Diablo II 1.10 Beta Test begins

[Korror]

Does anyone know whether multiple teeth can hit a single monster now?  If so teeth would be stiff competition for CB.

As of a few minutes ago, I can guarantee that each monster can be only hit by one tooth in each teeth casting.

Anyone else notice that all your skeletons (and maybe minions?) die when you level up? This seems like a bug to me.

Korror

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

Have you noticed if Revive are dying if you get too far away from them? I know that in 1.09 I often had the problem of minions not teleporting to catch up with me and simply disappearing, instead. However, now I haven't had that happen once on my Druid minions and I was wondering if it was the same for everyone.

Alas, yes. Getting too much distance from your army tends to have you drop numbers in a hella hurry. That remains unchanged.

However, the Iron Maiden/Blood Golem bug/feature is gone. Much to my dismay, upon casting him into a nasty Boss grouping and hitting said Curse. Nasty asty asty.

[WarBlade]

Edit:  btw... Pit Vipers groups and their Bone Spears are now the official Scariest Sonsabitches in the game, bar none.  Yeeeeeesh.

I dunno. It seems there are such a wild array of weird combos odd ones out, that it's very dificult to pick "the scariest". I'd say it still varies by character and character defenses.

For some comparative examples . . .
1.) In the Spider Cavern I ran up against some maggots, got poisoned, shrugged it off, no problemo. I ran up against some poisonous spiders, got poisoned, figured I'd shrug it off, didn't, ran like snot instead.

2.) Paladin in Act 5 Hell got hit by Bone Spears and barely flinched, then got hit by charging Undead whacking his life to near-half in single hits, another Paladin in Hell Worldstone Keep with 30 MDR and 75% Lightning Resist lost 400-500 life in about three or four Lightning hits from what I imagine would be Gloams.

I'd say this patch has even more erratic behaviour than LoD 1.09 did, relative to numerous variables. One moment you're fine, the next you're legging it back to town in blind panic. :unsure:

[Nicodemus Phaulkon]

I ran afoul of a boss group of Gloams, myself. Not pretty, and with 90% resist lightning it wasn't doing much for my life orb, which was flushing like a toilet.

My newest PITA award goes to Blood Lords, however. Physical Immune by nature, which doesn't stop them from being DAMNED fast and still having that lovely Frenzy ability. I used to be able to hold my ground against Frenzytaurs... this is another kettle of Minos altogether.

My newest pet peeve: Swarming. The act when moving two steps has the ability to set off sufficient monsters that you find yourself completely surrounded (and in blocklock, most likely), such that even 30% faster run/walk is insufficient to get away. Nasty asty asty.

Edit: I am NOT convinced that Crushing Blow is kicking in. Can someone pop that section of the MPQ and find out if there are diminished effects in Nightmare and Hell?

[Brista]

Sorry Nico I didn't see anything on Crushing Blow in difficultylevels.txt

I did see numbers on gambling

Rare: 10 000
Set: 50
Unique: 20

Now, I'm rather assuming that the higher the number the more probable and that the figures directly correlate

If I may also assume that 1 in 10 gambles is a rare (just a ball-park figure we've felt to be true in the past) that gives:

Rare: 10%
Set: 0.05%
Unique: 0.02%

That's about 25 000 bone helms you have to gamble with a level 60 character to get a Gaze if true

Or 2000 leather gloves to get a Death's Hand

Now if I'm interpreting those columns correctly (gamblerare, gambleset and gambleunique at the end of difficultylevel.txt) that seems to me that gambling for sets and uniques still isn't really viable - just because it would take so long

[WarBlade]

Edit:  I am NOT convinced that Crushing Blow is kicking in.  Can someone pop that section of the MPQ and find out if there are diminished effects in Nightmare and Hell?

I'm almost certain Crushing Blow is working, but I'm also %100 certain it's not doing a hell of a lot. I wonder if it has been reduced from the percentage that it used to be. :unsure:

[TabithaWolf]

1) I noticed that the level 1 damage for Plague Javelin hasn't been changed.  In other words, it still sucks.

Level 1 plague javelin may still suck, but I got mine up to ~25 (20 base, +4 from titans, +1 bul-kathos wedding band), and it was at 3648 minimum damage, over 12.2 seconds. Thats 299 damage per second. It actually killed things in hell (granted, they were just fallens, but I was having trouble hacking in the same gear my realm java wears and wasn't brave enough to go into act 5).

I am surprised they increased the duration so much. It was high before LoD, but it was reduced to improve frame rates and the damage beefed up to compensate.

I think my ancient tank java will be the only character I *won't* have to remake.

[Vash]

Something I don't understand....isn't an increased duration WORSE? Doesn't it mean that PJ is dealing less damage per unit time?

[lemekim]

From what I have seen, with each level of plague javelin the duration increases and the damage per second increases. So you do't have to worry about damage per second getting smaller with increased duration; it increases as well =) The overall damage grows exponentially however (if I am not mistaken, at level 40 it's equivalent to 55,000 damage over 18 seconds.)

