Trouble with Tribbles

[WarBlade]

There are odd spots in this game where the competition is just a little too insane. I've found this quite a bit in Act 5 where I'll run a character quite happily until meeting some new threat and suddenly BLAM! It's like Nihlathak and his old corpse explosions all over again.

This time I had something impossible.

A pack of Tree Hulk champs in the Spider Forest started hammering on my Paladin and his merc. After the merc died a couple of times and the pack had been separated and whittled down, I got in a little spot of bother. A Tree Stump had managed to close to melee range and while pretty much fully Frenzied managed to lock the Paladin into hit recovery . . . again and again and again. I could do nothing. I couldn't actually move the character at all. He was completely stuck while this thing whomped him into the afterlife. :(

This was a shieldless maul charger BTW.

(sigh)

Other freakish things I've seen in the game is the poison tossing snakes that appeared in the Halls of Vaught. Blasted my heavily overleveled Elemental Druid apart in the space of a second. should'verescuedstinkingfairiesinthehighlandsgrumblegrumble <_<
Gloams in the Worldstone Keep and Harpie packs on the Throne level warrant a "Beware of the Cold-blooded Murderer" sign on the front gate. :(

It's a strange irony that limits the Ancients to pixie status and yet grants 2 or 3 hit kill capabilities to every third monster on selected levels.

[TaiDaishar]

A Tree Stump had managed to close to melee range and while pretty much fully Frenzied managed to lock the Paladin into hit recovery

I remember when playing with a paladin in the ice caves, a while ago, I had to get my recovery up or be smashed by the yeti in the ice caves (played in the caves almost exclusively) so it's not that new about the stunning monsters (yeti, trees and Urder(sp?) being quite a difficulty, especially with paladin and werewolf.

Just another question though... what was the difficulty you were playing in and what was your life?

[WarBlade]

Nightmare 592
And the first person to suggest I "pump vit" gets an old trout. Vitality is this character's highest attribute and he has several items that grant life bonuses. :(

[TaiDaishar]

Nightmare 592

GASP! So little? By the way, did you have FHR gear? I recon that no FHR can be lethal against these kinds while a little (10-30%) will make it survivable most of the times but still not much easier.

By the way, it's the paladin right?

Oh and here's another suggestion, find a gray armor/helm and socket them with rubies (if you are in hell gathering up enough normals for perfect rubies shouldn't take too much time, not too short as well though)

[WarBlade]

GASP! So little? By the way, did you have FHR gear?

Don't know, but I took him back to Act 2 for some leveling instead and the first charm that dropped was FHR, which disappeared into the inventory pretty quick.

And yes, it was a Paladin.

[Pren]

Speaking of ridiculous damage, we know that inferno and lightning are way, way too damaging from gloam class and balrog class monsters. Mephisto's lightning is super lethal, but his frozen orb does jack. Diablo's lightning does less than a regular venom lord.

But, do we know why this is?

Lighhtning and inferno are both damage per frame skill. Was something changed by the patch? I remember a long time ago, -mde was reduced in effectiveness, I can't remember how, but while it certainly helps in 1.10, it doesn't do enough to make those two attacks anything less than ridiciulous.

[Rataxes]

I don't find the lightning from Gloams particularly dangerous at all, maybe because I made sure to maximize Light Res no matter the cost, but I don't feel their damage has been upgraded anywhere near as much as Arctic Blast and Inferno, those fudge me up in seconds if I get to close to a pack of Venom lords or Frozen creepers, and that is with maxed maxed Fire res and nearly maxed Cold res as well.

[AssA]

We're getting a bit of topic here, but anyway, those Gloams in act 5 hell do over 100 damage with 75 Lit resist, which really hurts when there's more than 2 shooting at you. Mephisto's lightning is a bit insane, doing 150 damage with 75 Resist on normal difficulty.

As for you Paladin, hit 'n run attack such as charge should work wonders. Also, FHR and ways to slow your opponents attack speed down should help quite a bit. Get some cold damage going on charms, or put some points into Holy Freeze (A merc, maybe). (Charms might not be the ultimate solution, since if they hit you first you're still screwed :P )

Also, cheesy Slow Target gear will help.

[WarBlade]

As for you Paladin, hit 'n run attack such as charge should work wonders.

He is a Charger. His only Combat Skills are 1 point in Smite and 20 in Charge.
Unfortunately Charge works a little different now and carries a nasty bug that can leave Chargers running on the spot for a couple of seconds, unable to move. Whether it was that or Mana loss that allowed the Tree Hulk to close the distance, I don't recall. Whatever the reason, once it did, then there was no escape. :(

[IlleglWpns]

Has anyone else noticed that charge speed seems to have increased? I mean it was fast before, but it is scarily fast now. Pretty cool actually.

[WarBlade]

Yes indeed. Better still, that stupid "dudududuh" Six Million Dollar man noise has gone. :D

Charge is amazingly buggy in the beta though. Repeat charging leaves the poor sap running on the spot while Tree Hulks are barreling in for a hammering session. There's another oddity too that may be nothing more than an optical illusion, but sometimes within a certain weapon range I could swear he 'blinks' through a centimetre or two of screen rather than actually running through it.

Probably just an optical illusion . . . :unsure:

[IlleglWpns]

Yes the charge bug is irritating. You don't even have to use charge lock for it to occur. I seem to recall it happening in an earlier build though, maybe it's because the beta isn't based on 1.09?

[WarBlade]

It can happen in 1.09, but the circumstances that cause it in that version don't occur enough to be a problem.

[AssA]

To avoid getting stuck when charging, don't hold the mouse button down. Instead, click, and after you've hit, click again. That seems to work for me.

[Mavfin]

Hey, that sounds like things that happened in D1 if you used no strategy and expected to kill everything easily, and things didn't work out like you thought. Stun-lock until dead with a shieldless character. Hm.

Warblade, did you really *have* to start another 'what's wrong with this patch thread', when your other one was perfectly active and could have been bumped to the top with this post? It was your paladin after all....

Edit: I see the reply, and that's fine. Just remember that the day I log on here and see a whole screenful of new threads about what's wrong with the patch is the day 90% of them disappear. It's not that you have problems with it. I understand that. It's the fact that everyone and their dog thinks their problem is enough different to warrant a new thread for it.

[WarBlade]

It's a completely different subject.

The Paladin rant was about problems encountered, mostly in the Synergy structuring being somewhat incomplete, due to an apparent lack of planning and foresight in some areas.

This thread is about monster problems in the area that certain combinations of monster abilities are still ridiculous to play against eg. 1.09 Stygian Dolls in high player count games. The fact that a Paladin was involved is incidental. It could just as easily have been a melee Sorceress or PD Necro or any number of moderate vitality frontline builds.

To re-state the case presented, since you've apparently mistaken the message entirely <_< , the new Tree Hulk problem results from an excessively high damage output on a skill that now has them dishing out attacks at a rate that can't be compensated for by a number of builds.

And other monsters exhibit similar annoyance value fast kill elements too.

Do you understand yet? :huh: