uberdrops?

[Feryar]

Hi,

I recently started playing D2 again, after over a years break,
and earlier today my amazon killed offed Duriel (after killing off
all of the available mercs :) sorry about that Jarulf ;) )

I'm 100% sure that earlier, when killing off an act boss for the
first time, you would get a special drop, like a rare or a unique,
but I didn't get one :angry: , is this some kind of bug or
did they just take that out of the game?

I'm plaing vanilla D2 btw, no expansion pack.


Oh, and I looked at the ladders, just for kicks, did they make
it easier to reach lvl 99, or is it just that people spend more
time playing the expansion than they did in normal D2?

-Feryar

[Elric of Grans]

Hail Feryar,

It *must* have been a long time since you last played! Uberdrops are no longer a first-time kick: now every time you kill an Act Boss, you get a big drop. Duriel is the exception (kinda), and sucks most of the time: they somehow messed him up bigtime.

clvl99? Weak as there: anyone can do it very easily, if they put in the time. I've heared of 40 hours straight playing to reach clvl99 - there may be faster than that.

[Az3ar]

WTF (sorry about the expression but thats the only one on my face in the moment) 40 hours for lvl 99?! it took me 3 monthes to get my barb to lvl 99, how many cow runs did they do damnit?!

[WarBlade]

They got rushed. They just tag along while a few friends do the killing basically just riding the coat tails.

As for the drops, all Act Bosses do the same strength of drop every time, which can work out to be from nothing to several nice items. Duriel as already mentioned is most likely to get a no-drop. Baal can yield a no-drop effect sometimes if killed adjacent to a wall (a bug apparently) and Andariel still seems to love toying with her pretty rocks. Duriel usually pops a Town Portal Scroll in an effort to address the no way out issue too.

[Feryar]

Yeah, it's a long time indeed. When I think about it, it might be as
much as two years :) I think I remember seeing your name here back then,
though, Elric. You've changed your sig IIRC.

I was always more into D1, but with blizzard killing off the DSF and stuff
I figured I'd give D2 another shot.
First game I joined instead of creating a passworded one for
myself, some hobo goes hostile because I didn't feel like
allying with someone 10 levels higher than me :unsure:

My faith was restored earlier today though, when some nice people
got me past that boring act 3 jungle crawl and even helped
me kill Diablo. I figured I'd be levelling in nightmare diff
right now, but I obviously forgot to talk to someone in town
or something, because I didn't get the quest :(

What's up with bosses dropping same stuff every time you
kill them btw? Kinda removes the whole thrill of doing it the
first time. Methinks the people who helped me must have thought
I was pretty damn dense when I told them they could have my
uberdrop if they just could help me past act 3 :D

It's still possible to gamble uniques, right? or did they change
that as well? God knows I've wasted a lot of money if they did.


(thx for telling me btw :) )




(edit: teh typos haunt me!!)

[Elric of Grans]

Hail Feryar,

Aye, sig's changed: I used to have an animation, but when I found it ate about two Gig bandwidth a month, I removed it. Hey, it's not my fault I'm popular :P *ducks*

Didn't get recognition for Diablo? You have to be near here when he dies to get it: if you're not, you'll get nothing (except maybe the drop, if the others happened to leave it). Drops are not the SAME, but they are always BIG: there are many people who do little more than run Mephisto in hopes of good drops. As for gambling, IIRC it's a 1:100000 chance of a Set item and a 1:1000000 chance of a Unique (I'm not kidding here). Good luck gambling what you are after ;)

[Feryar]

damn.. I remember actually being able to gamble for that tarnhelm.
With those odds that's not an option anymore then :)

Maybe I'll just reinstall, patch down to 1.04 and play offline then...

[EvilTeletubby]

http://www.diabloii.net/strategy/x-article...ip-dancer.shtml

Full info there, took them about 38.7 hours for a 99.

And yes, I miss Über drops too. ;)

[Thecla]

My faith was restored earlier today though, when some nice people
got me past that boring act 3 jungle crawl and even helped
me kill Diablo. I figured I'd be levelling in nightmare diff
right now, but I obviously forgot to talk to someone in town
or something, because I didn't get the quest

Well, it could have been because you weren't close enough, but another reason you might not get the quest is because whoever created the game had already killed Diablo.

I manage to do this all the time. Just the other day, I was rushing an old lvl 10 sorc (my only char on a separate account that I haven't used in a long time -- curiously she survived Bliz's recent extermination of unused accounts, while a more recently used Matriach on another account went PNF, finally to be restored, after a couple of months of e-mailing Bliz, with a silly "_A" on the end of her name) so that I could activate the account for hardcore in the event that 1.10 ever arrives.

