I feel guilty advertising my mod here

[SwissMercenary]

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;

Bah, it was 'fine' at 100%.

- Slight increase to monster attack rating in Normal (was too low).

I worked out that *that* was the reason for my survival against 'impossible' odds, there.

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

Felt like enough of a difference.

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. ;)

I just magic missle/storm crows them out of range.

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.

The problem is, I'm in Act 3, and haven't even *seen* a two socket body armour, let alone boots, and belts yet. Well, I've found a 3-socket Leather Armour (2), but that doesn't fit the bill. The countess dropped Ort for me, and I've been wanting to make Ort-Eld since, well, forever. You might want to look at that.

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.

I was assuming that it was so that you couldn't spot them by the location of the curse/aura icon.

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.

Appreciated. After the patch, the rest of Act 2 - palace and onward was... Trivial would be a good word for it. At least now I can Retaliate with some constency

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.

Well, yes, I understand the source of the problem - when you have crazy regen, you have no mana to leech back, really. I'm not past Act 3 Normal, so it was just a thought.

- 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. ;)

I actually think that was a bit of an overnerf. The firewall only got bad if you, well, let the shaman stack 6 of them under you.

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. ;)
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The AR boost was in my mind, a very good thing.