Those "uber 1337 haxxors" finally get the chop

[TaMeOlta]

Not to mention the fact that it is the opinion of many that any Druid with a bow or crossbow should:

a) Not be able to shift at all, let alone melee attack with the weapon
or
B) Be able to shift, but fire arrows and bolts and not be able to use any of the shifted skills.

I presume you are aware of this 'bug'/feature however...

Edit: dangit, them thar smileys

Shhhhhh , Kyrene , don't make them take away my BuriBear ! :P

[Brista]

I think that bugs are only as serious as their impact on the game is large

The interaction between Pierce and certain other skills including Frozen Arrow and Lightning Fury is the dominant feature of public BNet play.

People make cow games and wait for the Amas

People leave cow games if no Amas turn up (quite often they do anyway)

If intended then a rebalance is needed, if unintended then a fix is needed

Compared to that then the Druid pierce bug described is insignificant. I have never even seen anyone exploit it. Druids using bows to melee with is also comparitively minor. The Buri is the main bow used and that is because it has 100% ias with a Shael which is very effective at speeding up this particular animation. It is very unusual for other bows to be used, particularly as druids do well with 3 categories of 2-handed weapons. And there are plenty of other strong druid weapons of similar rarity

[Walkiry]

I think that bugs are only as serious as their impact on the game is large

The interaction between Pierce and certain other skills including Frozen Arrow and Lightning Fury is the dominant feature of public BNet play.

People make cow games and wait for the Amas

People leave cow games if no Amas turn up (quite often they do anyway)

If intended then a rebalance is needed, if unintended then a fix is needed

It is intended, and it's been re-balanced. In the original release of the game, piercing would nullify those skills, as in the effect wouldn't go off if the arrow pierced the enemy. The chosen fix was for the effect to go off at every hit (instead of only the first hit and ignore piercing), and then re-balance, as the use of freezing + immolation arrow (without timers back then) would be absolutely sickening.

Then LOD came along and made it possible to have items with incredible damage and high piercing work at the same time (100% piercing buriza, titan's revenge and other magical and refillable high damage javelins and so on), and down the drain all the balance went.

[Roland]

My understanding is the latest NO-CD bypass does not change the original .exe it just loads an alternative .exe into memory or else patches the memory resident original .exe image. Even if some validation checks could not be bypassed they would still see the original .exe (on the hard disk) as untampered with :(

I don't keep up with hacker / cheater / piracy news. I just get wind of it every now and then. Last I heard, it used a modified .exe file. Guess they finally got beyond that, huh? Ah well. Pity, that.

[Roland]

Diablo II Classic had two beautiful 100% piercing bows: Stormstrike, and Doomslinger. They were both a FAVORITE among Mageazons, before they got wiped out by horrible balancing decisions with 1.07 and LoD. And no, it was NOT overpowered, anymore than using Freezing Arrow / Immolation Arrow + Pierce (the skill) was overpowered. And besides, you had to bend all your gear towards attaining high mana, and high mana regeneration, just to support it, otherwise you were only good for one or two shots, at most.

I admit, LoD broke D2 in alot of ways, but there WERE 100% pierce items out before LoD, and they caused no problems. It was more than just the introduction of such items. It was ALOT of other factors, as well.

[Ice]

Been a long time so could be mistaken but were the 100% piercing causing overpoweredness in sorcs? Think piercing charged bolts and fireballs as mild examples... though that's a completely separate bug which (unfortunately) got fixed.

[Occhidiangela]

Any argument based in 'imbalances' in the cow level are, IMO, pointless.

The Cow Level is an easter egg. All that is needed to resolve it is to make it as it was in classic: One time shot.

Lightning Fury and Pierce are a great combination, but are only super powerul against bunched up groups of monsters, and against Single Monsters not all that great unless you use a wall to rebound a few bolts off of: that requires a bit of tactical manipulation of the terrain.

