1.10 Ridulous

[Crystalion]

I see that the other details were placed in a different thread, I thought that I had repeated them here.

Ah, I didn't see another thread--perhaps I'll stumble upon it...

It was simply fast, large, high damage packs coming out of the dark.  Flayers have always been fast and the Dungeon has always been dark, but they have ridulous damage

because then I'd know (?) what your hit recovery and to-block% were. In my case it is a very good thing WoF never let any substantial number of them get to me (if only for a moment) because I have no Dex (yes, an Assassin without Dex--sad, isn't it?) for blocking and my AC is soso... they wouldn't stun me, of course, but I'd not last long if they can swarm over 200 damage a second.

It's a good thing that potion drinking doesn't require faster hit recovery.

IIRC all "uninterruptible" attacks used to lock out potion drinking (am I mistaken? details?) and I'm told more attacks were made uninterruptible in v1.10 release so that could be a danger for some builds.

I assume that monster "radius of awareness" has been boosted

An interesting question. There are subtleties involved, I'm sure. For example there are a couple of skills in skills.txt that don't require line of sight which nonetheless do, except when they don't. :blink: I'd be more specific, but the test was rather involved and the results didn't seem particularly useful. Sometimes the .txt data is misleading (for example, Dragon Flight, last I looked, was marked as a kick, but *not* as a finisher).

As for the rest of Act III, (i.e. what most replied about), it was simple, Chain Lightning nailed flayer packs, since they could be seen (or were otherwise predictable) easily and it auto-targets (even offscreen).

I've been toying with the idea of making a Lightning tree Sorc, what with all the damage changes, so this is good to know (i.e. that you're finding it effective).

My Confuse necro can deal with known (or knowable) packs pretty easy, in Normal monsters cannot kill each other, but they do not swarm attack me.  In NM, monsters will kill each other, if they live long enough.

Interesting--I assume you're speaking from current v1.10 experience? My educated guess had been that confuse would be a killer in some spots in normal and almost never in nm and essentially never in hell (based on my reading of d2data) unless one managed to stop regen, of course.

Chain would have nailed them IF I had known they were there (Chain sets off hit recovery and the cast rate ensures that they never leave it).

Really? I'd always assumed CL did 1..N damage and so was somewhat unlikely to reliably put things into HR. Does lightning get special dispensation? Or do these guys have so little HPs that you mean that they are almost always put into HR? What am I missing?

There is a similar backdoor in Act2 for players without the Snake quest.

Yes, I think I got around to mentioning various act 2 quest oddities in some post. But the particulars of that trivia aren't very important, as, of course, the carry-along sleaze trumps everything (except Malus/Ancients/anything with a clvl req/factor).

in game chatter in NM shows many players dying in ways that surprise them.

saw a post lately where someone died to a LEB beetle ("one-hit" lightning death). It seems quite possible to me that the LE was adding to the normal on-struck beetle lightning effect. In any case, I'm sure there are quite a few "surprises"--many of them not planned/considered fair by Blizzard--for us to find and document.

This reminds me, to clarify my opinion of Hardcore: the unfairness of HC death (imperfect game: lag etc.) does have a redeeming benefit in that it weeds out a lot of players... in general I'm more likely to admire or enjoy playing with *players* who happen to prefer being Hardcore players, but I still dislike the the HC not-your-fault lotto (ymmv--IRL I'm one of those people that you could not pay enough money to be willing to play one round of Russian Roulette, for example).