could be wrong, but I may well have been one of the only people to ever try some of them. (It was definitely at least somewhat common knowledge that diadems and orbs were the best targets, but most people didn't know the reasons why. I certainly never saw anyone else do the ethereal Phase Blade trick.) Honestly, the biggest things to remember are staffmods and diadems, those are easily the most practical ways to take advantage. A lot of this is very marginal, and the odds of success aren't very high even in the best cases. (You probably don't want to know how many orbs it took me to get a +5 Blizzard/20% FCR, or how many Diadems/perfect skulls I ran through. I didn't keep track of numbers, thankfully.) But imbuing, properly applied, could turn out some truly one-of-a-kind items that were very powerful and useful in interesting ways, and it was a lot of fun to mess around with.
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Oct 16, 2022 20:54
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On the effects of being frozen: a lot of people don't know this, but being frozen actually has zero effect on casting speed (unlike walk, run, melee/ranged attack, or block speed, all of which are affected). Cannot Be Frozen was always a high-demand modifier (in particular, the unique ring Raven Frost was the most popular solution), but a lot of characters just don't need it. Depending on your play style and/or what skills you're using, a lot of casters just don't care if they're frozen or not. (Sorceresses can teleport anyway, and many casters spend a lot of time standing in one place and spamming spells.) On Charge: this is an incredibly fun skill that a lot of people overlook (or just use for locomotion). Using it for locomotion can also be tricky, because if you hold the button down it will just drain your mana to nothing (it's better used in short bursts). It's not too practical for combat unless you devote your entire build to it, but if you do... it has a very unique and fun play style (it doesn't really feel like melee, you tend to herd monsters to make openings and then pick them off very quickly), and does the highest damage of any weapon-based skill. There's also something hilarious about, e.g., having the paladin charging things on foot with a giant lance or hammer or something. (Fun trivia: in some early versions of the game it actually attacked with your shield! But that was pretty quickly changed, leaving only Smite as far as shield attacks go. This is also a good thing for Charge, because if it relied on shield damage it wouldn't be able to do diddly.) This Charge guide by SSoG is an absolute classic. Antidote Potions (and Thawing Potions) didn't always boost your poison/cold resistance (incidentally, they also give +10 maximum resistance, so if you have some resistance on gear you can actually get up to 85% after the potion). They used to do exactly what they said, and just cure their respective status conditions; I think the change was made in 1.11, but I could be wrong. Another fun thing about this is that while the duration is fairly short (I think it's 30 seconds?), every one you drink just stacks its duration on additively, so if you really want to you can just fill up your inventory with them and drink them all at once to be good for an entire play session. The potions are so cheap (at least once you're out of the earlygame) that this is reasonable to do, and for this reason the conventional wisdom was that poison and cold resistance from gear don't really matter. I almost never used them because I found it tedious, but sometimes they do really come in handy.
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Oct 18, 2022 22:56
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It's amazing how much of this game's dialogue has been burned into my brain. I literally cannot read any of your transcriptions of the text without hearing it in the characters' voices.
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Oct 22, 2022 20:47
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Scarabs are awful, even beyond the most obvious reason. The charged bolts trigger whenever you put them into hit recovery, which is bad enough in itself. But if one of them is Fire Enchanted or Cold Enchanted, it's bugged and will also cause invisible death explosions each time that happens. Fun! You die and have no idea why it happened. Even without that, though, the charged bolts could output a lot of damage, especially if you weren't expecting it (they don't look scary at first). The Halls of the Dead are probably the least frequently played "required" area in this game, because you can keep your cube between difficulties, and having the cube in inventory progresses you past that part of the quest. (The Horadric Scroll might still drop, but you can't even pick it up or give it to Cain!) I always cleared them anyway to get the waypoint, but a lot of people were unbothered by leaving that one unactivated. (Why is there a waypoint there, anyway?) There's a lot of weird trivia one could potentially get into about the Cube, and various things it used to be able to do, but I've honestly forgotten a lot of it (I don't remember what patch the "6 gems + sword" recipe is from). For instance: there's a second recipe for rejuvenation potions. 3 health potions + 3 mana potions + 1 chipped gem makes a normal rejuv, and if you use a normal gem you get a full rejuv. Neither of these recipes care what grade of potions you put in. Before patch 1.1x, though, you could make small ones with just 3 health potions + 3 mana potions, no gems required; they changed this at the same time as they added mana potions to vendors. I think it was considered important for game balance that you can't outright buy rejuvenation potions from vendors. A lot of the cube recipes have weird, undocumented secondary effects that can be surprisingly useful if you know how to exploit them. For instance, the "change low quality weapon/armour to normal quality" recipes always set the ilvl of the output to 1; you could use this to make staffmods of low-level skills appear on high-level items they normally wouldn't (of particular interest to summoning necromancers), or restrict the maximum sockets on an item (useful for getting the exact number needed for certain runewords). And there was a time when it was popular to use the "3 gems + weapon = socketed magical weapon" recipe to try to roll affixes like Cruel (200-300% enhanced damage); these have generally been obsoleted by runeword weapons, but it was a viable way to get melee weapons with respectable damage output (though it only worked on certain weapons that had a high enough qlvl for the affix, because the recipe set ilvl to 25/30/35 depending on gem grade). The item reroll recipes were very popular in high-level play. The ones for rare items do degrade the ilvl over time, which means they're more niche than they'd otherwise be, but as I mentioned before, diadems can get any affix at any ilvl so it worked great for them at least. The magic item reroll recipe, however, was fairly easy to do (any 3 perfect gems + the item) and preserved the input ilvl. So you could basically keep pouring perfect gems into an item until you got the affixes you wanted. Of course this took ages and really burned through gems, but it was