1.13 'content patch'

[librarian]

Heiho,

the announcement was made earlier this week, but in case of anyone having missed it until now, here's the b.net board link

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topic...288961&sid=3000

[Hammerskjold]

While interesting, I kind of find it a bit puzzling. This is assuming that bliz sticks by their word that 1.10 was the last patch containing major gameplay changes, eg: skill changes, monster immunities and HPs and the like. Reading one point of their announcement, something like 'within the limits of what we can do etc etc' I'm hoping they stick by their promise. 1.10 isn't perfect, but at least it locked the game stability wise.

I don't know about anyone else, but I definitely did not miss the 'good' ole days whenever a new patch was released, many previous characters were rendered obsolete, or 2 new problems popped up for every 1 that was claimed to be solved.

Having said all that, I'd like to see a saner and less stingy med-high rune drops, the current 'rarity' only applies to legit players and fuels the duped market IMO. Get rid of some of the neutering in SP ie: enable 'online only' Runewords for SP and activate the 'Keys Of ---' quests for SP. Keep 'Enigma's armor Teleporting ability, but change it to a charged ability (say, a charge of 1/1) instead of +1 Teleport Oskill. That way the dupers and botters whining will be that much sweeter to hear, because you can always say,'what are you crying about, Enigma still has teleport.':D

But really, my cynical side won't be surpised if bliz already have the majority of 1.13 done, and their request to fans is nothing more than a PR stunt. My very cynical side won't be surprised if this both a PR stunt and a type of survey for D3.

Really though, I'm just hoping they don't break more things than they fix. D2's patch history to me sometimes reads like a company that thinks a sledgehammer can be used for watch repair.

[librarian]

Heiho,

moaning about Teleport like it is done at first and lst page of the thread (I didn't care to read about 30 pages in between) misses one main point:
most of serious balance issues and indeed the overall party-denying qualities of LoD result from all that crossclass skill stuff. It destroyed the unique-ness of the classes, already with LoD release and the most important curses available to anyone. To bring me back to bnet would require to remove all this stuff, so I'd have a reason to play or ally with a Pal because of his aurae, a Nec because of his curses, a Barb because of his cries, a ranged class because of its abilities to dispatch the nastier bosses (FE O_/ MEAT) etc.


But I'd be really surprised if blizz would show the balls to remove this stuff, because it's always hard to take a step back; and the majority of bnet population wouldn't honour this.

One can do amazing things with the according technical properties, but this needs a lot of care regarding item/affix design; it needs for sure more care than just adding another heap of new items which will be either only interesting to overall-collectors, or shooting balance even more through the roof. Or than adding another Uber Event which is only solvable for players with no limit in resources.

I myself don't need more items, quests, classes. I want to play a game which is balanced so that I can play it completely through the acts/diffs without the need of endless hours of grinding, if only I spend some care into the character's skill design - and not into its equipment as main focus. I can do this currently, but not online, because online my chosen char is - regardless of class - unattractive to party with, because it can't offer anything useful to a party which won't already exist item-wise.
Without a party there's no reason to play online. /players x is sufficient.

[Taem]

Off the top of my head here at work:

** BUGS **
1) Get rid of Aura Stacking glitch
2) Fix Mana Shield/Charge bug
3) Fix Fire Explosion Nightmare bug
4) Fix graphical bug when using an item you don't have the requirements for

** GAMEPLAY **
5) ALL currently active skills go dead on hostile, so no more TPPK
6) However, remove 5-second delay so PK'ers can actually PK and players have to play smart
7) Change the way Uber Diablo spawns so not to encourage cheating
8) Remove a large portion of elemental immune monsters from Hell, or make immunities breakable somehow, as it is unplayable now for a sorc

** CLASSES **
9) Give many low level skills synergy bonuses. In conjunction with #9, you could have a whole new game of possiblities, starting with a low level build, then moving on to a high level build after you redistribute your points - think of the possibilities!
10) Make the Amazon spear tree useful and with synergies

** NEW CONTENT **
11) Make the Mercinary quests do something; some ideas:
>>>a) redistribute skill points, b ) redistribute stat points
12) Cain or"seer" type gives map layout of level via WP clickable interface for gold; i.e. you click on Cain, there is an option to VIEW MAP under IDENTIFY. When clicked on, it will take you to the list of world portals - so no new graphical interface need be created - along with a list of prices, which should be fairly steep. This would help reduce the desire to use 3rd party programs and put gold to good use.
13) How about flush out A4 with more levels. I'd imagine it'd be easy to recycle the graphics from different acts to make it seem exotic, then throw in some new quests.

[Hammerskjold]

Heiho,

moaning about Teleport like it is done at first and lst page of the thread (I didn't care to read about 30 pages in between) misses one main point:
most of serious balance issues and indeed the overall party-denying qualities of LoD result from all that crossclass skill stuff.

