Just a quick question.

Is there a reason for knockback on Dragon Talon? It is used for some certain situations or something? No sarcasm here, just a syrious question.

As it stands the knocback function makes skill into a 1 hit knockack.

Knockback kinda runins its usuefullness? Or am I missing something here.

I added magic dmg type affixes to pluckeye and blastbark.

Critical strike AR works it's applied through pierce. Reequip some +skills or rejoin the game to update the effect. D2 limitations...etc etc. 16 year old game etc etc...

I fixed the description/damage on immolation arrow. It does avout 150% the damage of exploding arrow but over 1 sec in a smaller area.

Knockback on Dragon Talon is hardcoded. But it wont KB bosses. If its annoying you when killing trash then use literally any other skill sins have for trash. Tigerstrike + Dtail is great for trash if you want to keep the kick theme going and use Talon on bosses.

I could add rune drops to Sarina. I suppose. What if I give her a higher chance for runes but not guaranteed drops since she is so easy to get to.

Edit: I gave Sarina a higher chance to drop:

norm: Io and lower
NM: Ist and lower
Hell: Lo and lower

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i like that idea of not guaranteed runes, shes a pretty easy farm and always has been, at least for norm, then usually general is the next step

maybe put a baseline for the drops, not too high but low enough so its not Lo spamming

Updated download with previously mentioned changes.

Let me know if you find any issues.

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1.8 Test patch_d2.mpq

Here is a test patch_2.mpq file. Please test it. Make sure things look as they should be. If you find anything that seems wrong then tell me.

Just copy this into your HU folder. Make a backup of your normal 1.7b patch_d2.mpq. Don't use -direct -txt with this, obviously.

No more teleport through walls or cube cheats with this one.

EDIT: By the way, I'm not going to make a low res version. Everyone should be playing Hi-res by now, honestly.

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Well, My monitor is pretty small so no Hi-res for me.

Here, I just made a normal res one.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwkRqRFyBZoXU2Jha0JERGJBejA

I'm still playing previous version, not 1.8 test patch. I was in Halls of Arimyth, east portal and when I wanted to enter Hall of heroes (if I remember correctly) fatal error occurred i.e. had to close D2.

That doesn't give me very much info to guess what the problem is. Sometimes these things just happen 15+ year old game. Try again.

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looks promising, i got it working, been looking at most chars so far, missing pally and druid, altho , dunno if some are up for open tcp on the realm ?

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'may the force be with you' - Yoda??

Good to hear

I'm down to play with you but I'm in Asia right now. So my timezone is difficult to play with others.

Do you have hamachi?

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Is it only me or you still have to put 1 point into blade sentiel in order to be allowed blade fury?

Might just be you. I just double checked and I don't need any other skills for Bfury.

Can anyone else confirm either way?

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just you

must be my installation so.

Tried 2 more times and managed to enter on second try. Later moved to north portal and again a crash, error looks like this:

In 1.5 patch same thing would happen with purgatory lvl2 until tiles were changed, maybe tiles are causing the problem here too?

- Small bug with name when entering throne of destruction:



- Telekinesis requires lvl6 but is placed in lvl12 slot and energy shield requires lvl 12 but is placed on lvl6 slot:



- Not sure if it is intended or it slipped through but "to life" attribute of "Spirit forge linked mail" seems kind of low, only 6 at lvl 54

I fixed everything except the map crashes. I don't get that problem. Can anyone else confirm you get those crashes?

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Couple more things I noticed/requests:

1) 2 or 3 of the LOS heroes are able to be knocked back, making them pretty much a beefy blood raven. I think it was amazon & paladin.

2) Hall of heroes (where you fight the forum-named enemies and get their ears) crashes the game upon trying to enter. No issues with West/North/East Arimyth.

3) Not sure what some other opinions are of this, but can we potentially have a waypoint in the cow level? Or maybe have the cow portal pieces a 100% guaranteed drop rate?

4) Daybreak grand charm, when cubed with the nightmare and hell glyphs, loses the charm bonuses and just has the aura until you defeat Legion and cube it with the scroll, adding the bonuses back on. Seems odd.

1. Fixed the LOS heros being knocked back

2. Not sure about this. Did it crash you before in 1.7b? Because I didn't touch these levels.

3. Cow pieces now always drop.

4. Fixed

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havent had a look at ancients but with the numbers given from synergies to barbarian combat skills , will they be a bit too beefy or have you got a balance on em?
just a thought tho.

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'may the force be with you' - Yoda??

1. Thanks
2. I can't recall but seems like it's been an issue in the past as well, looking at some other topics created about it, and other people mentioning it. Not a huge deal for realm play if it's like the old purgatory 2 where it sometimes would work (pain in the ass on single player where you gotta do the whole thing again). Maybe others can report if they've tried it out to see what's happening. Also not sure the rewards right now are worth the time effort but tough to balance with all of the side stuff, can get out of hand quickly.
3. Thanks
4. Thanks.

Otherwise it looks pretty well polished. Loving the act boss and side boss difficulty in hell (Samhain was quite the battle). Patch looks pretty polished.