something you could do; it was most popular for use on grand charms to try to get ones with +skills. And then there's the socketing recipe, which in 1.11 and later caused the ethereal armour bug. When adding sockets to an ethereal armour item, it'd preserve the item's boosted defence and then apply the 50% bonus for being ethereal on top of that (netting you 2.25x the defence of a non-ethereal item). You could then make armour runewords in these to get utterly absurd defence values (I once saw an armour with more than 4000 defence, which can then get multiplied by any skill-based boosts you might have). There was at least one runeword (Prudence) which conferred self-repair, if you wanted to wear it yourself, and of course ethereal items don't degrade on mercenaries so this was one of the better ways to get them some survivability. And I haven't even gotten into crafting! Oh, crafting. I suspect a lot of players went through the game and had no idea it was even a thing, because the game never tells you how to do it. (What are these weird items with orange names?!?) And even when you do know, it's fairly niche, and you have to know what you're doing to make it really worthwhile. The core idea of crafting is this: each recipe has 3-4 innate affixes, and then rolls another 1-4 affixes depending on ilvl. You choose a recipe with innate affixes you like and then spin the slots for the rest. (Also, crucially, the innate affixes don't block the same affix from being rolled randomly. If you roll lifesteal as a random affix on a Blood recipe, it'll add onto the innate lifesteal affix.) All the recipes take the form "magic base item + specific rune + specific perfect gem + any jewel" and output the same base item you put in, with an output level of 0.5*clvl + 0.5*ilvl of the input item, rounding down each time. (Unless you were targeting specific affixes, you wanted at least ilvl 71 to guarantee 4 affixes.) And the vast majority of the time you'd still get garbage, because it's 4 random affixes and you probably wanted certain ones, it took a lot of fruitless crafting to make something good. One other wrinkle that often came up: crafted items had higher required levels than magical/rare items with the same affixes. Amusingly, this could sometimes cause items to come out with a required level greater than 99 (the highest I personally saw was 104), meaning they could never be equipped at all. I believe they did eventually fix this in a patch and cap it at 99, though it was fairly late (I want to say it might've even been 1.12 or 1.13?). Crafting recipes changed drastically between the early few LoD patches, before finally settling into the form most of us are familiar with (four families of recipes: Hitpower, Blood, Caster, and Safety, each containing one recipe for each equipment slot) in 1.09. In 1.07 there were "Greater" versions of some crafting recipes, requiring higher-tier runes and base items, but offering stronger versions of the innate affixes; there were also fewer restrictions on base item type for weapon recipes, meaning you could craft things like orbs that are no longer possible (and then, in an amusing bug, Charsi could imbue crafted items! This didn't keep any of their affixes, but did let you imbue base items you normally couldn't). Then 1.08 had the enigmatic "Deadly" recipes, which could only be made at certain times of the month. Neither of these patches was live for very long, and "Greater" and "Deadly" crafting recipes never returned. Janky as it was, I enjoyed D2's crafting system, though if you pressed me I couldn't explain why. There are quite a few crafting recipes that could be useful, though a lot (easily the majority) were close to useless. Sometimes this was just "here's a reliable way to get a decent filler item", and other times crafted items actually had irreplaceable effects and were considered best in slot for certain character builds. Caster amulets: these came with 5-10% faster cast rate innately, and could roll "of the Apprentice" for an additional 10% FCR. These were the only way to hit certain cast speed breakpoints, and basically every caster character wanted one, provided it came with skill boosts. Amulets of ilvl 90+ (gamble and craft with a level 93+ character to guarantee this) were eligible for +2 class skills. But this affix also came with a required level of 89, so these were very much endgame gear. I made so many of these, easily hundreds if not thousands. Blood amulets offered some lifesteal, and Safety amulets a very rare off-shield boost to block chance, but I don't think I ever saw anyone make these. There's real potential there but most physical characters wanted other things from the amulet slot. Blood gloves: these came with 5-10% crushing blow, and some innate lifesteal. They're practically the only source of crushing blow in gloves (one unique item, Steelrend, offered it but they were very rare and pretty awful otherwise). You generally wanted to roll "of Alacrity" (20% increased attack speed), and these were eligible for some skill boosts (+1-2 to Assassin Martial Arts, Amazon Javelin & Spear, Amazon Bow & Crossbow, or Amazon Passive & Magic). Most physical combat characters liked these, but of course Amazons and Assassins got the most benefit. Hitpower gloves: these come with innate Knockback. Some people really swore by these on bow-based Amazon builds (especially if you roll the +2 to bow skills!). Basically nobody else wanted them, though. And the rest of the Hitpower recipes were entirely useless. For belts: Caster belts also had 5-10% FCR; there was a unique belt, Arachnid Mesh, that had 20% and was strictly better, but otherwise these were the only way to get FCR in the belt slot. Blood belts had 5-10% chance of Open Wounds, which was nice to have a little of on physical characters (it's a minor damage over time ability, but the damage doesn't matter, it also prevents regeneration which is the useful part). Outside the innate affixes, on belts you generally wanted to roll faster hit recovery, resistances, or boosts to life or mana. For boots: Blood boots came with some lifesteal, and Caster boots came with some mana and mana regeneration. Safety boots had some innate fire resistance and minor damage reduction, if you didn't want either of those. Otherwise, you wanted to roll faster run/walk and resistances or life/mana. Crafted boots weren't anything special, but the boot slot was often a good place to try to shore up resistances and if you had trouble finding a good rare, crafting could help (I liked these recipes a lot when playing self-found). For rings: Blood rings are the ones I saw crafted most frequently, for the innate lifesteal and whatever other affixes happened to show up ("dual leech", where you also got mana steal, was particularly desirable). These very often ended up with impractically high level requirements though. And rings were a crowded slot, it was often hard to fit in even a good one when characters needed other things there. I think 95+% of the crafting I did or saw done was either Caster amulets or Blood gloves. These were by far the most popular recipes, and at least theoretically could produce some really nice items. If you were playing self-found, I think the boot and belt recipes were most likely to produce something you'd end up actually using.
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Oct 27, 2022 02:48
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Expanding the Maggot Lair is a very good quality of life thing to see from these mods. That was always one of the more irritating areas of the game; one might think awkward terrain would be an interesting gameplay twist, but the Maggot Lair just kind of doesn't work for most characters. A lot of the attacking skills are very awkward to use in such tight spaces, some character builds just flat-out don't function in there (hello, Chargers; also anything that relies on minions) and others are very tedious. On the other hand, if you have a piercing or line-based attack (Bone Spear or Lightning, for instance; though a lot of the enemies are lightning-immune on higher difficulties), it's kind of hilarious. Even then, though, it's still not a fun gameplay experience, I don't think I've ever known anyone to go back in there after completing the quest. The Tainted Sun quest never made much sense to me either (both in-universe, and from a design perspective). The lights out effect is atmospheric, and the Viper Temple isn't awful as far as dungeons go, but the actual events are inexplicably disconnected from each other, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why it's a quest in itself as opposed to another stage of the Horadric Staff quest. I'd say it almost feels like they wanted to have six quests per act for aesthetic reasons but ran out of ideas, but then Act 4 probably disproves that. It's interesting that some of these mods decided to put more stats on the quest items. Even when these items were decent in vanilla, it was a bad idea to use them because they get arbitrarily taken away from you as you progress. (In vanilla, the Horadric Staff was actually kind of decent, especially because as a quest item it has no level requirement. I knew people who'd save extras and use them as starter weapons, especially for shapeshifter druids as they really benefit from all the attack speed on it. But unlike some other ways you could twink characters, this had limited utility because there was no way to bring one past Act 2.) Making them worth using makes sense from a lore perspective since these are supposed to be highly magical artefacts or whatever, but from a gameplay standpoint it's kind of counterproductive. Oh, another "fun" bit of trivia about quest items (and maybe another reason not to equip them). What happens if you lose them? So, when you die, all your items end up on your corpse, right? If you decide to try to get your corpse back by equipping some other stuff and die again, the game will generate another corpse with those items on it, and so on up to eight corpses in total. If you save and exit without collecting them, though, the game only saves a single corpse (which appears next to you in town when you next load in): the one whose items have the highest total sell value in gold. Quest items are hard-coded to have basically no value, I think it's 1 gold but you can't actually sell them. Imagine this situation for a moment. Your character dies, and you might think "hey, I've got this cool quest weapon in my stash, let me equip that and try to get my body". It's not enough and you die again. There's now a second corpse with only the quest item on it. As a kid, my first time playing the game, I did this, then got frustrated at my inability to even get back the second corpse, so I saved and quit not knowing what would happen. The first corpse got saved, of course, and the quest item vanished into the aether. Thankfully you aren't completely screwed if you do this... the game's smart enough with its quest progress flags that you can replace it, but you have to go back to the original locations of the pieces. (Child me did not appreciate having to assemble Khalim's Will all over again... that was not fun.) So yeah, maybe try not to lose your quest items?
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Nov 1, 2022 03:01
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I always liked Act 2 also, for the most part. It's really just the Maggot Lair that's awful.
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Nov 1, 2022 23:24
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The Arcane Sanctuary was always one of my favourite areas in the game, even if it's often more frustrating than anything else to play through (in some ways it's a bit like the Maggot Lair with all the very narrow pathways, but it's full of enemies who don't have to care, like the flying ghosts, and the vampires with all their ranged magic). It doesn't quite come through from the screenshots (or, quite frankly, doesn't always work that well ingame when objects like monster corpses fall in odd places), but the visual design here is reminiscent of an Escher painting with topologically-impossible staircases and such. It's one of the cooler concepts in the game and a very visually unique area. I won't comment on the lore though, it's kind of a mess as you say. DarkMatt posted:Blunderbore | CR: ** These guys (and their higher-level clones in later acts) are quite interesting as far as enemies go, actually. In addition to their skills, they have a special property that makes all their attacks cause hit recovery regardless of damage, and they have a chance of inflicting Crushing Blow. (Or... well. I looked it up and apparently they don't in Normal, but the chance is 15% in Nightmare and 25% in Hell.) The hit recovery thing can actually be pretty scary if you get surrounded by them, it's not hard to get stunlocked to death if enough of them are swinging at you. But what's Crushing Blow? It deals percentage-based damage, specifically based on current life. Against players it's 10% of your current life; against monsters it deals 25% in a 1-player game (monster life scales with the number of players, gaining 50% life per player up to 8, but Crushing Blow damage is scaled down to be consistent with the players1 life, so it ends up dealing around 5.5% in an 8 player game). It's further halved against bosses and halved again if applied by a ranged attack instead of melee. Despite all these caveats, many bosses in this game have so much life that it was considered a very desirable property by a lot of players. As a player, this isn't much of a thing to worry about; if you're dying to Blunderbores et al the Crushing Blow damage probably isn't what's killing you. So why am I talking about it? Well, Necromancers have a high-level skill called Revive that lets you reanimate enemies as they are, rather than making them into skeletons. If you use Revive on these kind of monsters... well, they keep that Crushing Blow chance. You can raise a whole pack of these things and just destroy bosses. It could be impractical to go find a pack of them for every boss run (especially with the time limits on Revive), but it's still cool, and they were a staple strategy against superboss things like the Diablo Clone and Uber Tristram.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:49
