A Call to Heroes!

[nobbie]

Great evil has returned to the world of Diablo 2. Will you answer the call to save Sanctuary?

Patch 1.11 is coming ...

Source: http://www.blizzard.com , News of July 29, 2005

[Baajikiil]

Source: http://www.blizzard.com , News of July 29, 2005
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Oh my. This looks nice. Perhaps the Lilith spawn and hopefully the Diablo clone spawn will not be keyed to the sale of dupes though. I only got a few cracks at the clone(and I took him down twice solo; warcry barb and WW barb FYI) I've been waiting patiently for a long time for a ladder reset, and any new uber monsters that they add would just be icing on the cake.

Now I just hope they didn't simply get my hopes up only to make me wait another 6 months before they released the patch and reset the ladder.

[DeeBye]

Which one is the real thread? You guys are messing with my mind.

[nobbie]

Which one is the real thread?  You guys are messing with my mind.
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Looks like MMAgCh and me had the same idea and hit the "post" button at the same second (yesterday, 6:29 PM) ;)

PS: I've just heard that Blizzard have now decided NOT to release the Diablo II 1.11 patch because on the day of its announcement (yesterday), 50% of all WOW customers have suddenly cancelled their subscription ;)

[FearlessOne]

Sure hope they fix the endless lag spikes and realm downs and disconnects that have been getting worse and worse over the past 2 months, to the point that its almost not playable, and fix these FIRST on Monday - which is supposed to be a 3 hr all realms down maintenance.

Then come out with the 'new' rehabilitated Andariel clone and trinkets and baubles plz. But if the lag not fixed then it will be a wet mop in the face...

[MMAgCh]

Looks like MMAgCh and me had the same idea and hit the "post" button at the same second (yesterday, 6:29 PM) ;)

Well, as they say: zwei Dumme, ein Gedanke :D

[BOB2]

It looks like it is time to wear the fighting suits again to fight the uber brothers and sisters of the Prime evils :wub:

[Griselda]

Here's the readme:

 
Changes in the 1.11 patch

A new Mystery has been revealed!

    * Players of Hell Difficulty Realm games are hereby warned once again, that a series of new and challenging tests await you! The answer lies within Diablo's Bosses, which span across the world from the Den of Evil to the Throne of Destruction...

New Items

    * Added 10 New Runewords.
    * Added new Unique Items that will drop from Special Bosses.

Hireling Enhancements

    * Players can purchase hirelings that are within 1-5 levels below their own level.
    * The rate at which hirelings gain experience has been increased. They should now stay closer to the player's level.

Major Bugs

    * Creating a town portal when corpses or other objects entirely fill the area where the portal will appear in town will no longer crash the game.
    * Skills obtained from runewords created while the item is equipped will no longer disconnect you from Battle.net when chosen.
    * Barbarians will no longer become stuck when using Whirlwind right after Inferno from the unique item Balrog Blade Flamebellow.
    * German, Spanish, and Polish users will no longer crash when the mouse cursor moves over an item that grants an Aura while equipped.
    * The game will no longer crash when selecting a skill granted by a weapon at the same time as switching weapons with the W key.
    * Dying or being requested to trade while changing the key configuration will no longer cause you to get stuck.
    * The "Missile Firing too far" assertion error has been corrected.
    * Attempting to sell a Horadric Cube or a quest item to an NPC by holding Control while clicking will no longer disconnect you from Battle.net.

Minor Bugs

    * Running the game with -install no longer causes the game to be installed as a Windows Service. -install is now ignored.
    * Sometimes the seals in Diablo's lair would not activate. This has been corrected.
    * Character expiration messages have been updated to reflect the expiration policy implemented in patch 1.10.
    * Unidentified items sometimes caused other set items to display green for items the player does not have. This has been corrected.
    * The German mouseover text for the Ist rune has been corrected.
    * Account recovery is now allowed for existing accounts whose name is only one or two characters.
    * When leaving a game on Battle.net, you will now be brought back to the channel in which you were previously.
    * Transmuting an ethereal item now retains the ethereal stats bonuses.
    * In Japanese Lord of Destruction, items that add to all Assassin skills incorrectly stated in their mouseover text that they added to all Druid skills. This has been corrected.

