A word of warning

[Swarmalicious]

It burns.

Radament, fire enchanted, Nightmare.
Full orb, 630 life, 60% fire res, dead instantly on killing blow. (Take note of his holy bolt death animation still going).

I really wasn't expecting that. I am supposed to be l33t. I am old school! I am...

...making another character. :P

screenshot - click

Careful on trusting what you've learned... things seem a tad different now.


edit: I know this is, at the center, a "gripe" post, but aside from needing to whine, I really was so surprised by this death I thought I'd try & save other HC's from the same fate. :)

[FenrisWulf]

Sorry to hear, Swarm, and good luck on the next!

I also noticed that Fire Enchanted bosses have a much more vicious final bite to them. Even in NM games, my Werewolf was feeling a bit toasty. They should just have a "Stygian Doll Enchanted" property and be done with it. :P

[Jugalator]

And here I was thinking FE explosions were dangerous enough in Hell in 1.09 :blink:

[Smoketest]

Yeah, cold enchanted + lightning enchanted is nasty too. Poison is a pain, etc. It's not too bad but I do have to watch what I'm doing more carefully. I used to be able to sleepwalk through normal/nightmare, but no longer. My hc werebear has almost bitten the dust twice from my inattention. 1.10 is a wakeup call for me, especially with my slow computer and 56k dialup. Lag is deadlier than ever with the new faster monsters.

I took my tri-elemental sorceress through the bloody foothills in hell (she's level 84) and it was okay but the poison from foul crows was sure a pain in the neck. She has over 800 life (and about 15% poison resistance - equipment is mediocre) and one poison touch from those guys completely drains the orb almost twice over. Talk about cheese.

Did a Mephisto run for testing purposes. Council members were downright difficult; Mephisto died in seconds. Definitely some balancing issues here. The act boss should be tougher than any of the minions in the act, IMO, not the other way around. Dark Lords and Blood Lords are rather annoying. All else is still cannon fodder.

[GenericKen]

Blood Lords and the final 3 council members are brutal, meph isn't that much harder than before (especially in light of the overall increase in difficulty).

And suddenly, EVERY FREAKING MINION HAS MANABURN. The hell man? 7 of the last 10 uniques I played had mana burn on themselves and every one of their minions.

[Brista]

I think Fire has now overtaken Lightning as the most dangerous element. Good luck with the new one, Swarm - there are some darn nice hammers around and I am seeing quite a few people talking about making a "booyaka" so you really have to have one now that you're famous :)

[Occhidiangela]

Doesn't his Fire Enchantment explosion get some of his poison attack added to it? Might need to test.

Yes, them 'sploding boss critters need to be handled with care.

Also, do you think you might have been stuck with a "critical Hit" 5% thing that doubled the damage?

[Swarmalicious]

...now that you're famous :)

That made my day Brista. Thank you :)

(I have one in the works, but idea of the Holy Freeze Zealot completely consumed me once the patch went live.)



Occhi -

Doesn't his Fire Enchantment explosion get some of his poison attack added to it? Might need to test.

Yes, them 'sploding boss critters need to be handled with care.

Also, do you think you might have been stuck with a "critical Hit" 5% thing that doubled the damage?

I think yes, and yes. I remember fighting Rad in normal, and iirc his last poison attack wiped me down to 1 HP immediately, even though the rest of the fight was pretty uneventful.

[Dark Luke]

before 1.10, fire enchanted had always been a joke that their CE damage could almost be ignored. I haven't went that far on ladder so I don't know how much does 1.10 FE hurt now... did that radament had CE too?

[Brista]

Radament does not have CE, at least there's no visible effect

He can do a vicious poison attack. It was noted in the Beta that some of the poison attacks from that class of creature seem in line with what you might expect but the occasional attack is Achmael/Coldworm quality and is likely to send you back to town on one hit point after drinking 4 reds

This happened to my barb a few hours ago so it is definitely part of the final version

Possibly what may have happened is one of these uber poison hits just before the Fire Enchanted burst, maybe a crit

I don't know if the poison is carried on the actual burst itself as Occhi suggests, it may be

However many people are mentioning how powerful Fire Enchanted now seems to be. It may be that the damage is linked to the life of the boss - I took a huge hit off Geleb in Normal in an 8 player game

[Pren]

Radament is no joke in 1.10, at least, he was pretty terrifying when I took him on as a LEB in a /players 8 game in nightmare. I trapped him between a pile of rocks and the wall, with my merc below him and constantly resummoned valks and decoys north of him. He'd drop my lvl1+2 valk before the casting time was over. I had to swill mana potions and throw many full rejuves to my poor merc.