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MagusofStars posted:This is also why regen and life-steal are fundamentally pointless. Even if life-steal was buffed, the deaths still occur over such a short time frame that life-steal is rarely going to be enough to tip the scales from dead to "barely survived". And Diablo just isn't built with any real endurance/gauntlet style dungeons, so the fact that steal/regen keeps you topped up between battles isn't particularly meaningful. The bit about mana leech here is absolutely correct. Most physical characters want at least a small amount of it, because it completely obviates the need to use mana potions except against unleechable enemies (of which there aren't that many, and you can use potions there). That said, I do think everyone is underselling life leech a bit. The thing about Diablo II, especially in lategame/endgame, is that there's a big imbalance in damage numbers between player characters and monsters. Monsters typically have tens of thousands of HP and deal ~100 damage per hit. Meanwhile, player characters have hundreds of HP (extremely durable characters might hit a couple thousand, but it's not too unusual for a glassier character to have under 1000 HP, and some of the most durable reached 5000 or so), and are outputting thousands of damage per hit. So even after factoring in all the penalties, the damage numbers were so big and life totals so small that it was definitely possible for a character to keep their life full via leeching and only be vulnerable to death from sudden big damage spikes (like Fire Enchanted explosions and such, or a lot of hits at once, getting stunlocked, etc). It isn't a perfect solution by all means, but it's not useless. Of course, if you really wanted near-immortality by leeching life from enemies, what you wanted was Life Tap, one of the Necromancer's curses. This let you recover some absurd percentage like 50% of the damage, was completely unaffected by all the other penalties leech normally suffered, and (I think?) worked on unleechable enemies. You could get charges of this on a wand, or there was a set of unique gloves called Dracul's Grasp that gave a chance to cast Life Tap on striking, and were more or less the best in slot gloves for any physical character who didn't prefer having other curses around.
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Nov 5, 2022 14:32
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I really don't know what to make of the necromancer just being given a skill that effortlessly generates corpses. As frustrating as it could sometimes be, having to manage corpses was one of the things that made necromancers unique and interesting in the original game. This change feels well-intentioned, and I'm sure it smooths out gameplay considerably, but it feels like a mistake to me. (If you asked me, I'd say it would be better to overhaul the druid's summoning tree into a corpse-independent summoner alternative, and leave the necromancer alone.) Blood Golem is a fairly boring skill now, but it had an interesting history. From the beginning, the intent was that its life was linked to yours, so it healed you when it did damage (and healed when you used potions on yourself), but you lost life when it took damage. It tended to be very risky to use and very much not worth it (barring an infamous bug that made it OP when paired with the Iron Maiden curse, which got fixed pretty early; I don't remember exactly what this did though). Eventually, very late in the game's life cycle (I think it was 1.13), they decided the drawback was stupid and got rid of it entirely. So now, Blood Golem is just a golem that leeches life and heals you when it does so (and I think it still gets health when you use potions?), and is a lot more viable for it. DarkMatt posted:We don't have a good way to rescue Hirelings if they get in a jam...yet, and each time she dies we have to pay a gold fee to resurrect her, which is a cost I don't want to pay. I'm kind of confused what you mean by this, unless you're maybe thinking of a source of Teleport? Town Portals also kind of work, though of course you're jumping out of the battle and back into it (and it doesn't work that great unless you open a portal in advance before you need it). Also, you can feed potions to mercenaries. Either by dragging and dropping it onto their portrait (which is usually too slow to do mid-combat), or by holding shift when pressing the belt hotkey. Full rejuvs work just as well on them as they do on player characters. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it can help keep them from dying. Replacing Werebear with "Elemental Form" is a neat idea for the druid, especially because in vanilla wolf and bear builds tended to end up pretty similar. They used different skills and had slightly different textures of play style, but ultimately they felt fairly similar in being hard-hitting melee tanks that wanted to maximise their attack speed. (Werewolf was supposed to be the "fast and accurate" to Werebear's "slow, hard-hitting tank" but it just meant you took different paths to the end result most of the time, and balanced their gear a bit differently.) I'll be interested to see where the elemental form's play style lands. So, let's talk about Duriel. Oh, Duriel. Simultaneously one of the least and most interesting bosses in this game, because he's very straightforward and also often unreasonably difficult. He's not difficult because the game is asking anything elaborate or technical from the player, he's difficult because he outputs big damage numbers and inhibits your movement in a small arena. Ironically, the best strategy against him was often to employ slowing of your own, if you could (Decrepify is really good against him, if you can survive long enough to cast it). Also, it was often a really bad idea to try playing hit and run with him, because he won't use his charge until you get out of melee range, and that hits harder than his other attacks. Depending on your character, strategies often boiled down to "get better equipment" or "win via attrition using potions/town portal/reviving your merc". 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.)
