Make bug reports as detailed as possible. Make sure the bug is actually a bug first by reading the design document Here.
Balance suggestions should have a comparison to similar skills/items.

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How do you feel about a Melee mastery and a Throw mastery rather then having to invest in a certain weapon? or did you always like that?

I havent had a chance to play, just looking at skill trees atm

Personally I like a mastery for each weapon type because I like the potential variety it allows (4-6 Barbs in a game all using different weapons in a productive manner). That said, while I think it's silly for MaceMastery to affect all blunt weapons (from wands to Hammers) while the other Masteries only affect a single weapon type, I don't care enough to actually change it.

I'm not sure I'd choose Melee vs Thrown though, since nearly all weapons count as melee weapons (only bows, xBows, and the thrown-attacks with Combo weapons are excluded). I recently made an item type in v1.7 for 2-Handed weapons (allowed me to make Runewords and cube-upgrade recipes specific to that weapons class), which from both a balance perspective and a story-line perspective (2-handed weapons use a different fighting style) would make an intuitive WeaponMastery type. Someone could create a FinesseWeapon type (for high-dex weapons like v1.7's 1-handed swords, knives, scepters), or EdgedWeapon (swords, maybe spears and axes) and BluntWeapons. Basically, if folks are against 6 types of weapon mastery, then they should put forward how many types make sense (maybe 3 or 4), and then for v1.9 or v1.8, someone could implement types that try to break weapons into 3 or 4 types with near-equal numbers.

For now, I'd put forward these types for implementation in HUv1.9:
Edged (sword, axe, jav, knife, thrown, Claws),
Blunt (Mace, club, hammer, Staves&Rods),
TwoHanded (2-H Sword, Axe, Hammer; PoleArm; Spear)

As a coincidence, I've been adding DeadlyStrike and OpenWound mods to Edged weapons, and CrushingBlow and DmgTargetAC mods to Blunt weapons already in v1.7, but I'd been specifying the different weapons manually. Take a look at the runeword "Prowess in Battle" to see an example.

Berserkers a1, starting at monastery, are just stationary occasionally shooting blade fury's.

A few monsters (Berserkers, A2 Sandraiders, A3 Zakarumites, and a few A5 Minotaurs) had their AI changed in a way that required editing of .dll files. It sounds like you might have an old copy, but I'm not sure which file it would be.

Check the the last-modified date of these files, and let me know if yours are out of date:
D2Game.dll (2016-04-30)
D2Client.dll (2016-03-13)
D2Common.dll (2016-02-05)

That aside, you should be able to play through well enough. I think the changes to A3 Gidbinn quest required code editing as well, so maybe hold of on cashing in Gidbinn until we've confirmed that the .dll files in the test package are up to date.

If you're just missing one of the .dll files, then I think I could upload a link to it, but I think PureRage will be issuing a new file in a week or so (when his current schedule clears up).

I'm home tomorow night and will have a small update coming. It sounds like you have the wrong files though, zerkers don't fire blade any more. Can you confirm if the data folder is in the HU folder and you are running -direct -txt.

Can confirm the correct .dlls are included in the test package.

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I checked those files and replaced them, not sure how I got them mixed up ,mby chosen wrong options when doing it for the first time, anyway.

Nice one Berserkers seem fine now.

Some initial observations and half-asleep first impressions from checking out the skill trees and planning builds:

• The lvl30 Amazon melee lightning skill has a minor error in its Jab synergy. It says 1 Bolt every 4 levels, but there are no bolts in the skill.
• Skill tree layouts are quite confusing at first. It seemed to me that you forced it into various shapes. I think it would be beneficial to keep some familiarity and put some skills back into where they were, columnwise. For example, Fire and Cold Mastery back to the center, Arrow skills grouped by element like they used to be. Necro Curses, Amazon Jav skills, Barb Combat/Shouts, Assassin traps and Druid elemental skills striked me as odd too.
• It would be nice to have the large Vengeance area of effect back. The small one looks and feels feeble in comparison.
• Is it possible to bring back Enchant/Frozen Armor whole party buffs?
• Is there any reason to build Exploding Arrow over Immolation? As I saw, the damage seems to pale in comparison, you only need about half a second of burn to reach the same damage.
• When you have overall 26 points in Energy Shield and its synergies, the "8/16 Drain Mana" string disappears from the tooltip. It comes back when you put another point there.
• Is Phoenix Strike limited to 1 mode intentionally? Feels much less epic this way.
• I haven't played yet so I don't know about balance, but the additions to Holy Shield made me think. It could help build diversity if the shield requirement was lifted (with the name changed of course) so that two-handed paladins could get those bonuses as well.
• I took a quick look at the unique weapons and found that some weapons were missing completely. Lances and War Pikes, most notably for me. Makes me somewhat sad.
• Does Slow Missiles stack with curses like it used to? It could be too much pierce together. If this is deemed a problem, it would be good idea to separate the skill into a curse part and the original slow part, so that the slow is not overridden by curses.

Overall it looks nice, even if very strange and different. I hope players can stomach all these changes because a lot of thought must have went into them. I especially like the Sorc build paths. Blaze is really cool for example!

LightningStrike Description - There are only a few strings that had the "+X Things per Y levels", but I can see where Bolts isn't getting the message across for that skill. It's gaining extra targets with that synergy, so rather than jump between 5 targets it could potentially jump between 10. Elsewhere in the description is refers to "Hits" but perhaps I should just add a new string "Targets", since that can be used in many skills.

SkillTreeLayouts - You mentioned feeling tired, but if more people feel confused, then perhaps it's worth taking a look at. At the moment, one benefit of moving things around and making people actually look for something is that it might make them less likely to believe that something does what it has done in the past.

Vengeance AoE - I'm not familiar with any other size (other than zero), but the skill doesn't seem too strong or too weak to me right now. I've been trying to make Tanking builds do less damage than more fragile builds, so that might be why Vengeance isn't hitting as hard as you remember.

AoE Enchant/FArmor - I'm not familiar with this. I've only been able to play in a group of 2-3 recently, so there hasn't been much drive to make this change. One of the themes I was putting into v1.7 was the promoting of micromanagement to liven things up (theoretically making things more interesting, and potentially challenging). Perhaps if there's more support for the need of AoE buffs, then I don't mind making a cloned version of Enchant for item procs with an AoE version of Enchant for the Sorc. I suppose increasing the mana cost by five times would still make it very low in a group.

Immo vs Exploding Arrow - Exploding Arrow radius is 60% larger, making it very good at handling groups and a bit better at non-adjacent targets. Immo is clearly better at a single target. I've tried an ImmoZon, and to me they feel plenty powerful despite their synergy skill (IceArrow) having no extra damage (it's just a tactical skill - very low mana and meant to freeze things for a long time, it's really handy with decent %PierceTargets), but I haven't had the time to try Exploding or Freezing builds for comparison. Exploding Arrow has about four times the explosion damage of Immo end-game, but the Immo DPS over an entire second is 25% more than the damage of EArrow's explosions. Immo pairs with IceArrow so that you'd be able to pin targets down for the entire flame duration. EArrow pairs with ColdArrow just because I thought it was more fun than relying on a single element for all your damage.

EShield Description - In v1.7 I tried to make a standard for skill descriptions. If something appears in the top description section (4 lines here) then that thing will never change (EG Skeleton Resistances and Block% given to them in monstats.txt), if the data appears in the ThisLevel and NextLevel areas, then at some point it will change (Since some things change only every 2-3 levels, I thought this was a good idea to encourage more skill investment). The Drain Mana Efficiency of EShield changes, but stops at 8/16, so I stop showing it in the per-level areas and show it in the top area. It sucks that there's a glitch with the tool-tip description, but I haven't found a better way to implement this description-changing behavior that I've grown to like. Other spells that would be affected are ChargedBolt, Teeth, Raven, MBoulder, SpiritWolf, RaiseSkeleton, RaiseSkeletonMage, and probably a few more.

PhoenixStrike - Yes it was intentionally set to release a single effect. As the only MA with all three elements of damage, I wanted to set it apart. I've played a PhStrike Sin, and it seems fine to me in practice. The first charge (Ice) has a next-hit delay of 1 frame (The Ice damage doesn't stack), so while it's releasing many IceBolts in a roughly 6 yard radius, it's main use for me was freezing things (crowd control). The 2nd charge (Lightning) has no hit-delay, so the 6 lightning crawly things hit the origin target quite hard (seemed good to me vs large targets like most bosses) but after that they're pretty unreliable. The 3rd charge (Meteor) is the same as usual, and was made to be the last charge so that MA Sins would essentially have a castDelay just like MeteorSorcs.

HShield - If it's just the synergies (absorbs, PoisLenRed, etc) that you're after, then weapon switch with a shield when you cast the skill, and then switch back to your 2-Handed weapon (you'll lose the defense boost only I think). Using a 2-Handed weapon should noticeably increase Paladin's damage (LifeLeach starts to become more relevant), so I wouldn't want them to get the defense boost from HShield (They should consider pairing with a Defiance merc, and placing a point in Conversion (excellent crowd control)). I increased the range of 2-handed weapons, so for example you could easily attack with a spear over the shoulder of a Merc or from behind summons like BoneWall. You shouldn't need HShield's mods if you're going 2-Handed. The ResAuras max at level 10, so the HShield synergies cap at 5%. Consider 20 points into Vengeance, and then use Salvation for the +%MaxRes bonus against element-heavy targets.

Uniques - Long ago I disabled all v1.3 uniques because even when I rebalanced some of them, I would have rather had a rare drop. Since then I've been trying to only make a unique item when I had a good idea for something I thought would be "fun". The theme of Spears in v1.7 is to be defensive, to set them apart from Polearms, which are meant to be offensive (they have higher damage and stat requirements than most other weapons). If you consider that most uniques and set items are intended to be upgraded to Exceptional or Elite versions (gaining +Skills or other auto-mod type qualities), then v1.7 might have more viable Elite uniques than any other version of HU. I'd agree that some of the uniques in v1.7 at the moment might be more interesting if they were less generalized (there are very few +%FireDamage items because it's easier for me to make a single +%AllDamage item, rather than feel obligated to clone the +%FireDamage item across each element and try to find an interesting quirk for each of them (The exceptional unique boots are a good example of something I'm not proud of, but they're alright)).

Yes SlowMissiles and Innersight stack with Curses. I'd agree that if players were to max SMissiles and LResistances, it would reduce enemy resistances into the negative, and be very effective. Similarly, HolyAuras stack with Conviction. In general I'm alright with teams of players being very strong when working together. I'm not alright with a single person managing much more than 33%Pierce though, unless they've spent a lot of skill points on it. I've been recently considering a rebalancing of some of the piercing-type skills from 1% +1%/Lvl to 3% +1%/2Lvl, this would reduce them from a max of 33% to about 20% when maxed, while players that spend only 1 point would be reduced from 15% to 10%. At the moment, I'm heavily leaning towards putting off that rebalancing for v1.9, since I'm aware that the changes between v1.6 and v1.7 will make v1.7 seem hard enough as it is.

Thank you for taking the time to investigate things in an excellent amount of detail.

I agree with the vengeance comment Shantu made it would be nice to have the AOE vengeance from 1.5 back even if it was smaller than in 1.5 and even less damage than before.

Guided arrow feels really terrible now it needs pierce back with a limit to the amount of pierce you can get or a damage boost. Strafe is so much better than GA + multiple shot now. I would never max GA or multiple shot right when even a 1 pt strafe out performs both.

I would like if zeal had some +ed% on it. It feels bad putting points in it just for some ar.

Chipped rubies (i think its rubies) don't have replenish.

I'm only in A3 normal but trash is much harder than bosses. Some champions 1 shot me but bosses don't even come close to a threat.

Overall its pretty fun, I haven't played everything yet extensively yet, just ama and pal.

EDIT: add replenish to arrows and bolts

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One other thing I think is important is that Brevan/Purerage really intended this to be difficult, slowed down (no more hell act5 in a couple of days like previous patches) and meant for parties of 3-5 people.

Anyone around willing to team up and traverse through? I have several characters ranging from mid act 1 through act 5.

not sure if you want to hear about animation errors or not --

jab oskill on barb with wind shaft (uni javelins) makes barb disappear
wearwolf/wearbear oskill on blood crescent with doubleswing makes barb stand there but still deal damage, obviously theres not an action for this, just saying it is out there

i can play a little al, but my schedule is super sporadic

Vengeance - Perhaps for v1.9 folks could change the AoE of Vengeance to be more similar to v1.5. I think for v1.7 Vengeance is different enough from v1.6 that while some people hate the change, some might like it. At the moment, I'd assume Vengeance would retain it's v1.6 values in v1.8.

GuidedArrow - This was balanced in a similar way to BoneSpirit. They are tactically very similar, except that while BSpirit faces very few resistances, GArrow allows Life/Mana Leach, onStrike procs, travels faster, etc. I'd agree that the play style of MultiArrow+GArrow is similar to BSpirit+Teeth. I paired Multi with GArrow because neither benefits overly much from Pierce. You could always aim Multi very far past a group so that the arrows are launched tightly together, and since only one of the arrows can hit a monster, the rest will continue to hit monsters behind the first. If you do have Pierce, then spamming Multi is still pretty thoughtless and effective.

Strafe - It sounds like you're using it in a way I haven't considered, that makes it more effective than I expected. After playing Strafe+Magic and briefly trying Multi+Guided, I had concluded that they were balanced enough to move on and test other things, but I suppose when I've got the time I'll poke around again and see if I can figure out what you were doing.

Zeal - I agree that if you are not playing this as part of a HolyAura build, then raising it much past level 1 probably isn't worth it, especially if you've already got some AR from other sources. Raising this skill is mainly done for the synergy effects on the HolyAuras. It should have pretty decent physical damage when paired with Might, Concentration, Fantacism, or BlessedAim.

Chipped Rubies - Thank you for pointing this out, I've fixed it for the next update (another 10 days away maybe?). I don't even know when this issue got introduced, but I suspect it's been present since before my last edit to the gems file. Just goes to show that a fresh set of eyes with a keen attention to detail is needed to find many errors.