Ancients seem fine from my testing. They don't scale from barb skills much since heir skill levels are very low and barely increase per difficulty. Others can test them and tell me what they think about them.

Glad you enjoy the patch Al. Hopefully we can get this patch going on the realm soon if the community wants to use it. I don't want to force my edits on anyone.

As far as the new areas go. I didn't make them and I didn't mess with them for 1.8. I never crashed when I was testing them in 1.8. I do remember crashing sometimes in the original Dark Hold map back in 1.5. I think I will leave it for now. I just don't have to time to go through the process of working out what the problems are with those maps. In the future I or someone else can fix them or redo them so they don't cause crashes.

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Yea not worth spending a ton of time to fix it.

May be time for a community vote to see if people want a new patch.

I just added some synergies between might/blessed aim/concentration/fanata so that they are worth at least 1 pointing on your way to better auras. I did this mainly because there are no skill prerequisites now but it opens up more builds. Might is actually viable now, because it gets IAS and AR from fanat and blessed aim, for example.

I'll upload an update with the latest changes soon.

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OK I updated the downloads. You can download either the text files or the MPQ. The text files would be faster to download, but feel free to test the MPQ as well to make sure everything is correct with it.

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TXT files download updated. Use the txt files for the latest updates.

So, Ive been quite busy polishing this patch. I realized that elemental, poison and magic damage skills were too strong vs trash mobs but balanced vs bosses, especially endgame. While physical damage abilities and melee damage are in a good place. In order to fix it I have all but removed the char level and base level scaling on spells. 99% of spells have gone from a +100% synergy endgame to a +10% synergy endgame. This reduces endgame spell damage by about half of what it was before. Early level spell damage will be about the same as before. This might sound like a lot and it is but all I did was bring them to a balanced level.

Because of this reduction to spell damage I also reduced boss absorbs so you end up doing the same damage to bosses and less damage to trash. Blah blah blah blah. Trust me.

tldr; spells are more balanced now

Life leech was too strong and abundant so I reduced the amount you get from items. Before my melee chars had ~30-40% leech. Now they have ~15%. Now weapons give up to 6%, gloves up to 4%, other slots give up to 2% with some exceptions for special uniques or sets, etc.
Leech is still good but now you need pots too.
Much more balanced.

Elemental damage, besides poison, on items was too strong as well, so I reduced it all by half. More balanced now.

Dol runes life per kill scale with level
Added a little FCR to Tir tunes
2 new Unique items platinum boots and platinum belt

changed the levels on the challenges to norm: 50-65, NM: 66-85, Hell: 86-100.

increased merc life by 50%, they were a bit soft compared to characters.

Test the changes and let me know. I feel good about this patch now. Its ready.

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Updated the download again.

Just some fine tuning on boss/monster hp and res. It will be slightly harder now.

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at lvl 18 i fight coldcrow in newest test verison with fissure druid (179 max dmg slvl 7) and the fight takes ridiculously long wtf lol are you sure you adjusted the boss stats properly?

anyway, it doesnt rly matter if there are some problems with this patch, its pretty obvious that pretty much nobody is playing 1.7 on the servers and mxl community has given up on it too to a large extent, so a fresh release is more than welcome

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Used latest version 3.0 and energy shield can be leveled up every lvl and telekinesis can be lvled more then other skills on same slot

as of now there are no immunities which was based on 1.7, i feel like immunities are an integral part of d2, making it harder for some chars to play certain areas and needing to team up, as of now im running around throwing lfury at everything no problem, especially now with no synergies there are so many more options for dual elemental/phys damage. halls of pain is no longer scary

i believe it was initially taken out due to lack of players

thoughts?

i vote bring back immunities, just makes the game better

The removal of immunities in 1.6 was due to fewer players, and the days of many people running 3-4 mans were gone, so forcing encounters balanced around this was folly. People weren't running dedicated tank+healer+aoe teams anymore.

In 1.6, one of the only things I found worked very well, and no one complained about, was how monsters (particularly bosses) had specific high resists, no monsters had immunities, but gear did not give huge amounts of resist pierce. For example, lightning damage vs reanimated horde monsters in A5 Hell was not effective; you had to try to stack pierce, and it was not very easy to do, unless you had a LR/Conviction partner with you while throwing LFurys at trash packs, then yes, it was pretty easy. However, this strategy was not very good vs bosses, since LFury (and basically all aoe abilities) sucked single target. This philosophy worked well; it was the other bugs and resets that made people hate 1.6. I'm not sure how this compares with what Mraw's patch is like. I haven't tested it because I think he hates me and would not value my feedback anyway.

On another note, without "forced" synergies, I worry that in the new patch, you could simply max a trash farm skill (like LFury) and then max a boss rape skill (like poison javs) and have little challenge in any aspect of the game. It would be difficult to balance like this, but I haven't tested it, and he is a better modder than me, so maybe he has some master plan. I am curious as to his means of juggling the AOE-Trash-Single Target-Bosses paradox, along with how it plays out in solo/duo vs 3-4 man.