I slightly disagree on this point. Personally, I think Oskills\cross-skills are not necessarily the problem, but Oskills that involves a high level skill such as Teleport.

But I'd be really surprised if blizz would show the balls to remove this stuff, because it's always hard to take a step back; and the majority of bnet population wouldn't honour this.

Yup. Considering what I've seen of the majority of b.net actually wants, I agree that the forecast ain't likely.

One can do amazing things with the according technical properties, but this needs a lot of care regarding item/affix design; it needs for sure more care than just adding another heap of new items which will be either only interesting to overall-collectors, or shooting balance even more through the roof. Or than adding another Uber Event which is only solvable for players with no limit in resources.

Yes it's a bit of a downer, despite my carping on bliz they can and do make at least a technically stable, and addictive games. But yeah what you just said. Bliz is not exactly known for a light touch when it comes to D2. I wouldn't be surprised if this will be just another case of more of the same. I'd be happy if I was proven wrong, but we'll see when it comes out.

[Fragbait]

Hi,


don't know if this has been brought up yet, but it seems to me that this patch that they are making serves very much to evaluate what the big crowd wants the most (say the three most frequently mentioned ideas of improvement), in order to incorporate these things into Diablo III if possible.

I don't think that it's about bringing content into a 9 year old game, unfortunately.
So that's why I think that they will bring in gameplay changes rather than new graphical or story content. Maybe they'll make mercenaries controllable, cut out the townportal scrolls (they won't be there in DIII...) or play around with respec somehow.


Greetings, Fragbait

[BruceGod]

You can already "break" immunities. However, doing so without partying with a paladin would mean that you were using one of those nasty 0skill items, now wouldn't it?

[Hammerskjold]

Hi,
don't know if this has been brought up yet, but it seems to me that this patch that they are making serves very much to evaluate what the big crowd wants the most (say the three most frequently mentioned ideas of improvement), in order to incorporate these things into Diablo III if possible.

Well, in the second post after Librarian's first.

snippet:

But really, my cynical side won't be surpised if bliz already have the majority of 1.13 done, and their request to fans is nothing more than a PR stunt. My very cynical side won't be surprised if this both a PR stunt and a type of survey for D3.

I don't think that it's about bringing content into a 9 year old game, unfortunately.

Yep, I agree that's probably a very safe bet. Unless it's been changed, bliz said something about 'within the limits of what we can do', or similar to that effect. And iirc, they even said list only ONE wish per person, if people can't help it and starts a wish list (something I know can be irresistable sometimes), they will only look at the FIRST item on that list, if at all.

Again, I just hope if 1.13 comes out, it doesn't break anything else in the game. That's how high my expectations are. I mean it's somewhat nice that they're even thinking of doing this, but let's face it. D3 and SC2 is what's taking priority right now for bliz, or at least should be. Anything that requires major work like new graphics\music\a lot of re-programming for D2, will take away resources (time or money) needed for D3 & SC2.

[Archon_Wing]

But really, my cynical side won't be surpised if bliz already have the majority of 1.13 done, and their request to fans is nothing more than a PR stunt. My very cynical side won't be surprised if this both a PR stunt and a type of survey for D3.

Really though, I'm just hoping they don't break more things than they fix. D2's patch history to me sometimes reads like a company that thinks a sledgehammer can be used for watch repair.

I am also of the thought that it is merely a PR stunt.

What will probaly happen:

Patch 1.13

- "Rebalanced" certain skills. Blessed hammer and chain lightning synergies have been turned into anti-synergies. Now you lose -% per point invested in them. 20k hammers no more! Have fun killing fallen in normal. This is consistent with former patches- nerf currently popular skills to oblivion and make other ones insanely overpowered, but hey who notices things such as balance? Just look at Starcraft. It's balanced because everything is broken, equally. We strive to reach the same goal in all our games.

- Poison Explosion damage doubled. CE and PE synergize each other. LOL balance.

- Fixed a bug where you could create amazons. She was removed earlier for balance purposes.

- Fixed a bug involving Fire Enchanted monsters doing much less damage then they should. Oh, you meant too much? Oh well, I'm sure you won't notice.

-Fixed a bug where unique items and runes dropped 10x more than intended.

- If you attempt to create more than 3 games a month you will be banned, because you are probably a hacker. Please subscribe to World of Warcraft.

