notes on v1.10 (beta) Assassin Blade skills

[Ruvanal]

Aha! It all makes sense now. If NextHit=0, then NextDelay is simply applied as an "initial delay". This would explain the behavior of both Fists of Heaven's Holy Bolts and Diablo's lightning. The 3 frame delay for Diablo's lightning attack is precisely why players can avoid it completely if they stand really close to him. The diablight missiles have a rated speed of 13.3 yards per second. With a 3 frame initial delay, that means they won't damage anything standing within 1.6 yards of Diablo.

How about modding the NextDelay for diablight to a very high value and see if that will make players immune to it from a farther distance?

For this missile I point to the missiles.txt fields of
Param2=30
*param2 desc="Minimum range"

Which if I am remembering correctly will translate to about '5 yrds' game scale. Or about the distance of his outstretched hands which can reach over a characters head.

My results have been similar to Crystalion's with things like inferno missiles having a NextDelay=150, no failure to hurt the monsters if the NextHit=0.

The two zeros are, iirc, actually blanks (Ruvanal et al: isn't there a diff in some columns between "don't care" blank and zero?).

In some columns, yes there is a difference, but here these are zeros. It will depend on the data type that is being used for the field. In most cases the data type will be for one of the numeric forms (BYTE, WORD, DWORD, signed versions of these) in which case the blanks are zeros. If the data type is that of a string variable though, a blank would be an End of String symbol ('\0') while a 0 would be a zero with an End of String symbol ('0'+'\0') which in turn would need to parsed to actually mean a zero value.

Your two annotation question marks are, I believe, indeed Assassin charge-up skills released.

Actually they are not. They just appear to be a couple of unused missiles that the design team was playing around with during the development of the LoD game. Probably they were placeholders for the assassin skills till some of the other support work could be completed. There are quite a few unused missiles in the files, for example look at missile ID=178 'electric throwaxe' that I have found nothing that uses it. There is though a partial reference to this missile in the files that indicates that they may have considered using it as missile form for the one handed hammers (never enabled in the final release of the game v1.00).

QUOTE 
if the part about blade sentry attacking untill it scores a successfull hit is true, then i guess the same applies to multi-shot: you stand next to a monster and shoot with 10% chance to hit and level 9+ MS you'd hit almost every time. /QUOTE

Interesting thought. Would depend on the rate of travel of the missile I'd think, relative to its NextDelay. That suggests if the missile is too fast to benefit, then Slow Missiles might help.

The missile velocity and size would be very important here. With the speed of 24 and size of one, I don't think that there would be more than 2 checks on the larger sized opponents before the missile was out of range.

Which makes me wonder: those missiles with a 4 frame delay between hits, if they are already slow and have SM cast on them, can they actually hit twice?

IIRC from some testing long ago, yes a slowed missile like this can harm more than once. But it would require the target to be either rather large or stationary in most cases to actually achieve this result even with a slowed missile.

Which makes me wonder #2: Nova, it slows down until it is stationary at its maximum range, I pray to god it has a NextDelay above 4 or it may actually hit twice at max range.

Actually the Nova skill has a constant velocity of 24. What you are seeing is just a perceptual illusion that makes seem like the missile is slowing at the end. Probably this also is coinciding with the switch of one of the frames of the graphic animation.

Actually the way I discovered this "bug" was because I was trying to understand how I might make Blade Sentinel more effective (which includes the "standard" question: what does Slow Missiles do to this missile?).

It will also help if you understand just what it is that you are looking at. The missile blade creeper has a velocity of zero. It is basically being 'dragged' around by the monster bladecreeper (<- note no space) that is one of the assassin pet monsters that she summons. It is this creature that is the whirly thing that you see moving about, not the missile itself (which has no graphics).