I joined some public games, and found someone to party with: after finishing off Andy in Act I, I brought in a high lvl character to get the staff and cube in Act II for my companion, and take out Duriel, then rejoined with my sorc to talk to TalRasha and get the quest. Then we went to Durance with my high lvl char and took down Meph to 1/4 life. I rejoined with my sorc and we finished off meph from a distance (my lvl 10 sorc using a lvl 1 charged bolt, and my lvl 15 barbarian compatriot using a bow; it took a while). He had to go, so I joined another game, with an amazon, who was slightly suspicious of my lvl 10 sorc in Act IV. I ran around the outer steps trying to kill off the odd doom-knight minion/boss with my lvl 1 static field and ice bolt (it would have been easier if I hadn't used up all my mana pots killing meph, so I had to keep portaling back to Jamela to refill my mana ball). Then I offered to clear out the CS with my high lvl zon if I could come back in with my sorc at the end to kill Diablo, which was agreed. So I cleared out the CS, killed off the seal bosses, and rejoined with my lvl 10 sorc to kill D. We opened the last seal. It was me, a lvl 26 zon and a lvl 20 barb (who had joined subsequently). They were having a bit of a hard time with it. I sneaked up behind D and static'd him down to about 1/5 life with a few deaths (I don't think the others really understood what a contribution I was making to the effort, in comparison with their puny attempts at damaging D); the worst part was that one flame ring almost -- but not quite -- killed me, so it was hard to sneak up without going near to death. Then they finished him off. That's when I realized the 'zon, who had started the public game, had already killed Diablo...

I even do it to myself. After starting a game to mule over some hc item, I figured I would go after normal/Baal with my hc necro, and get him his Destroyer title (he'd done the ancients). So I worked my way through the keep, and the throne, and Baal's minions, and Baal, only to realize that I had created the game with a character that had already killed Baal...

Anyway, the moral is if you're trying to complete a quest in someone else's game, always check that you can when you join the game.

[Feryar]

Yeah, I know all this stuff :)

Strange thing is, I hooked up with the guys when they were killing
off mephisto, which was in a game they had created, so I asked them
if I could create the next one. I did, they killed off meph while I was
dodging CBs, and we went to Act 4. In that same game they killed off
diablo while I was in the CS. He was off screen though, but still....
I came out of a portal 4-5 secs before he died, I guess that must be
the only good explanation. I had a lot of out-of-sync monsters during
the whole run, so maybe I wasn't really where I thought I was.

Anyway, he is dead now :D


On a side note, did Blizzard make it possible to export characters
from the realms to open? It kinda sucks having to log on every
90 days just too keep my characters. That cost me my old account,
since I was without internetconn for a whole year. I've read the
text file that came with the latest patch, but they obviously didn't
write everything they've changed there.

[Occhidiangela]

That is Blizzard's way now. If you don't refresh every 90 days, at the least, they all retire and join the drunks at Atma's tavern, telling stories about the Stone Skin MSLEB that . . .

[Ruvanal]

... In that same game they killed off
diablo while I was in the CS. He was off screen though, but still....
I came out of a portal 4-5 secs before he died, I guess that must be
the only good explanation. I had a lot of out-of-sync monsters during
the whole run, so maybe I wasn't really where I thought I was.

You were too far away.

I did a post on what I best understand of the Diablo quest 'mechanics' at diabloii.net recently. Here is a copy of it. Some around here may have a few refinements for it.

By talking to Tyreal in a game that has not had the A4Q3 completed, but has already activated the quest, will cause the the red portal to open if the player talking is eligible to go to act 5. This will complete the quest for that game (stopping any other players from completing it). This will not happen if thequest has not started or the player talking to Tyreal has not completed that quest. Due to the amount of damage that is usually flying around in the Chaos Sanctuary, I will generally not bother with trying to keep my mercs around while doing this quest for credit as they will generaly just die again very quickly (Diablo does x2 damage to mercs with all attacks, while all of the mercs damage vs. Diablo in hell is reduced to 1/4).

To make Diablo appear the five seals must be opened and the the three seal bosses need to be killed. When that is done, the rest of the monsters should die and the sequence to spawn Diablo will be started (the invisible 'death wave' is actually a part of the Diablo spawning sequence).

Now things get different.

