The way we work around the lvl 20/40 issue is to create a public game like “baal quest fast” and have the high lvl sorc teleport down to the throne while the mules sit around in town. As long as we have one joiner that wants to finish the quest, we don’t have a problem. This is actually the longest part of the whole thing, since it sometimes takes a few tries; other times we get a few joiners right away and it goes very smoothly.
I agree that it’s counterproductive to put multiple folks waiting in one game for a spawn, but it can be a real pain trying to get on to a server that’s ripe for a spawning (i spent a good 2 hours today trying to get on a server that was simmering, didn’t manage to get on it, gave up, and it went an hour later). Once you have one, it’s worth parking one or two chars in there to keep it. Also the other person helping hold the game didn’t know how to go through the whole process of getting on to a particular server, and he was going to sleep soon too, so he just offered to park the sorc there for safe keeping.
Damn trade fell through… He told me he lost connection while the BK sword was on the ground. I have c/o (highest current offer) on another one with a hel.
The barb is up to lvl 74 and I’m probably going to solo NM Baal tonight and try the waters in hell. For running with all of 39 mf, the barb keeps finding stuff. I just stuck it all on the joint mule. I’m also burning in the mules, as vol noticed last night. I’ve been burning them in an SDMB///cecil game so that people can mule easier since it’s been such a quiet time the last few days. As a matter of fact, if you’re reading this before about 4:00 PM eastern, the game is up now while I’m at work.
I was wondering about that: every time I’ve tried to burn in a mule, I come back an hour later and I’m kciked back to the “create/join” game screen. Whenever I’m playing, I (usually) don’t have any connectivity issues, so I figured that battlenet just kicked chars that were non-moving for a period of time.
That is exactly the case. An idle character times out in between 15 and 30 minutes. However, if you can keep the character from being idle, the game will continue indefinately. There are a number of ways to keep your character from timing out.
What I do is select Identify scroll on the right click mouse button. I place the cursor on the left half of the screen, your inventory may or may not be on the right half. Press the right click. As long as you hold the right click button and don’t put the cursor inside your inventory (it will come up when you press the right click), the character will appear to be casting a spell time after time after time… forever. Tape the right cklick down, put something heavy on the button, whatever… as long as the button is down and the character is moving, you’ll never time out.
Also, if you get into a game with someone else doing that, you can just sit there doing nothing. The other person will keep the game from timing out. vol had a mule in the game I had running last night. She was still there when I switched mules. BTW, I’m burning in the gem mule now, so he’ll be unavailable until I get home.
You can also just join a public game. I burned in most of my mules (before I started this hellforge project, anyway) by joining a public game with a name like “Act 1 start” or “Act 2 start”, since usually the players play through at least one or two acts. I usually ask if they mind, generally they don’t care at all since they still get more experience with me sitting in town than with that slot empty.
usually i pick one that’s been in progress for 5 or 10 minutes, and then run out into the blood moor and run into a corner somewhere, so that i’m not just in town. Public trade games work well for this too, since people are always coming and going and keeping the game alive.
Or rather, he walks a 6’ by 4’ patch of it We finally got a chance to test my clonekiller tonight, and it actually worked! I still don’t have a knout, so I put Black into a jagged star, instead, and my merc was dying too quickly to activate the amplify damage. Nonetheless, we were able to make short work of D’’ not once, but twice.
The first time, I tried soloing him, while theckd and BuckGully stayed in town (and yes, he was spawned while we were all in the game). I managed to get him down to about 10% life, before I ran out of full rejuevenation potions, and he killed me. Then, the guys came down and joined me, at which point the battle was quickly ended. The second time, I figured I had had a good enough test, so we all three went at him from the outset. This time, between theckd providing another target, and the lifetap he was auto-casting, I didn’t need to drink a single potion. D’’ died in less than a minute. Not bad for a level 55 character with no elite equipment, wouldn’t you say?
Now I’m going to work on levelling more… Once I get to level 70 (so I can use an Anni, too) and rescue Anya, I should be able to clear out some of my charms, and then I think I’ll go to Baal runs, to take advantage of the last hit bug while it lasts. Meanwhile, I’ve finished my build, and I need to decide where to put the rest of my skill points. Any suggestions?
fwiw Chronos i got a third spawn overnight, and X and i mopped the floor with him this morning. He dropped a 17/18/10. Not bad
i’m gonna try and fish for another game to sit in quick while i’m finishing up some HW this afternoon.
