Woah - Diablo 2 getting a content patch?

You bastard, I forgot about those. I should have said the only unique item.

I never did find a Jeweler’s Archon Plate of the Whale (4 sockets, 100 life) either. I did find a JPBOQ though that I sold for unspeakable riches. The only sword with a yellow hilt! (ooooooh)

Can you tell I’m excited to play again? I miss the loot.

It’d be neat to have the old SDMB game back. I used to play in that group too, but not the hardcore. I actually just started playing some socially with a couple of friends a month or two ago. Man, it’s positively weird how well that game holds up. The graphics are shit, but it’s still fun to beat on stuff and get the lootz.

  1. Fix runes.

Runes are far easier to buy or trade for than to find in a drop. Over 4 years, my best drop was an ohm, but 30 minutes with ATMA (a muling application) and handful of runes and I had all the runes.

Single player makes things a lot easier.

  1. Either fix set items or add a bunch of new ones. Again, the average player will never complete a set that’s worth anything. It’s just so random and hard.

I dunno, I’ve finished every set at least once. By the time I quit, I was only mf’ing for a few .10 items, like Mang’s Song and Tomb Reaver.

  1. Fix Nihlathak.

I really need to post my Nithalak killer build. I never die to him. I hunted him a lot in .09 since it was far faster to get a lvl 97 charm for rolling from him than from Baal. In a nutshell, build a Meteor/Orb sorc with max block, and hide behind one of the pillars. The pillars force the mobs to attack you only one by one (and with max block, they can’t touch you,) and the pillar protects you from direct attacks. If you don’t kill any mobs, he can’t use corpse explosion.

  1. Completely overhaul looting system.

I also made a Baal mf’er. I can do a solo baal run in under 5 minutes. Make a lightning sorc (doesn’t really matter which spell you pick, lightning or chain lightning both work fine). Lister’s group is the only one that can possibly spawn lightning immune, if he is, restart or lure him south. If he’s not, tp’ing around the throne makes them stuck. Then, kill baal using a 4 ist shield with hint #1 above. :slight_smile:

  1. But in hardcore, pickup groups are just too risky as is.

Play single player and learn the joys of Players /X. :slight_smile:

  1. Trapsins need an end-game build

Never played em. :slight_smile: But, I think, based on my lightning sorc builds, theoretically, a a lightning sentry build should be able to solo the game (skipping lightning immunes, of course.) I’m not sure if you played with synergies, but everybody got beefed up.

  1. So do bowazons that don’t rock a Windforce

Best bows in the game now are the new 4 socket runewords for bows, and they aren’t hard to get. 4 socket mat bows with +3 bow skills are all the rage, far cheaper than breath of the dying in a hydra bow, and without the skills.

  1. Tone down the immunities. Yeah, I get it. Pre 1.10, DII was too easy. But layering multiple immunities on nearly every mob in hell is just stupid.

You usually do have three types of damage, don’t forget the merc. Usually, I played a sorc with a merc, and tp’d past 80% of the game.

I never tried the hidden bosses (I was 100% into Single player by then,) but I heard that was pretty bad too.

  1. Bring back gambling uniques and sets. They shouldn’t have made these so rare (again, literal lottery odds). They have a good method now for getting SOJs out of the economy, let us gamble for uniques and set items again.

I never had much trouble getting a meph runner up and running starting from scratch (always a blizz sorc.) The last time, I had an entire mule account filed in 3 days.

  1. Buff gems. Past normal diff, the only use of gems is a few middling cube recipes. Gems are a good and neat idea, make them useful into Nightmare at least.

I think the cube recipes are great, and they did bring some balance to the gems in .10, e.g. clearing sockets, adding sockets, etc.

But, the old recipes are still awesome. Rolling lvl 97-99 charms was awesome (3 pgems.) And theoretically, 3 socket magic swords are now priceless.

  1. US EAST such shit.

Heh no argument there, I used to go there when USWest was down and taunt the easties. :()

  1. Ease up on the inactive character deletion.

Ah, the joys of single player. :slight_smile:

  1. Figure out a ladder system that gives the average player a chance to see their name.

No opinion here.