A3 Trash - Without more information (which trash, what's your life, DR/MDR, resistances) it's hard to tell what's going on. It's possible that you've found a bug, but if you're still getting used to things, then it's just hard to tell. If you're trying to maximize PDR/MDR as the main source of defense (certainly a valid strategy in A1 and A2), then I could see where a critical strike (DoubleDmg) from a champ (+33%Dmg) would end up in a hit that could remove a much larger chunk of life that normal. With regular amounts of DR players would get used to 66% of trash damage as "normal", but a critical strike from a champ would (after DR) do about four times that "normal" damage. I wouldn't expect that to 1-hit players, but maybe you were cursed, maybe there was lots of stuff going on, etc. Bosses aren't intended to be overly difficult, especially in Normal setting, but they should pose some form of threat. There will be a Solo edition on v1.7 that has 20% reduced monster damage.

I'd agree that I intended v1.7 to be slower than v1.2 or v1.3, which often felt like either you were completely stopped by an ActBoss or mob of immunities, or you just couldn't get enough FRWalk on your gear to keep up with how fast your skills were killing (I vividly remember MultiZons launching arrows into the darkness and running a few steps before launching again, stopping momentarily to pick up a quiver from corpses of those slain before even their AI had activated). Many of the changes I've made in the last several months have been towards making v1.7 easier or faster-paced than what I'd originally designed and enjoyed. For example, I've increased mana regen by 50% for all characters (it takes 60 seconds instead of 90 to refill your bulb), and reduced mana costs for most spells by 20% (this is why the design document is incorrect for mana costs). I'm not against making stuff a bit faster paced for folks who just want to play with two skills, since I suppose I've already had my chance to enjoy things. I accept that plenty of players enjoy the therapeutic grind of running Tundra (I had these guys in mind when I designed Hell difficulty to be lvl95 everywhere, so that people could farm wherever they wanted rather than just Tundra). I think after the first couple weeks, when people have figured out the changes and new effective strategies, they might find v1.7 pretty easy. Just the other day I received one of the first critiques that it was too easy since Trash monster AI could be butchered by CloakOfShadows, DimVision (Raven has this onStrike again), Confuse, Attract, Terror, Convert (and MindBlast), Howl, GrimWard, or stunning effects.

Jab Animation - Dang, I had just checked that this worked with all classes, but I guess you were using a dual-wield barb? I don't think I checked that. Thank you for letting me know about it. I'll investigate if there are any solutions, but generally for animation stuff there isn't. If it's just dual-jab Barbs, then I might just tell people to avoid doing that (the error log file-size alone becomes a problem), but I suppose I could easily move Jab oSkills to be a 2-Handed Spear only mod.

DoubleSwing WereFolk - I'm alright with animations where players do not disappear (I'd agree they look dumb, but they're not broken, and I haven't noticed any that generate log-file errors (If you'd kept up that Jab Barb test for a while, it might be worth deleting your d2log.txt files in the mod's root folder because it might be upwards of several hundred MBytes in size now)). If you notice any other problems, like maybe there's no attack rate limit and you're swinging 25 times a second, then that's worth taking a look at for other reasons.

the pace of play is slower than every patch since 1.3. i believe that is what brevan intended. after the initial shock though it becomes easier.

Act 1 and 2 were fine but something about act 3 normal feels really slow like the mobs have a bit too much HP and my gear is really really good (eth rares with almost max ed for my level). Maybe its just me, but I spent all of act 3 hiding behind my cold merc watching him destroy everything for me.

Anyways, I just hit act 4, trash mobs feel a lot better now and I feel like the main hero a bit more instead of my merc.

On bow skills:
It just feels really terrible putting points in the physical bow skills. Why would I even bother using GA and the massively neutered multishot when strafe does the job of both better. Since GA cannot pierce and the extra ED on GA is made up by the speed of strafe and because multishot has terrible range and requires so much investment and it deals 3/4 damage and cannot proc on all its arrows. And then after that why would I max strafe? If i max it i get more arrows...I'd rather just save 19 pts and cast strafe 2-3 times. shooting a smaller amount of arrows also keeps you locked down for a shorter time which makes it easier to hit and run. I won't max magic arrow for the same reason and 1% ed per point feels like a bad joke. I'd rather max immolation arrow.

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oskill werebear + jab just causes a no animation

also i can oskill cast werebear and weapon switch to something else, not sure if that was meant to be

i think shout/bo/bc were working in town before? just nice before running into a wp

pretty sure that was a change made after 1.3 that would need to be re-implemented

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That and replenishing arrows. Please, if you only make one change based on my feedback then let it be that. :')

I know you can make missile skills not cost ammo, but that doesn't work for strafe as far as I know. So replenishing arrows is the only solution.

EDIT: update on my progress

My amazon is in act5 now. Act4 was a lot easier than act3. It took about an hour to clear bridge+CS and kill diablo. Diablo fight was fun had a few close calls.

I traded my cold merc for a wolf merc. The cold merc started having trouble staying alive with only ~400 hp vs wolf merc ~1500. I just killed White dragon and saved anya. White dragon arctic blast feels untankable even with 15% cold absorb, so I just used strafe and kited him. Everything since the rough bit mid act3 has been pretty straight forward no more troubles.

My build: 20 critical strike/20 inner sight/20 jab/1 pt rest

Not sure what I want to max next. Maybe jab synergies.

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Couple questions:
1) Are you gearing via the cube recipe to get uniques/sets? Or finding everything through farming?
2) Are you clearing trash with strafe, and if so, is it phys or are you rocking things like nozokan and elemental dmg gear? How is the clear speed if its phys?

I agree with the replenish on arrows/bolts/throwing items.


I picked this back up a few days ago from the last spot i left off at a couple months back:

Level 87 foh pally - just cleared the north/east/west arimyth halls of heroes (solo on the multiplayer edition). Definitely challenging. Troll posts were fun/tough. The heroes were a good level of difficulty. I ended up pulling each hero one by one to fight off. The only gripe I had with the entire thing is it takes quite a while to go through 3 long arimyth maps, fight 9 heroes, and the end result was 5 stat points added to your character. I don't mind the small bonus, since it's not necessary to complete and we don't want to allow a side quest to make characters broken or overpowered. Maybe reducing the size of the arimyth maps is worth taking a look?

Legion - couldn't solo him as is, will have to give this another attempt when I get stronger. One person applying OW and having to deal with 5 enemies every wave is tough with the fohdin. And since I couldn't defeat legion, I could not attempt Soulmancer.

I didn't know I could create uniques and sets with the cube. Do you mean upgrading? I'm using a mix of crafts, sets, uniques and rares. Only using 1 unique actually because most I find are for other classes.

I use strafe to clear and I have nothing to compare it too but its not slow but not fast. It feels about right. I'm killing most trash in 3-6 arrows. which is 1-2 casts of strafe per monster. I do 600-900 damage physical dmg with strafe and jab does 660-800. 56% crit chance which was a huge dmg boost when I maxed it. My items are about level 50 and I am almost level 70 so I really need to craft something new with better base items.

I imagine elemental builds do more damage since gems and runes add so much.

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Repairable stock of arrows and bolts?:

Charges cost ~190 each +150ish for the first to repair.
Dropped by Coldcrow, turned her into a mini boss.

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Cool, but i'll miss the charm space that could be used for dmg/hp charms.

Maybe make her drop unique arrows that have replenish on them?

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Leave it in the cube, it's 10-15 stacks of arrows/bolts in a 2x1 cube space incase you don't get drops for ages.

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It just feels like unnecessary hassle and clutter when you can add replenish to arrows and get the same effect in a much simpler way.

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It took a while to setup, but we started playing the test patch with my brother over Gameranger.
I played a favorite of mine, a 2h charger paladin, Tiko a bone necro. As a disclaimer, it is entirely possible we were doing everything wrong and I honestly think we were missing something. The following may seem like a rant, a whine or both but please do not take this personally. I am simply trying to recount our experience, hoping to express some of the pain we felt. I love Hell Unleashed and I have all the respect in the world for you guys for all the work you have put in.

Unfortunately, however much we tried, we didn't like 1.7. We spent 5-6 hours playing and reached Black Marsh wp only, all bosses defeated before that. I know for sure that I did not have fun and I have no motivation to play any further.

I think there are some great ideas here, like Behemoth monsters (quill bears are downright scary the first time you see them), new mob skills, the ability to gamble all item types, some of the new builds, etc.

However, I feel the essence of Hell Unleashed was lost somewhere along the way. To me, it has always been about power and epic bossfights. You feel powerful as you destroy hordes of demons with relative ease. But when you reach the boss, you are usually humbled by its power and have to work extra hard to defeat it. Bosses are extremely difficult, but it is due to this difficulty that victory feels so great, a real achievement.
This creates a cycle where you have periods of calm, progress and adventure, divided by dangerous bossfights where you are tested to the limits.

Mobs of course do not have to be made out of paper and bosses do not have to be impossible to defeat. But 1.7 feels like the other extreme, where each fallen/zombie in the given zone is like a small brickwall. And when you get to a boss, you fear the mobs around them much more because they deal so much more damage.

Strong mobs wouldn't be a such problem if you were actually able to use your skills. But the hero feels like a miserable, potion-addict cripple, because every group of mobs requires you to spend all or most of your mana pool if you want to use your skills. Auto attack is an option, but orders of magnitude slower than using the supposedly mob-clearing Teeth. So you keep chugging mana pots to kill trash, even with a 100 points in Energy already.

This causes progress to be slowed down to a painful crawl. Admittedly, we didn't use the best builds. My charger spent most of his time az a zealer because Zeal was at least affordable. His mana pool was only enough to kill about 1 or 2 monsters with Charge (low Energy though, but needed the points in str and vit). As we progressed, I started using flame pots because of the aoe effect (and no mana cost thankfully), which was much more effective than doing what my build was originally supposed to do.
The bone necro was pretty miserable too, even though we expected him to perform better. A group of mobs took about 6-7 teeth to kill and his mana pool allowed casting about 10-11.

After killing Leoric once, out of desperation, I switched to a Nova/Lightning sorc, my brother to a Rabies druid for another Leoric run. The sorc alone felt more powerful than our previous characters together, but the mana pool problems were the same as before. Same goes for the druid.

Another thing we noticed is that counters seem to be gone from the bosses we have seen, or maybe they were simply not impactful at all. Most noticeably Leoric, where I could easily stand in one place and shoot lightnings at him without taking any damage. His 'signature' bone spear retaliation seems to be gone completely and I no longer fear fighting him. With my pala, he did seem to do a lot of melee damage, so I just stood about 2 skeletons away from him and kept bombing with flame pot.

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As I said, there must be definitely something that we missed. I'd love to see how you play, Brevan.
As it is, the game feels off to me and no longer Hell Unleashed.

I tend to agree with this. Although it becomes less of a slog starting in act4. Act 1 - 3 is painfully slow on trash though and bosses are like quillrats.

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I also tried 1.7 and got bored as it just feels too different. Maybe this is what HU was like in 2010 but that's irrelevant for many of us because we didn't play back then. The main issue was there were just no drops. I got to level 18 and found nothing. I don't know the loot tables or how to check them but are there no low level sets anymore? I started playing at the end of 1.5 and now in 1.6 and I enjoy the item drops even at lower levels. Unique bosses dropping 2 blues instead of 3-5 rares, how are you supposed to play co-op with no drops? I couldn't even get enough drops for myself. I don't know, it just feels slower and watered down. Hopefully more stuff can be added.

I'm replying to things posted over the last couple days, so there's no "TL:DR" summary. Maybe just skim down to the topic that's relevant to you. My apologies if I missed a detail that was important to the topics raised.

Phys bow skills - I've played both Multi+GArrow and Strafe+MagArrow, and while they a bit different balance-wise, they're similar enough that I'm content with them. When things are balanced within about 20% (i.e. I just don't notice a big difference), then that's good enough because some folks like playing slightly stronger or weaker builds. For me GArrow was better for bosses due to the low counter rate, but as you've found, a low leveled Strafe sounds like it'd be fine too. MArrow has the benefit of no ammunition and fewer resistances.

WereBear Jab has no animation - When I tested this, it didn't produce errors, so I don't expect someone's game to crash. I'm tempted to leave Jab on javs, because while there is indeed a problem with dual-wielding Barbs using Jab, the problem is that they're using an animation that can't attack (the GetHit recoiling animation), so I'd expect players to figure out quickly that they should change strategies as a dual-wield barb (maybe use DoubleSwing). No errors were logged, so I expect no crashes.

WereBear buff followed by gear switch - Players have been able to buff themselves and then switch gear for quite a while, but I appreciate how this could have seemed like a bug, so thanks for mentioning it. I have recently (not sure if you were using these files or not) changed BloodCrescent from +10 oSkills to +5, and I removed Lycanthropy, because I realized that as a weapon-switch buff for a dual wielding Barb it was far too strong (would last about 5 minutes with +200Replenish and +40%HP). I'm okay with some Barb using two swords for +10WereSomething and getting around +100Replenish for a couple minutes. In v1.7 there's a lot of buffing gear possibilities, but hopefully the limited number of slots or hassle of regearing will help balance things.

Buffs (BO, etc) working in Town - There aren't a lot of trapped wp where you'd need to buff up first, but I suppose the wp in Act4 are pretty close. Consider going to a safer wp first, or dropping a point into Howl (excellent at removing minions from a unique monster).

Replenishing Arrows - I'm suspicious when implementing solutions to problems I've never seen, since often the solutions have side effects I can't predict. For example, I've heard that one of the side effects of replenishing arrows is that it makes follow bot scripting easier. PureRage has implemented a pretty ideal solution for folks who don't have the time to pick up quivers from the ground. I also don't mind increasing the minimum number of arrows/bolts that drop in a quiver. It's currently 200-500, but I suppose 300-500 would be a noticeable increase, and might even be useful if the game is full of bowzons. Keep in mind that MagArrow, ColdArrow, and FireArrow don't use ammo, so most builds have options when low on ammo. There's still a cube recipe to generate arrows from 2 bolts, and bolts from 2 arrows.

Jab build (20 Jab, InnerSight, CriticalStrike) - Sounds like a solid build, clearly plenty of life leach possibilities to help you tank. With that much CriticalStrike, you could ignore the DeadlyStrike mod on gear since it'd only act at about 1/3 the value listed, so you could make use of gear other builds might pass up. Good stuff. I'd recommend 1 point into Impale (since it does 100% Magic Damage from your Jab synergy) to handle the phys-resistant stuff, and consider if LightningStrike would suite your playstyle. I expect LStrike to be pretty solid as an AoE skill, but I'm not sure if the Next Hit Delay is too long (ideally, if the lightning jumps between 2 monsters 5 times, then each should take 4-5 hits). You might like having something on switch with Confusion or similar AI-disrupting curse for areas with lots of unleachable undead (I liked skull-crafted rings).

Legion fight - I was thinking that it might be a good idea for the enemy Necro's minions to allow changes to their AI (Convert, DimVision, Howl, etc). I'm pretty sure it would still be a fun fight, and I've already seen how strong an unlucky spawn of 3 Necromancers can be.

Cube Recipes are available in the webpages folder, along with information (possibly outdated for some details) regarding uniques, sets, runewords, boss monsters, etc.

+PhysDmg mods are smaller than +ElemDmg mods because they are affected by skills and stats. For example, the +10-20 Dmg from BulKatho's ring gives my bowzon +50-100 dmg. PhysDmg is meant to be lower than elemental though, since more PhysDmg means more life leach, so it has been balanced as a defensive element.

Survival Kit - Looks like an ideal solution. I took a quick look for changing when the quantity warning appears for quivers, but I didn't notice it (for throwing weapons the change looks like it'd be trivial, but misc.txt is missing those columns from weapons.txt). I was going to change the warning to occur at around 20% quiver capacity (I think it's around 10% currently?). I've already tested and confirmed that this is working, no bugs logged in the debuglog file. Having no fancy icons for those two skills seems fine to me.

Brief HU History - HU came out around 2005, and was advertised as a very challenging mod (review "Hell Unleashed.doc" in the mod root folder, although it has slight updates for v1.2 if you're reviewing from the v1.3 root folder). After its release, a few vocal players requested a simplification of items (anyone remember when Squelch complained that weapon mods should only include %EDmg, %IAS, %Deadly, and Leach?). Over the years players were buffed to the point where only bosses were challenging. Most players forgot the variety of solutions to overcome bosses, perhaps because it was faster to load in their level 99 char to rush through. I'd like if v1.7 reminded players that there are a variety of solutions to a slowly rising challenge level. Bosses are intentionally a bit easy in Normal because I didn't want players stopped before they could learn. Players are welcome to invite their friend's level 99s to help with NM Andy though, if that sounds fun.

@Shantu - I'm sorry you and your friend did not have a good time, and I respect that you might not have the free time available to explore other builds or solutions. I can accept that while the details you mentioned (Teeth requiring 6-7 casts, and casting 10-11 times before needing a potion) are already part of the design document, I don't think anyone else is reviewing that as part of their testing either. Getting feedback from a blind test is valuable, thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the Molotov pots, I included them for builds that take a while to get started (apparently poison pots are hardcoded). Bosses still have counters in v1.7, but perhaps v1.6 has a lot more? Although you arrived at your conclusions about v1.7 after only getting to BlackMarsh, I respect that you might not have time to continue testing.

@Syndo - If you had told us which boss was only dropping blues, I could fix it. Blue items from a boss are almost always failed set items (you can tell because their durability is doubled), similarly yellow items are failed Uniques (their durability is tripled). Feel free to review the webpages included in the test package for the list of uniques, sets, and runewords. I'd agree that there aren't a lot of low runewords yet (I've been trying to make stuff that's decent for quite a while, not just a couple levels), I was hoping people would play a bit and I could use their feedback to make some. One of the main purposes of this public test was to get feedback for item improvements.

I don't agree with this at all. Don't balance around people hacking or you might as well not even bothering modding HU. People will always hack this game there. Don't punish legit players because *maybe* it will make auto bot easier. That's crazy. I don't really know how much you can script for autobot but I'm pretty sure not having replenishing arrows is not going to stop hackers from using it. "OK BOYS NO REPLENISHING ARROWS ANYMORE TIME TO STOP HACKING" No...I don't think so they would just using something else.

Me and many others don't want to be bothered picking up arrows when no other class has to bother. Sure melees have durability but arrows run out much faster than durability does and doesn't require inventory space and you can eventually get indestructible items. I don't want to be bothered picking up arrows or carrying them around. I sure as hell don't want to be bothered carrying a charm in my cube, placing that charm in my cube and then using a skill to spawn arrows.

You made the charm so you admit that amazons should have basically unlimited arrows. So, why not just go all the way. Maybe make replenishing arrows an item drop or make it harder to get as a compromise. This is really the only change I want to see. Please please please

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C'mon... If you don't want to carry arrows, don't use a bow. Every other class has to carry arrows if they use a bow. Sorc, pally, druid etc. all make good use of bows. The arrows from the bag aren't unlimited and the cost of charging is about the same as the price of buying from the shop. The size is under the assumption a melee would carry 2 smith runes and need to empty the cube every time they repair.

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And no class would need to carry arrows if they were self rep. What happens when melees get indestructible or self rep weapons (will always happen since they are the best items anyways) and bow users are left in the dirt carrying this charm around. I'm just saying if you don't add self rep to all arrows for whatever reason then think about giving a mid-endgame equivalent to indestructible weapons for arrow and bolt users.

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In general, one of my goals for v1.7 was players getting what they paid for. It's not always possible to make a 20 point skill investment much stronger than a 1 point investment while still letting the 1-point investment be worthwhile. Skills that take a lot of mana or melee range should get some kind of extra punch. Skills that you just cast and forget (like Thunderstorm, Armageddon, HolyShock, etc) are generally weaker. Melee builds are generally tankier but lower damage than ranged builds. Summoners with durable summons can have either a high mana cost, low offense, or some other trade off (is requiring a corpse that big an issue for skelemancers? Not in my experience, but I don't mind if they're a bit strong since they take a bunch of skill points). Archers use ammunition, Javelineers must wait for javs to replenish relatively slowly rather than spam javs constantly. It is unfortunate that some folks won't like an Archer's ability to unload a large number of arrows for as long as their quivers last, but that's just one feature that exists to separate them from other ranged characters. I like variety of characters, so I won't remove that feature from Archers to make them more like Javelineers, and I won't give all bow skills unlimited ammo because that means Archers are getting something for nothing. I've already played a few Bowzon classes and found them to be among the strongest builds because attacking at range while summoning stuff is super effective, while HU's ethereal bows are frankly unbalanced as it is (we're working on that, but it's a tough problem to solve that has already resisted several solutions (although I'm not against removing Ethereal from bows entirely)).

It is a good idea for some modding-capable folks who are attached to the way things are in v1.6 or v1.5 to make a list of the things they want in v1.8, and then when other people are playing v1.7 those modders can implement and test those changes for v1.8. Those modders are welcome to copy-paste v1.7 features if they liked a few things (maybe the style of oSkills on low sets allowing characters to cast skills too high for their level, or how several uniques exist mostly as an extension to low sets, or the way monster skill damage has been standardized). As long as v1.7 is different from v1.6 and v1.8, it should be less likely that players will feel bored and permanently leave.

I strongly support the implementation of self replenishing arrows. This just removes some annoyance rather than actually nerfing the bow classes in general. Its a great addition and not something people will get bored about. If anything they will be happy they won't have to carry arrows around with them.

when i tested 1.7 i noticed a lot of balance was done around supply and resources. melees lug around lots of red pots, casters blues, and archers arrows. i also noticed bow characters are among the strongest builds in the game. simply giving tier 1 builds a buff, which is significant in this context, is going to skew the power even more so to bows. i would dare say that simply having to carry around extra quivers is far less crippling than the mana cost many casters have to deal with (2 or 3 casts and empty bulb). i definitely argue against adding the extra quiver stacks charm, because its only enabling the best skills more so. of course, that means i don't think replenish quivers should be included given the current balance context.

I understand this, but carrying extra arrows isn't difficult and doesn't really add any extra element of strategy to the game besides a pointless time sink (no matter how small) and a little extra cube space. I didn't realize bow users don't need potions. Anyways, its' clear this won't be changed, just wanted to add my 2 cents. I'm done here.

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I don't think anyone is saying carrying arrows is hard, but it's a resource you need to manage. What happens when people decide they "don't want to be bothered" by picking up potions, or other items?

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peace didnt work in armor

Runeword98 Peace tors ShaelThulAmn

Sorry, but "Peace" doesn't currently exist in v1.7. If you've got a good idea for what niche you wanted it to fill, let me know and I'll try to think of something appropriate relative to the options at that level.

I think PureRage mentioned that the reference webpages are included in the testing package. If not, then download the Webpage Maker and run it in the data/global/excel/ folder. Note that you won't need the Properties.txt file that comes with whatever version of the webpage maker you download (Properties.txt in the testing package will be more up to date).

If you were after an offensive armor (just +5%AllDmg) around level 25ish, consider "Malice" (RalOrtTalThul). Note that armors are generally defensive in v1.7, and almost never have +Skills of any kind.

If you were after a defensive armor around level 35ish, consider "Fortitude" (IoSolIthIo), or "Strength" (ShaelDolHel). "Strength" has the indestructible mod if you've got Eth armor.

A potentially low leveled armor handy for mf/gf is "Wealth" (JewelEldElJewel), note that any jewels work, magic, unique, or rare.

Cool, thanks for the tips. I was going to throw it on a merc, just wanted something random, happened to chose one that didnt work. Ill check the reference guide. Thanks

Pretty sure I messed up the most recent patch updates, but I was getting no cast delay on Summon Grizzly. Not sure if that is unintended

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Fair enough, I didn't include CastDelay data for several skills in the DesignDocument. Most skills with a CastDelay have that information in the top part of the skill description, but there are a few skills where I ran out of room so didn't bother to include it (e.g. BoneWall and BonePrison). I added that information to skills when the new "ReduceCastDelay" mod was granted to items, so players could see the effect on their skills. Note that mod is capped at 33% (you could get more, but it won't affect skills).

Many summons have no cast delay in v1.7, except Valkyrie Decoy and Shadows (5 sec), SpiritWolf Spirits and Vines (1 sec), and Bone Wall/Prison (1 sec). In general, offensive summons have no CastDelay.

Summons are balanced not on how quickly they can be replaced but by whether they are offensive or defensive. For example, a Druid Summoner with decent MP regen should be able to tank something using just SpiritWolves just fine, but things will go a lot smoother for him if someone outputs some damage (He could use Grizzly, Raven, or DWolves. Just because there are no synergies between most Druid Summons doesn't forbid a pure Druid Summoner, it just means I didn't think he'd need extra help to be viable). Similarly Grizzly and Golems deal damage very well, but tend to die in a couple hits. Summons in v1.7 will probably seem pretty OP at first glance, and they are by far one of the harder things to balance because whenever I look at the math and think they must need a nerf, I play around with some for a while and head-desk at their AI. You can lead a Summon to the monsters, but you can't make him drink their blood.

As a bit of advice, if you're using Summons where their HP grows by a % of the base (i.e. the HP changes by the same amount every level (e.g. most offensive summons)), then skills that give a flat +HP (OakSage, BO, Prayer) help them a lot more than skills that give +%HP. Similarly defensive summons (you should notice their HP being generally more, and increasing dramatically from levels 7-8, 15-16, 21-22, 27-28) are buffed much more by +%HP.

Shadows are an exception, since they're balanced as being between offensive and defensive summons but are apparently hardcoded where their HP grows by a % of the base. That means I had to give them a large % per level to maintain their balance, they are generally over powered early game, possibly under powered end game, and receive a massive boost from +HP skills (notably Prayer). I've played with them in NM, using a Prayer Merc, and they seemed perfectly fine. I'm sure with CloakOfShadows or MindBlast to take the heat off them, they would do just fine. Like Valk, they gain equipment improvements with every skill level, and ShadowWarrior eventually earns a unique Mask that occasionally procs Fade onStruck (just in case folks don't know that she'll usually cast whatever you've got selected when she's first summoned, and can be buffed that way with about 1-3 skills before she even enters combat).

C'mon that's a bit dramatic.. there's a clear line between potions which everyone needs and actually are in danger of running out of and arrows which you really won't ever run out of.

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Okay so, i've tried a few different classes up to level 30 and feel this patch is pretty fucking awesome. But i have a few suggestions which will improve on the game;

- Implement plugy into the patch. This will eliminate mule characters and constant server relogging bullcrap.

- Change the animations for the assassins claw moves to the new ones which were in the last patch, they look so fucking epic.

Thats all the helpful suggestions i have. But personally it would be nice to see fanaticism with a synergy so i have more reason to use it with zeal.

CHEERS!

this, i def dig the old animations and would love some plugy for my toons

MAKE IT HAPPEN BE SOMEBODY

I'm really interested in knowing what was your thought process when you came up with the changes to the Assassin's Martial arts tree.

Fist of fire is strong, but not too strong. The fire patch doesn't last 20 seconds like it used to, but it stays long enough to be relevant and add a good chunk of extra damage.

Claws of thunder is broken because the last charge doesn't have next-hit delay, which ends up doing huge chunks of damage on medium-large sized enemies.

Blade of Ice is way underpowered. Yes it does slow and yes it does freeze, but the damage is way too low for how little usefulness comes from that slow. On top of that, the freeze rarely lasts as long as it says it will and doesn't work on most enemies. Consider that 5.3 yard is less than the 6 yards Dragon tail used to have, which was barely enough to keep enemies off your ass.

A while back somebody changed the elemental charges to not completely suck and it made them all much more fun and interesting to use.

I know the Elemental MA skills aren't easy to balance, they're mostly hard coded and they're close to mage-level damage on a tank.
Problem is we have to charge 3(~5) times then release and in that time interval there is very little damage being done.


I have a few suggestions. If you're going to keep the MA skills as they are, nerf claws of thunder by 15-20% and/or add next-hit delay to the last hit.
Either greatly buff the damage of blade of ice, and/ or greatly increase the explosion radius (by at least 100%, preferably more). (Preferably both, or just change the MA "back" to what they ended up being in 1.5?6? can't remember when they got changed)
If I'm going to do no damage I might as well freeze most of the screen to compensate.