I say, leave LF alone, since its overpoweredness in Cows is irrelevant to a great deal of the game.

Now, if the 'fix' Pierce so that 'Pierce on Pierce all' goes away, that will probably put the combination into the 'just right and nearly perfect' category.

Darnit, just like my raspberry to the folks who whined about Lances for Jabbing Amazons in 1.05. How about we give the non-Bow amazon some room to work her, OK? :)

[Occhidiangela]

A melee attack with a bow strikes me as a gross iimplementation error. Not hard to make the attack skills turn red when a bow is equipped after change to wereform, just as throwing turns red if you have a sword equipped on a Paladin. :P Can you throw potions or cast Armageddon while in wereform? No! So, don't shoot the bow either.

The logic stands up.

[TaiDaishar]

Or maybe make that with bows the WB/WW forms will have a ranged attacked? Letting them keep their skills but with the ranged attack make it less powerful (the numbers aren't up to me to decide)...

About WHAT the ranged attack will be is kinda difficult since there's not much things a bear or wolf can throw at things without looking incredibly idiotic... of course they could maybe make some slight modifications to the WB/WW models to have something good for throwing.

[Jarulf]

For some real explanation about pierce and why it changed and so on, check out Isolde's post about it in the "How I believe GA and pierce should work..." thread. I think it might answer some questions :)

[aurikan]

Unfortunately, for your idea to be put into implementation, new art assets for the WB/WW would have to be created. The Blizzard folks probably haven't budgeted (much) artist time for the new patch. Personally, I'd agree: I'd rather see the bugs fixed and game made more open for modification than see a few new animations.

[Occhidiangela]

They already have a method to turn skill tabs red when a 'foul' arises. I don't think it is a matter of new art, it strikes me as a matter of code linkage that already exists to apply to other skills when _x_ condition is met.

No animation change needed on the char. It just preempts an attack in wereform when a bow is equipped, just as Elemental skill casting is pre-empted.

No art involved, as I see it.

[FenrisWulf]

Originally posted by Occhidiangela
Can you throw potions or cast Armageddon while in wereform? No! So, don't shoot the bow either.

Well, we don't exactly shoot the bow. :P More like...poke enemies with it. :D

Due to the fact that the capacity for Weredruids to use Bows/XBows as melee seems to be fairly well coded around (ie, we don't stand in place and try to attack enemies within bow range, instead moving into melee range; as far as I can tell from testing, we don't get any Explosive or Magic arrow effects, or even Piercing; we don't lose Bolts/Arrows when we attack), it looks to me to be more like a feature than an implementation error.

[aurikan]

My post was a reply to TaiDaishar's suggestion that Wereforms rear back and toss stuff and/or get ranged attack animations. I guess I'm too used to reading in threaded mode, as it isn't otherwise clear to whom my post responds. <_<

Edit: BTW, this is in response to Occhi 2 posts above :P

[Walkiry]

Diablo II Classic had two beautiful 100% piercing bows: Stormstrike, and Doomslinger. They were both a FAVORITE among Mageazons, before they got wiped out by horrible balancing decisions with 1.07 and LoD. And no, it was NOT overpowered, anymore than using Freezing Arrow / Immolation Arrow + Pierce (the skill) was overpowered. And besides, you had to bend all your gear towards attaining high mana, and high mana regeneration, just to support it, otherwise you were only good for one or two shots, at most.

Yes, of course, that's exactly what I was talking about. See, what's the damage of those bows? Low, minimum, negligible. When you were building a mageazon you geared towards mana and mana regeneration, and made big investments in Energy to support it, meaning low dexterity and so low damage from the bow. Also, reaching level 99 was no joke, so you had to settle for 60-70 skill points to distribute in your skills and that was it.

If you wanted a big damage bow you could not get 100% piercing, as you had to rely on your piercing skill and use a rare Gothic/Ballista. And you'd need quite an investment to get over 50-60%.