  1. Come up with a proper PvP system.

No opinion here either, although I made a fortune in sojs crafting PvP equipment. I was a crafted glove salesman. :slight_smile:

  1. Give us real PVP by bringing player damage, player hp and monster hp closer to a balance.

PVP has always been screwed, even back in the day of the Pink Rabbit’s belt, white items, and Order Noose.

  1. Wow, this turned into a real DII rant. I’d love to play the game again.

I never thought I would get tired of D2, but about 6 months after starting single player, I had built every single possible build I wanted to play, tried all the equipment, and achieved every goal. I was sitting there one day, rerolling meph levels trying to get the stairs closer together for my mf run, and I realized, I’ve done everything I could, it’s over.

My beefs with the game:

  1. 99% of the game (killing in general, questing, etc.) is ridiculously easy. You almost have to handicap yourself to even come close to a challenge (players 8, distribute stats unevenly, weird skill builds, etc.)

  2. The other 1% is ridiculously hard. I’ve found maybe 4 sojs in 4 years of meph runs, hardcore is too unforgiving. I’ve also never received anything of value from a Baal or Diablo run. My best drops came in Baal’s throne room. I’ve also never, ever gotten a unique from gambling.

  3. Certain item groups are just lame. There’s no interesting elite boots or belts, exceptionals are the best in both categories.

  4. Certain items are so awesome, there’s really no need to use anything else: Mara’s, Soj, etc.

  5. Certain parts (professions?) of the game, particularly mf’ing and XP’ing after level 92, are ridiculously, mind-numbingly, boring. Imho, these should not be the end goal of the game.

  6. The graphics make my eyes bleed. Please don’t put black sprites on a dark background with night lighting. Also, monsters should be at least 2-3 inches tall so I don’t go blind trying to click on them. While you’re at it, ice shouldn’t be bright enough to hurt my eyes.

  7. We should be able to turn off random maps. Seriously, we play through each level thousands of times. What additional challenge is it to move the exit from the north to the south? It’s a waste of time.

It’s not just the TPPK problem.

My last HC char died about six months ago. Here’s how it happened:

I joined a “HC LEVEL HERE! 6” game. Yeah, somewhat shady but that’s mostly all of what shows in pubby games.

I was in NM Act 5.

There was a murderer’s row of chars already in game, granted. Mostly high 70s. I was mid 60s.

I joined, hopped in the Shenk WP. Killed a few mobs.

70-something sorcy declared hostile. Literally 2 seconds later I was dead.

Sorcy had hopped into the WP, two tps, two casts and I was dead. With the horrendous US EAST lag I saw no midpoint between “full health” and “deeds”.

For HC, this is simply unacceptable. You spend literal days (I was probably 1.5 days on this char) building up, and the bullshit PVP system takes it all away in seconds.

No, /players X isn’t an option. Doesn’t work on BNET, at least when I was playing.

No, I don’t really want to play single player. So much is lost. I do enjoy multiplayer games, despite the danger.

I can’t imagine building another HC char though - and HC is the only thing that makes the game interesting and enjoyable, to me - with PVP being so broken.

Quoth Superhal:

For boots, I don’t think that there are really any boots that are all that extraordinary, but Marrowwalks (even without the bug) can be good for necromancers, and Shadow Dancers are good for kicking assassins. For belts, meanwhile, Arachnid Mesh is the top choice for all spellcasters, Nosferatu’s Coil is a solid choice for meleers, and Verdungo’s, while a bit boring, makes you a lot harder to kill.

I can teach you the map patterns, if you like. The precise details are still a mystery, but you can usually at least tell which rough direction the exit is in, from seeing the starting point.
GameHat, when the patch comes, look us up. A lot of your criticisms can be handled quite nicely by playing with friends instead of random strangers.

Ah that must have been a while ago. There’s a delay(10 seconds I think) after hostiling before you can use WPs now. The only place you can get killed this way now is just outside the act’s gateway.

Hmm, maybe I’ll give DII another try then. Torchlight is filling most of that need though. I would love a solid group to play with, maybe if I reinstall DII I’ll look up a doper group.

TPPK is still out there as far as I know, so be careful. Any projectile in the air that isn’t yours can kill you.

There are a bunch of other things that disappear when you go to town, not just hydras-- I think Blessed Hammers and Meteors disappear, too, and I know traps do. I’m not certain about fireballs, but the timing would be very tricky on those: I don’t think it would be possible to have enough fireballs in flight at once to kill a reasonable HC character.