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Nov 8, 2022 00:10
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Spoggerific posted: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. Oh, yeah, I always forget about this because I mostly played offline with /players8 (where there's zero need to power level and just playing through the game normally will leave you at ~86-88 by the end of Hell). This is absolutely correct. Once again, I don't remember the precise technical details here, but the reason for this had to do with the way D2 has diminishing returns on experience if the level difference is too great (in either direction). If I remember right, this particular levelling path did eventually get superseded by another method, but a lot of people kept doing it anyway. Simply Simon posted:Tyrael is the most incompetent moron in a game full of them. He trained the Horadrim wrong as a joke, never checked back on them after they fulfilled their initial purpose, ignored Sanctuary entirely while the Prime Evils tried taking over - twice - then tried to do something way too late and hosed it up so badly he now has to beg mortals for help. This is absolutely the case, and also something I completely failed to notice as a kid because he looked cool and had an impressive-sounding voice. I remember when D3 came around thinking I really didn't appreciate how badly Tyrael came off in it, but going back to look at D2 pretty much everything that goes wrong is at least indirectly his fault, and every time he tries to fix something he makes it much worse. I would put this down to bad writing, but honestly, at least the first two Diablo games were nihilistic enough it might just be a theme. Spaceballs posted:"Now you see why evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
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Nov 8, 2022 02:42
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I think everyone hated the Kurast jungles; the first half of this act is one of the least popular parts of the game. I don't think I mind them as much as most, or at least I stopped minding once I got into the mindset of fully clearing all areas regardless; once the uncertainty of how much of it I'd have to slog through was gone, I was able to find some enjoyment in it. But they're a pain to navigate with all the rivers and narrow bridges, gaps between trees, windy paths etc, and a lot of the game's most annoying enemies live here. And on top of that, they're some of the biggest areas in the game, and have more map/layout variance than a lot of other areas. Welcome to the jungle! I always wondered if the Golden Bird quest was supposed to be a tutorial-ish hint or nudge toward trading with other players. You find a fancy thing with gold text from a monster, but it's useless to you, so you identify it with Cain and trade it to someone who does want it and get something that benefits you. The actual quest, though... uh, we just drank a dead guy's ashes and became harder to kill? All right then, sure I guess. I never understood Asheara's character design. Or, I should say, maybe I didn't until everything came out about Blizzard? Why is the leader of this supposedly-badass mage corps (who talks like she means business) wearing practically nothing? IIRC they actually did a bit better with that in D3, loath as I am to praise anything about that game. So, uh, let's talk about the Iron Wolves. As everyone's already said in various ways, they're disappointingly useless, easily the worst of the mercenaries (for a variety of reasons, which I'll get into). Which is a shame, because they're pretty cool, conceptually, and those red coats of theirs are snazzy. So what, exactly, is working against them? -Spell damage scales differently than melee, relying almost entirely on +skills and synergy bonuses. They actually do get synergies, but only from skills they actually have (which already puts them at a disadvantage compared to a real Sorceress, because they don't get access to all the possible synergies), but it's even worse for the fire ones because Fireball and Inferno don't synergise each other, so those guys are basically fighting with sparklers and confetti. -As mentioned, they have the worst survivability of any mercenaries. The Cold ones can actually do okay thanks to their Frozen Armour, but that only goes so far, and they're probably not able to equip good protective armour to benefit from the defence multiplier (and any armour that would be protective doesn't help them much otherwise). -Their AI sucks. This is especially noticeable with the Cold ones: they're really good at freezing enemies... but they have tunnel vision and will fixate on shooting at the same enemy until it's dead, which makes them terrible at doing the crowd control you'd want them for. (If they'd switch targets each time they fired, they might have actually been good!) They also have a regrettable tendency to just wander into packs of enemies and get surrounded, which gets them killed fast. (The Rogues do this too, unfortunately, but it's slightly more forgiveable because they're better at everything else.) -There is barely any gear that helps them (you want +skills, faster cast rate, and maybe +X% elemental skill damage if you can find that), and almost anything that does is among the top-tier caster items that would be better put to use on a real character. There are a few swords with +skills (including the +fire skills swords Hellplague and Hexfire, who else wants those? But we don't care, because the fire Iron Wolves just literally don't function), and if you played on Ladder the Spirit runeword was perfect for them... but their strength stat is so low they won't be able to equip it in a shield until the 90s. Other mercenaries at least can be given strong damaging weapons, and get better ones as you progress through the game to try to keep up with you. I wanted so badly for Iron Wolves to be good. I tried my best to optimise one in vanilla for novelty's sake, but it just never worked. The best kit for them was a Spirit sword and shield (I even made an ethereal Spirit shield just for him, so he could actually hold it), Ormus' Robes (a unique armour with +3 to a specific Sorceress skill and some elemental damage bonuses, I think I eventually got an Ice Blast one), and Griffon's Eye or Nightwing's Veil (helms that boost lightning or cold damage respectively), or something like Harlequin Crest if you couldn't get those (because they were incredibly rare and in high demand). And you could put a Rainbow Facet jewel or two in sockets, if you had them. Even with all of this working for them (and again, this is all high-demand stuff that characters can use better), it's just not enough. I think, maybe, if you're playing a Paladin whose primary aura is Conviction (which drastically reduces enemy resistances), a lightning one could do okay, but it's just so much work to get them up to the standard of basically any other mercenary with mediocre/decent stuff. (And that same Griffon's Eye you'd waste on a mercenary would make a Lightning Sorceress absolutely terrifying.) On the subject of the lore and writing, what I will say is that the first two Diablo games were fantastic at setting a tone and atmosphere, both with the ingame text and the manuals. A lot of it does fall apart when you look at it closely, but then, the vast majority of the time we spent playing these games was on repeat playthroughs and ignoring it entirely. It worked because we didn't think about it, except in little snippets out of context.