The poison is quite obscene.

Oddly enough, FEB explosions didn't seem to hit anybody in 1.10s. I guess it's unfortunate that it was fixed.

[Nomad_oWn]

Died in nm to an exploding bartuc in Worldstone. 69 lvl barb with 2200+ life compliments of bo and oak sage in the party. In addition, I was wearing a Nokazoan Ammy that boosted me to 85% resitance to fire. My remaining resistances were maxed at 75 with the exception of poison and included a few mdr points. My characters life Orb appeared completely full prior to death screen but perhaps minimal damage was present.

I've died many times in hardcore to many different things most of what can be attributed to lag. This didn't have the same feel to it. No period of lossed interaction, no speed up or resynch of the game.

My impression is that its a bug in the game or its a very serious new feature that will put the fear of god in every hc player until its understood.

I'm always very careful to avoid explosions but sometimes its just unavoidable for a melee character that has mage and ranged party members. If this is a feature it seems like one thats very unfair to hardcore melee characters.

I'd actually feel better about it if the game just flashed a big lightning bolt animation towards a random party member and sent him to the great beyond. At least, you'd know what the cause of death was and that there was nothing you could do but pray to the hardcore gods for better fortune.

I applaud the designers for (finally) fixing exploits and increasing the difficulty but I have to question a feature that gives a creature 2k plus damage in a single blow and either ignores resistance or dwarfs it.

[chiz]

I agree with Nomad oWn, there seems to be a bug or something to this. I have died a three times so far (SC) and two of them to this. I have a werewolf with 2.5k life, and full res when my friend is near with salvation, that ought to be enough to survive that. It's gotto be something odd here, they can't have intended this to be possible.

I alos noticed another odd thing, i was helping my friend doing the ancients in NM, there where three of us, 2 pala and me (werewolf). It was really easy, hardly taking any damage at all, just chopping away. After killing one of them we moved on to the axe guy, the merces where tanking the WW guy. And two of us died in the same hit from the axe guy, we simply couldn't understand how it happened, prior to that hit he could hardly touch us, and then, smack.

It is easy to blame lag or bugs when you die, but this really seems odd. I was planning on starting a HC char, haven't played Diablo2 or HC in a year or so, but with strange deaths like this, it just doesn't seem worth the time. When it's not a matter of skill but of time before you run into things like this.

[Myge]

That is messed up, I died instantly to the ancient using the axe as well (Korlic is it?) --posted in workshop-- anyway FE LE seems to be the new MSLE of 1.10. Takes chunks of your life away, and if you're amped, you're in for a world of hurt and then comes the explosion. Seems the only alternative for my poor barbarian is to go hybrid and use dual throwing for these critters.

[Baajikiil]

He can do a vicious poison attack. It was noted in the Beta that some of the poison attacks from that class of creature seem in line with what you might expect but the occasional attack is Achmael/Coldworm quality and is likely to send you back to town on one hit point after drinking 4 reds

This extreme poison I have seen on several occasions. I'll be moving along in act2 at a normal pace(several diff characters), with good to mid poison resist, and every once in a while get hit with a poison that does several healing potions worth of damage. Often the damage is faster than potions can heal. I never noticed anything special about how I got the poison(perhaps a mummy, perhaps a pile of goo, but it certainly left an impression as I ran to town after drinking all my potions.

[Ferengi]

I'd actually feel better about it if the game just flashed a big lightning bolt animation towards a random party member and sent him to the great beyond.

Well, sorry but ROTFMAO.

I know your pain firsthand alas, the monsters are not uniformly "really tough now", which actually would be OK. WHat seems to be happening is random area monsters are 10x+ worse than some nearby area, so one is cruising thru the game thinking about all those players claiming the game is too hard until one is unlucky enough to take a wrong turn. It is a matter of luck (or whether a player actually plays all parts of the game or skims), in fact your suggestion actually matches what happens better than any other I've heard. :D

[Nomad_oWn]

WHat seems to be happening is random area monsters are 10x+ worse than some nearby area, so one is cruising thru the game thinking about all those players claiming the game is too hard until one is unlucky enough to take a wrong turn.