Hammers most certainly don’t. In fact they’re one of the most popular TPPK abilities. You’re right on traps, I’m not sure on meteor but I doubt fireball disappears. I think frozen orb disappears since I’ve never seen it used this way and it would be incredibly easy to use. Ice blast on the other hand doesn’t disappear. It’s how I lost my last HC character. I saw that the sorc was going to try to TPPK me but I was a holy frost paladin with maxed cold res aura so I hit that figuring I could survive with 95% cold resists and more than 100 extra resists stacked above that. But I still died in one shot. That was when I quit hardcore.

If you still died with all that resistance, then there had to have been some hacks involved. There’s no way an ice blast could do that much damage through that much resistance honestly.

And I’m pretty sure that when they introduced the whole thing about spells disappearing when you go to town, that Blessed Hammer was one of the ones they said they disabled. Not that what they said has ever in any way been in conflict with what they actually did, of course.

Yeah, hammers disappear. Paladins can’t really TPPK anyone if they don’t have a bow.

Ice blast can definitely kill you through all that resist. It isn’t on a cooldown, so you probably took about six of them and they’re each hitting for 25k~ before reductions and consider that -res is applied last and conviction was probably up.

I’ll have to take your word on the hammers. I haven’t payed much attention to changes only relevant to HC in around 2 ladder seasons.

Nah, I just thought Cold Mastery had diminishing returns for some reason when guessing whether or not I’d survive a hit. She’d have only needed a Cold Mastery of about level 25 to cut through my stacked resists enough to one shot me.

I would love to learn this skill. Is it something you’re comfortable explaining in this forum?

No discomfort at all, though it’s easiest with visual aids. It’s easiest to see in Worldstone Keep 2, but once you see how it works there, you can understand it all the other places, too.

Most of the maps are made up of large room-tiles (about the size of what you can see on the screen at once, though it varies from map to map). Landmarks (named monsters, waypoints, entrances to other levels (stairs, cave openings, etc.), and a few other things) each have their own tile, with a few variations on each. The landmarks you’re most interested in, of course, are the entrance to a level, and the stairs to the next level (or gold chest or boss at the end of a dungeon). It is very often the case that the tiles for such things connect to the rest of the map on only one side, and there are four variations of the tile, one for each direction. So, for instance, the area with the WSK2 WP can hang off the rest of the map to the northwest, southwest, northeast, or southeast. Well, which way it is tells you which way the area with the stairs down hangs off the map. Basically, if you leave the WP area in WSK2 and immediately turn right, you’re heading in the direction you’ll be going when you enter the stairs-down area. This usually means that the stairs are somewhere in that general direction from where you start (though not always; the map can sort of wrap around behind you, too). Since you hang a right when you leave the WP area, I would call the WSK2 a “right map”.

Catacombs 2 (again, from the WP to the stairs down) and Maggot Lair 1 and 2 are also right maps. The Underground Passage is a straight-through map (that is, from the Stony Field entrance to the Dark Wood entrance, just keep going straight in the direction you were going when you left the first stairs area). Almost all other dungeon levels are left maps. So, for instance, to get from the Durance of Hate 2 WP to the stairs to Durance 3, leave the WP area, immediately turn left, and keep going that way.

Unfortunately, I do not yet know the patterns for Durance of Hate 3, Catacombs 3, or any of the overworld maps (aside from the obvious, like follow the road in A1). I’m reasonably certain that there are patterns there that I just haven’t found yet, though.

This thread is really making me wish that my discs (and serials) weren’t a continent away. Although I dread to think of what my battlenet ping would be from here.

Changelog for the test realm is out and it isn’t even 2011 yet.

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=21730644778&sid=3000

Oblivion Knights got nerfed into the ground. Where was that nine years ago?

Hammerdin’s can no longer kill mummies and other magic immune undead. People are so going to complain about the most overpowered character being nerfed!

CE has been increased in power, never felt it was weak to start with, but who am I to complain?

Let see…fixing the unbalanced damage of monster’s CE and lightning bolts, removing Iron Maiden from OK. And now there’s respec! Can we therefore say there will be respec in Diablo III as well? I can see the forums going crazy with “respec will spoil the game!”