My vote for where to put points would be Holy Shield or Sacrifice. I would assume that defence makes a difference against his physical attacks, which is all that ever does noticeable damage (to my pally anyway). At the least, if you have 75% blocking, you’re probably fine. Sacrifice is obviously for synergy with zeal.
However, there’s one skill that i’d say are vital for hell difficulty baal runs, and a few that are worth considering. The most important is to have only one point in Charge. Yes, Charge. Yes, one point. Why? Oblivion knights are the bane of your existence after lvl 80. When it takes 40-50 baal runs to level, the unfortunately timed Iron Maiden is the most evil thing you can run into. Smite is great for two reasons: it stuns the obliv, so that he can’t cast on you, and it does very little damage with only 1 point. Often Oblivs come in packs, so while you’re Smiting one you’ll get cursed with IM by another, and since the damage is low you’ll be able to stop attacking before it kills you in most cases. The only drawback is that you have to either play smart or be very strong, because usually you’ll take a pounding from all the other monsters around the obliv – i find it easiest to let the other players start whomping on the herd while i run around to the back and smite the oblivs more safely.
I’d say that Redemption is also worth dropping one point in, for its ability to take out corpses. There is no pain like a pack of oblivs being resurrected by a Horadrim Ancient.
Also, Resist Lightning has an unlisted passive effect of raising your max lit resist by 1/2% per point (same goes for Resist Fire/Cold). So putting a few points in Resist Lightning can help with Burning Souls. If you wear GA, then you only need 10 points to get max resists to 95 – I haven’t gotten to take advantage of this yet since i’ve been working on sacrifice to increase zeal damage, and souls don’t bother me too much.
Yes and no. He uses the same to hit formula as everything else, so in principle, high defense should make it harder for him to hit you. But his attack rating is so insanely high that in actual practice, no amount of defense is going to be enough to bring him down below 95%. So I rely on my maxed shield blocking to protect against physical attacks (which I agree were the only real threat: I didn’t even notice any of his spells). On the other hand, my low defense is probably one of the main reasons I suck so badly against groups of monsters: You can’t block as fast as two or three Fallen can attack.
I already have a point each in Smite and Charge, since they’re prerequisites for Holy Shield (and as I said, I need that blocking). But I’m not sure I’m following you about the importance of Charge: Is it not subject to Iron Maiden? And I haven’t yet met any Hell-level burning souls with this guy, so I’m not sure how much of a problem I would have against them.
Meanwhile, on thinking some more on those two fights yesterday, I’ve realized that I was nowhere near being able to solo D’’. It’s true that I looked like I was doing well in the first fight, but I think we all made the mistake of thinking of my damage as linear. It’s not. When I had gotten his health down to 10%, I thought that the battle was almost over, but in reality, I was only about a third of the way through. This is because so much of my damage is from the Crushing Blows: It would have taken about as long to take him from 10% health to 1% as it did to go from 100% to 10%. By the time that my regular damage begins to be significant compared to the Crushing Blows, the Diablo Clone’s health bar would only have 1 or 0 pixels of red left. On the other hand, I think that we did pretty thoroughly prove that my character makes a very effective part of a clonekilling team, when paired with someone who can take care of that tricky last few percent.
hahaha. I didn’t notice that. both of those instances of Charge should have been Smite. When i was thinking about what i was going to say at first, i was gonna add charge because you can quickly close the distance between you and the obliv, but then i decided it didn’t really matter that much. Unfortunately, it looks like my subconscious managed to sneak it in there anyway. Sorry bout that.
And i was completely ignoring the fact that smite is a prereq for holy shield. I think my brain took a while to get cranking this morning. Apologies all around.
That’s a good point about crushing blow though. For reference, i transferred a pair of Goblin Toe boots to my pally and i got to try them out earlier this afternoon. They have higher crushing blow % than gore riders (25% compared to 15%). And i noticed a real difference, at least early on. Makes me much more effective. In one game, a friend and I took down a clone in about 2 minutes (a few weeks ago it took us at least 10 or so, but we were lower level, so it’s not a completely fair comparison). Later on, I soloed a clone in a 2 player game and took it down in about 3 or 4 minutes. Usually it would take me 10-15 minutes soloing (very defensive build, and i usually use conviction on clone instead of freeze, which drops my damage by around 1200 points per hit).
punha, since I haven’t seen you on recently, I’ve left a few low runes and some rune upgrade gems on the pgem mule. there are 45 pgems (including 3 pskulls) on the mule now and I have a few more that I haven’t muled yet. I haven’t seen much in the trading forums offered for gems except items that I don’t need and aren’t worth much in the way of runes. If anyone needs an item that they can get for pgems, feel free.
