Forcing hidurares instead of uniques

[Crystalion]

"hidurares" is a term I coined long ago, back when I was one of the people that discovered the weenie char gamble rings/ammy trick in early D2 to climb up to SoJ from possessing the earlier uniques (even before that I had posted that Blizzard had probably messed up on gambling).

Things (re: gambling and re: the way uniques are blocked) have changed a couple times since then, but I still like the term.

Hidurare is a composite of High Durability Rare and such an object can be said, loosely speaking, to be "hiding" a unique, as they result from failed unique rolls.

These rolls can fail either because a unique doesn't exist for that base item, or because the ilvl wasn't high enough for the quality req level of the unique, or because that unique has already be spawned in the game at hand.

That later failure is what interests us here, and what was long ago used to force SoJs (which doesn't work now, because of the new "rarity" subsystem).

You see, the thought occurred to me that gambling actually spawns the items, even if they are not purchased.

My v1.10 sp testing bears this out. Whether this is also true for realm play I don't know, but I consider it likely.

This means that doing a lot of gambling (just hitting the shop, to see a new selection, not actually buying anything) will eventually block the generation of uniques due to having previously generated them (i.e. a "jackpot" on the gamble resulting in a unique, which you weren't even aware of, because you did not purchase it).

To verify this concept, I swapped the frequency of rares and uniques for gambling in difficultylevels.txt (and bought a bunch of stuff to be sure the new frequency was as I expected, then started a new game). I also added a cube recipe allowing me to reroll any magic item into the same base item unique. Note that such a reroll will not work twice in a row, in the same game, since the second time around it will be blocked and thus create a hidurare.

By this simple duo of mods I was able to perform the following test:

v1.10 sp, modded as noted above:

a. new game, normal
b. 100 views of gamble inventory at Elzix (quite a bit of clicking, but didn't take too long)
c. I went through his normal shop inventory and bought (one of) every base type for which he had a magic item
d. I cubed these (attempted unique with ilvl set to 99) and sold them back to him
e. I counted up the results...

13 uniques, 9 hidurares.

Please note that this isn't a very controlled test, because my clvl was, iirc, 83?, so he could show me, iirc, any legal gambling base item, but his shop item wares are seriously limited. However, afaik, every single base item I bought from him to test was capable of cubing to unique (i.e. the uniques exist for those weenie base items).

Still this does seem to confirm what I suspected... that a whole lot of clicking (or a bot) can change the game state enough to effect a unique to hidurare conversion for future drops.

I see no harm in publishing this tidbit, as I can't imagine any great harm in allowing MF/bot maniacs on bnet to up their percentage of rares (suitable for upgrading, of course) as opposed to uniques of the same base. The chance of a unique from a gamble is so slim, that you'd have to either seriously suffer carpel tunnel, or resort to using a shop bot to make this effect very significant.

Still, it does suggest that gambling (window shopping at least) isn't a great idea before a MF run, for players in general.

edit: typos, clarifications.

p.s. of course uniques => 3x durability hidurares and sets => 2x, but sets won't fail to drop just because they were generated for a prior gambling screen.