[WarBlade]

Poison Dagger pulls much the same stunt with a Duration getting up to around the 10 second mark when maxed.

Poison Explosion also increases duration per level - another minimal increase.

Poison Nova Retains its 2 second duration

Venom . . . eep . . . 196 second duration on a sLvl 20 skill in Nightmare. :blink: - apparently not though

re-edit edit: :blink: :lol: ermm . . . don't mind me just stuffed it and got Venom wrong. Read on. :D

[Dagni]

Umm, Venom's 196 second duration should be how long until you need to recast Venom (ala Fade or BoS). From the mpq, it looks like Venom has a fixed 0.4 sec poison duration. But it should do I think 425-445 damage in those 10 frames at slvl 20.

- Dagni

[lemekim]

Poison Dagger pulls much the same stunt with a Duration getting up to around the 10 second mark when maxed.

Poison Explosion also increases duration per level - another minimal increase.

Poison Nova Retains its 2 second duration

Venom  . . . eep . . . 196 second duration on a sLvl 20 skill in Nightmare. :blink:

Really? From what I'm seeing on my test assassin, at lvl 40 its about 1k damage over 0.4 seconds =) This might be some bugs in the skills however; I have noticed that sometimes when I use blade fury, I cast frozen orb with charged bolts... Sigh.

[WarBlade]

Ahhh that'll be it.

Oops. My bad.

Ok, so Venom was 2 seconds, is now 0.4 . . . bugger :(

[lemekim]

And it seems the poison damage calculation was changed; if I use a weapon with 200 poison over 5 seconds, the poison duration does not get set to 5 seconds as before, it pretty much stays the same... Strange.

Also, have anyone able to create some tempered items using the tal (or ral) + jewel + superior weapon/armor cube recipe? Or am I simply trying the wrong one =O

[Dagni]

Fought Duriel in Normal. Ouch! Ouch!

He has Holy Freeze, so he's doing a little damage from that. With a Half Freeze time item, and Duriel in Normal probably having a low level HF, I was occasionally - while running away crying "Mommy" - able to unfreeze if he stopped to attack me, before he started chasing again. Most likely in Hell his aura would cover the entire room.

But that's just incidental to his major hurt. You know you're in trouble when you start wishing Duriel was charging you :o After his charge he would do a Jab or Double Swing or something, so he would do two quick consecutive hits that would HURT! I had 310 life (and no AC at all), and the charge was doing maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of my life, and each 'Jab' hit maybe 1/6 or 1/8, so I just could not even close to stand there and tank him without rejuv pots. I've made very similar builds recently in 1.09, and I could tank Duriel with these characters without too much problem - at least until my heal pots ran out, which didn't take very long. But now Duriel was doing damage waay too fast for heal pots to help.

So far, I've yet to see a non-rare drop (other than gems, etc) from an Act Boss. Four rares from Andy, three from Duriel. I imagine that that's not the case if you've already killed them, and I'm sure it is possible to get set/unique items, but has anyone gotten a blue item from an Act Boss being killed the first time? I expect that the chance for a rare (if not set/unique) is 100%.

- Dagni

[kandrathe]

I took my "Ice Princess", lvl 92 sorc against Hell Baal. First, getting there was interesting. Almost all the monsters were new to the Worldstone keep. Much poison, bone spear, and Baal hassles you on every level now. Oh, and joy, on WSK Lvl 2, Fetishs. I'm not missing the Demon Imps though, either.

Going against Baal's minions revealed a couple points of interest. After the first wave, Baal did not pop all the corpses in the throne room. When Achmel The Cursed and his unravellers in the 2nd wave appeared they ressurected the fallen shamen from the first wave and the Doom Knights, and other monsters that were still corpses in the throne room. Until I knocked off all the unravellers, it was chaos, and at one point I'm sure I was fighting off 30+ monsters.

Lister was Fire, Cold Immune, so I used static to get his to 1/2 life, but after that he regenerated faster than I could kill him. He was the only one I couldn't kill. And, this was players 1.

Baal has some new tricks. He teleports to you, rather than just aimlessly, and his fire "drill" effect is much bigger.

All in all, considering just how strong that sorceress is, I found the Hell Baal quest extremely hard in comparison to how it used to be. Baal dropped 4 rares, and 2 magics.

[Maral]

I think the new patch hits the sorceress the most. At least, the biggest problem I've had so far was with my lvl 81 hydra sorc. And it was in Act1 Hell. That girl was breezing through the whole game on "players 8" before this patch and now she's incapable of doing a simple countess run! Did I got scared? As hell - since she almost got killed I didn't even consider sending her to Act5. I guess it's time for me to try this out...

Update: I took her for a walk in the WK and I must say it was quite fun. It wasn't easy but it was just so hard that I had to use all my skills to survive and move on. Alas when I reached the Throne of Desruction everything changed for the worse.

First I stumbled upon a succub boss that killed poor Hrothgar in a glance (I think after a while he got used to it). The demon was fire and cold immune and I have no high level lightning skills so I had to park her.