Cold Crow: She had higher than normal fire res and you are using fissure vs a single target. I reduced the fire res to a normal level. Try using a good boss killing skill for bosses.

TK: fixed. Thanks

Immunities: Ya I feel the same way. The game doesn't feel the same without trash immunities. It is easy to get multiple types of damage with the new system plus mercs. I'll add them back.

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looking good

Text file download updated

coldcrow fix
TK fix
Added some immunities to hell, they can be broken by a high level LR/conviction.
Buffed poison skills, they were a bit weak overall.

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Smith same thing high fire res? After 15 min not even half i said fuck this shit and skipped it. .

Btw you have respec in final version or you supposed to waste some prereqs skill points early game and then live with it?

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Smith is spectral hit which means he has 20% extra elemental res. I will remove spectral hit from him so that elemental builds don't suffer so much in act1 norm. I also found that he has a higher hp multiplier than other bosses for whatever reason so I'll reduce it. Good find, thanks for testing.

Anyways, you are using possibly the worst boss killing skill to test killing bosses with, if you are still using fissure.

Respec will be in the final version, but it won't be easy to get. There are almost no prerequisites now..If you want a build based on high level skills then live with that choice and level up with no skills or use items with +skills or get some 1 pt skills to level and respec to get them back later. You get all skills by lvl 30 which is just act2.

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will respec be from sorrow again so 90% of players will never get it? i hope it will be different this time

on barbarian my personal opinion is that it was a good choice to make it all-rounder mastery again because it allows you to use whatever nice weapon drops, that seems more natural and fair to the barbarian player, so props for that

btw hammer paladin is pretty pathetic starter, 20 base mana, 4 mana hammer cant even kill 1 zombie from full mana orb so its 1.7 again with low mana bulb mana pot spam and then paladin gains 2.5 mana per lvl up and hammer lvl 2 costs 4.5 mana (hammer3=5mana). to be fair to lvl up first few lvls is not horrible with boss pack and mana pots (literally a minute) but it wouldnt hurt to give some more mana for starting out for the sake of having decent mana value with no energy investment, about 30 which is just 10 more mana than it is now would mean a lot

/e: spoke too soon lol bow amazon with the (fire, other early dont look strong either, but didnt test them because theri added damage is lower) arrows is worse. 20 mana base, 3 mana per arrow, takes some chugging of mana early but thats fine since the cost doesnt increase drastically like hammer however. it would be good if the damage was better. there seems to be some tiny aoe but it doesnt compare well with blessed hammer area coverage. it does get extra missiles but that takes time, especially considering that you can put 1 skill point per 2 levels only, so it would be good to increase the damage dealt from lvl 1 drastically to make the first few levelups more smooth.
same for teeth, same for psychic hammer, same for any skill that does less than 40 damage at lvl 1, same for any skill that cant kill 1 zombie in blood moor from full standard mana orb

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@voidmxl
the mana issues are not a problem untill late game and theres so much regen and mana after kill options, shouldnt be an issue, getting lvl 1x for tir runes or some sapphires in gear would do wonders imho.

and the respec thingy is supposed to be tough. otherwise just rebuild your char. shouldnt be ezpk to have a char that can do anything in any setting, thats just my view on it, ofcourse it can save some time but some stuff shouldnt just be handed over.

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'may the force be with you' - Yoda??

I agree with kannli. For me, respec should only be available once per char and at the end of the game. Or it should be easily available but come with a permanent penalty, like losing 2 skill points and 15 stat points every time you use a potion.

what would you say with regard to damage of some lvl 1 skills such as psychic hammer 26-31? as a soulution to teeth damage, its possible to shop a wand and that adds enough damage, but with psychic hammer im not sure.

for mana cost kannli thats a fair point, i can see how sapphires can help it. i leveled a fresh char to lvl 10 like that and it was fine. but since that is the case i suggest to remove lvl req on leather armor, skull cap etc. i was already confused last patch when half vendor inventory was red from lvl req on 2 handed axe. really if there is a benefit in having that low lvl req lmk because i see it cause some problems as well, such as not being able to shop a socketed item as easily with a freshly started char. same goes for sorceress staves, makes it harder to gamble a staff quick that you can use instantly

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Will some of you guys please play past blood moore before you start asking for changes? Keep playing and youll see mana evens out, keep playing and youll ses you can get to level 18 without wasting many skilll points, its your choice you want to use a higher level skill, so live with it. Im just hearing worries about everything pre act2 normal. Try testing a char in a2 hell and see how that is, act1 norm is not something to bitch about lol

^ you might not like my criticism, but you cant silence me. this time i will say everything before the patch is out, so i wont have any regrets, thank you

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I can reduce the req on skull cap/leather armor, but not any weapons. That's a fair criticism and something that I didn't really think about. But now that I think about it it is strange being level 1 and 90% of the items you see you cant use. Haha.

Mana isn't really an issue. I've made sure of that. If you have mana problems at level 1 then go punch a few quill rats to death and level up and you will get more mana and money for chipped sapphires, etc.

