Forcing hidurares instead of uniques

[Crystalion]

"hidurares" is a term I coined long ago, back when I was one of the people that discovered the weenie char gamble rings/ammy trick in early D2 to climb up to SoJ from possessing the earlier uniques (even before that I had posted that Blizzard had probably messed up on gambling).

Things (re: gambling and re: the way uniques are blocked) have changed a couple times since then, but I still like the term.

Hidurare is a composite of High Durability Rare and such an object can be said, loosely speaking, to be "hiding" a unique, as they result from failed unique rolls.

These rolls can fail either because a unique doesn't exist for that base item, or because the ilvl wasn't high enough for the quality req level of the unique, or because that unique has already be spawned in the game at hand.

That later failure is what interests us here, and what was long ago used to force SoJs (which doesn't work now, because of the new "rarity" subsystem).

You see, the thought occurred to me that gambling actually spawns the items, even if they are not purchased.

My v1.10 sp testing bears this out. Whether this is also true for realm play I don't know, but I consider it likely.

This means that doing a lot of gambling (just hitting the shop, to see a new selection, not actually buying anything) will eventually block the generation of uniques due to having previously generated them (i.e. a "jackpot" on the gamble resulting in a unique, which you weren't even aware of, because you did not purchase it).

To verify this concept, I swapped the frequency of rares and uniques for gambling in difficultylevels.txt (and bought a bunch of stuff to be sure the new frequency was as I expected, then started a new game). I also added a cube recipe allowing me to reroll any magic item into the same base item unique. Note that such a reroll will not work twice in a row, in the same game, since the second time around it will be blocked and thus create a hidurare.

By this simple duo of mods I was able to perform the following test:

v1.10 sp, modded as noted above:

a. new game, normal
b. 100 views of gamble inventory at Elzix (quite a bit of clicking, but didn't take too long)
c. I went through his normal shop inventory and bought (one of) every base type for which he had a magic item
d. I cubed these (attempted unique with ilvl set to 99) and sold them back to him
e. I counted up the results...

13 uniques, 9 hidurares.

Please note that this isn't a very controlled test, because my clvl was, iirc, 83?, so he could show me, iirc, any legal gambling base item, but his shop item wares are seriously limited. However, afaik, every single base item I bought from him to test was capable of cubing to unique (i.e. the uniques exist for those weenie base items).

Still this does seem to confirm what I suspected... that a whole lot of clicking (or a bot) can change the game state enough to effect a unique to hidurare conversion for future drops.

I see no harm in publishing this tidbit, as I can't imagine any great harm in allowing MF/bot maniacs on bnet to up their percentage of rares (suitable for upgrading, of course) as opposed to uniques of the same base. The chance of a unique from a gamble is so slim, that you'd have to either seriously suffer carpel tunnel, or resort to using a shop bot to make this effect very significant.

Still, it does suggest that gambling (window shopping at least) isn't a great idea before a MF run, for players in general.

edit: typos, clarifications.

p.s. of course uniques => 3x durability hidurares and sets => 2x, but sets won't fail to drop just because they were generated for a prior gambling screen.

[Obi2Kenobi]

And besides, most people wouldn't want rares instead of uniques. :) (0% at an Azurewrath, or +.0000001% chance at that really good rare?)

[Crystalion]

And besides, most people wouldn't want rares instead of uniques.

I can think of many exceptions. But using gambling to make it more likely is such a minor effect for the time investment involved that it isn't much more than a curiousity, eh?

The primary case would be that some exceptional uniques suck, but a high ilvl drop might generate a nice cruel++ rare suitable for upgrading instead.

And here are a couple of very far fetched ones, just for illustration:

a. a bot runner sneaks into your game and views thousands of gamble screens, just for the joy of possibly depriving you of some of your unique drops over your next couple hours of play.

b. an item farmer in classic, for whom normal uniques are total irrecoverable junk, uses a bot to prep MF run games so his act boss kills will drop slightly more high ilvl rares for conversion to LoD and upgrading later.

Ignoring the silly bot/prep issue, #b is somewhat interesting, as the limited affixes/items in classic sometimes make certain drops and gambles "better" there than in LoD. For example, I suspect certain triple resist rares are easier to get in classic.

Certainly if you want white exceptional throwing weapons for imbue and then upgrade classic shops with a mid-level character will offer them (nm/hell) whereas LoD will not.

There are so many oddities in the game, most of them not very important, like the hidurares trivia in this post. ;)

[Ruvanal]

a. a bot runner sneaks into your game and views thousands of gamble screens, just for the joy of possibly depriving you of some of your unique drops over your next couple hours of play.

I suspect that this is more likely to occur when someone decides to burn some cash on gambling something like amulets while waiting on the other players to take care of "business" in town. Since they will be frequently resetting the gamble screen for only one or two items that they want, that could force a lot of othere to have to possiblity of popping the unique up (and unnoticed) on the gamble screen.