Fixed Game Exploits

    * It is no longer possible to bypass the 10-second hostility timer by activating a waypoint at the same time as declaring hostility.
    * A player must now have sufficient room in their inventory to receive the Scroll of Resistance. This prevents receiving multiple copies of it.
    * Uber Diablo is no longer killed when Shenk the Overseer or Blood Raven die nearby.
    * Necromancers with Trang-Oul's Set equipped could sometimes become invincible to attack. This has been corrected.
    * Blessed Hammer no longer remains active while in town, preventing players from subsequently declaring hostility and having the hammers hit other players for damage.
    * Set items retained their multi-piece bonuses after the player died, even though they were removed. This has been corrected.
    * Items with skill-charging effects will no longer give synergy bonuses to skills when equipped on a character without those skills.
    * Pasting from the Clipboard no longer allows the creation of characters with more than one dash or underscore in their name.

[DeeBye]

Here's the readme:
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This patch is a bit underwhelming. Oh well, that's okay. I like the balance of 1.10 anyways.

[Smoketest]

Underwhelming is a good word. Of all the things 'fixed', the only one that I ever ran into was the Seal glitch. (Granted, my play experience isn't as broad as that of some friends, who did run into a few of the listed crashes.)

I did a quick comparison of TXT files from 1.10 to 1.11 and there isn't much that was modified. Mostly new additions for the 'extra content' and it looks like the previously realm/ladder-only runewords are now available to singleplayer folks as they are now enabled/detailed in the client version of runes.txt. Blessed Hammers got an adjustment in missiles.txt and one of the venom lord types got adjusted in monstat.txt. Fangskin gets his own custom treasure class in Hell too, it seems.

Unless there was a lot of unreported bugfixing in the EXE, it looks like stair traps, Zeal mistakenly firing at range-2 targets with range-1 weapons, monsters attacking through apparently closed doors, completely elementally-immune leapers after dying while frozen from Freezing Amor, and so on, will still be the rule of the day.

I'll have to wait until there's an updated MPQ filelist though. The new patch_d2.mpq contains some unknown files, so it's possible I missed something.

Oddly enough, I'm not in a big hurry to explore Hell for this 'new' content. I would have preferred that they focused on getting as many EXE-based bugs fixed as possible. (We could always mod the data-based bugs away...) But alas.

Looks like Nobbie's got another update to make to his mod. :)

[Crystalion]

...I'm not in a big hurry to explore Hell for this 'new' content. I would have preferred that they focused on getting as many EXE-based bugs fixed as possible...[right][snapback]84817[/snapback][/right]

I hear ya.

Of course I also would like to see *them* fix the mpq data errors, as modders can't fix those for realm play.

However, having looked at cubemain.txt and read this from the bnet forums:

lilith is not the only new "uber" when you kill the countess, summoner, of nihlathak you have a chance of them dropping one of three keys. transmute the three keys in act V and a portal will appear, much like the cow portal. it will be either to uber duriel, uber izual, or lilith. they are similar in toughness to uber diablo. kill them and they drop either diablos horns, mephistos brain, or baals eye. i think if you transmute them you get an uber uber leet item. i dont know though, i have only fought uber izzual, and got mephistod brain. hope this helps :)

it does seem likely that you get to fight to fight 3 ubers on the road to a final uber. If this is true, and replaces the goofy cheaters-sell-SoJs to shops bogusity, then I'm all for it.

(edit: I haven't seen anyone say whether the new "standard of heroes" can be sold to a shop, but if it can I wouldn't be surprised if it is used to replace the SoJ trigger for DiabloClone)

Also, fwiw, here's a link to bnet forum post claiming to list ten new runewords/stats.

[Abby(HF)]

Anyone have info about the patch changes? I'd like to update my site, but want to make sure the info I post is correct.

So far I've seen 8 of the 10 new runewords and one new unique pair of boots. I've gotten mixed messages about the uber bosses, and what the Standard of Heroes does.

If anyone has any first hand information in regards to anything patch related, I would appreciate it.