What happens when you have a 100% piercing bow with massive damage (like buriza) that stacks with the AoE of the freezing arrow?

Uh, yeah, that's exactly what happens.

[Roland]

I thought you were attributing solely the 100% piercing property as the cause of imbalance. My fault for misreading.

[Roland]

And yes, that was an issue. Although I never heard of a Piercing CB or FB Sorc. I did, on the other hand, see ALOT of Piercing Glacial Spike Sorcs. ;)

Good to see you're still around. BTW - You never did get back to me on that bit, re: hosting. ;)

[Walkiry]

And yes, that was an issue. Although I never heard of a Piercing CB or FB Sorc. I did, on the other hand, see ALOT of Piercing Glacial Spike Sorcs. ;)

Do you remember that at one point Cold Mastery was described as "making cold attacks piercing"? Piercing + Glacial Spike was amazing indeed.

[BlackLightning]

Wow!
Just a preliminary thing- Is this the thread with the most replies? It seems like the largest one I've seen!

Anyway,
I think Blizzard made the Sorceress masteries kind of strange. First, it says in some guides that LM (lightning mastery) reduces the mana cost, while in the actual game, it increases damage.
Also, CM (cold mastery) is said to reduce enemies resistance to cold, but doesn't affect anybody in duels (I think).

The Guided Arrow skill of the zon should be reduced in power and capacity, due to the large amounts of people who hate my friend when he goes to "palapk#" games with his amazon. I suppose a number of things need to be fixed with the patch, but with Blizzard's "Judgement Day", I'm pretty sure that they'll solve most of the problems. :D

[Roland]

Wow!
Just a preliminary thing- Is this the thread with the most replies? It seems like the largest one I've seen!

Maybe in the new forums, but certainly not ever. We've had topics that boasted three to four hundred replies. I don't think this one's broken 200 yet.

Anyway,
I think Blizzard made the Sorceress masteries kind of strange. First, it says in some guides that LM (lightning mastery) reduces the mana cost, while in the actual game, it increases damage.
Also, CM (cold mastery) is said to reduce enemies resistance to cold, but doesn't affect anybody in duels (I think).

1) Lightning Mastery, pre-LoD, reduced the mana cost of Lightning spells by a percentage. It worked in much the same way as Cold Mastery, in that as more points were put in, you got less return on it. Useful, but not worth a whole lot. Then again, Lightning skills back then weren't in much favor anyway, shy of Static Field. Still, I liked the old way of reducing mana cost. 'Twas quite helpful, since Lightning spells tended to be the most costly (alongside Cold spells).

2) No. Cold Mastery DOES work in PvP. Always has, to my knowledge. I don't know why you thought otherwise, but it does. The thing about it is that it does NOT work like Lower Resistance. Instead of taking a straight percentage deduction, it reduces the resistance by the percentage. Confused yet? Lower Resist at 70% gives -70% to your resistances. So, if you had 50% resistance, you would now have -20%. Cold Mastery, on the other hand, reduces it by a percentage in a mulitplicative way. Cold Mastery at 70% means you subtract 70% of your resistances, or in other words you only have 30% of your resistances. So, if you had 50% Cold resistance, 70% Cold Mastery would change this to (50% - [70% * 50%]), or 15%. Thus its effectiveness is actually DECREASED when the target has low resistances. And, thus, if your opponent has 0% Cold Resistance, your Cold Mastery has absolutely no effect. However, if they have high resistance, it can be quite beneficial.

The Guided Arrow skill of the zon should be reduced in power and capacity, due to the large amounts of people who hate my friend when he goes to "palapk#" games with his amazon. I suppose a number of things need to be fixed with the patch, but with Blizzard's "Judgement Day", I'm pretty sure that they'll solve most of the problems.&nbsp; :D

The skill itself is fine. There is no reason to change it, EXCEPT to eliminate the GA piercing bug. Other than that, the skill works as it is intended, and is not in any way overpowered.