Make MA charges uninterruptible again. Increase the radius of Dtail back to where it was, ot at least to 4-5yards, and add another radius synergy to something else (Venom is probably a good choice)


No amount of buffing would help Phoenix strike's first and second charges. (Really doesn't help chaos ice bolts doesn't go as far as it used to)

Shadow warrior either survives to fight another day, or blows up 5 seconds after being spawned. There's no inbetween. With that said, the shadow now casts your skills more effectively than before. No idea what you did with it, but it's a lot more "reactive" and I like it.



Overall, this is the first HU patch since 1.3 that I actually don't like (I liked 1.3). There's many good things in this patch though, like rares being really good and the XP curve being way faster. Maybe I'm biased because my favorite class was technically butchered, I don't know. The skill synergies make me scratch my head and almost all of them makes no sense. Sure, there's a reason you made X have a synergy with Y, but to anybody that doesn't know your reasoning behind it and looking at the trees, the only thing going through their minds is "Why is this having a synergy with that?".

It's nice that some skills have a synergy with a skill of another element, and I appreciate that multi-element builds are a thing now, but it really feels forced.
People should be able to either focus an element, or branch out. That choice shouldn't be taken for them.


I tried leveling up a sorc. Eventually got tired of putting most of my point into energy and still having to drink a potion every 3 mobs / 6 casts. My sin doesn't have mana issues that bad, but still has to drink mana from time to time, especially in extended fights.

Meanwhile, my friend is having the time of his life spamming his infinite magic arrows with no mana cost, and using strafe from time to time and doing a good deal more dps than the guy in front taking all the hits and struggling doing so. Tanking is a thankless job.


Oh and one more thing, I don't like being forced to use clawblock.

Playing this test patch has been super fun. I'm trying out a skellymancer and noticed some discrepancies in one of the sets: using infernal gear, my character only receives +3 to raise skeleton/mage/mastery (instead of the +10 noted in the web pages). I've tried reinstalling, but to no avail.

As far as gameplay, I notice that the minibosses preceding the act bosses tend to wipe out necroskeletons far more quickly than the act bosses themselves (tobial comes to mind). Necroskeletons don't seem to be viable against bosses whatsoever, seeing as the available gear for skeleton-oriented summoning is (somewhat) limited and the resistances of the skeletons don't scale. I find myself spamming deathknight (which, in the skill description needs a corpse, but actually doesn't) to tank bosses while letting my merc deal damage, which seems kind of cheesy. However, as always, it's still a fun build to play. I think the addition of scaling resistances might be one simple way to balance the skeletons' usefulness.

Cheers for the good work! This mod rocks.

when i was testing the patch months back, brevan mentioned that a great deal of skills have had their hit delays removed.

The +3 instead of +10 is the intended design. It gives +10 to any class that isn't the class that has the skills in the first place.

I don't know how much damage charged bolts are supposed to do, but hitting a boss 12+ times for 1-1200 electricity damage seems overkill, considering it also does another -1200 with the nova, and another 1-1100 with the first hit.
Meanwhile, Blade of ice does a single AOE explosion of 500-650 damage.
And the first charge of pheonix strike has next-hit delay too, as if to make sure cold can't be viable.

This post is meant to reply to several comments since I've last had a chance to reply to things mentioned. Feel free to skip to your name if you don't like reading.

@Superkamakazi
Glad to hear you've taken a look at a few characters to level 30.
I've got nothing against plugy in Single Player, but if it's not been a part of HU in the past or present, then there might be a reason I don't know about. Perhaps the way the shared-stash can't be checked for carry1 items (horadric ring, etc) is considered too much of an exploit.
I took a look at the skills file for v1.6c, since I had it handy, and can only tell you that I'd need more information on how claw animations have changed.
I'm not sure what synergy between Fanatacism and Zeal would please folks. I suppose the same synergy would need to be applied to Might, Concentration, and BlessedAim as well, since I intended those 3 to be pretty equal with each other and Fanatacism. My goal is skills balanced to the point where you're not sure which you should level, because at that point I'd expect to see a variety of builds appearing (it would be neat to see several melee Paladins in a game where they weren't all FanatacismZealots).

@Riem821
The Assassin's MA tree was balanced around the idea that the player was a tanking build. WeaponBlock+Fade should make an assassin pretty durable by themselves. WeaponBlock+ShadowWarrior (thus high duration CloakOfShadows) might not have the resistances of Fade, but having a Summon is strategically pretty strong. Since the MA sin is a tanky character, her skills shouldn't be as offensive as a Fragile character as described in the design document. I figured the way charge-up skills work (kinda sucks that they only apply charges every-other-attack at best), I could leave the charges pretty strong and allow their inherent weaknesses to pull them down a bit.
FistsOfFire vs ClawsOfThunder vs BladesOfIce : Charge 1 and 2 are pretty much the same for all 3 (dmg to attack, then dmg to AoE). Charge3 for Fire gives more AoE damage, Charge3 of Thunder gives a single-target high-damage attack, Charge3 of Ice gives an AoE crowd control effect. Based on your feedback, I'll take a look at Thunder (I found the spot that controls the number of CBolts (it was labeled "Skip" and was set to 4 so I'm not surprised I missed it earlier), so I'll play with it until the intended 8 bolts are released instead of 12 (I'm expecting half of the CBolts to miss medium targets)) and Ice (I'll check if it's damage has any errors, and maybe buff it a bit regardless since I can appreciate where Charge1 of PhoenixStrike shouldn't outshine this).
BladesOfIce freeze duration should last as long as the description states, unless the monster was cold resistant (this has always reduced chill/freeze durations, so I'd guess it's hard coded).
I'm glad that you liked the changes someone made to MA skills in the recent past, but as I've been away you'll need to describe them with details. I won't promise those changes in v1.7 (it might be nice to have skills different from v1.6/v1.8), but since they were fun I'd expect something like them in v1.9.
You mentioned freezing most of the screen in a previous version, what resolution do you play with?
You mentioned uninterruptible MA charges, but I'm not familiar with this. Are you referring to v1.6? Consider using BladesOfIce Charge3 or PhoenixStrike Charge1 for freezing a group and then attacking while they're frozen if your attacks are getting interrupted while charging up something else. Alternatively CloakOfShadows can have a similar effect (I usually play with this on my right-click while my left toggles between Charge-Up and Finishing move; this way SWarrior cloaks pretty often)
The radius of DTail should go from 2-6 yards currently, with 4 yard radius being achieved about as soon as you get it if you've been raising its synergy (i.e. the radius is effectively 4-6 yards for the DTail build). Perhaps you meant remove radius synergy entirely, and just set it to 5 yards? I made the radius synergy dependant because I felt that DTail was too strong a skill when 1-pointed. It might be the only skill in the game that looks at the player's after-adjustments damage and then applies its skill damage (i.e. if DTail = 50% Damage, then it's 50% of whatever your char-screen says (albeit phys-dmg only), which is why TigerStrike with DTail is so strong).
PhoenixStrike's charges are intended to be slightly worse than the elemental claw skills because you get to select the element the enemy isn't strong to. Charge1 freezes similarly to Charge3 BoIce, Charge2 is good single-target damage like Charge3 CoThunder, etc, but PhStrike's charges shouldn't be stronger than the charges of those other skills (thus the ice bolt radius was reduced to about the radius of BoIce). There's been a couple tests (i.e. playing from A1 to A5 Norm. During the first test the nexthit delay was added to Charge1 since as you can imagine it would be pretty OP doing 20-30 times it's current damage; Note that Charge2 and Charge3 have no hit delay so should stack with Charge1's damage) of this build already without much trouble, so it's unfortunate you didn't enjoy it, but there are plenty of other builds to try if you find the time and interest.
It sounds like your ShadowWarrior was working fine. I'd recommend using a Prayer Mercenary if you wanted a tankier shadow.
It's unfortunate you don't like v1.7's current state. There are a lot of changes between v1.6 and v1.7, which is one of the reasons I've wanted v1.8 to be based on v1.6. I don't expect any version to make everyone happy, and if there were no changes between versions then I'd get bored pretty fast. If it's just the MA Assassin builds that turned you off, then perhaps v1.9 can steer them closer to your expectations, but I'd like more people to try them as they are before making large changes.
I can appreciate that some of the synergy selections aren't as intuitive as Vanilla's story-based justifications (fire pairs with flames because you're good with fire, etc). One thing to consider in v1.7 is that you shouldn't feel locked into a particular build just to maximize synergies, they're just 2% per level after all. I'm currently testing a Bladesin (BSentinel, BFury, BShield, SMaster, CMastery), and the CriticalStrike from CMastery more than makes up for the loss of a single synergy for each of those skills. Sorcs are another example where their elemental Masteries have far more effect than a single synergy, but by using an element a monster isn't resistant to you would also do fine (i.e. both approaches are balanced enough for me to leave them alone). If you follow the synergies then you should be fine, but if you don't then there's a good chance you'd still be fine.
I've recently played MArrow + Strafe, and I'd agree that MArrow is at least as effective as Cold and Fire arrow. I expected the loss of Life and Mana Leach to be a bit more of a hindrance. After those skill settings were implemented, mana regen rates have been increased, spell costs reduced, and potions were made easier to use. Perhaps later I'll review more Bowzon skills with those changes in mind. That aside, it sounds like your friend found a solid team, where the Tank was doing their job well. It's unfortunate no one thanked the Tank for their critical role, but its good to hear that the Zon was well appreciated.

@IconOfSin
oSkill effects have not been changed in v1.7, so (as Riem821 mentioned) the class that owns that skill only gets +3. When a skill bonus says "Necromancer only", then it's not an oSkill and you'll get the bonus listed in the webpage. v1.7 has very few skill bonuses like that though (almost no items are intended to give more than +3 to any skill, so I figured I may as well make them oSkills because those seem fun to me).
Thank you for pointing out the error in the DeathKnight skill description. It's not supposed to use a corpse. I recently went through skill descriptions trying to correct them for this public release, but clearly I missed this description. I expected a SkellyMancer to rely on their Merc and DeathKnight for ActBosses, and considered reducing DKnight to level 24, but in the end I decided Andy was easy enough in Norm for anyone to equip some Regen gear (e.g. emeralds in armor/hat) and tank her (A high-damage Merc with a defensive player (a Tank or defensive Summoner) is simply a good team). A SkellyMancer should find Trash mobs relatively easy but bosses relatively hard.
The resistances of summons shouldn't change, since 33% is 1/3 of monster damage whether they're dealing 1 or 1000. The PDR/MDR numbers do scale with the level of most summons. For SkellyMancers, SkellyMastery is the main source of their PDR/MDR, so raise that skill to improve their defensiveness while also improving SkellyMage's attacks (SMage's attack are based 1/2 on their level and 1/2 on SMastery level). Consider a point in Weakness if you want your summons to last a bit longer on bosses (Weakness removes about 1/3 damage, PDR/MDR removes roughly 1/3 damage (i.e. 1/3 Trash damage but only 1/9 ActBoss damage), and Skeletons resist 1/3 of what's left, so they would take about 20% damage from Trash or 30% damage from an ActBoss). Decrepify is another decent curse for letting your summons last longer.

Here is what was done with the Elemental charges in 1.6 (or 1.5, can't remember).

Fist of Fire:
1: Add flat fire damage + Sorceress Fire ball with small AOE
2: Phoenix Meteor fire patch without the meteor delay
3: Fire nova with a small aoe

Claws of Thunder:
1: Add flat Lightning damage + Sorceress lightning in a line
2: Lightning Nova
3: Phoenix lightning AOE (Later was changed to 4 lightning meteors in succession because the Phoenix lightning had next-hit delay, and shouldn't have more range than Ice)

Blade of Ice
1: Add flat cold damage + Sorceress Ice blast aoe
2: Cold Nova
3: Phoenix Chaos ice bolts.

This made Fist of fire better for damage over time, claws of thunder better for burst (especially after the lightning meteor replaced phoenix lightning) and blade of ice was fantastic against trash due to large AOE.

The entire phoenix skill was replaced with magic damage.
1: Add magic flat damage + Bone spear
2: Phoenix lightning but with Bone spears
3:Semi-large bone-teeth nova.

The problem with Phoenix only having access to one of the charges is that it's really difficult to pick the one you want in the heat of battle. Missing, blocking, going into hit recovery all screw up your timer and you almost always end up hitting too much or not enough.

As for chaos ice bolt, at some point down the line, somebody sped up the projectiles so they go further on the screen. Additionally, right now, the phoenix chaos Ice bolts actually freeze almost everything, while blade of ice mostly leaves stuff chilled, so the last charge does pretty much nothing most of the time, and phoenix has significantly more range on the freeze.

If you're going to keep Thunder's ability to burst single targets, I suggest toning down the aoe (radius or damage). Fist of fire could have some of its damage shifted to the fire over time. Blade of ice should get more damage and I don't know what makes chaos ice bolt freeze so reliably, but that should probably be moved to the last charge of Blade of ice.

As for the synergies, I'm not a fan of everything being tied to clawblock.
Clawblock always has issues about ending up either OP or useless. In past patches, it was particularly difficult to get a high FBR which made clawblock constantly stunlock you to death if you were in melee range. This made using Dclaw for elemental charges suicidal, and Dtail the only viable choice because it kept stuff away from you. After asking for it repeatedly, the charge up skills ended up uninterruptible, which greatly helped to prevent stunlocking in the middle of a mob pack and being incapable of charging for 10+ seconds.

I guess you could call it an inherent weakness?

Also, does the sigon shield actually drop? Couldn't gamble it and I spent hours trying.

Yes

_________________

Okay, can it be found on the gamble screen? Is it still a tower shield? Is it still level 35?
[Edit: Checked the files, no fucking clue why gamble refuses to give me the shield]

On another topic entirely, I've been having issues with some doorways refusing to open in act 2. What doorway is blocked seem to be arbitrary, and it sometime get fixed by swapping weapons. This is a very old bug that I haven't seen in a long, long time and I have no idea what causes it.

For the record, I'm playing in TCP/ip and my character is not the host, and rejoining the gae doesn't fix the issue.

I'm literally stuck due to this bug. I can't reach Ardual because his door is always blocked by this issue, even in singleplayer, and even after resetting the map.

I'm gonna try fiddling around TCP/ip to see if I can open the doors with another character so my sorc can continue.


