Misc. minor musings & testing v1.10s oddities

[Crystalion]

This is correct, the mlvl-clvl>=10 penalty of the internal table has changed from 13/256 = ~ 5% to 5/256 = ~2%

Ah, good to know, thanks.

My latest v1.10s oddites beg the question (which I can not easily test) of whether Fade or Cleansing aura flashing in v1.09 is really handy...

Since the Spirit Ward unique elite ward shield has a 5% chance to proc level 8 Fade when you're struck, I got to wondering how effective the combo, for a Paly, would be of using this shield with Cleansing. I did two and three player normal difficulty PvP tests in the Mausoleum (for convenience because the pentacle and rogue-on-a-stick™ fires can trigger being stuck procs).

It is pretty clear to me that when these auras pulse they remove x% of the remaining duration of the curse (or poison, I assume, though I've not tested that in many versions). It is clear that Fade and Cleansing "stack". An interesting tidbit is that pulses of equal level Cleansing also "stack" as far as my testing would indicate (keep in mind that due to the pulse application nature of the effect, chronograph times for the durations have variability depending on when in the pulse cycle the curse hit, making results subject to statistical interpretation). My theory for this would be that aura pulses of identical slvl are allowed to "overwrite", and since the Cleansing effect is edge-driven (i.e. only the pulses matter) multiple (same slvl) auras reduce the duration for each of their pulses.

Unlike EQ, I never played with aura flashing in D2, so I'm curious if in v1.09 or before you can use this effect to quickly lift a long curse (my test curse was weaken, at a 30.6 second stated, and ~32 measured base duration). I vaguely recall, long long ago, testing Cleansing vs. long duration poisons, but I don't remember any details.

An interesting oddity in testing was when I sought to align partied Paly's Cleansing to be 180 degrees out of phase (that is, attempting roughly one pulse per second alignment) I managed to trigger yet another lying character screen™ bug where one of my Palys would never show any aura, even though was being affected (by two, including his own). In this state I had him leave the test area for another zone, and the display then showed his aura thrown up on his hireling, but not himself (in reality it was up on him too, of course).

If I'm correct in my testing, then a party of Paly's all singing slvl 1 cleansing would take down any curse in the game in under ~2.5 seconds (roughly). A lot of the time a curse like Decrepify would essentially wink out in a fraction of a second.

I didn't test for Fade/Cleansing possibly working to remove slow or chill duration (I know the descriptions only mention curses and poison duration, but you never know, eh?). Nor did I test the "psuedo-curses" like slow missiles and inner sight (taunt PvP could also be tested, unmodded, if you had an act 3 hireling victim with a Spirit Ward--iirc someone posted that taunt works on hirelings/minions but I've not tested that myself).