As far as bloodmoor being too tedious. I just tested it and it is by no means difficult, I leveled up quickly on /Players 8. However, the monsters do have 50% more hp from the latest balance changes across the board. This has caused bloodmoor to be a bit more tedious. So i can reduce bloodmoor monsters hp back down to what it was before to give new chars the same fast start as before.

I agree with Kannli and Al, respec is fine as it is now. You can get one full respec from Sorrow Lord and you can kill the hall of heros in normal for a stat respec and kill them in NM for a skill respec.

Anything else?

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Get the patch on the realm.

And get us notice of reset date ahead of time so i can take a week off!

yea a slight nerf to monster hp in bloodmoor that sounds reasonable, thank you for that.
it sure is nice to have a quick start

idk but smashing a jug in the halls of the juggernaut can spawn an astral blade, which is surprisingly tanky. i spawned 2 at the entrance so it wasnt disruptive.
i suppose it can be a trap for the fight when players hit a jug on accident lol, but if its not intentional then there you go

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Text file download updated again!!

I also just reduced the lvl req of low level magic affixes that were below level 6 to level 1. So all that red gear at charsi won't be red for your noob chars anymore. Looks much nicer I must say. It was something minor that was overlooked but it looks much nicer now. Good idea.

I'll leave the blade as it is. Sounds fun. Beware of the jugs! They don't call it Hall of the JUGgernaut for nothing.

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Edit: Ops didnt mean to double post....anyways:




I'm workin' on it!

I'd like some more time testing to find anything else worth changing. Then I will create the MPQ and people can test that and see if everything is good. if the MPQ is good then we can send all the stuff to Duffbeer. After that it is in Duff's hands.

One thing about the final version of the patch is that I forgot to change the item stat costs of "enhanced damage %" which means the current max ed% is still 511 when it should be 255. This isnt a big deal right now but it needs to be fixed since now you can sometimes spawn rares with 280%+ ed, which this patch isn't balanced for. I didn't change it yet since it would cause item data errors for all old chars and I didn't want to disrupt people testing. not really a big deal, just want everyone to know ahead of time. When the final patch rolls out you won't be able to use your old test chars.

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what is max res? on my stat screen it shows 66 max, for merc it shows 75, but i remember it looked like this in 1.7 patch also and it was incorrect. something is buggy, not sure what it is, and it probably has nothing to do with the mpq and txt files

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Its 50 for merc and player, maybe thats why youve had mana issues

it would be good for akara to sell some belts with her pots

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cant edit sadly, but: and while were at it, boots as well because frw is always sought after

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I kinda feel like the Unique / set drop chance is much higher then 1.6 or 1.5, not sure but it feels like since the 1.2 version it was gradualy improved?

Personaly I always liked how classic d2 handled it. HU since I remember had a improved chance for Unique/Set chance rolls, which was always about right, the chance felt about right for the size of our community.

I believe the roll chance for them was improved in 1.7, ( I could be wrong tho ) Personaly I always prefered to hunt for items, it made them more valuable once you finaly got a item that you have been looking for.

One of good changes in 1.7, was the improved drop chance for runes. Which was nicely done, and everyone appricieated it on realm, from what I remember.

Although I think Uniques/Sets should be harder to get.

"I increased the nodrop chance on all "junk" items. I also removed stamina/thawing potions from the drop tables. I removed gold drops completely from non-champion and non boss monsters, this includes chests"

I've noticed that too and wonder how that has effected drop rates, more items = more uniques

Charsi isn't good enough for you? #CharsiLivesMatter

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You got a point there, the way I see it:

This is how I always thought it works lol

The system uses a drop table that is unique according to, Act;field,level and rolls what type of white base item, if any its going to drop.

Then it rolls again (kinda like a crit roll) if the item is going to be a higher rarity type, rolls magic, rare, unique, set.

so considering the Junk type of items drop less often, would the system drop more white base items?

If in fact that's the case, then that would mean overal icrease in high rarity drops.

idk how much HU drop system differs from classic tho lol.

No, the drops don't work that way unless you make it that way. The way I changed it doesn't cause more of other items to drop.

I didn't change any unique or set drop chances from other versions of HU.

You guys are crazy, its the only explanation.

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Updated download again.

Reduced the base mana cost of level 1 skills
Adjusted some boss HP
Adjusted assassin charge up skills since I forgot to do them before when I changed skill damage

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People said drops were more common in 1.6 too but it was never changed from 1.5 for drops or gambling.

RNG leads to panic theories. You might get a unique on the first quill rat, or never see one for 1-2+ hours.

Tooltip for Defiance is a bit wonky. Says +1% DR from zeal/sac but seems to be 1/4, same as smite/charge.

I assume Vengeance is a synergy for itself to prevent it from being an effective 1 point aoe farm skill. Well memed.

Some of the skills do not scale very well. Like War Cry does 3375 damage at lvl 39.

Taunt is REALLY good since it scales indefinitely with no falloff. 50% phys resist debuff @lvl 25 is bananas.

Amp+IM+iron golem+golem mastery is massive buttrape damage, may need to double check that.

Just my 2c.

Ok so since this is a 1.7 Edit patch then, is the Rune drop chance improved as it was in 1.7?

Becaouse as far as I remember I was talking with Brevan, and he clearly said the chance for high-end runes was indeed increased, in 1.7.

Ive no idea was there any other drop related changes.

doesnt work on unique enemies though

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Updated download again.

Defiance looks good for me. Using old files?

Buffed WC

Taunt only works on normal monsters, but i reduced it by half anyways.

reduced thorns on skills by half.

Rune drops are the same as 1.7

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it would be good if some veterans who test could make some 10min gameplay videos to put on youtube. maybe you could show your frenzy barb mrawskrad? im sure we can learn a lot from that gameplay

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Defiance does look good now, don't know how mine was wrong. I had the data with -direct/txt on.

It all looks pretty good, but IMO:

-The damage Might gains for itself could be raised a bit, if the goal is to make it viable end-game. The synergies don't quite add enough since it barely does more damage than Fanaticism on its own, at the cost of significant IAS+AR. The 4% CB is nice, but not sure if that's enough, unless there's almost no gear in the game with CB. I haven't done much PVE, just Hero Editor skilling. Anyway, perhaps 10%/lvl instead of 8%/lvl damage?

-The +1 life/lvl on Prayer is very strange. Perhaps make this +5 or +6?

-FOH damage sucks, 2188 @lvl 40 D:

-WC dmg still shows the same? I downloaded the new data folder, taunt shows it's nerfed though.

-Shadow warrior/master HP is very low. 1455 @lvl 30

-Fade is kind of bad; 7% DR @lvl 31 is okay, but that's a steep investment; the curse/plr/res are pretty low, even with max WB.

-Maybe increase radius of Mind Blast by 1 or 2, since the damage is super bad, I assume its only purpose is aoe stun+conversion

-Cloak of shadows does not work after first cast because you set the cloak duration to 0. It doesn't let you cast. Best to set the aura length to 15. If you make it less, then the black flash hurts your eyes, but longer, and the darkness is annoying. 15 frames is a good set time.

-Cobra Strike poison nova could be reduced from 8s to 5 or 6s to be more viable. Perhaps the radius and velocity could be improved too, it's pretty derpy.

-Rabies damage/duration could use a slight buff. 8s is just a really long time.

-Shockwave #missles+range could be increased, or just increase the damage

-Grizzly could use a damage buff. 2697 @lvl 30. MAKE GRIZZLY GREAT AGAIN.

-SoB thorns does almost nothing for some reason. It says 735% dmg@lvl 32 but monsters take <5% damage. o.O

-Thunderstorm is uber strong. I mean epic afk buttrape strong.

-Firewall, Blaze, and Meteor durations can give a lot of stacked damage. 15.2 seconds of meteor @lvl 30, 20.6 seconds of Blaze. Firewall has 4 stacks I guess, which might be too good, not sure. Maybe make Firewall last longer but have a longer recast too? 15 seconds with a 4 second recast?

-Blizzard kind of sucks in damage and duration.

-Enchant damage could use a boost, 559 dmg @lvl 30

-Valkyrie could use a base damage buff. It takes 3 hits for a lvl 25 Valkyrie to kill a random named in the Black Marsh of normal and it has equipment level 75.

-Maybe give Fend DR% for hard points or something to make a phys spear zon actually attractive.

If you want to test endgame skill damage then use around level 45 skills. Super endgame would be around 55, I believe. I read the rest and I'll do some adjustments later. Busy right now, though. Thanks for feedback. It helpsreduces.

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Well it looks like all the skill growths beyond lvl 30 are pretty relative (unless there are bugs where some skills double over again), so my observations still stand. The only thing I'm unsure of is how much %dmg and pierce for spells can be reasonably obtained for each class, such as why the poison nova on Cobra Strike is not good.

Tier 5 damage starts at slvl 29. So at slvl 30 you only have 1 level of tier 5 growth. Actually test with appropriately geared characters before jumping to conclusions.

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I use hack charms and bogus weapons to simulate the 'geared' experience. Also I checked skills at lvl 40 originally (as my mention of FOH damage being bad says) as a basis, so I was close to begin with

I never knew t5 specifically starts at lvl 29. The more you know.

The only serious concerns I suppose are cloak of shadows, spirit of barbs, sorc burn damages, and thunderstorm. The rest was just my 2c of feedback for balance to do with as you please. Hopefully it gets up and running soon.

barb find potion can find hp pots that dont stack with what is already in the belt. might not be possible to fix it if the mechanic is hardcoded but oh well

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Updating with the changes and seeing that wolf/bear can't cast any elemental skills anymore

Maybe this is too late to be asking for, but something I think would be cool is to see warcry become used again. Currently in it's state, it has two major problems:
1) the range is real small.
2) the mana costs are pretty high for a barb.

Easy solution would be to pump up its radius some and cut the mana cost in half.