[EDIT:] Figured out the source of the issue, although it took me a really long time to figure it out. The reason was that some doorways, not all but some, simply didn't like my sorceress having a targeted ability on the left click. Changing the left click to normal attack allowed me to open those doorways normally.

I was thinking rather than fanaticism receiving a synergy but maybe zeal gaining something like 10% ED per hard point in fanat, might, blessed aim or something along them lines, so people will be able to choose either an elemental path, or physical. and it wouldnt necesarily be over powered as to add extra hard points in the other offensive skills wouldnt benefit them further, and would have to decide whether more phys damage is better than more res, or magic damage etc. and maxing fanat and might for example wont be very effective so the user has to choose one making them all suitable for use with zeal

I've returned from being away, so should be able to poke around with adjustments to v1.7 in the nearish future.

While I was away, I considered what I could do for Fanatacism, and decided that since several other auras have synergies such that when two Paladins are playing together, if they maxed the same aura then one of them could switch to that aura's synergy for some of the effect of the maxed aura. For example, if two Paladins had both maxed Might, then one of them could switch to Vigor, since Vigor gains some %ED from Might. I can see where Fanatacism was missing something like this, so when the next update for v1.7 can be arranged, I'll change Fanat to receive 1% UninterruptableAttack per level of Concentration, and Concentration will receive 1%IAS per two levels of Fanat. The idea is that if both Paladins had maxed Fanat, then one could at least switch to Concentration to give both players some more IAS and %ED.

The reason I'm not in favour of buffing Zeal from points in the %ED auras is because the %ED aura's damage to attack is increased by stronger weapons, while the HolyAuras are not. In the end-game, a phys-damage weapon is probably doing about 300avg damage, while a level 34 %ED aura adds around 150%ED (so it adds 450 damage to your attack). The HolyAuras generally add about that amount of damage to your attack, so I figured they're pretty much balanced as is. Whichever aura the Paladin uses is fine with me (maybe %ED if they've got life-leach gear, maybe the HolyAura if they're playing with a Bow that enables FreezingArrow or ExplodingArrow).

I tried playing a phys-damage themed Zealot to A3 recently (I find after that things get time consuming and very predictable - I feel pretty confident that a build is struggling or not), and while I'd agree that waiting until level 30 for Fanat feels like quite a wait while you're playing solo, I didn't have any trouble playing the character (I played all of A1 and A2 just using the touch pad on my netbook computer, which certainly adds a novel type of challenge). I'd recommend 1-pt into something early like Prayer for the unleachable-critter areas, but I often considered 1-pt into a HolyAura would probably be worthwhile even end-game (99%PhysRes stuff exists, so a non-phys attack is a great idea). I've recently changed low level weapons, rings, amulets, and jewels to promote more +Dmg mods (these were mistakenly balanced for an earlier version of v1.7 where skills added more %ED initially but gained less with levels), so most of my gear was stacked with +Dmg jewels with lots of IAS. If your character was struggling in the past, then with the next update, consider playing that char some more after regearing him in a way that reduces the issues you noticed earlier.

Sounds beautiful brevan

I just got a question (even more a WISH ! ).
Are u guys going to get rid of the meaningless skill (vanilla-like) pre-requirements?

There are no skill prerequisites in v1.7, but synergy effects aren't critical so consider spreading your points out anyways. 40 synergy points usually gives +80%Damage, so you probably wouldn't notice if you only got 60-70% from a synergy, while you might really appreciate having a single point in a skill like Bash (the Knockback effect is strategically handy), Confuse (messing with TrashMonster AI is very effective), or similar. By the end of the game you should have +14 skills, so a level 1 skill would end up around level 15, however for most of Norm you will have only +1-2 skills, so don't be afraid to raise something like Zeal to level 3-4 for the extra hits and ARating.

For skills that form a trio of skill synergies, I tried to make one of those skills available by char level 6 so you could start raising your build before leaving BloodMoor. There are several builds that don't have early skills, so those players might have more fun raising some other skill for the early levels (you'll have more than 60 points to spend by A4 Norm, so you may as well decide what else you'll be raising when you start the character).

So no pre-reqs! awesome!
I loved The Midlands mod (by PureRage) for that reason and the fact that on Barb each STR point was 1 dmg and that way STR had a lot more value than in vanilla or other mods.
btw u mean syngery points ARE critical ?:)

ok i got other questions !
1)Is there a way to reset stats or skills? ofc at the cost of gold or something?

2)For example, Barb had some Warcries which didnt work on bosses, only on monster. Will those work on bosses as well?? You could make them last shorter on bosses or reduce bosses' stats by lesser amount compare to monsters.
Same for stun skills, can stun work against bosses? again u can make stun last way less on bosses or u can give bosses chance to resist stun attack so that stun skills dont become OP.
Generally i hope all effects work on bosses as well so that all skills have usefulness.

3)There is a mod called Hell's Revenge http://www.moddb.com/mods/hells-revenge . Its a very unique mod u can check it.
Basically classes have bonuses and penalties when using different type of weapons, for example Barb is awful with Bow! which is awesome in my opinion cause barb isnt meant to be a bow user.
In many mods u just find a good bow and u stop using melee cause the bow is simply better (range). So in this mod u cant do that because classes are meaningful !

I know v1.7 has the capacity for a respec potion that returns your spent skills points and stats, and I believe PureRage set the potion as one of the rewards for an optional Hell quest (maybe Legion, Soulmancer, or Hall of Heroes). Although I'm not a big fan of respeccing your character, I can appreciate that some folks could be unhappy if their synergies are giving them +78%Dmg while they had accidentally spent 2 points on a skill they had intended to spend 1 point in.

In v1.7 each point of Strength or Dexterity will give you about +0.75%Enhanced damage with weapons (so +150%ED if you've spent 200 points in Str/Dex). Each point of Str will give +3ARating, while each point of Dex gives +5ARating and +1AC. Note that the +ARating from strength is delivered via a hidden passive skill given to all characters upon creation, but like any Passive it's bugged to only give you the benefit when it's skill level changes (i.e. when you create a character and dump points into strength, you won't get ARating until you rejoin the game or get a +AllSkills item or shrine). Strength is required for heavier tiers or armor and for some classes of weapon (e.g. clubs/hammers, polearms, spears). Dex is the main stat for bows, 1-handed swords and rods (I figured these folks would want the dex for blocking anyways).

As far as effects that work differently on Trash vs Bosses, Diablo2 is hardcoded in some ways that I don't know how to work around. I don't think I can make an AI-changing curse work on a boss (I did try and fail to make Convert work on pets because I thought it would be kinda neat if Succubi had a small chance to Convert your summons. In hindsight I decided that teleporting with converted summons wouldn't be fun anyways (it would have left a sour taste in my mouth)). From a balance point of view, even if this were possible I would recommend trying v1.7 for now, and look into making that kind of change in v1.9 if folks agree that it'd be a fun idea.

While testing v1.7, several Testers felt that in Norm the bosses were not especially hard while the trash that lead to them could occasionally be harder (easier for you to get surrounded, etc). I'm not against making bosses harder, but would like more feedback about NM and Hell gameplay first (folks who complain that Norm is too easy might not have noticed that Norm is easier intentionally for folks new to HU). Since Trash in v1.7 is relatively hard, I think effects like Convert, Stun, Confuse, etc, could be quite popular.

I can appreciate that some classes use some gear better than others (barbs do not block well in v1.7), I generally tried to make gear usable by anyone. One of the main themes of v1.7 are the prevalence of oSkills and +AllSkills rather +ClassSkills. With that in mind, if someone wants to be a BowBarb then I've got nothing against the idea but I might remind them that DoubleThrow would probably be more effective.

I'd agree that right now Bows in general are not in the best place balance-wise. I'm heavily in favour of removing Ethereal from spawning on bows (it feels like a needless buff for phys-bow skills), since editing the Ethereal buff on weapons seems to be nearly impossible. Before PureRage's break, he mentioned that he should be able to convert the -StatsRequired buff to +StatsRequired, which would at least make people "spend" more for the bonuses in ethereal stuff.

now that ive gotten the mod runnign and have done some poking around with gambling, and building up a few characters, i have some observations about the mod.

first the massive changes to the general feel of skills and what i can and cannot expect out of them is making me really excited to really dive in proper with a group of people on realm.

but there are somethings which look pretty worrisome to me as well, namely lightning damage (in general) and synergies.

lightning damage seems to generally sit far and above other castable damage on more or less every character when the large variance of damage is expected to keep the skills in line, but even then the average of the min/max damage seems to be far above and beyond what other similar skills do, and that isnt even taking into account the general skew towards larger values in damage ranges that the d2 engine generally likes (iirc the expected value of any damage range is to be 65-70% of the spread, rather than 50%). for a concrete example the holy auras (sidenote the level req reduction makes me really happy) at 30, holy fire does 410-640, and shock does 1-1100; so an average damage of 525 vs 550 (or id expect to see 570 vs 770). or lightning vs... i guess fire ball, and bolt? : 1-6100(avg 3150, exp 4250) v 1900 - 2500 (avg 2200, exp 2300) v 3300 - 4000(avg 3650, exp 3790). though i like the idea, i think lightnings damage has generally been pushed a little bit too high when large damage ranges were involved.

the other point of synergies being too weak is easier to explain at least. the difference between putting in 20 points to just max a skill and putting in a full build seems to leave the specialized person sitting with a skill that doesnt do significantly more damage for most of the skills out there. as a quick example, someone with level 30 lightning can expect to do 6100 damage, but if you dont take any of the synergies (aside from warmth and es, since those are on everything) you can expect to do 64% of the damage, but have invested 40 fewer points, letting you take other powerhouse skills. the document on the first post suggested that this difference should have been almost twice as wide so im leaning towards this kind of effect being unintended.

the issue of melee skill synergies is also worth noting but the issue is a bit more complexe given how melee skill synergies generally have worked, but the fact remains that someone not taking melee skill synergies vs someone taking them may in some cases end up doing 80% of the full builds damage. while i dont know if this can be solved like this, having the synergies boost the damage gain per level instead of giving a fixed amount of bonus damage could solve this (ie instead of frenzy giving +2% damage per level, it could instead get 5% more damage per level (+5% ed%) and while that looks like it will hit roughly the same point at ~ lv 25, a full build ds will be far and away better than someone who didnt really invest in it).

other things ive noticed were that some synergy texts have been slightly misleading (energy synergy on war cry, hp synergy on prayer, warmth/es synergies, chant synergies, energy shield synergies) and those could probably be fixed easily.


on another note i decided to start a long play of a double swing barb and soon following it a chanter to see what i thought about how the mod really felt as opposed to my theorycrafting, and its been really really fun so far, though i feel like im not supposed to be able to get 8-10 hits/s in starting from level 7, but i dont know how much that can be helped when dealing with double swing.

i also note that self chant being stronger than party change isnt a thing anymore, which makes me worried that chanters themselves wont be able to do big damage, but ill have to actually do a long play of one to be sure.

Thanks for taking the time to look into the design document and mod, I hope you enjoy exploring the details as you progress.

If you have a reference for the random number generator function used in D2, then I'd be happy to take a look at it. I did a quick search and haven't found much online, but it was only a quick search, so that just tells me that it isn't a commonly known feature. Perhaps later I'll get around to running some tests so I can convince myself that the function is consistently picking high numbers in the range, and then edit skills with wide damage ranges appropriately.

That aside, I took a quick look at Lightning damage, since 3k average is too high for it at level 30, and found that the Tier4 and Tier5 values were a bit high (10%). This isn't relevant towards your argument, but thanks for helping me find a bug.

The EShield and Warmth synergies were a relatively new addition, since during testing this year it was decided that Sorcs needed more bang for their mana-buck, and providing a small synergy from Warmth and EShield was a good way of encouraging players new to D2 to raise those skills and see more benefit from their investments in energy. I'd recommend leaving these synergies the way they are for v1.7, and possibly change things in v1.9. I'd agree that a completely synergized skill doing 2.2 times base damage compared to that skill synergized enough to do 1.4 times base damage might not be enough of a difference for someone to fully maximize the synergy, but I would consider it an excellent change if it encouraged someone to build their Sorc in a novel and effective way.

I'd agree that melee and ranged skills based on weapon damage don't gain a huge amount from skill investment. In hindsight, I probably should have removed all enhanced damage players receive from their stats so that I could add larger numbers to their skills. With larger numbers to play with it might have occurred to me to have a synergy that effectively doubles the %ED the skill gives itself (pretty sure this is what you meant when you mentioned a 5% bonus to %ED via synergy). For now, I've played a few melee chars through most of Norm, and I think things are good/balanced enough for folks to have fun in 2017. I think removing str/dex bonuses from weapons is a very promising change to consider for v1.9, since I kinda expect weapon-using builds are already going to be on the strong side (Ethereal's 50% bonus alone is hard to work around and appears immune to code editing). One nice effect of reducing the importance of synergies for melee skills is that it might encourage folks to think outside the synergy-box a little more. I was quite happy to see some folks testing javazon/strafe hybrid builds and reporting that they were working well.

If you continue with the DoubleSwing Barb, let me know if it seems fun enough. For me, it was hard to determine what to do with DSwing to set it apart, and I eventually decided that reduced mana cost with reduced %ED might be enough, since it's certainly a fast skill. Let me know what kind of weapons you're using currently, and I'll think more about DSwing's situation. If you're using a very slow but high-damage weapon with a very fast but low-damage weapon to attain your fast attacks, let me know if DSwing isn't alternating which weapon is in effect (I'm under the impression that the average of your two weapons is relevant). At the very least, perhaps in v1.9 if there's no %ED from stats DSwing could be promoted as fast-attack alternative for areas saturated with IronMaiden or Thorns (Berserk works fine already but attacks slow).

There have been a couple tests of Chantresses, but I look forward to your feedback since it would be good for calibration. Personally I liked the build, and felt that it did a decent job of switching a Sorc's role from glass cannon to tank.

In general, don't feel bad about pointing out errors. I expect v1.7 to be imperfect, and I'd prefer if some builds are slightly strong while others are slightly weak. I mainly don't want everyone to pile onto a single build all the time.

