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.