A potential idea would be to change the mechanic, although I'm not creative enough to think of something cool.

In any case, I think if warcry were made somewhat useful again, it would give the barb a little more variety and also have a nice little side effect of reducing the number of bo barbs created, since we may actually see warcry barbs in parties.

could buff the intial success % of find potion to 35, after all item find barb will max it regardless and maybe some people who dont use this skill will see how helpful it is for many situations with corpses (coldworm, summoner, etc)

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i also noticed that when fighting a boss that has the regen overlay, when you die or use the book to go to town and then return to that location and hit the boss quickly, either does the boss not fully reover, or does not recover at all, this is kinda cheesy and im not sure why that is, my gear has ow and psn dmg and its a melee fighter.

btw i have a question, what is the "expected gear" and lvl as a frenzy barb for duriel and his guardian? im curious to know what is expected and what i ended up with

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It has always been that way. It takes a while for the boss to regen. If you end up fighting a boss near a portal shrine or something like that, then yes it is possible to TP, shift click a pot belt, run back in, and hit the boss - but that is a fairly rare thing.

in the case of duriel room its extremely easy to get a hit in fast but ok, i have known about this from earlier versions as well.

something else quite shocking if its unintentional (and i hope it is), i tried to shop a scepter with blessed hammer from akara for a long time and it didnt pop up even once, same goes for smite. idk if it has anything to do with the skills being moved around but for blessed hammer pally he should definitely be able to get a scepter with blessed hammer

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It says scepters can spawn with staff mods in the file for pal, which means any of the normal allowed skill bonuses can appear.

what are you saying? that it can spawn? i dare you to do the test for yourself then.
probably hammer and smite cant even appear as a staffmod anymore at all. pls look into it

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AFAIK, the default staffmods are hardcoded to either be on or off, but more can be added through automagic. As long as it says "pal" in "scepter", then all of those skills should be available. Either he changed something beyond my understanding, or you are just unlucky.

well smite might still drop from monsters or using the downgrade recipe but not be shoppable at the vendor (at least not akara), but blessed hammer definitely should be shoppable. and frankly i did a lot of runs so the chance of it being coincidence is nearly zero.

and btw do you think its good that high lvl staffmods are not shoppable? to me it seems like it would be a positive addition to the game since you can shop a decent base without having to wait for a long time or having to use the downgrade recipe to downgrade a lot of blue scepters, or getting it by chance on some other char and then mule it, but perhaps you can say something negative about it

/e: apparently you can gamble from jerhyn up to lvl 18 skills easily (saw vengeance), not sure about blessed hammer and smite still

jerhyn is selling blessed hammer relatively often actually, but akara i didnt find it even once so idk what is going on, perhaps vendoring from jerhyn changes the conditions for the items so that it can spawn blessed hammer

was able to shop normal +3 blessed hammer scepter from jerhyn but from akara zero scepters with blessed hammer and from both zero scepters with smite.

from what it looks like is that akara has a lower "item lvl quality" than jerhyn so she sells items with staffmods from 1-12, jerhyn from 1-18.
BUT strangely enough akara does not sell blessed hammer, jerhyn does. and even stranger, the only lvl 18 skill that akara sells as a staffmod is static field. coincidentally those are exactly the skills that have been moved around on the skill trees

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Download updated

Foh dmg buffed
WC dmg buffed and reduced manacost
buffed shadow hp slightly
buffed fade slightly
mindblast dmg and aoe buffed/reduced convert chance to 1%. Useful when it procs but it wont convert everything and be annoying.
COS doesnt work the way you think. The timer is equal to the duration. So, I moved the def buff to claw mastery and reduced the duration of COS to 10 secs. You have to cast it more often for the debuff but its only on a 10 sec timer this way.
Cobra dmg buffed slightly
Shockwave dmg and # of missiles buffed
Fixed SOB thorns
Blizzard dmg buffed
enchant dmg buffed

about paladin scepters: welcome to RNG loot
Being able to shop godmode base items would trivialize the game even further. It was never a problem before and I made it even easier with 1.5 when I introduced the blue to white recipe. No one QQed about this in the history of HU and I'm not changing it.

It's easy and helpful to hack some test chars but that often gives you a narrow view of how something actually is in a legit play through. I'm sure somethings will be "OP" compared to other things. That's always the case. I think making balance changes based on hacked test chars and not actual gameplay is shortsighted. It would be nice if more people had time/desire to test the patch in a legit playthrough but that's never gonna happen.

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not sure if we are talking about same thing, there are 2 things im mainly saying in previous post. the first thing is the question wheather lvl 24-30 skills should be shoppable on white items, that you replied to. however it does not address the vendor issue (static field only lvl 18 skill sold by akara, others lvl 12 max, akara sells no hammer. jerhyn sells hammer but no smite. all those skills have been moved around so there might be an issue with it. if you think this is rng then i invite you to post a screenshot disproving my point)

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It would be nice if there was more extensive testing, but playing 7 different characters with 10+ builds each would take dozens of people actively playing, AND hoping they actually understand the game and give relevant feedback. You'd also at least need an actively hosted test server that can be given updates on a daily basis.

Even my "simulation" is very time-consuming. i swap out charms with skills/damage based on the area I'm in; I usually have all skills maxed and do a cata-andy run, then a tomb run, a travincal run, a river of flame run, and a worldstone run, while testing various skill/build combinations along the way. Doing this took me about 5 hours for all 7 characters a few days ago. Unfortunately even this can cause you to miss things (like how I fucked up Grizzly) because, as you implied, I didn't play the entire game with every specific build.

All we can do is accept that most people don't want to test anything, they'll just wait for it to go live, and then if they find something they don't like, they'll never hesitate to complain.

ive been trying to recruit the mxl community to test, but not much luck

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P.S.

-Vengeance is messed up now. level 40 Vengeance with a 36-84 weapon (2060-4808 Vengeance dmg) does almost no damage to monsters in cold plains of normal on the nova. The hit kills the main target, but the nova does almost nothing.

-Blessed Hammer might be too strong because the Might synergy that ups Concentration directly ups BH. Level 44 BH/Might/Conc is 6506 damage. I'm not sure how to address this - perhaps just slightly reduce the coefficient of Conc to BH rather than nerfing the Might synergy to Conc.

-Howl and Battle Command could be made to have more purpose than 1 point. Maybe make BC add 1% magic pierce per 2 hard points and 6 soft points? How about removing Taunt, and make Howl also do what Taunt does on a lesser scale since it's aoe. Such as enemy flees for 5 sec for X yards, and also -1% defense and phys resist per 2 levels. Just an idea.

-Grim Ward could also use a change, since it's hard to invision someone ever putting 20 points into this. What about also making it a totem turret that also shoots a small bone projectile (just use the Fetish pea-shooter missile, or those gargoyle ninja star traps?) at a nearby target, causing damage and lowering their attack speed in addition to the movement speed debuff. Limit the number of totems to 1 at a time. Make the damage largely based on hard points so it isn't a 1 point wonder of extra free damage. Perhaps add additional missiles based on hard points. Again, just an idea.

-I'm a little worried that the Necro poison skills are too good without requiring synergies. The old "forced" 60 point build of it, along with 20 in LR, limited your sub-spec by a lot. Also, Confuse is really strong, perhaps by accident. It says it may not be overridden by another curse, but it definitely can be, and the radius+duration is insane. In fact, you can use confuse + IM and go afk while the entire screen of mobs kills each other. This is exacerbated by using Attract to force their targets first, and Attract only requires 1 point. As you can imagine, this with golems and poison nova(that requires no synergies) to finish them off is quite insane. This could be fixed by making confuse have a VERY low radius and duration, and having it raise very slowly through hard and soft points. Something like a 2 second duration and a 1 yard radius, and it goes up 0.5 seconds and 0.5 yards per level. And/Or give it a cooldown or a very high mana cost? Or, just make it so confuse doesn't stack. Come up with something.

Also, the unbreakable immunities is a little silly IMO. lvl 48 LR - 34% - can't crack a garbage boss in A1 Hell. In fact, that lvl 48 LR can't even crack Rakanishu's lightning immunity in normal Seems to defeat the purpose of LR/Conviction o.O

Perhaps more to come as I continue.

if you nerf hammer pls dont make it irrelevant i want to use it next patch ty.

btw i use most barbarian skills like taunt and sometimes grim ward. they are quite useful imo, grim ward could be a 1pter too and find potion as well lol, but they are definitely useful

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Venge is working as it has for years. You must be doing something wrong or confused on how it actually works. The Nova doesn't benefit from the ED% from venge itself.

Hammer might be OP, but its not broken. It's also cancer to use, so it should be stronger than average.

-Barb warcrys...maybe but I won't right now. Trying to get this finished. Barb is fine and fun and strong now. He doesn't need it. Less is more. At a certain point you are just added shit just to add shit.

-Nercro poison. maybe its too strong maybe not. we will see. If someone wants to wait for IM+confuse then go for it. I already cleared the map with X skill while you are waiting for quillrats to kill eachother.

-unique mobs can get unbreakable immunities with the unique mods they get. It's fine....stop QQing. Jesus Christ.

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Please go test the nova before you insult me. I'm using a 539-732 Phase Blade with 255 str, and lvl 48 Vengeance with lvl 48 conviction and concentration. That's 2563 normal attack white damage (5862 with conc) and the nova cannot kill monsters in act 2 of normal.

This is my weapon, stats, and the damage the nova does to a Fallen in A1 Hell.

http://imgur.com/a/SnTEB

The single target damage is great, everything dies in 1 hit, but the nova is butt worthless.

I've been playing a melee paladin the last week legit. Venge is fine. I even tested venge with a white crystal sword before my last post and I was killing a2 normal mobs just fine. It's been fine on my entire journey from lvl 1 to lvl 78. You must have different expectations or you are doing something wrong. I have no idea. Its fine for me nothing about it has changed since 1.5. No one else has had problems with it.