<edit> Lightning Damage Test
I edited Telekinesis to do 1-5000 damage, and gave Zombies 100,000 HP. I killed 13 Zombies with an average of 40.1 attacks each, and an average of 40 was expected. Perhaps a 5k range isn't enough to cause the expected oddities with the random number generator, but that is pretty close to the maximum range in v1.7, so there might be no noticeable imbalances caused by the damage ranges in v1.7.

For two of the Zombies, I held the mouse button down to continuously cast, while counting the number of times the Sorc's arms raised in the casting animation. For most of the Zombies, I would click once, wait for the Knockback animation to almost resolve, and then click again. There was a noteable Zombie who seemed unaffected by 3 casts in a row, so perhaps I was missing him somehow for a couple of those casts (the knockback isn't 100% but it is pretty close, so 3 casts without it seems less likely than simple human error).

Data (casts to kill per Zombie): 37 44 40 36 42 38 36 40 40 47 37 42 43</edit>

i had to work the reasoning out for why the test showed what it did, and the tldr is that this is probably what you wanted or close enough to it.

the slightly longer version is that the test you did doesnt quite prove what you wanted to prove, but proved something a bit nicer which is when the target sum is large, the rng skew to higher numbers and the natural skew of summing random rolls towards lower values actually (effectively )cancel out in a really nice way, which is fairly interesting to me.

at any rate, as for weapons at low levels which worked well with double swing, i ended up jumping between a bunch of axes, spiked clubs, and scepters for slow weapons, and scimitars/sabers/daggers for fast weapons. the fast weapon feeling for ds hasnt really changed at all since these were always good picks (if low in damage, but now there are skulls to fix that). as far as slow weapons go, there are way more good options now than there used to be, so that made starting the char alot more fun gearwise than i was expecting.

the frenzy synergy for doubleswing definitely feels like a noobtrap though, its already useless for my char, and my char is quite low leveled(14% increase in damage for 20 points of synergy). an item like biggins bonnet is equivalent to 10 points of frenzy synergy in terms of added damage, and the rough difference in damage between someone who didnt invest in frenzy for damage and someone who did is set to shrink down to nothing rather quickly, incidentally the same is true for double throw vs grim ward and all small ed% synergies on other skills.

right now im trying to hunt down a group of people to do multiplayer with, as i feel like thats the only way to confirm or deny how i suspect chanters will feel

i was doing some brainstorming on ways to carry over the intents behind the physical attack synergies in a way that wouldnt hurt or alter their usefulness (possibly make them easier to think about but more likely just different) and the idea i came up with was what if the synergies (or in the case of some skills like strafe, hard points) instead of giving ed, increased the weapon effectiveness ratio (since i am fairly sure i got teh term wrong, the 50% or 75% weapon damage that multi was based on or the 150% weapon damage given to sacrifice before). that would make the synergies effect easier to understand for a player (as smaller ed synergies are harder to value at a glance).


also i had gotten a (very) small group together and played a chanter to lv 40. they are alot less fun than their counterparts in other versions of the mod, though the damage is definitely there for them. the main issue is that while the damage is there for a chanter, you get the feeling that once everyone is enchanted you dont have alot left to do; everyone else benefits from chant far more than you do, and chant doesnt really have skills to spare at any point to get kill skills. this change is just a side-effect of changing fire mastery, as now you dont have the self chant bonus which made you hit harder with chant than anyone else youused it on. that said in solo play i could see them being fun anyway since you wouldnt get that immediate invalidation from enchanting your group.

Thanks for sharing the Barbling file, I think his 2-handed sword was fantastic considering its level. One reason low uniques like the cap are relatively strong is because I tried to make them worthwhile when upgraded to Elites (they'll be missing a +1AllSkills, so I added extra stats, sockets, or something to compensate). As it is, you could get be getting a +1AllSkills and PDR/MDR from a BarbHat, but I'd agree that isn't worth much at the start of the game. Make sure you've got a +1AllSkills weapon on switch or something (e.g. BattleCommand), because when you raise Strength you won't get the ARating boost (or block bonus) until your skill level changes (the hidden passive skill all characters have has the same D2 bugs as other passives). A +1AllSkills weapon on switch will let you quickly gear-swap for the bonus and then move on. When you start leveling slower (e.g. after A1) then the minor ARating difference from raising strength shouldn't be worth worrying about.

The weapon-effectiveness ratio I think you're referring to can't be modified by skill level or any other effect. There's a single field (in fractions of 128) for each skill that can be configured for how much of the weapon's damage is passed on to the skill's damage. For Multi, it used to be set to 96/128 (i.e. 3/4). For BladeSeninel, since I removed it's hit-delay, I set this field to 1/128 (after 25 frames this is 25/128 or about 1/5th weapon damage per second). This fraction of your weapon damage is taken before any %ED is applied, having the skill level or synergy affect it would be very similar to affecting the %ED applied (i.e. 128/128 weapon damage with +5%/Lvl is similar to 64/128 weapon damage with +10%/Lvl (your damage increases the same per level but starts at 1/2 weapon damage)).

There are some attack skills where the %ED synergy is low because I didn't think the skill needed more damage, but I thought it would be a good idea to nudge players in the direction of using the synergy skill. Leveling GrimWard certainly isn't worth it just for the +%ED synergy on DoubleThrow, but using DoubleThrow without using GrimWard at all would be the bigger failure. There are similar synergies between skills that freeze, stun, or chill monsters and another skill that might benefit significantly from monsters moving less (e.g. IceArrow+ImmoArrow, FrostNova+Blaze, etc). Some synergies exist just to promote a combination of skills, the synergies are weak when the combination is strong (e.g. "free damage" skills like auras and cast-and-forget buffs), and the synergies are strong when the combination wouldn't work well without it (e.g. PoisonDagger's synergies, ChillingArmor and ShiverArmor synergies).

I can appreciate that some synergy descriptions are hard to understand, since there are some heavy limitations (unless you want to write custom strings, which I was trying to avoid). In some cases I expected players to just put a point in and figure out how things changed (I tried to include all skill details somewhere in their descriptions). In the cases where I just used a skill name in the synergy section it was because many things in the skill changed (i.e. Damage, ARating, Duration for Enchant from its synergies), and I just ran out of room (you're allowed up to 6 lines of synergy text, but again custom strings with new-line-characters in them could probably get around that). If there are skills where you've invested in a synergy but still don't know what you're getting for it, then let me know and I'll consider reviewing the descriptions more (I've made custom strings for less important reasons).

It is unfortunate that your Enchanter in a group setting was less fun than normal. I would agree that the damage they contribute to a group is significant, so I can't see buffing them. While I was playing a Chantress, I tended to tank for my merc (A1 Fire, since that's a hard combo to pass up). If I were in a group that already had a tank then I think I'd be able to do pretty well by grabbing an exploding arrow Bow or xBow, but I appreciate that rolling such a bow might take too much time for my group to put up with, and that mod is only available on Rares around level 50ish (but it's available on Vidala's set and BlastBark at earlier levels). If you don't have the gear or skill investment for tanking or using a bow then I think the play style of a Chantress might feel pretty similar to a Healer Paladin, which isn't for everyone. I don't mind the "I'm just a healer" play style (it's an uncommon style in D2), but Testing earlier this year encouraged me to buff the initial duration of Enchant to reduce the "I'm just an enchanter" feel. If you fell into that situation then I can see where things weren't fun, but I'm not sure what changes to make to avoid it.

It's worth noting that +%FireDmg (i.e. FireMastery) doesn't affect +Fire-to-attack for missile attacks, so you need to be in melee to benefit from that. If you were playing with players that managed to get a lot (~30%) of +%FireDmg (e.g. 3xRal in BloodCrescent) while fighting in melee range, then I agree that they were benefiting from your Enchant noticeably more than you. If you've raised ShiverArmor and ChillArmor then you essentially have free FrozenArmor and EnergyShield skills, and should be able to tank well enough to consider melee if your gear has an average amount of PDR/MDR.

It's also worth noting that since the standard minimum monster resistance to all elements is 33% in NM and 50% in Hell, the -34%FireRes of maxed FireMastery skill would let a Chantress' attacks do noticeably more damage than other players she's enchanted (even if she's using a missile skill). For monsters with higher FireRes, the effect of HUv1.7 FireMastery skill should be very good.

Let me know if you were considering some other effect of previous versions of FireMastery (other than +%FireDamage), since I don't know what changed since HUv1.3. Perhaps I can work that effect into things.

Is there going to be 1.7 SP ?

the only thing that made enchant fun to play was that idea that self chant was better than group chant. right now you feel spent once you cahnt your group. its sounding like the idea that enemy resistances will generally be higher in nightmare and hell are reason enough to just say cahnters dont need to be fun till endgame, but maybe its just that they are infact not strong enough or need some kind of adjustment so they can have a normal characters full damage. from what i can tell: an end game characters damage will be in the 3k -4k damage range (roughly). a chanter will do about 1.5k, the chanters self damage will end up to be about 3k with exploding arrows which does make it comparable to other characters, unless they are grouped with said chanter. then its a matter of 4.5-5.5k vs 3k which is less nice. the idea that resists would stop chant from being more than an ar buff only holds with physical chars. elemental attackers would still beat out chant quite heavily.

again i dont know what to do about it, and if its on purpose i guess its fine: chanters can be totally passive in groups, or be glorified merc chars.

as for chants effect on projectiles with regards to fire mastery, im fairly certain your mistaken, but ill try to get a proper test in this weekend for it.

finally all of my worries about the new synergies boil down to their misleading value on a character. it sounded like they intended to point out skills which work well together, but synergies up until now mark out a builds kit. they havent been for things which deserve single points either here or in vanilla. the general advice i give people looking to try to come up with their own builds and want to know where to start (pick a skill you like, max it and its synergies, and put points into defence things for your remaining skill points, but not in that order) is now going to be wrong. doing that will get you heavily investing and overall wasting points without real benefits. alot of characters look like they have confusingly grouper synergies and/or synergies with no real impact and that may end up being a step back towards 1.09, not that thats a bad thing: it just betrays my expectations.

Whats your plan on HP/MP potions?

Right now the lowest potions heal for 120 HP really fast and tbh spaming healing pots is one of the worst aspects of Diablo.

I have this suggestion on healing pots.

1)Make all pots heal during 15 seconds.
2)Make potions heal in %. For example the lowest potions will heal 25% life in 15 seconds. Next tier will heal 50% in 15 seconds, etc.
3)Spamming potions will not increase the amount of HP gained in any way.
4)Make potions combine-able via cube. Cube lower tier potions to create higher tier potions.
5)Increase the price of potions in shops.

This will give a true meaning to the potions and will increase the difficulty of the game.

What do u think?

@file824ph
Please paraphrase how Enchant isn't working our for you, because I'm not sure how you would like it changed. As a reminder, I didn't play HUv1.4 to HUv1.6, and the main change to Enchant from HUv1.3 was its synergies (I think they were Warmth, Hydra, and FBall). An Enchantress build in v1.7 is intended to be different from v1.3, the player is expected to either use a bow (Enchant affects both the arrow and the explosion if you're using ExpArrow or ImmoArrow, at least doubling the Enchant damage) or enter melee (the damage from Shiver or Chilling Armor is considered part of the build's damage and while Tanking those skills are the dominant source of damage unless your fighting one or two critters. It might be worth pointing out that your Sorc doesn't need to actually be hit for those armors to retaliate).

I'd agree that it is technically possible for non-casters to do around 3-5k average damage per attack (especially heavy hitting skills like Berserk or Charge), although in my tests it was only by sacrificing defensive stats (e.g. use Ber rune's +ElemDmg in armor rather than Ist rune's %PhysRes). One of the things that struck me while modding is that there are dozens of effects someone could add to attack skills (e.g. procs, damage to attack from many sources, leach, etc), but for casters there are only a few (+%SpellDmg, -%EnemyRes, onKill effects, maybe a couple more). At least most spells are ranged attacks that ignore defense, giving them a big advantage. In the end it's hard to play around with the variety of attack-skill buffs without making melee stronger than intended. I'm undecided about whether to reduce melee damage towards the goals described in my design document, or just consider their advantage as being the benefit of the dangers of playing in melee range. I'd certainly support the change for v1.9 though, especially if the playing community's numbers increase a bit (I'd expect the Tanking role to be potentially tedious without support).

Regarding the comparison of Enchant vs other attack skills, keep in mind that Enchant is adding 1.5k to the Sorc's attack, which should already be comparable to other attackers, since she can more easily sacrifice defensive buffs like resistances (assuming she's relying on EShield and PDR/MDR), and her weapons gain the same stat-based %ED as everyone else. For example, my Chantress char has typical defensive gear, and while Enchant was adding 1.3k, her attack with Enchant was 2.1-3.0k. None of her socketed stuff was offensive, so her attack damage could improve quite a bit (I wouldn't switch though because while playing Solo she tends to tank decently sized groups, so the Cold armors are her main damage source along with the merc's exploding arrows). The char has played around with a few of the items that enable WereWolf and has Frenzy as an attack skill, so her attacks per second are comparable to other melee builds.

If you're still interested in testing the effects of +%ElemDmg on missile attacks, let me know if you'd like me to enable a cheaty charm in the next update that has +100%ElemDmg. If you're comfortable making that change yourself, then you can find a couple cheaty charm lines already in uniques.txt, so just enable them, make the changes you'd like, and then transmute a charm in the cube into the cheaty charm. Thanks for offering to confirm a test.

If there are some skill synergy combinations you had in mind as broken, let me know. Without that information there aren't many changes I can quickly make to correct things or at least explain the combination. In general, I was tired of earlier versions of HU combining skills of the same element into a synergy group because it usually meant you would max a skill like FrozenOrb and then never use the other skills in its group ever again (they often weren't better for damage, AoE, or other effect). I got bored of that and wanted more variety of skill usage (to be fair, I also enjoyed the Convictor build that only used Conviction with a fast-attacking Zeal to proc spells, but at least the spells were varied and switchable via new gear).