I put a Stormspire on the weapons mule, It used to be worth a lot, but now everyone wants a Tomb Reaver.
I was working on finding a dclone game and in the process found that there is no specific “-east” irc room. Hoping that maybe the servers worked for both, I plugged away anyway. .55 went while I was trying.
Never got there.
In the meantime, does anyone know anything about this bot/program? One of the guys in the irc channel posted it up and it looks interesting, but I don’t want to install something that might 1) compromise my password or 2) compromise my 2 cd-keys.
I can’t access either link from work. punha, I’ll give yours a look when I get home.
As for the bot… I don’t know which one this is, but many people running the old “pindlebot” got their accounts deleted and some got their CD code deactivated. Blizzard does not like hacks, and from the IP address it looks like this one is no different.
Some people will tell you that using exploits or third party programs are all part of the game. I don’t agree, neither does Blizzard. I won’t even use Maphack… although it does get tempting after you’ve been looking for the stairs for what seems like half an hour…
The problem with MapHack is it makes it far too easy to re-roll maps. WP to Durance 2 and the stairs aren’t right next to the waypoint, you know right away and can simply visit another difficulty level.
In Happy News Land: I got my first ever gambled unique yesterday! OK, so it was only a 26% Nagelring and I already have a perfect one, but it’s still nice to see it happen.
read the end of that post in the link and you will see that there is no guarantee that the Bot is NOT detectable, therefore you have to use at your own risk.
With that said, I personally would not use it. If there is no guarantee there is no use for it. That website is a somewhat reliable place to find bots and hacks, but again, blizzard seems to be playing hardball in the more recent times against maphacks, MFing/item hoarding bots. I used to pindlebot ages ago for about one month, not really worth doing in my opinion. One of my friends went crazy with it and got tons of items in .09. There was a sweep on bots, he lost nothing, but quit after it was “detected”. Another friend didn’t stop after the first sweep and used a newer version that was seemingly undetectable and after a few months was caught with his pants down and lost TONS of accounts, good items from classic D2 of his, hardcore characters and all his bot “earnings” as well as most of his trade profits. It’s a hard line to cross I think. If you want to enter the darkside and don’t really mind the consequences by all means go for it. But if you really cherish your accounts and characters, steer clear from using bots and maphacks.
theckd, after you left last night, Yeti and I moved over to your game to hold it, but there was almost no activity as of 3:00 AM MST when we left. I tried to leave my character dancing in the game overnight to keep it open (incidentally, have you ever noticed how… pelvic the Paladin’s cast animation is?), but by this morning when I checked again, I had timed out. I guess that you weren’t able to grab the game again? Oh, well, at least Yeti and I were able to beat our clone before switching games.
I’m guessing that whoever triggered the first server had several games open on that server already, and after fighting the clone however many times (and without my help, to boot ;)), he decided against triggering another (at least not that night). Has .165 triggered yet?
I timed out overnight as well (on both .165 games i was holding), i didn’t find out until this morning, so i don’t know if it went overnight. I’ll check on irc later. Congrats on the clone kill.
I managed to pick up 3 charms this weekend (mostly friday and saturday) and fought 7 or 8 clones (in a variety of groups, including 1 or 2 solo encounters). I’m hoping to try and get in more games tonight, though i do want to spend some time doing more mule rushing (i have 4 or so ready for hellforge, and another 4 that aren’t through nm yet). I’ll certainly be on later though, as i have some homework to attend to.
Well, the eastern side of SDMB b.net has been a ghost town compared to our western counterparts. I’ve seen MDSL a few times and thinksnow once. Where is everyone?
We finally got a chance to test my clonekiller tonight, and it actually worked! I still don’t have a knout, so I put Black into a jagged star, instead, and my merc was dying too quickly to activate the amplify damage. Nonetheless, we were able to make short work of D’’ not once, but twice.