Proceeded to the big bosses before Baal. The second pack took me a while. The fourth took even more. I struggled at least an hour before Lister spawned. His mods were nothing special BUT... I simply couldn't kill him :( . My primary skill is 27lvl Hydra (supported by 28lvl Mastery), and all Minions of Destruction are immune to fire. As support skills I use lvl 28 Glacial Spike with lvl10 Mastery and lvl 9 blizzard. The Minions of Destruction I took one by one. And if it wasn't Hrothgar I'd still be fighting them :( . The reason - lvl 28 GS does nothing to them - they heal faster then I do damage. Even if I combine it with Blizzard and Thunderstorm nothing really happens to them. So it took tons of mana potions and quite some time and I, correction, Hrothgar, killed the minions. As for Lister - he's probably still there waiting for that nice little sorc to come again and tickle him with her magic.

Finally I came to the big boss and I must say I expected more of him. After such a bad trip I thougth it'll take me hours or might even be impossible to beat him. Well it wasn't. Took me around 7-8 minutes to dispatch him. He dropped this. I think it could have been worse. Considering I lost more than 500k gold to ressurect my merc it's just puny.

[Kevin]

Got a Treads of Cthon (unique chain) from Duriel in a 2 real players, players 5 game on normal. We were both 25 when we offed him since we had been full clearing the game in players 5 from the get go.

I think one of the Hsarus' Iron Stays (the set belt) came from Andy. That belt is bugged by the way. My wife and I posted about it on the B.net bug forums, let me see if I can dig that up and just link it. Yeah, it's here if you want to read it. http://www.battle.net/forums/thread.aspx?F...ount=2#post1594 I think it is just a display bug. Treesh has worn the belt more than I have so I still haven't seen the oddities quite as much but I have turned and looked at her screen a few times and worn the other one we found as well.

[WarBlade]

That is by far going to be the most heavily reported bug of the beta. Blizzard people are probably sick of it already, but one wonders why, if it's so obvious, they failed to catch it?

- This bug happens with Life, Mana and Stamina.
- Any item adding large amounts of these equipped on the character (don't know about stamina charms) will highlight it.
- The results are even worse using Tal Rasha's Horadric Crest on a meleer(+60 Life, +30 Mana).
- I watched an Assassin's Stamina bar flickering back and forth at a rate of a full cycle every two seconds earlier tonight. It was so annoying I abandoned her for testing purposes (but not before working around the distraction to mis-read a Venom entry) :unsure:

[Ruvanal]

Fought Duriel in Normal. Ouch! Ouch!

He has Holy Freeze, so he's doing a little damage from that. With a Half Freeze time item, and Duriel in Normal probably having a low level HF, I was occasionally - while running away crying "Mommy" - able to unfreeze if he stopped to attack me, before he started chasing again. Most likely in Hell his aura would cover the entire room.

Decide to take a look at teh slugs stats. Surprised that you could even manage to run away from him in the first place. A characters base walk/run values are 6/9 while Duriels are 10/15.

But that's just incidental to his major hurt. You know you're in trouble when you start wishing Duriel was charging you  After his charge he would do a Jab or Double Swing or something, so he would do two quick consecutive hits that would HURT! I had 310 life (and no AC at all), and the charge was doing maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of my life, and each 'Jab' hit maybe 1/6 or 1/8, so I just could not even close to stand there and tank him without rejuv pots. I've made very similar builds recently in 1.09, and I could tank Duriel with these characters without too much problem - at least until my heal pots ran out, which didn't take very long. But now Duriel was doing damage waay too fast for heal pots to help.

In normal his skills are
Charge level 5
Jab level 15
Smite level 7
Holy Freeze level 1
+3 level s at NM and +7 levels at Hell.

Resistances norm/nm/hell
Damage 0/0/50
magic 0/0/33
fire 20/50/75
ltng 20/50/75
cold 50/75/95
pois 20/50/75
blocking 0/25/50
HP 3995/55799/61162(non-ladder) or 81546(ladder); not sure which of these two values will be used in SP mode, probably the ladder value.
damage in normal only and only the base amounts without skills
A1 attack 19.6-25.2
A2 attack 19.6-25.2 +100% chance of 15 frame stun.
Rather messy to dig this out by hand. I see part of why the AS site was not taking time right away to try to list monster stats. But it would not be to bad to set up a data base program to crunch a lot of this out.

So far, I've yet to see a non-rare drop (other than gems, etc) from an Act Boss. Four rares from Andy, three from Duriel. I imagine that that's not the case if you've already killed them, and I'm sure it is possible to get set/unique items, but has anyone gotten a blue item from an Act Boss being killed the first time? I expect that the chance for a rare (if not set/unique) is 100%.

From the look of it the monsters with a boss=1 are the ones that will not be getting the magic find applied to them. The quest TCs for the act end bosses have very high chance checks for uniques and sets and then a 100% chance of rare checks (providing the item can be rare).

Lemekin:

Also, have anyone able to create some tempered items using the tal (or ral) + jewel + superior weapon/armor cube recipe? Or am I simply trying the wrong one =O

The tempered formulas are not enabled and are incomplete also. They would nothing very useful in their current set up if they were enabled.