@DoubtFuLMind
The healing of potions in D2 seem hard coded to vary depending on the the class using them (e.g. Sorc=60, Barb=120). With that example in mind, if a Barb has twice the HP of a Sorc, then the potion is healing for some percentage of their HP already, but it's probably not 25%. Changing the formula or function used for potions might get around the hard coded effects already in place, but I haven't experimented much with that. I've heard some complaints for percentage-based healing, since it makes lower tier potions obsolete (i.e. it's better to remove all but one potion for life and mana, and set them to the percentage folks like. With flat-number healing, you can drink a lesser potion that still exceeds your lost HP/MP because the rate of healing might better match your losses), and low-HP classes like Sorcs were being dealt the same damage from monsters but healed less from the same potions because they had fewer HP.

Regarding your points:

1. 15 Second Duration - The current 6 second duration was agreed on in tests earlier this year. I'd be fine with a 15 second duration for v1.9 if other folks agree that v1.7 potions were healing so fast that NM and Hell were too easy to be enjoyable.
2. %-Based Healing - I'm fine with this, since it's essentially already done, but it would just be a single healing potion and mana potion. I'd recommend pushing this change back to v1.9. I think I've read elsewhere that v1.6 already has this effect, so perhaps some players would enjoy the slight difference between versions, which would discourage the change in v1.9.
3. Potion Spam - As far as I know, this has never increased the healing rate, although I think it stacks the duration. There has always been a chance for double-healing based on your Vitality/Energy stat, perhaps that's what you noticed? I think double healing doubles the rate of healing rather than the duration.
4. Cubing Potions - I considered this, and the main reason I didn't enable it was because I felt it would be too tedious (Imagine waiting for that one player who refuses to continue without cubing up an inventory of higher healing potions for whatever reason). The difference between potion tiers currently shouldn't be a big deal (about 50% on average), and the change is reduced by ReplenishLife gear (current potion healing is just a very high ReplenishLife effect, so if you replenish by 100 already (e.g. WereForm, sockets gems), and a LightHeal potion adds 110 while MidHeal adds 160, then going from 210 to 260 shouldn't feel too significant). All that aside, if folks want to continue with Tiered potions in v1.9, then maybe a cube recipe would be a fun change to try. For what it's worth, you can currently buy UltraHeals in any act (I wanted them available in NM and Hell, so D2 modding limitations required them in Norm). The Ultras used to have level restrictions (level 85), but testing earlier this year encouraged me to remove potion level restrictions (this is another change that folks might like in v1.9, but during testing it wasn't adding any fun factor or significant challenge)
5. Potion Prices - Sure this could be increased. I usually don't buy potions since they drop plentifully, so I don't think it would affect most folks. Do you want the potion drop frequency reduced? Should this just affect healing potions? Rare or expensive mana potions seems like an unnecessary penalty for casters since they can't trivially leach from monsters (they were intended to use mana potions in v1.7, although recent changes have decreased that a little trying to improve the spell-spam fun factor).

I dont know how balanced are potions in 1.7 but i hate when potions make the game a lot easier than they should.
I hate the idea of survival thats based mostly on potions (if u know what i mean). Thats why i believe if potions had long durations and werent spammable and stuckable then the player would focus more on his actual gameplay instead of relaying on potions to survive.

So are you gonna modify existing areas and make them look "new" with additional design by your choice but the original remains, just add more creative props and all. just follow the original design of the levels and add more stuff to it. That's from me for now.

I've posted an update/test package for v1.7. Compared to the previous update in November, here are the recent changes:

Recent Changes:

1. monstats.txt,
   - HoW base life from 60Norm, 70NM, 75Hell to 70, 80, 85. Block from 50% to 33%, ResAll from 0% to 33%. Threat rating from 4 to 3.
   - Oak base life from 60Norm, 70NM, 75Hell to 70, 80, 85. Threat rating from 4 to 3.
   - SoB base life from 60Norm, 70NM, 75Hell to 70, 80, 85.
2. itemstatcost.txt
   - item_nonclassskill (oSkill) has had it's description removed, this line was copy-pasted with label "item_nonclassskill_description" and that line does nothing but apply the oSkill description on an item.
   - stats produced for the elem_minDmg_perLvl (fire, cold, ltng, pois (this looks dumb though, don't use it in v1.9 without changes), magic). I already made a Phys copy a while back, so just completing the set.
3. properties.txt
   - "Uninterruptible" added for the "Uninterruptable Attack" mod on items (same mod as appears on Concentration aura). Will replace Evade oskill.
   - "Deadly-att/lvl" added, with 1/8th DStrike in min field, 1/2 ARating in max field. Will replace weapon mastery oSkills.
   - "oSkill-NoDescription" added that only applies the item_nonclassskill stat.
   - "oskill" changed to also add the item_nonclassskill_description stat. Now we can add invisible oSkills to items. I was trying to add "SpellMasteries" and "CharStatPerks" as oSkill automods for gloves and boots to make it easier for players to activate those passives without +AllSkills, but I failed to make it work only for those two passives (wtf Blizzard). One side effect of this change is that your char's current gear will lose the oSkill description, but that's it (no crashing, no bad inventory, no skill loss).
   - elem-dmg/lvl mods added for fire, cold, ltng, pois, mag, and Elem.
   - relabled some old elem-dmg/Lvl mods to elem-MaxDmg/Lvl, since that's what they're actually doing. A quick relabling in uniques, runewords, cubemain, sets, setitems, magicprefix, magicsuffix, gems, then a quick test (Um rune, Diggler, Hexfire (new fire-dmg/lvl), Nokozan, ArcannaStaff, topaz craft weapon) showed no broken items. Quick test of each new elem-dmg/lvl mod on a test item looked fine (except poison, it's not dividing the number by 256 or displaying a duration).
4. states.txt
   - SpellMasteries state added (intending to replace the 3 EleMastery, PoisMastery, and MagMastery states). I can only give 5 effects per Passive, so this gives 5 PierceRes effects while CharStatPerks will give the ManaRegen effect.
   - Enchant state will now dye weapons white and the charscreen damage blue. This was done to ease confusion with this state's re-use with ChillingTouch, ShockingGrasp, VampiricTouch and Enchant.
5. charstats.txt,
   - removed all starting gear from characters. I can't give these items automods, so you're missing out on the hidden-passives buffs if you're not buying an item with +1Skills.
   - SpellMasteries hidden passive given to all characters, this replaces the "scroll of town portal" skill.
6. skills.txt,
   - Enchant, ChillTouch, ShockingGrasp, VampiricTouch now all share the Enchant state (they will no longer stack, they will all display silly flamey whirls when cast but should play a sound appropriate for their element if you pay close attention).
   - VampiricTouch now gains a duration synergy and ARating synergy with EnergyShield and BoneArmor (copy-paste of Shocking Grasp's fields). ChillTouch still has those synergies with BoneArmor and ShiverArmor.
   - FireMastery ColdMastery LtngMastery PoisMastery MagMastery states removed, stats given to SpellMasteries and CharStatPerks. This was done because these skills exist on several items as a way of balancing the -%EnemyRes available to all classes.
   - SpellMasteries passive skill created. In testing, when a Sorc invests in a EleMastery, she gains no bonus until her "AllSkills" mod changes (so weapon swap if you've only got a weapon with +AllSkill). If she only has access to +SorcSkills, then she'll have the correct stats only upon joining a game (I'm not even sure why this is the case, but it's a pretty good or lucky result).
   - CritStrike passive state removed, stats given Pierce, preqrequisite skill Pierce added. Skill level and skill-tab positions of Pierce and CritStrike swapped. This was the better implementation because many items have Pierce oSkill to promote non-Zon archers.
   - Avoid passive state removed, stats given to Dodge, preqrequisite skill Dodge added.
   - BO & Shout states replaced with battlecommand, stats (except +Stamina) given to BCommand, prerequisite skill BCommand added. The purpose of this change is that a Barb can only select BCommand for casting (due to skilldesc.txt changes), but I can still have BO onStruck mods on gear.
   - BCommand is now level 6, Shout is level 24, BO is level 30, Manacost of BCommand increased to 10 to compromise for it's 3-in-1 effect.
   - IronSkin state removed, the PhysRes and +AC stats given to CharStatPerks, the +%AC removed while +AC buffed to compensate. This was done because IronSkin exists on several items as a way of balancing the PhysRes between classes.
7. hirelings.txt, all Hirelings given the SpellMasteries (needed for EleMastery skills) hidden passive, A2 & A5 had room to receive CharStatPerks (needed for ironskin) so they have it. A1 lost CriticalStrike. A quick test with A3 merc in Hell implies successful implementation (killed a 99%ColdRes Zombie without much trouble, so his ColdMastery should have been in effect).
8. skilldesc.txt,
   - HoWolverine upper description updated to 33%Block 33%ResAll.
   - BO and Shout removed from left & right click menus, skill description altered
   - BO, Shout, Taunt, WarCry, BCommand skill icons moved on the WarCry tab (aligned BO, Shout, BC)
   - VampiricTouch synergies updated. These don't appear when you select the skill as an oSkill, but I wanted to update them just in case someone in v1.9 wanted to give these skills to some class.
9. sets.txt
   - Arctic Set "PierceAllRes 10%" completion bonus removed, 2-piece CriticalStrike oskill replaced with 20% DeadlyStrike.
10. setitems.txt,
    - Tal'sBoots WereWolf and Fury oSkills moved to 4-piece bonus, 30 ReplenishHP added
    - Tal'sShield +1AllSkills added as 3-piece bonus. In the past the extra +%SpellDmg on the weapon was intended to make up for loss of a +Skill on completion, but I think that's not enough anymore (+%SpellDmg is more common now)
11. uniques.txt,
    - Replaced instances of NaturalResistance oSkill with resAll/Lvl.
    - Magefist weapon masteries replaced with DStrike-AR/Lvl.
    - SoulShards (from hell Act bosses) reduced the bonuses from 5% to 3%. These mods exist on more items nowadays, so don't need such large numbers on end-game large charms.
    - WolfHowl enabled in FuryVisor. oSkills WereWolf FeralRage, reanimates ShadeWolves, 2 sockets.
    - TombReaver enabled with Dmg vs Undead, 20HP 2MP onStrike, RIP, 85%EDmg with extra IAS (-90 speed point, i.e. 4 frame attack with Fury in WWolf form).
    - Dragonhead enabled with 5%onStruck Lvl30 ABlast, Inferno, Lightning (basically just completing a Convictor set with Tiamat'sRebuke, DragonMouth, Elementalist's set, etc), 15%ResMagic, 2 sockets
    - Templar'sMight enabled with oSkils for all 5 SpellMastery skills (couldn't think of better ways to make it differ from "Hatred" runeword while keeping it Offensive, at least it's the only armor with those Masteries so could be worth a lot of ManaRegen), NoFreeze, +15%MP, 3 sockets.
    - Tyrael'sMight enabled with no PDR/MDR, but has 15%ResElem&Non-Elem, NoFreeze, +10%HP&MP, 3 sockets.
12. runes.txt. This is where I had the most trouble with BO-BC-Shout procs, and decided on the solution above. I'd made changes that felt stupid to about 5 items before I reverted to just the changes below.
    - "Call to Arms" BO and Shout charges changed to oSkill. Since those are essentially soft-synergies for BCommand, I'd rather this item be too strong by needlessly buffing a Barb's skills rather than charge-synergy-bugging him into 20+ free skill points.
    - "Jealousy" removed MagicMastery (I'm probably over using this as it is, let alone giving it away for a SS Amethyst and Sur)
    - "Brand" (spear and jav), replaced SpearMastery and ThrowingMastery with DeadlyStrike/Lvl and ARating/Lvl, replaced Evade with Uninterruptable 20%
13. cubemain.txt,
    - Edited ruby crafts to remove oSkills other than common ones (IronSkin, IStamina). Replaced with /Lvl stats with similar effects.
    - No change to sapphire crafts since those procs are relatively common.
    - Disabled gear-dying recipes. For all I know, multiple dyes might stack and allow folks to create items with several states each, but maybe each dye replaces the previous. Better safe than sorry for now.
14. magicprefix.txt, disabled the +AllSkills mod on boots (boots should never gain a +AllSkills in v1.7)
15. missiles.txt, added a next-hit delay to the Barb Ancient Madawc's Throwing Axes. Each of his axe-volleys should hit, but rather than someone getting 6 axe hits, they'd get 2. While testing, I noticed that his FireEnchantment bug is a little like an aura with a radius of about 6 yards, it seems to proc 0-10 times per second, and might have been doing trash attack damage each time (my sorc's mana shot down, but not her HP, so the 66%EShield with regular PDR/MDR was sucking it up). The axe's next-hit had no effect on this. His FE-bugged melee hits do about 6k-9k damage in Hell (my test-sorc with 50%FireRes 0%PhysRes lost about 3k of her 4k HP, and all of her 3k MP but I don't think the mana was max at the time)
16. Noteable Experiment: I tested with Lvl5 BC-BO-Shout skill oSkill item that also had 100%Lvl40BO onStruck. I could buff myself with BCommand with Lvl5BO stats, when the Lvl40BO was cast, it did not affect the %EDef and +1Skill of BC, but did raise the BO stats (and probably duration) to level 40 values. Casting BC afterwards reduced the BO stats to level 5. It looks like when two skills of the same state are cast, the highest of shared stats are kept while unshared stats are overriden by the newest cast.
17. Noteable Experiment: I tried to reduce the Barb to 3 weapon masteries: 1Handed, 2Handed, and Ranged. I was unable to make them work (itemtypes created, skills.txt adjusted, in-game test had the skill with no effect (not even the pre-change effects, so I'm not sure HardCoding is to blame)). I might look into this further at another time, but for now I'll see how the state-issue looks (Barb's states already reduced via BCommand and ISkin changes, Sorc states reduced via Mastery changes. I believe those were the two worst cases).

Anyway you can put a new link for the 1.7 patch up I have everything but that..

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

damn Brevan, that was quick work!

I think 1.6 has 2 barb masteries: ranged / melee. You might be able to take a look at the current patch to see how it works there.

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I just read through all of the unique set and runeward items looks pretty good only issue I seen was there needs to be more fcr ... I will make a list of things I believe should get it... As for the sets I believe Terry's set should be there .. it would feel strange not having it in Hu..And the last thing I sat here laughing my ass off at all the ears ......

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

@SlappyNuts
To be fair, some of the changelog dates back to November's edit, I just didn't see those changes as important enough to need a test-patch.

