This is been brought up a few times before, but for the love of God can we remove them? They're weak, add little to gameplay, and lag the ever loving shit out of you. It's especially bad in Tundra, which is unfortunate as it's one of the top trash running areas.

Also Moloch's poison creeper needs to go. If anyone else can think of skills that are lag crazy that don't really do shit, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask to change them as well.

I wouldn't mind getting rid of them. They don't do anything useful and people skip them most times since they have superior magic immunities.


As far as poison creepers go. I never liked them. Only good for leveling. Other than that they clear dead mobs and prevent horking. Waste of coding imo

most of the catapults are placed direct onto the map files like an object. Its easier to remove other shit cos you just have to take that name outa levels.txt. For catapults they gotta be removed manually.

Edit: ah, never mind, you could just disable em by changing their AI to "Idle"

+1

Edit2: a few bosses use the skills the catapults use (skenk is one IIRC and darkness is another). I think shenk is the only one that causes lag with em though.

Edit3: crazy deja vu from that last edit wtf.
Meh now I wanna babble and theory craft a bit more

Molochs creeper... I think it is more for aesthetic purposes. The skill he uses is the poison creepers attack skill (pois creeper is an invisible monster that spawns the vine underground graphics as it walks and stands still). The attack releases a missile that looks like a vine bursting outa the ground then back in and that spawns a load of sub missiles that make up the mat.

The range for the mat missiles is 100 frames + 25 frames per level so they get stacked up bad.
Either the regular missiles can be kept and the increased duration per level is removed to lower the mat duration of druids creeper too (id be fine with that). Or the skill can be cloned and renamed + the same for the missiles and just cut the vine duration for molochs version to like 25 frames.

Another issue with moloch is the poison spray counter. It just causes lag, the unholy bolt counter is what kills you.
On the subject of pois spray. Please please remove it from poison facets or stop it triggering counters. Last patch my druid would smack duriel once and trigger a spray that then triggered 10000 counters at point blank range (not cool).

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The mat just simply applies poison damage anyways... it's not like it needs a long duration to apply poison damage.

The pois is constantly reaplied while the enemy is on the mat, so the duration on the poison is actually alot longer than is listed on the skill. It's only really handy in early act 1 to 2. Cast, have a mat spawn then pop a wolf beside it to drag shit on to it (or drag enemies on then keep circling them to keep them on it). The 6 second poison becomes 10-14 seconds of poison at the same DPS in effort to make it's AI look better than it actually is.

After that, creeper does nothing but clog up your screen with shit and you have 1 useless skill maxed for the other 95% of the game...

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Well the duration of poison could always be lengthened if necessary to compensate for the loss of matt duration. It would be preferrable to get the skill to not lag as hard.

I dont see it as much of an issue to be honest. Tossing the creeper into a pack of enemies is the most effective way anyway and its only used in act 1. Consider setting it to 50 frames rather than 25. @ 25 frames, it seems more like a mini nova than a poison matt. Molochs attacks are pretty slow, so at most, he would be able to stack 2 if he used the skill twice one after the other. It deals pretty terrible damage anyway, he would be more dangerous if he used regular attack than creeper.

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YESSS, remove the catapults please

While the catapult presence won't be truly removed I have set in the change log to completely kill their laggy projectiles by changing their AI. I'm pretty sure just about everyone will enjoy this change.

i do not think removing content from game is a good idea, tho, i think catapults are useless i suggest a replacement.

Replace act 5 catapults with the act 2 fire turret from harem lvl1 (a even stronger version, and ghostly or champion always if possible with the inmunities)

removing content from game makes it a bit lamer, soon we will have a plain field filled with mobs to just go meat-farm thru them xD

Ironically the cats haven't caused me much for lag even in a full game unless a skellie macer is there. Same goes for Molochs psn mat. I have more lag issues when a psn zon spams plague with slow missile applied than any other reason.

One place I do lag, and usually badly is during the early stages of fighting Izzy. Happens with all types of chars and not every time.

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"The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits" Albert Einstein

Not everyone as a relatively new comp though... People with older comps such as my 9 year old lap top are just simply subjected to a lot more lag than some new machine.

My comp is far from new trust me. I recently "upgraded" to an AMD xp3000+ single core 2.2mhz processor I found used. The only decent component is my video card is an Nvidia GeForce 6200 with 256 MB memory.

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"The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits" Albert Einstein

What I'm saying is not everyone's going to have something as relatively new either. Some people got relatively dinosaur PCs such as myself using a 9 year old laptop. Admittedly I'll be upgrading my hardware pretty soon, but I'll surely remember all the lags this old laptop suffered during playing d2.