I didn't even insult you. You are QQing about immune random unique mobs. The game is meant to be hard. You can use a merc/different skill to kill some trash ass random unique monster. Simple as that.

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in hell you should try using conviction and ele pierce in gear then vengeance should work just fine.

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'may the force be with you' - Yoda??

how would you finish act 1 with a bone necro? i ask because to me bone spear seems like the way but its dmg is about 160, next lvl 180 and going to trist it takes about 2:40 to kill griswold hitting with bone spear repeatedly nearly the entire time, thats longer than it may sound like.
and looking at docs, he shows as 630 hp.
andy 27k hp, about 30x gris according to docs, which would take arround 90 minutes with this setup, then assuming that i buff my dmg and hit nonstop it would still be maybe 1 hour accourding to those numbers.
what am i missing here?

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In the BossStats file he included I see Griswold has 1510 HP, 0% Magic resist and 17% Magic Absorb. Your Bone Spear (at the 160 you indicated) should hit him for ~133 damage and kill him in 11 casts.

Andariel has 29760 HP, 0% Magic resist, and 17% Magic Absorb, requiring 223 casts of that same level Bone Spear.

If I had to guess what you were missing with Griswold, I would say, cheekily, your bone spears?

lol no, i just forgot to extract the new files from the zip
looks like it wont be sleep mode anymore then, thats good. gonna test gris soon

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http://i.imgur.com/O9slSCH.jpg
well... this is 50 bone spears at 157-181 magic dmg each. looks like overall it will take something like 250 bone spears

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that xp boost in blood moor could be reduced again. not to base but the increase amount could be 40% of what it is now, because atm its an xp fest and trivializes the xp in den of evil and blood moor

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I don't mind the xp boost because it drops off a cliff at level 7.

BTW Mraw - have you made certain that the music will function properly on realm; no broken boss loops?

well at p8 i was still getting really good xp at lvl 10 which seemed very much comparable to cold plains, except the enemies are much easier, but if everyone else doesnt mind the imbalance early game then i wont disagree because its just the first 12 lvls or so and those can be a drag. its just that it feels like a downgrade to go into den of evil or cold plains lol

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Some general info that might be handy while testing:

• Here's a quick reference about staffmods. They're not the same as automods (some sites might confuse these but the files are pretty clear on the difference). I'd recommend searching for more information if you'd like to know more about HShield or Smite since those are both special case staffmods in D2 with hardcoded behavior. Despite the level changes of skills, they will belong to the same tiers as always since those are determined by their placement in the skills.txt file.
• The BossStats webpage doesn't multiply monster HP when they spawn with mods (e.g. ManaBurn), so Gris' HP will be larger than in the webpage, and also the webpage maker doesn't consider d2mod.ini, which icreases monster HP more than in v1.7. I'm not sure, but I think a 10x multiplier for a SuperUnique's listed HP isn't too far off the mark.
• Griswold is ManaBurn, which still adds 20% magic resist just like it always has. Consider using a merc that you can keep safe by distracting the boss with something like a summon, at least until you get BoneSpirit.
• XP in D2 is reduced when you are more than 5 levels above the monster. It's a pretty fast drop, so if you need more XP for the next level while monsters are giving you less, then yeah you'll feel it like a wall. Fallen are level 1, I'd expect the SpearMaidens in CPlains to be level 2-3, so after char level 7 you won't be gaining much XP in those low areas. This is normal for any version of D2.
• Music is handled client-side, so if you are seeing issues on the realm, then it's worthwhile to first look into your installation. The realm uses the normal resolution (800x600) no music version of patch_d2.mpq.

I was thinking about some skills that became redundand without the synergies that will most certainly not see any play and what possibly can be done to change that

Sorc lvl 1 skills:
Firebolt - This skill dmg is meh and obviously compared to rest fire line just 0% of it being used...

I suggest swaping with the OLD FLAMEWAVE :D:D ( Im not giving up on it he )

Coldbolt
Not sure what to do with this one? mby someone has some suggestions.

to add to the argument compare them skills to chargedbolt, which has amazing mechanic and can dish out syrious single and multi target damage.

Barbarian standard leap? No idea. compleatly useless skill.
Edit: Make it synergise with the Atack Leap? by adding some leap mechanic?
stun, freeze, aura, curse, something like that. Perhaps there is a window here to make some interesting Leap build?Aoe Knockback?

Leap Attack into aoe something and than WW stuff xD

Everyone loves to leap attack right. Its awesome.

now...there was one more skill I alwayes wished to have been slightly modified, I never dared to ask , but what the hell!!


Firestorm is a good skill and in its current state seems to be in "ok" spot. But how about make it rly awesome? Perhaps make it scale in lenght with levels?

Im not talkin here Diablo style firestorm xD, more like +30% 50%? 50 might be overdoing it .

Some of my thoughts I wanted to throw out there.

GG WP its gona be a nice patch.

Firebolt and Icebolt do good damage for boss fights and will incur fewer boss counters than other spells.