You can contact me on here, via my website or by email.



My D2 Site



Thanks in advance!

Abby :)

[DeeBye]

The final battle with uber Baal, Diablo, and Mephisto is indeed hard. I did an attempt with some random pubbie BNet gamers earlier tonight, using a Summoning Necro. The battle takes place in Tristram.

I had to bail out of the attempt due to lack of sufficient funds with which to resurrect my Mercenary. Every time I died (which was a lot), I had to go back to Cold Plains and summon another army. My Summoner has no way of directly killing, so it was up to my Mercenary to create the first corpse. I eventually ran out of cash and the pubbie gamers didn't seem to want to help me. Oh well.

We were able to dispose of uber Baal and Diablo, but Mephisto was the one that rendered me useless and poor. He had Conviction and used Blizzard, Thunderstorm, and a super version of Diablo's Firestorm. My Skeletons stood up quite well to Baal and Diablo, but Mephisto tore them to shreds in a just a few seconds. After my skeletons were dead, my party of pubbie players soon followed.

Some notes from a Summoning Necromancer:

Dim Vision works very well on all of the spawning undead (which means everything except for the big three). I was able to completely shut down every enemy with the exception of the ubers. Too bad that my pubbie party didn't seem to notice that and kept casting area of effect skills that counteracted Dim Vision and drove me nuts :(

Corpse Explosion is useless. Yeah, a lot of corpses appear but they always went into mainatining my skeleton army. The CEs that did go off were ineffectual against the ubers, at best.

Clay Golem and Decrepify worked just as well as they would against any other Boss. The ubers slowed to a CRAWL when I was able to concentrate on this instead of the hundred other things going on.

I might be a little biased based on my single experience at taking on the ubers, but I really think that a Necro is the way to make this battle into something beatable. Yes, I died a lot of times, but not nearly as many times as my party members did (and I was running around with less than 800 life). They were lucky to last 30 seconds while I was able to run around with my trusty army for up to 5 minutes at a time. Dim Vision, yeah!

I think that the key is to take them one at a time and shutting down the spawns. I'm imagining my Necro parked safely in a corner somewhere while a bunch of nasty Hammerdins, Blizzard Sorceresses, Zealers, Fury Druids, and Smiters take their frustrations out on a single uber boss while I spam slvl 30 Dim Vision at the edges of the screen. A healthy Clay Golem and a tiny AoE Decrepify will turn the uber's attack into a slow slideshow. Lure each uber one at a time and rinse and repeat.

[SetBuilder]

The final battle with uber Baal, Diablo, and Mephisto is indeed hard.  I did an attempt with some random pubbie BNet gamers earlier tonight, using a Summoning Necro.  The battle takes place in Tristram.

I had to bail out of the attempt due to lack of sufficient funds with which to resurrect my Mercenary.  Every time I died (which was a lot), I had to go back to Cold Plains and summon another army.  My Summoner has no way of directly killing, so it was up to my Mercenary to create the first corpse.  I eventually ran out of cash and the pubbie gamers didn't seem to want to help me.  Oh well.

We were able to dispose of uber Baal and Diablo, but Mephisto was the one that rendered me useless and poor.  He had Conviction and used Blizzard, Thunderstorm, and a super version of Diablo's Firestorm.  My Skeletons stood up quite well to Baal and Diablo, but Mephisto tore them to shreds in a just a few seconds.  After my skeletons were dead, my party of pubbie players soon followed.

Some notes from a Summoning Necromancer:

Dim Vision works very well on all of the spawning undead (which means everything except for the big three).  I was able to completely shut down every enemy with the exception of the ubers.  Too bad that my pubbie party didn't seem to notice that and kept casting area of effect skills that counteracted Dim Vision and drove me nuts :(

Corpse Explosion is useless.  Yeah, a lot of corpses appear but they always went into mainatining my skeleton army.  The CEs that did go off were ineffectual against the ubers, at best.

Clay Golem and Decrepify worked just as well as they would against any other Boss.  The ubers slowed to a CRAWL when I was able to concentrate on this instead of the hundred other things going on.