A) if the player that lands the killing blow on Diablo HAS NOT earned the credit for this quest yet, then the following.
- Any players that are partied with that player and are in the Chaos Sanctuary (not sure if range will apply here, see case B) will get credit if they have not recieved it yet.
- Any players that are partied with that player and are in The Pandemonium Fortress will get credit for the quest.

B) if the player that lands the killing blow on Diablo HAS already earned the credit for completing the quest, then the following.
- Any players that are partied with that player will recieve credit if they are alive and within about one screen of Diablo when he dies (being able to see the full death animation is a good rule of thumb, not just the edge of the animation).
- Any players that are partied with that player and only have their corpse in the game will recieve the credit if the corpse is within the one screen distance (same as the earlier case). This of course is not a viable option in Hard Core.

The differences in A and B is why sometimes players can get credit while just standing around the Fortress, i.e. who ended up landing the final blow.


A side note for those that think that there should be a level requirement for defeating the act bosses and such. I disagree, that is too can be too arbitrary and is a poor kludge. Just change the act boss quest system so that if a player has already completed that quest lands the killing blow, no one gets credit. This would stop 'rushing' dead in its tracks.

edit: disabled the emoticons.

[WarBlade]

A side note for those that think that there should be a level requirement for defeating the act bosses and such.  I disagree, that is too can be too arbitrary and is a poor kludge.  Just change the act boss quest system so that if a player has already completed that quest lands the killing blow, no one gets credit.  This would stop 'rushing' dead in its tracks.

No it wouldn't. A known side of Diablo's AI is his tendancy to hunt more powerful characters. Bearing that in mind, I'm left imagining a situation were a rusher simply slaps D down to a sliver then continues to draw fire while a 'rushee' tries for a ranged attack killing blow.

If one were to slap a quest invalidation function on a Slayer, Patriarch, Destroyer etc. merely doing damage (or cursing or having an aura radius pass over Diablo's location at any point), I'd be inclined to agree. Unfortunately such ideas also give rise to an issue of where to stick the threshold - I personally feel that similarly leveled characters should have the opportunity to lend assistance to friends. To that end I'd say allow people to backtrack for boss kills either one or two acts, but no more.

[Ruvanal]

No it wouldn't. A known side of Diablo's AI is his tendancy to hunt more powerful characters. Bearing that in mind, I'm left imagining a situation were a rusher simply slaps D down to a sliver then continues to draw fire while a 'rushee' tries for a ranged attack killing blow.

That does not match any of my experience with Diablo. Having helped get a friends mules past Diablo several times, I would not even attribute anything like that to his AI. On several occassions he would just go after a target and ignore my higher level character no mater what I did to try to distract him from his 'objective'. His AI at times seems to be to pick a target (not neccessarily the closest) and dog it for a while in spite of any distractions or who is doing the most damage. The only time that I have seen that would gaurentee that a target would be picked is if it was the only target in the AI 'visual range'.

Would this stop all efforts to get some characters 'rushed'? No. But it would greatly hamper doing so. It would require some intelligent and co-operative play among those involved to carry it out. And that is something that I do not see from the mass ranks of players out there (the majority of the LL and AB players do not fall in this catagory). I can't imagine most of the players knowing how to effectively 'hit' Diablo without problems from the clvl-mlvl factor in the to-hit calculations. Even if some do know how to go around this, they would probably have to keep making the new characters just for this. Remember that most the 'rushees' have problems if some does not just give them items to get started and are constantly begging for free help because they do not know how to get items for themselves (i.e. pick it up off the ground). Make the the help giving process more difficult and most of that will go away (the help is usually coming from a previous 'rushee').

[Thecla]

Would this stop all efforts to get some characters 'rushed'? No. But it would greatly hamper doing so. It would require some intelligent and co-operative play among those involved to carry it out. And that is something that I do not see from the mass ranks of players out there.

Well, it would certainly slow down rushing, but my guess is the mass ranks of players would catch on pretty quickly if it came to rushing. (Who knows, maybe Maphack would add some new rushing "features" in addition to all those other great labor saving improvements it has that Bliz mysteriously forgot to include in the game ;) .)

Actually, I don't think it would be such a good thing to completely prevent rushing, giving waypoints etc. There are often reasons someone wants to do that, and the game sometimes does feel like too much of a linear waypoint/quest treadmill when you go through it on your own. Where I think the game really could use a different system (don't ask me what though) is in the way experience points are allocated and shared. If xp leeching weren't possible the way it is now, the odd lvl 1 character in Hell/Act V wouldn't matter at all.