- Added a new quest Uber l33t Den of Evil . It is activated if high runes are sold, meaning that only people with duped runes are going to activate the event, but don't worry we think that will discourage duping like it did with Uber Diablo.
In Uber l33t Den of Evil, not only do you fight the 3 in uber form, but you also fight Lilith, Uber Duriel, and every monster in the game, including random bosses. Oh, and shamans can revive any monster, including Diablo. And cast corpse explosion.
(We recieved reports that someone from the Amazon Basin has already defeated this in 3 days, armed with only a low quality javelin and cracked sash. But many antidotes, thawing potions and chilling potions that somehow exploited a mechanic in the time-space continuum that caused a tempoary division by zero, but not long enough to destroy the universe. Hardcore too, no less. )

- Made the lobby prettier. Of course, the game boggled down to a crawl. We will fix it in 3 months, and ignore the community who will probably come up with the fix in two days. Then we can ban them for modifying our stuff!! (Example: Starcraft 1.16)

- Added a "tppk" button. We are aware of the exploit, but we don't care. We did however, decide to make it fair by allowing everyone to do it.

- To prevent bots from joining, you will now enter a 68 character long captcha which will work about half the time. (But hey, I'd rather have this if bots died)

- The forums have been modified to only allow pro-Blizzard opinions. If you are not a fanboy/girl who thinks Blizzard can do no wrong, please die. Before you die though, consider our next great games, Starcraft II and Diablo 3 which will now be sold in 10 parts to "enhance" the story line.

- Ugh, we know we said battle.net was gonna be free and stuff, but aren't you tired of this game? We sure are.

:)
But hey, it could be worse. So don't worry about it. Blizzard has a tendency of getting things right... eventually.

[Archon_Wing]

Off the top of my head here at work:

** BUGS **
1) Get rid of Aura Stacking glitch
2) Fix Mana Shield/Charge bug
3) Fix Fire Explosion Nightmare bug
4) Fix graphical bug when using an item you don't have the requirements for

** GAMEPLAY **
5) ALL currently active skills go dead on hostile, so no more TPPK
6) However, remove 5-second delay so PK'ers can actually PK and players have to play smart
7) Change the way Uber Diablo spawns so not to encourage cheating
8) Remove a large portion of elemental immune monsters from Hell, or make immunities breakable somehow, as it is unplayable now for a sorc

** CLASSES **
9) Give many low level skills synergy bonuses. In conjunction with #9, you could have a whole new game of possiblities, starting with a low level build, then moving on to a high level build after you redistribute your points - think of the possibilities!
10) Make the Amazon spear tree useful and with synergies

** NEW CONTENT **
11) Make the Mercinary quests do something; some ideas:
>>>a) redistribute skill points, b ) redistribute stat points
12) Cain or"seer" type gives map layout of level via WP clickable interface for gold; i.e. you click on Cain, there is an option to VIEW MAP under IDENTIFY. When clicked on, it will take you to the list of world portals - so no new graphical interface need be created - along with a list of prices, which should be fairly steep. This would help reduce the desire to use 3rd party programs and put gold to good use.
13) How about flush out A4 with more levels. I'd imagine it'd be easy to recycle the graphics from different acts to make it seem exotic, then throw in some new quests.

I agree with of the following except no.8. Sorcs aren't really unplayable in hell at all; immunities prevent them from being so ridiculously overpowered as they are in nm/normal. Mercs and other support spells such as static field or even the much maligned telekinesis can deal with the majority of immunes fine as only special monsters are immune to more than one element. And super immune uniques can just be parked mostly since it's usually a waste of time to fight them anyways. That, however, is yet another issue.

Being able to easily break immunities would also make lightning fury zons even more mindless than before.:)

[Delc]

I am also of the thought that it is merely a PR stunt.

Of course it is. I'm sure the goal is to get people to dig out their old D2 disks again and give the game another whirl, if even for a couple hours. That way when D3 gets released people will have it fresh in their minds.

It will probably be released with a few fixes for whatever they deem the worst issues/bugs, and some amount of new content to get people to at least look at it. It won't be big sweeping changes. Just a little taste is all it takes to bring back horrible addictions.

[Fragbait]

Hi,


I really only care about DIII. I don't think they can change/fix anything about DII that would make me dive into it again. The one thing that I wish for can't possibly be realized with DII, it would have to take an entirely new (old) game to do it - maybe not even DIII:

Player characters need to be fragile again and to make up for that, I want to be able to really exploit the terrain tactically. Geez, DI is unparalleled in this respect, and we are in the age of photorealistic 3d now.


