Roll call for "hidden" bonuses/features

[Crystalion]

Oh-oh.  Seeing how I've been around since 1.03, I did think I was an Old Timer.

I've never heard of Laser.  From the pic, I'm guessing this is a mix of Inferno and Chilling Armor?

Well, let's see... I had D1 the day it came out (so I have v1.00), and pretty much the same for Hellfire. I pre-ordered the collector's edition of D2 (so I have v1.00) and was in the LoD beta courtesy of GFraiser (thanks again). But I'm convinced that there are LLers reading this that can trump that (example: D1 beta). So Old Timer is still relative.

I won't recap the whole theory and operation of the Laser here (though I doubt archives are still available for the original posts?) but the essence is that Chilling Armor bolts between two Sorcs play ping-pong, so if you meet three criteria you can have "fun" in a number of ways.

1) you must avoid lagging the game out (if your initial laser "pumping" is inferno/artic blast you tend to get the "no sprites shown" "bug" which is good, because you can easily get the display engine to freak out erroniously and eat *all* the cpu)

2) you must avoid having your Sorcs croak (if you don't have lots of MDR, or, say, snowclash belts, you'll be seeing unbelievable damage to yourselves with a fully pumped Laser)

3) you must "pump" the Laser efficiently (Inferno and Artic Blast are far more time efficient for this than other ranged attacks)

Under the right conditions, many many hundreds of bolts can be pinging back and forth. If you "uncap" one end of the beam (e.g. by teleporting one Sorc) then half the beam shoots off and perhaps hits something (ouch bigtime if the monster isn't cold immune). Meantime, if the Sorcs have cold absorb (ala Snowclash) then they are actually healing a little bit, hundreds of times a second (it adds up).

Because of lag issues, it isn't clear to me whether or not you could eventually use a Laser ala D1 Mana Shield recast bug (or Larry Niven's Magic Goes Away short story, with the spinning disk) in order to hit some active effects limit (in D1, iirc, your 128 recast MS could keep a Rogue from even firing an arrow at you, etc.).