I might be a little biased based on my single experience at taking on the ubers, but I really think that a Necro is the way to make this battle into something beatable.  Yes, I died a lot of times, but not nearly as many times as my party members did (and I was running around with less than 800 life).  They were lucky to last 30 seconds while I was able to run around with my trusty army for up to 5 minutes at a time.  Dim Vision, yeah!

I think that the key is to take them one at a time and shutting down the spawns.  I'm imagining my Necro parked safely in a corner somewhere while a bunch of nasty Hammerdins, Blizzard Sorceresses, Zealers, Fury Druids, and Smiters take their frustrations out on a single uber boss while I spam slvl 30 Dim Vision at the edges of the screen.  A healthy Clay Golem and a tiny AoE Decrepify will turn the uber's attack into a slow slideshow.  Lure each uber one at a time and rinse and repeat.
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While I will agree that uber diablo and ESPECIALLY uber baal were easily pwnable, we couldn't even touch uber meph. After an hour and a half trying, with chars of every class popping in and out, I left the game. neither my lightning sorc or my ww barb could really do much. Meph appeared to be immune to lightning, as 10 shots with a 10K max dmg lightning did absolutely nothing to him. Also, concentrated hammers from 6 hammerdins at once didn't faze him either. I'm not sure how you kill uberMeph, but I'll freely admit he can pwn me all day long. At least with 8 players in the game, that is.

[DeeBye]

While I will agree that uber diablo and ESPECIALLY uber baal were easily pwnable, we couldn't even touch uber meph. After an hour and a half trying, with chars of every class popping in and out, I left the game. neither my lightning sorc or my ww barb could really do much. Meph appeared to be immune to lightning, as 10 shots with a 10K max dmg lightning did absolutely nothing to him. Also, concentrated hammers from 6 hammerdins at once didn't faze him either. I'm not sure how you kill uberMeph, but I'll freely admit he can pwn me all day long. At least with 8 players in the game, that is.
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A friend of mine was in a party that defeated uber Meph. He said the key was to Smite the crap out of him and just wail away. Nothing else they did worked at all.

[BOB2]

Here it is at 1:15 pm, a couple of fellow D2 addicts and I make the 3 ubers go west with a single death to cry.
As for the team:
an hammerdin running salvation then concentration
a blizzard sorc currently in graveyard replaced by an hammerdin running salvation.
a wholwolf barb transformed into a wolfdruid


The story begins yesterday evening after getting the 9 keys, by a first battle against Lilith that is indeed really hard to beat. Getting to her is not that easy, there are cold immune everywhere and the blizzard sorc had a hard time just doing heal, teleport and static repeatedly. Once the fight has begun, she is using a very impressive poison attack that obliged sorc and hammerdin to continuously return to heal in town. She gave us a horn.

Uber duriel was a piece of cake. Using hammer and blizzard in an open area is tremendously efficient. Sooner the eye was ours.

Then came the turn of uber izual. If you no dot have a weapon with Prevent Monster Heal or a ring. Your story is done, your wont be able to kill him. Getting to him is not that easy with oblivion knights and minions and spears girls that charge you mixed with little imps. But once you are on him you can easily bring him down to half of this life thanks to static field, but then all the damage he takes are regenerated along the way. Added to that the frost nova makes you suffer. So a battle council was held over the phones about the tactics to use and a pmh ring (nature’s peace was transferred onto the druid barbarian). Go back to hell and Izual was a question of seconds to die……

The lessons were:
we were very fragile and weak even if inventories were full of charms life and resists.
tactics to fight uber diablo seem to be of good use against the 3 new key bosses

So this noon after lunch and a good night of sleep (experience made us very reluctant to just do one more battle before going to bed :( ) we took a try to tristam.