Greetings, Fragbait

[librarian]

Heiho,

Player characters need to be fragile again and to make up for that, I want to be able to really exploit the terrain tactically. Geez, DI is unparalleled in this respect, and we are in the age of photorealistic 3d now.

technically this is possible in D2.
Fragility of chars is a matter of juggling numbers of both the character's part - think reducing automatics of life/vita per levelup, and, of course, items - and monster's part - think damage-wise.
As for the terrain, at least some parts in every Act offer great tactical possibilities, but the game design doesn't require tactics. It says a lot about paradigms when you consider that in Act1&2 you're able to close doors, but later on there aren't any anymore, respectively in Act5 you only can destroy them.
To force more usage of tactics would, as an example, mean that you change group settings so sometimes there's a strong 'boss' eager to melee you who has backup of ranged fighters. But almost all group settings are either melee/ranged only, or the 'bosses' (Shamans, Unravelers etc) are ranged and weak. Which makes it quite comfortable to just attack the more dangerous 'boss' and ignore the dumb melee minions.
Imagine a Hephaisto with some Abyss Knights or even Oblivion Knights as following minions, and soon you'll recognize the tactical possibilities of the cranky lava environment.

Well, it still wouldn't be NetHack, but this generation of games' design wouldn't let the cash flow.

[Taem]

After having played The Dark for a little over a year before putting D1 away forever, there are different tactics used in D1 when dealing monsters and the terrain. For example, if archers are firing at you, hide behind pillars sneaking up to take one out at a time because if you take on all of them at once, you will most likely die; using doorways as chokepoints to deal with larger mobs because as a group, the mob will slaughter you, but individually, you stand a chance to survive. Those are just two of the tactics I used often in D1 that aren't even considered in D2 - D2 is more of a point-click-destroy-repeat!

[Hammerskjold]

:)
But hey, it could be worse. So don't worry about it. Blizzard has a tendency of getting things right... eventually.

Yeah, it's that 'eventually' part and others that still makes me look at some of bliz ideas* and go, ' dude seriously, WTF. WTF, seriously dude.'

* IE: the SOJ duping situation and it's 'solution' like you mentioned.

Ah well, we'll see when or if this thing comes out. Which should be any day now...just like D3.:P

[Fragbait]

After having played The Dark for a little over a year before putting D1 away forever, there are different tactics used in D1 when dealing monsters and the terrain. For example, if archers are firing at you, hide behind pillars sneaking up to take one out at a time because if you take on all of them at once, you will most likely die; using doorways as chokepoints to deal with larger mobs because as a group, the mob will slaughter you, but individually, you stand a chance to survive. Those are just two of the tactics I used often in D1 that aren't even considered in D2 - D2 is more of a point-click-destroy-repeat!

Hi,


I'm with you. Imagine how gameplay in act II tombs would change if closed doors indeed were closed, if monsters couldn't fire through doors, if you could block narrow openings because they're no broader than you. When was the last time you ran from a monster and fought it on terrain where you felt you had the tactical edge?

Even in the open areas, for example in act I, how would the feeling change if you knew you mustn't be swarmed at all costs, because it can mean death even for high chars. If you'd have to edge forward step by step to not activate to many foes. If there were more obstacles to hide, forests that actually decreased the cth of ranged fighters and buildings that played a bigger role - windows to shoot out of, anyone?

A side effect of an in such a way increased difficulty / complexity would be that you wouldn't need monster combinations that certain chars can't break, like an aura enchanted, extra fast, physical immune and fire immune ghost boss for a werebear with fireclaws (let's don't bring up items, please).

But I'm sure (hope dies last) we'll see some improvement in that respect in Diablo III.


Greetings, Fragbait

[Taem]

Ready for the new ladder, and patch 1.13? We will see if all of those cool "new" idea you guys might (or might not) of had comes true.

* 0. Diablo II Ladder Reset – Patch 1.13 04/17/2009 01:47:17 PM PDT

We’re preparing for a Diablo II ladder reset to coincide with the release of the 1.13 patch that’s currently in development. We don’t have a final release date for the patch yet, but we’re providing early warning as a reset could occur as early as the end of April. We’ll be providing updates with more certain dates once the patch is closer to release.

Please be aware that with a ladder reset all ladder characters are moved to non-ladder. This means that your characters will still be accessible but will no longer have access to ladder-only features and games. In order to play in the new ladder season after the reset you will need to make new ladder characters.

This thread will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

[Taem]

Wow, back from vacation and still no patch. I hope that's a good thing.

[Hammerskjold]

That official possible target date was way too optimistic, even by bliz standard. End of april...:P

My bet is at the very best nothing goes off without a hitch, start of summer. Specifically, end of school for most students.

So possibly 1-2 more weeks, at the time of this writing. But that's nothing more than open speculation at this point.

The safest bet, is it will be released when bliz deems it 'done'. Nothing we haven't heard before. Maybe a simultaneous release with D3 rollout. Which should be coming real soon. :P

[Taem]

Update - 9/2

Work commences on patch 1.13. We won't be providing any information on when the patch will be available, except that we expect the PTR to be available "soon". We will provide some amount of warning very, very shortly before the PTRs become available. Please keep in mind that any number of factors could delay the start of the PTR and ultimate release of the patch. Thanks for being patient, we're getting close now.

[ Post edited by Bashiok ]