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Nov 12, 2022 16:41
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Oh yeah, that's right, they did remove Iron Maiden from Oblivion Knights in 1.13. I always forget about that. It was an awful mechanic (especially if you played Hardcore), but honestly, I kind of missed it once it was gone. It was horribly unfair but it definitely made you pay attention, which added a certain texture to the gameplay in these areas.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:23
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Honestly, thinking about it, the Bloody Foothills are one of my favourite areas, even if I wouldn't normally think to put it on a list of the game's high points. It's just really satisfying to hack through the area alongside the Barbarian warriors (you can even support them with any auras or buffs you might have), and feels like your character is part of a bigger war effort in a way the rest of the game doesn't (outside of here and a few named NPCs like Flavie, the only fellow adventurers you see are corpses). And also, the catapults and obstacles etc do at least add a bit of a twist, these areas feel a bit more dynamic than previous ones.MagusofStars posted:-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. I was going to say quite a lot of this and then you beat me to it! Though it is worth pointing out that Bloody runs were nerfed heavily after a patch or two, IIRC (I don't remember which one specifically). It's still a fun area to run through, but it's not worth running repeatedly for levels any more. I'm not sure if this was just part of the general nerf to the EXP formula in 1.1x (which added penalties to EXP gain if you were too high or low level relative to the monster you killed), or if it was targeted more specifically at this area on top of that. MagusofStars posted:-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. I have a real soft spot for the Barbarian mercenaries, though a lot of that is because I was a big Wind Druid player and they really get along well. Outside of that specific context (and maybe one or two other builds they work almost as well for), they're unfortunately hard to justify using. The barbarians, in my experience, have the best AI of any mercenaries (helped a bit by the fact that what you want them to do is "get up in the enemy's face and hit them", but they don't get stranded nearly as often as Town Guards), as well as the best survivability. I think their use of Bash and Stun is part of why they live longer, because it serves as a minor form of crowd control and makes them get hit less often. They just don't offer much of anything beyond tanking, and it's hard to get respectable damage out of them (especially in comparison to the Town Guards who get auras and have access to some really powerful polearms). The main reason to use a barbarian was the Lawbringer sword runeword, which gave a 20% chance to cast a high level Decrepify. If you were a character who dealt in physical damage (and especially if that was spell-based physical damage that couldn't benefit from auras, like, say, Druid wind spells), giving a Barbarian mercenary that sword was one of the best things you could do to boost your damage, and it also helped with survivability for both you and him. (Town Guards did have access to The Reaper's Toll, a polearm that could cast Decrepify. Having played with both I preferred the Barbarians, they did less damage but they lived longer and were better at spreading the curse thanks to attacking faster.) The other fun option was giving them a Crescent Moon sword, which had a chance to cast Static Field for percentage-based damage that scaled with player count (unlike Crushing Blow), but that was honestly more gimmicky than effective. One thing I will point out is that it was almost always better to give them a two-handed sword; they can't use anything in their off-hand regardless, and their damage formula does use the two-handed damage value. MagusofStars posted:-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. I'll also concur with this. They usually had interesting enemy variety in them, too, I always went out of my way to do them.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:10
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Oh, right, I wanted to talk about Larzuk's quest reward too. It's good. It's the only way to add sockets to Unique and Set items that don't come with them, and you can do a lot of other cool things with it too. It is worth noting, unfortunately, for magical items you get 1-2 sockets at random (I believe it's even odds). This was really annoying, because it meant even if you managed to find an item with the perfect combination of affixes, you still had a 50% chance to ruin it at the last minute. In some earlier patches, it was even more busted, I know for instance in 1.07 crafted items actually got 3 sockets, and IIRC magicals could too, but they realised pretty quickly this was a mistake. Outside of putting sockets into your endgame stuff to squeeze out that last bit of optimisation, the other good use of Larzuk was on white items to make runeword bases. He guaranteed the maximum number of sockets, so if the runeword you wanted to make required that many, you were in business. (And the maximum sockets for a given item type was actually somewhat affected by ilvl, so if you knew where the item dropped or used certain cube formulae you could get even more control over this to produce some harder-to-find values. Upgrading a low-quality item to normal in the cube set the ilvl to 1, which on elite armour would guarantee you 3 sockets for most of the desirable runewords...) As mentioned, it was really common to rush characters just to get more chances to socket things.
