Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

Really Mongo? You tell everyone else to pull off their nostaliga glasses and yet you put on a pair of your own? Static Field was capped at 25% fairly early on (by 1.03, but I seem to remember 1.01), LoD was 1.08/1.09 and 1.03 wasn't more than two to three months after D2 came out (and I think it was earlier than that). 1.08/1.09 changed SF so that it capped out at 33% and 50% in Nightmare and Hell, but SF was capped after a point and Hell Diablo had enough health, even in D2, that you couldn't kill him with just SFing and then FOing in a short amount of time once Blizzard capped SF's maximum health it could take off.

See the patch notes for Patch 1.08, the patch that was released on June 29, 2001, the day that LOD was released. Thus, as I described, static field wasn't nerfed until LOD was released. (And feel free to look at the earlier patch notes, because you'll see that other than a tooltip change, no changes to static field were made until 1.08).

You might ask how I remember that? Well, I played a Static Field/FO sorc up to the mid-90's and appeared on the original hardcore US West ladder (around 70ish, iirc), which took months of playing to achieve. When LOD was released, I was disgusted that people were able to get to level 99 in one day by running the first area of Act V over and over, which essentially involved no threat to the player, because most of the mobs were too busy fighting NPC's. How was that for Blizzard balance and QA?

Mongo, that's when they the raised the cap in the higher difficulties, it was capped before LoD. That was done as a hot fix and then the tooltip was update in 1.03 to note that change. Again, it helps to actually remember how the skill was. You claim others are using nostalgia glasses, but made a huge nostalgia glasses mistake yourself.

There were a ton of skills that were hotfixed, but never mentioned in the actual patch notes because they had already been hotfixed it. Look at Strafe for instance which in 1.0 was uncapped in the number of arrows that could be used against a single target. They hotfixed that as well and capped the number of arrows that could go into a single target to 3 IIRC, might have been less. I know before the capped it, Strafe was the Amazon's great boss killer as I used it to great affect on the end act bosses.