I've reviewed v1.6's WeaponMasteries, thanks for guiding me to them. In the files they affect only throwing (rather than ranged), and Melee (as expected). I'd have to test more, but it looks likely that the weapon masteries are hard coded to use only the original weapon types. I don't expect my 3 desired Mastery options making it into v1.7.

@Asteroth
I'll try to review the gear-slot-options for FCRate (it's intended to mostly be on gloves, weapons, and in some cases skills). I was recently thinking of trimming it down actually, but I'll consider your opinion if I have the time for that item review. Keep in mind that there are other caster effects that are pretty important, such as +%Spell damage, -%CastDelay, -%EnemyRes, +%ManaRegen, etc, and that FCRate seems to cap pretty quick (I think it was around 90% for 9-12 frame casts for most classes (generally 50% more spells per second when wearing 90%FCRate)). There is a breakpoint for a few classes at about 110%, but I figured folks could just use their sockets for that if they wanted (from 9 frame to 8 frame is a very small damage boost, but to each their own I suppose).

If you'd like to check items on your own (including affixes: just select a gear slot (caster weapon that isn't staff) and use level 90 then filter), then let me know if things exceed my expectations:

• CasterCraft's +10%FCRate buff and Dagger's +10%FCRate automod don't count towards the 'not more than'
• Weapon: +30% FCRate (not more than 50% without using sockets)
• Gloves, Amulet: +20% (not more than 30%)
• Other slots: +10% is allowed (not more than 20%)

I don't remember why I disabled the Seige-Platinum-Adamant series of equipment, but that took Soulmancer Set along with it. It seems like a no-brainer to return that set with HUv1.9. For the record, when folks find problems with v1.7, they should keep in mind that one of this version's main features is that it's a relatively fresh slate for future modders to grow on.

The Ears charms were PureRage's idea, and can be collected in the optional areas behind HellForgeDragon.

I will take a closer look at all those things .. I just don't some caster builds to be left behind... I will update you with my findings.. the ears rule..

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

Question what's up with these plus 7 to all skill charms? If there not in the game I'm not going to test with them because you will get inaccurate tests..

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

There are a few "Cheaty Charms" that exist for getting chars through areas faster if you wanted to test something up ahead (like a boss fight). There are small charms with +100%SpellDmg and +HP/MP, grand charms with +7Skills with HP/MP ResAll and FWRalk. Similarly, some of the test characters provided are in NM and Hell because not everyone has a hero editor (I don't).

When I first started modding, I wanted to change as little as possible (just skills, items, and monsters), so I didn't edit the limits of what item mods allow (+7 skills is still the +Skills cap per item), but since I wanted +14 to be the max skills I just cubed up a couple charms.

One of the advantages of those charms is that the GCharms (massive life buff) would let me catch 1-hit KO bugs (there was a maggot shooting green "poison" that was actually doing physical damage per frame, roughly 25 times more damage than expected). The +%SpellMastery of the SCharms allowed me to get a better idea of how a team might feel if they stuck together (each of my spells counted as 2 or 3 spells), while their milder HP/MP buff is similar to travelling with Meditation or BO in the party.

After the first 20 or so characters, it gets a bit boring "retesting" the same areas again, so I wouldn't blame someone if they wanted to grab a couple charms and just teleport to the boss so they could test the next act.

Okay I get it... After testing many different builds from Fury druid to Poison light fury zon I find that the damage seems low ... This might frustrate people. Plus I know old timers won't care much on gear but new people like goody's and I think this will drive people away when they farm for ever and there elite gear is nowhere near what it was... Just something to keep in mind..

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

Thanks for the feedback,

To be fair, the Fury Druid (Fury + Lycanthropy + Wereform ?) shouldn't do a lot of damage since he's intended to be a tanking build. PoisonJav + LFury is more of an AoE Ranged setup, so also isn't intended to be a high damage build. In both cases, I'd expect you to have had no trouble surviving since both were likely durable characters. Did the tested Sorceress builds' reduced durability feel worth their increased damage?

I think I recall folks having skill levels around 50 when I last played HU (i.e. +30 skills was pretty normal), while in v1.7 +14 skills is normal. If it helps folks feel like their gear is good, then they could pretend the +Skills are all doubled, since they effectively are (+3 in v1.7 is the same as +6 in some versions of HU).

Similarly, I recall 10k HP being fairly average when I last played, but in v1.7 1.5k is probably a closer average to expect. If you find an item that gives +100HP in v1.7, then that's like finding +700HP in other versions of HU.

Usually a unique is Elite when the mods given to it were not percents and large (e.g. +100%HP is just as balanced if you're level 1 or level 99, but +100HP is only balanced end-game). I didn't always have the cube recipes set up the way they are now, where they give +1-2Skills when you upgrade a unique item, so the original class set and elite uniques were created just to ensure that players were getting closer to +14 skills end-game.

Previous versions of HU had many normal and exceptional uniques that were nearly pointless to pick up later in the game, so changes were made to reduce that effect. In v1.7, if you're willing to use the upgrade recipes (Starstone gems aren't hard to find end-game, Gem shrines will upgrade Perfects to Starstone for new players), then most uniques work fine end-game if they're upgraded to elite. Most runewords and sets work fine end-game. Your progress isn't as limited by farming, with the intention that people spend more time questing.

The goal of v1.7 is to be a good starting point for folks to build HU in another direction. Next year everyone can enjoy the version of HU that grows out of v1.6.

If people are farming v1.7 forever, then I agree they're wasting their time. Feel free to collect all the items (including an Exceptional and Elite version of Basic uniques) and stockpile runes, but then consider trying a new character or build, to experience something new. If they get bored of that character by the end of Norm, then feel free to start a new one rather than play one you didn't enjoy. Let us know what you didn't like in that build, so it can be improved for HUv1.9.

I remember from 05-08 the main boss killers were barbs and druids I wouldn't just consider them tank builds.. they had high life high dmg for reason because they were in the bosses face... The Zons plague javalin recast timer needs to go . Going from 140k to around 16k and having a recast timer on it makes the build gimpy ... 16 k is with all the plus to poison skill synergies.. The Blade sin well you can build it around cb or venom but venom is pointless because there no claws for poison that I have seen. The way the sin casts blade fury slows her attack drastically from what use to be. Pallys fist of heavens and hammers .. these to builds were boss killers now they can barely kill in hell shenk ... I don't have any of my old modding tools to give numbers but I'm giving you in game testing on icp with 3 chars loaded to mock the difficulty as if it was on the realm.... I spent around 20 hours with these builds... I will test others in the next day or so cheers..

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P.S. Have I superceeded your infininate need for proper English now or will your mind forever be locked in a perpetual stacis.

When is the full version of 1.7 being released ?

We found a bug with the final, packaged, delivered version which set us back a bit.

Given the lateness of the set of changes that caused the issue, I think it's pretty reasonable that this will be the only bug that we don't try to sell to you as a "feature". HUv1.7 is still expected to be released in early (1st week?) January, although I might get a Solo version to you faster (it's up to Duff to update and reset his realm, and he might be busy at this time of year).

The issue was that when I gave hidden oSkills to weapons (these deliver the WeaponMastery stats if you've got access to the WeaponMastery skills, and this way no one can have more than 2 WeaponMastery passive states on them), I forgot that oSkills will increase the required level of the item to the skill level (level+6 for other classes). This resulted in fresh not-Barbs going to buy a weapon and being faced with a level 12 selection. I was willing to grab a rock and give it a go, but alas the Testers won, and everything is being repackaged after giving the oSkills a level requirement of -10 (apparently this works, I expected D2 to treat a negative level as zero, in which case not-Barbs would still be facing level 6 weapons).

I'm also mulling the idea of distributing a BitTorrent file the Community could use to distribute files. Does anyone like the idea of using BitTorrent? That would require you to save a copy of your HUv1.7 file in your download folder and to keep your torrent program actively seeding the file for quite a while (maybe just don't turn it off, I don't expect folks to seed (upload) more than 1-5 copies of their file). Although BitTorrent is considered sketchy, it should be legally fine in this case since it's unlikely Blizzard put a copyright on "patch_d2.mpq". The BitTorrent solution would get around DropBox download limits.

I don't need the SP version but the multi. We gonna play it with few streamers Would it be challenging if we are 5 6 people ? We gonna play it on TCP I guess or if your server is fast maybe there I don't know.

There are probably going to be servers in the US as well as UK so you shouldn't have latency issues playing on realm.

5-6 people will breeze through norm and nightmare. Samy and other bosses will still hit hard, but to me the game feels balanced for a 3-4 man party. I'm not sure what 1.7 has done with increased players/increased difficulty.

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While testing this year, v1.7 was toned down in difficulty, since it was agreed that getting used to the changes themselves would add extra challenge and could get frustrating for many. I expect one of the main changes in HUv1.9 would be to ramp the difficulty up. Having played v1.7 for a few years and about half of the intended builds, I consider Norm pretty soloable despite Multiplayer files. When I played recently with my brother (choosing builds that wouldn't synergize each other, e.g. 2-Handed Paladin (Might BAim) with 1-H Fanatadin, PNova Necro with BlizzSorc, etc), we had no problem in Norm at all. Considering the current number of HU players visible in the community, HUv1.7 was balanced more towards 1-3 players per group.

@Rakehell
If you intend to play TCP/IP anyways, then I don't mind producing a one-off version for your group of 5-6. It would take me a while, since several skills would need to be changed (They're currently balanced to assume they wouldn't be stacking with other skills, but with 5-6 players/mercs/pets, they'll be silly-strong). Aside from about a dozen player skills and monster HP, I don't think much more would need to be changed to make the game enjoyable for twice the originally expected players. Maybe just let folks know that your version is very similar to but not exactly the same as v1.7. You can discuss details with me later if you're interested. Maybe for now just take a look at v1.7.

Well my rant for 1.6 was it's to easy even for one person playing the MP version. Well when you get to Mephisto on norm you get rekt but only some bosses are hard not all. So if you really would like to do a separate version buff the normal monsters and give them some nasty skills so we can't just clean them up easy.

Make the regular gameplay except the bosses harder. The guys who will play are not noobs and they would like a challenge besides the bosses. That's my only request if it's doable or maybe make the game load on players 32 or something. Regular monsters are too weak

Trash is hard in 1.7. Much harder than any HU version to date. Bosses still hurt, but will die quickly with a large team.

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Also I would like to suggest you to add more bosses that guard certain areas like you did for most of the quests. Like add boss where Khalim's hearth is and on act one tree where you get the scroll for the stones. It will be more interesting to earn those. Can't remember what other places you didn't added bosses but it would be nice Brevan

It is too late to add stuff to v1.7, but when a v1.7 Suggested Changes thread comes out, I'll try to review some of the suggestions I know didn't make it into v1.7 and put them on that list for whoever wants to turn v1.7 into v1.9.

Keep in mind that Khalim's Heart is guarded by 3 Leviathan and 3 groups of unique Frog Demon. Sure you could run around them, but for those who choose to stand their ground, that battle has the most exp (relative to its area) of pretty much all battles in HU.

I suppose the unique Brute-type guy that guards the Inifuss Tree could be made more interesting, I'll leave that choice to the folks behind v1.9 or maybe v1.8 (lots of BigBosses might become a good theme for that strain of HU that helps keep it apart from v1.7).

But you must make it so you must defeat the bosses to access the items like you did with the other quests (via portal) also make Deckard Cain impossible to rescue until you beat the bosses, again via portal to original D2 Tristram maybe and make it so if you don't complete all quests you can't go further in game Just suggesting something you already did but you haven't on all places

Righto, the inconsistencies could be annoying if you favour a particular style.

For what it's worth, when Soulmancer first implemented the sub bosses that open portals to the end-bosses, he did place quest restrictions on those portals. Perhaps it was the version after the first where the restrictions were implemented, I forget. Either way, the next version had them removed since enough folks didn't like the change.

One of the penalties of portal-spewing bosses is that it discourages players from playing with HolyAuras, BladeShield, or Thorns. When a monster dies to the aura-pulse, BShield, or Thorns damage, the game doesn't spawn their portal. I'm not aware of any experiments to get around that problem, nor have I heard of solutions to it.

So maybe make them drop something like Khalim's flail and make altars that you smash with them so a secret stairs open and you enter to get the quest items I said about. Or make a red portals that are near the bosses and you can't enter them until you kill the boss. Or make the bosses drop items that grants you 1 time only use of spawning red portal where is the quest item.

Also the Anya quest should be done like that and the barbs from act V The barbs can be locked in the red portals that doesn't have any meaning but every group of barbs ca'n be freed before killing the boss (see above)

Also the Gidbin and the statue should be earned that way too. No pain no gain.

there is no "unlimited" stash ?!!?! not even for solo version ?;/

Sorry, but I'm not sure what this is. If you mean Plugy, which is a mod unrelated to HU, then that's up to you to install and configure. I've seen support for Plugy in the D2SE.ini file, so it's probably easier to get working if you're already using D2SE.

I'd recommend setting up a new folder in D2SE for HU to experiment with Plugy, since I don't know if it would interfere with your ability to play multiplayer.

Yes bro, i mean plugy. And yes i am using D2SE.
Hmmm ill see if i can make it work.

(if anyone has a working plugy for HU solo plz give a link! )

EDIT:
Ok i have download the Plugy from http://plugy.free.fr/en/index.html
but honestly i have no clue how to make it work.....
any halp ?

Whenever i tp to Dark Woods i get this error after 1-2 seconds. Currently Dark Woods is the last portal i have unlocked.

The best way I've found to get around the DWoods WP bug is to take any other WP first (let the "Entering ..." message disappear, this is necessary), and then take the WP to DWood. I don't think anyone really knows why this bug exists, it might have been introduced by the D2ModSystem itself, since it's quite well known.

Suggestions:

I would like to see Fist of the Heavens / Holy Bolt hit all monsters with the bolts and not just the undead.

I would like to see Holy aura's increased by about 3% from synergy instead of just two. As well as their pulse frequency synergies max levels be raised to 15 instead of 10.

I would like to see a use for Conviction with Paladin skills rather than just for Vengeance / Zeal (with elemental damage weapons).

I would like to see the maximum level for runes be 80 rather than 90, as this requires too much grinding to get interesting runewords.