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Dec 6, 2022 02:42
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What version of the game are you playing? Iron Maiden + golem suggests to me you might be on an older patch (if you're taking advantage of the bug, which was fixed long ago), and if so skeletons may not be a viable strategy for you (I seem to recall them being pretty unplayable until they were buffed in a few patches, though I don't remember whether it was 1.09 or 1.1x that finally made them work). That said, if you are talking about the current patch... Decrepify is the thing that makes the biggest difference (especially alongside slow from Clay Golem, and even better if you can chill too, like by giving your mercenary cold damage), but obviously it's not usual to have access to that by Duriel (you might if you're on /players8), and depending on player count it's possible to not even have it by Diablo. Those two are definitely the hardest bosses by far for a summoner (yes, on Normal, they're easier later once you're more powerful) and to a certain extent the strategy is just "keep coming back with new minions and eventually you'll win by attrition with a bit of luck". If you're careful, casting the golem in his face can help keep him off the others, though that only goes so far because the lightning hose and fire nova will just kill all your guys. It only gets easier from this point onward.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:32
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I always kind of liked Nihlathak, honestly. I think it's because of the way the voice actor handled him (I always enjoyed going out of the way to see his optional dialogue); you really do get the impression that he might be a bit slimy and unpleasant, but he's conflicted/depressed/resigned about something. And at the time it was pretty novel to have a human villain in this game with an actual motivation other than  . Of course what the game actually has him do is pretty much utter nonsense (and he's had a gigantic evil temple all along? okay then) and squanders any potential he may have had, just like everything else.As a boss, Nihlathak is also interesting, because it's the game giving a nod to the idea that pvp might theoretically exist, a trend we'll see again a bit later in this act. It's not all that similar to an actual pvp fight, but he does use a lot of moves player characters have access to. (And, of course, he can actually be difficult but in a way you can counteract with strategy! Corpse Explosion is extremely dangerous, to the point a lot of characters can be one-shot by it, but you can use various tactics to mitigate it, whether it's using the corpses for your own purposes first, luring the enemies away and killing them far from where you plan to fight him, etc.) We should also talk about Tomb Vipers. These are one of the most infamous enemies in the game, though I'm not actually sure if they can spawn on Normal. They appear only in the Halls of Vaught (the level where Nihlathak is), and they have a buggy poison cloud attack that deals their physical attack damage every frame. (Whenever it checks collision. So if you or any minion move within the poison clouds, you will die very fast, but if you stand still you might be fine.) Nobody really cared until a patch added a special drop to Nihlathak that made him worth running, and all of a sudden it was a huge problem. The best way to mitigate it was stacking integer physical damage reduction (PDR), but not every character could or wanted to do this. Speaking of enemies, several of the enemy types we saw in this update can be quite difficult to deal with. Blood Lords and their analogues (I remember people calling them "Frenzytaurs") may not seem like much now, but especially on higher difficulties it's easy to get mobbed by them, they can hit quite hard and they're durable enough you need to approach them with a plan. And one variant of them is physical immune in Hell, which is a nightmare for any weapon-based character. And then there are the succubi, which deal physical damage with their Blood Stars and can cast Amplify Damage on you; in numbers, especially in areas like Frozen River that have water impassable to you but which they can fire over, they can fill the screen with projectiles while being too far away for you to interact with. (And one variant of these can be physical immune, too!) I don't think it matters what type of character you're playing, at least some of the enemies in Act 5 are going to be very tricky to deal with. DarkMatt posted:...Don't die anymore by the way because it's bugged so that while the permanent resists will still show as active, you lose it on death and only get it back when you start a new game. Fun! No idea if they ever patched this and it's not easy to tell if it's still a bug. I love this game. This is less onerous than it sounds, what you probably saw referred to as "start a new game" effectively just means when it loads your character in for the first time at the beginning of a play session. It's still not as amazing a reward as it sounds once you factor in the resistance penalties from higher difficulties, but we can discuss those once they come up. Unless you're dying frequently and continuing to play long sessions afterward, you can benefit from the scroll more often than not. (And hey, if you play Hardcore, the reward works as intended! Um. Probably not the best fix.) As mentioned, at least in vanilla, the decision of whether to claim the Halls waypoint is a real one. If you don't get it, you have easy access to Pindleskin, as well as a way to effortlessly reroll Anya's shop inventory (mainly useful for traps-based Assassins, in Nightmare and Hell you could very easily shop for claws with +3 to traps or +3 to shadow disciplines). While there were a lot of high-end things he couldn't drop, running Pindleskin was one of the more reliable ways to grind for mid/high tier uniques and set pieces. If you do claim the waypoint though, it's much quicker to run Nihlathak himself, which you may want to do because he drops one of the keys to Uber Tristram (where the game's superbosses live). Xarn posted:I noticed that you don't seem to use skele mages at all. Are they that trash? I kinda like them for the slow, but I have only 1 point in them (+ few from gear) and they definitely aren't keeping up with the skellies (who have the advantage of amplify damage being level 1 curse, lmao). The short answer here is, skeleton mages suck and are very difficult to make viable. They look cool and can contribute on occasion (if nothing else, by distracting enemies from the minions you actually care about), so you may as well put in 1 point and summon them, but they're not worth investing in. Having the poison ones around to negate enemy regen can be kind of nice, they have a very high duration but negligible damage. Cold-type ones are a mixed bag too, the slowing can help but they also lead to corpses shattering which makes it harder to do the rest of your necromancy. People used to talk quite a bit about trying to make "Lord of Mages" builds that focused on them, but I'm not convinced it could actually work. I did try once and he was one of the few characters I actually gave up on entirely and couldn't complete Hell with. Even if you go out of your way to aid them, using Lower Resist as your primary curse, etc... they just don't do enough damage to keep up even when fully optimised. (And there are many more boosts available to physical-based minions, like the various auras you can get from Desert Guards.) I wouldn't be surprised if at least one mod tried to fix them, because they were cool and people liked them but in vanilla they just kind of don't work.
