I feel guilty advertising my mod here

[Brother Laz]

And this is why you shouldn't be in a hurry to release a patch. 1.16 was flawed, and the 'fix' 1.17 was totally screwed. You can download 1.18 now, and it's 1/ much easier than 1.15 in Normal; 2/ good. ;)

Highlights:

- Dying curse now really nerfed;
- Nerfs to monsters that were somehow skipped in the 1.16 'rust storm'; (*)
- Shadowpriest (vampire) types are now actually interesting;
- Boss monsters now finally have the correct resistances;
- Slight increase to monster attack rating in Normal (was too low).
- Colour coding of runes, gems and elixirs.

(*) Fingermages, Baal...

......

Ah, let me think. Death curse, and those damned afflicted/tainted type nasties, I believe.

Dying curse fixed now (I had Andariel turn red and survived it!). The annoying cold spammers had their damage slightly reduced, too.

Although I suppose that I just don't have enough practice fighting them. (Change to the Tree of Infuss boss greatly appreciated, though!)

Yep, that's one overlevelled sucker. What you can do is use some physical area attack (rogue merc...) and watch them all teleport away, then grab the scroll. ;)

Ah, so the simple jewelword is still pretty much the way to get decent gear early on. (Well, unless I'm missing something.)

'Dawn' and 'Dusk' were so popular that I added a pile of new, very low level runewords in the new patch.

'Rebel' (El-El, armor), 'Pax Mystica' (Eld-Tir, staves), 'Rainbow' (El-Tir, belts), 'Elegance' (Tir-Eld, boots) and 'Ghoul' (Tir-Nef, weapons) are low level runewords suitable for baby characters, particularly the first one.

Oh. I thought it wouldn't last.

As Durach once said, I nerf everything until there is nothing left. Yeah, I banned him.

Really appreciate your work. The crap to signal ratio that you put up with on PHK is well, anything but disturbing. Idiots.

Yep, and to top it off, half of my downloads are redirects from B.net hacking sites. Grrmbl.

Edit: Come to think of it, invisible monsters caused maybe almost half my deaths, courtesy of their lovely immunity to Hex.

Actually, this is a semi-bug - I never quite found out why it happens, but it doesn't explode your computer so I'm permitting it to stay.

Also, what's the deal with the new 10 minute resistance potions? With that long a duration, you might as well give characters a permanent 50% resist to fire/coldghtning when they rescue Cain - the 225 gold price tag becomes a non-issue at that point.

They are already gone in the patch, because I made the same reasoning. ;) As I told you, 1.16 was rushed. :( But take a look at the new runewords sometime...

Also, very nice 'teleport-on-hit' ability you gave to the Infidel type monsters. Made for a few exteremly hairy fights in the palace.

...Act 5 ice caves... ;)

I don't know what part of it was caused by your damage rebalancing and attack rating reduction did, but I know that I could not have surived that fight in 1.15. And I probably didn't deserve to, either. (Last Stand is a great attack, there.)

Bad news first: the attack rating was too low, and was increased again. It is still half of what it used to be in 1.15, which should mean about 25-30% chance to be hit by melee monsters. It's a lot better than the hopeless 60-70% in 1.15, but in 1.16 it was like 10% in many areas.

I had an idea in regards to the new Samhain and Mana Coil - is it possible to make a spell cost a % of your mana bar?

No. The problem with Mana Coil is everyone maxed energy. The diminishing returns should alleviate this problem a bit (72 mana spells are still hard to cast at 100 energy!), but the greatly increased feedback damage should make it a decent instant death spell, provided you manage to drain your mana enough. We'll see.

......

- Monster speed. Previously it wasn't uncommon for me to get waypoint \stair trap ambushed (especially in outdoor WPs).

Yep, many monsters are slower now, and only very few of them are faster. :)

- Shaman firewall. Some people might like it as a challenge etc, but again at that early level even with ShadowForm and 75% fire resist, it was edging close from challenging to 'this is getting a bit much'.

Heh, firewall was THE #1 complaint about Act 1. ;)

Overall seems to be still challenging, but the frustration factor is reduced. Other people's miles will vary. Looking forward to 1.17.

So sorry for the attack rating boost. ;) Some figures:

Level 1: 16 (1.15: 32)
Level 5: 36 (1.15: 77)
Level 10: 62 (1.15: 168)
Level 25: 174 (1.15: 318)
Level 40: 334 (1.15: 458)

Shouldn't be too hard to keep your chance to be hit low enough. ;)