The portal was open in the upper right corner of the map. We moved very slowly, without any merc to discover the whole upper right corner then we follow the side of the map in a reverse clockwise direction. Arrived at the bottom left corner, still no monster: we were tense and nervous, feeling like a sheep waiting for a wolf to eat it.
The sorceress moved a foot and the first skeletons from Mephisto were summoned. One or two seconds later, it was on us, conviction was running but the characters were ready to handle it thanks to highly defensive builds. Our resists were all still at max. The fight begins, the static seems to work. The hammerdin and the barbarian were at contact as well as the three mercenaries. Life tap was on Meph head as well as blizzard. The barbarian was concentrated on beating Meph. The hammers rolling in circle were devastating the summoned skels. The PMH ring was of good use, and the life of Mephisto was going down slowly was surely when ……

As fast as a devil (indeed he is one of the prime evil), Diablo was on us arriving from the center of Tristam. Armageddon was on our helmets raining from the sky. We were almost swarmed by summoned demons from Diablo, everything was getting confused. The paladin was stuck and unable to moved because of summons. No way to escape. One second later I followed the same path. At the same time Baal and its brother arrived together feeding the screens with new monsters, life was going down and up but because of the huge number of opponents, hit recovery was leading us to a certain death…. fleeing was the only way to go. The hammerdin succeed to get out of the heat, I was closed to press the alt+F4 saved and exit button when I see the gold message explaining that the sorceress was dead. Then a second cold message saying that the paladin has left the game. I swallow a last full rejuv and also left the game then the screen freezed (even if I used the standard way of leaving the game)
With a little bit a fear, I tried to join back the game and failed because of a misuse of the caplocks touch. The second attempt was the good one. I was still alive and the game was still on. The hammerdin arrived a second later followed by a second hammerdin replacing the beloved sorceress with no way to recover :(
The way to get it was patience and time.
We BC, BO and shout in the upper left corner. The second hammerdin was volunteer to pull the 3 bad guys.
We had not to wait to get on the Mephisto return but he was alone, and his death was fast. I do not even remember to have seen its conviction running. 2 skels later, Baal was lured. Only one of the copies arrived, but it was the good one. Only one merc died but Baal was now a memory. We were not able to lure Diablo so we entered back in Tristam carefully and disposed of him as of this brother Uber Diablo.

As a conclusion, we were a little bit to much willing to bring them down fast and one of us is dead now. But we finally got a heroes banner and a low torch (+3 all barb / +10 all stats / +12 all resists).

It is probably the end of an old story as the ladder reset is for next Monday. But we can now proudly say we did it.
B)

[AssA]

I can't help but wonder if they made an undocumented change to Duriel's droplist:



I know his drops haven't ever been spectacular, but this :o

[Baajikiil]

A friend of mine was in a party that defeated uber Meph.  He said the key was to Smite the crap out of him and just wail away.  Nothing else they did worked at all.
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There are several threads at the AB detailing successful Torch collections, including at least one in HC. Generally the same melee heavy tactics that take down the clone the fastest work on all three ubers--with the stipulation that you must pack on enough resists/absorb(mainly lightning really) to negate meph's conviction.

Smiters, zealots with great gear+CB can take them down. I have heard that CS zons do well vs all but meph(that pesky lightning immunity). You will need some form of crowd control as well, hammerdins, necros, even well equipped bowazons can handle this. This fight is very tough, but with coordination, and knowledge of what you're up against, it is beatable.

I really, really wish they would have reset the ladder at the same time as releasing the patch though. Trying to figure out how to get a Torch starting from scratch would have been nice. They also could have hidden more features serverside I would have thought. A few hours after the patch, we knew where all the new items dropped, and most of the stats of the Ubers.

Well, fixing some old bugs, and not introducing the new bugs would have been nice as well.

[Tyderian]

I know his drops haven't ever been spectacular, but this :o[right][snapback]85246[/snapback][/right]

Duriel always drops a town portal. I don't remember the exact conditions, but there's a way you can actually get stuck down there. Did he drop anything else?

[Jeunemaitre]

I know his drops haven't ever been spectacular, but this :o
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AFAIK this is something that has always existed. The reason for poor drops from Duriel is the irregularity of the floor in his area. There are several dead tiles that nothing can exist on: often, because of his size and positioning, the program calls for his loot to land on the dead tiles when he is killed, thus negating the drop. I can't remember the reason why the tp scroll usually survives, but I think it has somehting to do with the order in which it is dropped and the direction that it goes. I could of course be making this all up, but I thought I remembered having this discussion before...