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Dec 10, 2022 18:48
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I think I might have assumed Baal was attacking Harrogath in an effort to get the relic, until Nihlathak handed it over to him? But that isn't really supported by the text either. It's again. Weirdly for me, I don't think I have that much to add to the technical discussion of Magic Find and drop formulae. (Although I guess I should mention that the most common slang for this stat was "MF" and hunting items with it was called "MFing"... yes, this makes puerile jokes very easy and I'm sure I've heard them all.) Although I did attempt to explain "super chests" back when we covered Lower Kurast... it's not that they have a fixed table, exactly, they're just bugged to use only 16 bits of the seed instead of 32, so for each player count there are 65535 possible drop patterns instead of 4294967295. This made it so people could catalogue the possible drops and if there happened to be something good like a high rune in one of them, that made the odds better than other sources. This is how absurd rune drop rates are (even after 1.13 increased the odds of high runes by a factor of ten). Lower Kurast was the most popular place to run for them, because they were very easy to identify there; some people also tried to run them in River of Flame but it was a lot less reliable. The formulae changed quite a lot over the years with the various patches, or at least they were often buggy in older ones. Famously, in some earlier versions, there were breakpoints you could reach where bosses would drop nothing but sets, or even nothing but uniques. This was obviously very abusable, though it was quite difficult to reach the amount of MF needed. In current versions of the game, there are substantial diminishing returns applied to MF (more specifically, to the "unique find", "set find", and "rare find" stats that are derived from it) to prevent this from happening. (And, of course, complicating this is that sometimes people wanted to hunt items with no MF. If you were looking for non-magical base items to make runewords in, too much MF was actively detrimental. Some of the optional dungeons people wouldn't otherwise touch ended up being popular for this, because in Hell they have the highest possible area level of 85 and could therefore drop anything; in particular, the Pit in Act 1 and the Ancient Tunnels in Act 2 were most popular.) One other fun thing: there were ways to get the first time kill bonus ("quest drop") on a boss multiple times. I don't remember exactly how to do it (because it isn't worth it), I think it involved creating the game with a character who hadn't completed the quest, and having another character kill the boss while not in a party with them? (Oh and then on top of this, there was a helpful bug which frequently caused Andariel to get stuck giving the quest drop every time you killed her. I think all you had to do to trigger this was immediately talk to Warriv and go to the next act after killing her, without talking to any other NPCs? Very easy to do this by accident for obvious reasons.) MF also has no effect on shops or gambling, in case anyone might have been wondering. I always played on /players8 just because I found it more fun/challenging, the boosted drop rates were just an added bonus. Setting it to anything lower than that just felt like cheating to me even if it might've technically been more optimal.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:09
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DarkMatt posted:Achmel is a mystery. He's still just as much of an rear end in a top hat as other Greater Mummies, but he doesn't get a monster mod. Instead, he gets a unique aura, exclusive to him, that adds a very hefty amount of poison damage to attacks, including his. As I understand it, technically speaking he actually has a "Poison Enchanted" modifier that is exclusive to him and gives those properties to him and his minions, it just doesn't have associated display text so it's invisible. Under the hood it's just like any other unique monster modifier. DarkMatt posted:Finally, he may decide, he's so nice, we're gonna get him twice. Vile Effigy clones Baal, and the only difference is the clone will have half of Baal's current life. The only way to tell them apart is to notice one of them is dropping down much faster than the other, because their visual healthbar will be the exact same until you make a gap. It also gets weaker the less health Baal has, so, again, Baal can be nice and almost never use this or be mean and fire this off really early in the fight. This is bad if he does this, because two Baals with no differences except for Life is especially dangerous, and, takes forever. Fun fact, there's an interface difference that lets you tell the two Baals apart (at least in vanilla, I'm not sure if the mods kept it since a lot of them mess with the health bars). "Demon" appears centred for the real Baal, while the fake Baal has it off-centre relative to his name (the D aligns with the B iirc). This tip was brought to you courtesy of the official strategy guide that came packaged with many versions of the game, I rarely see people actually talking about it. Of course, identifying the real Baal only goes so far, because the clone's attacks still do full damage and it dies much faster than the real one, so often you're better off just killing it first anyway. DarkMatt posted:Fun fact: The Minions of Destruction are curse immune, so I cannot break them up. Shame. That would've been a good answer to this blob of meat. This sounds like a change the mod made, maybe? In vanilla they're definitely immune to the AI curses (Terror, Dim Vision, Confuse), but I know other curses like Decrepify worked just fine on them. Eastern Sun's version of the boss rush is pretty cool, I didn't expect them to do something like that. Of course, I'd imagine slogging through this gets a lot more irritating if you decide you want to do Baal runs or something.
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Dec 17, 2022 21:43
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There are a couple of reasonably easy runewords that can help with resistance if you know about them (one even can go in shrunken heads!). Qual-Kehk hands you Ancients' Pledge (Ral, Ort, Tal in a 3-socket shield), which on its own should be enough to get you out of negatives for Nightmare. It just doesn't do much of anything else, and is definitely a last resort kind of option, but it'll get the job done. There's also Smoke (Nef, Lum in a 2-socket armour) which will give 50 resist all and some FHR, it's a really great armour if you can get the runes and honestly I've seen some characters wear this to endgame. The other one you'll want to know about is Rhyme (Shael, Eth in a 2-socket shield), this gives 25% resist all and some boosts to blocking among other things, and most importantly it works in shrunken heads. If you get a non-magical head with decent skill bonuses, you can slot this in and have an endgame-worthy shield. Truthfully, though, a summoning necromancer probably doesn't need to care as much about resistances as most other characters, since you can just let your minions do the fighting and focus on avoiding getting hit yourself. Most characters definitely do need to prioritise resistances, though (at least for fire and lightning). Edit: Spirit shields are really good and best-in-slot for most spellcasters (under most circumstances). But there are some caveats: unless you're a paladin, you'll need to get a Monarch shield to have 4 sockets, which is an elite item you won't be finding until mid-Hell and requires 156 strength to equip. Also, Spirit is one of the "ladder-only" runewords, if you're playing offline you will need a mod to enable it. Explopyro fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 21:33
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Even in vanilla, IIRC, Duriel is guaranteed to drop a scroll of TP as a failsafe because there's no other way out of the chamber. I don't think I've ever seen him drop this many, personally, but it's definitely possible for him to drop the scroll and nothing else. There are many, many reasons nobody ever did Duriel runs.
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Dec 25, 2022 02:21
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:10 |
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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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