I see where your coming from and can't argue with your remarks but this situation was far beyond a simple caught me off guard. An exploding bartuc in worldstone against a character with max resists and 2200 life would need to do over 14k in damage I believe. Please help me out here math wiz's. In addition, this character had been exploded on before and recieved only minimal damage. What was different about this time? I can't really answer that. Remember also that this was NM. If NM Bartuc does 14k damage on explosion what does Hell Bartuc do? The splitting of atoms comes to mind. :)

I hope this isn't taken as whinning because its really not. The first couple of hc deaths way back when are the hardest to take. After that you stop planning their birthday parties in advance. This event was the result of something very wrong or simply undiscosed in the game and certainly something the hardcore community very much needs to determine and be aware of.

Either way I'm sure I'll read about it first here.

[Ferengi]

An exploding bartuc in worldstone against a character with max resists and 2200 life would need to do over 14k in damage I believe.

I believe that FE death is actually CE, which means that it is 1/2 physical and 1/2 fire. I don't believe that the physical can be blocked, only DR helps. So the actual damage needed to kill you is 2200x2+1. CE is supposed to be 60% of HP and NM Bartuc has 4644 HP per d2data. I don't know the multiplier for player count for monster HP, but I can work backwards, NM Bartuc would need 7334 HP (which is a player counter multipler of about 1.6) for the explosion to kill you.

well I was just checking d2data for 1.09 data, and something is clearly wrong with the numbers. I was going to add there are some funny effects with CE that I learned with CorpsePopper, a max CE 1.09 necro for killing Nilathak in a "racing" contest. Basically, it is possible to be missed by CE due to angular relationships (which was just my best guess at the time). The physical part of CE can be blocked by any physical obstruction in the map area between you and the corpse in addition. It was not uncommon for CorpsePopper to find a lone, unharmed monster wandering around after blowing up a dozen monsters in the area.

But I actually suspect that it was Yet Another Programming Error in the game.

[Guest]

The physical part of CE can be blocked by any physical obstruction in the map area between you and the corpse in addition.

I don't know if you're an mpq fiend or not, but (player and Nihl) CE has nothing for LineOfSight column (so what you described shouldn't he happening, it should always hit you), the peculiar thing about this column though is all skills have either nothing or a 4, maybe either of 1-2-3 controls if the physical portion checks LoS or not, and it's off by default?

Seems to me by Blizzard logical that it's a bug though.

I know your pain firsthand alas, the monsters are not uniformly "really tough now", which actually would be OK.

This is really on a silly level in in-doors parts of act 5, both my Hammerdin and fire Sorc breezed through there, killing monsters in 1-5 hits, then Frenzytaurs show up and they kill me over and over, not even 50 hits kills them.

For my Sorc I think it took on the lines of 200+ hits and 3 deaths to kill a particular Frenzytaur pack. And with what you mentioned of "luck", that sure is true, since monster spawning is random it's not that often that Frenzytaurs show up.

[Nomad_oWn]

Good post. You are correct per AS though it doesn't mention the ele vs physical aspect.

"If dead, does damage of 75%-100% of max hit points, in a radius of 4 yards".

It would make more sense if it were purely physical since my resistances were very high. If there were fire involved then it shouldnt be enough to kill 2200 *50% =1100 +1100*.5=1650. That would be the physical damage with decrepify I believe if 50% of the damage were fire and the fire damage would be 2200*.15=330 for a grand total of 1980. I think my resistance multiple is probably wrong there since when in nightmare with a penalty you actually need greater than a value of 85 to get 85% resistance.

There is something stated in AS that could come into play here.

In Nightmare and Hell, Minions gain +33-50% Fire Damage.

If indeed there is elemental damage involved, does the above apply to the CE effect as well?? If so that seems very unreasonable.

This does raise some other questions for me:

Will anything reduce this damage? Dmg reduce by, mdr, shouts, auras, etc (he had battle cry on him at the time so I'm guessing no unless there is more to this).

Does amp/decrep increase this damge? If per Necro CE then I'd guess yes which very well could be the issue since the battle was within baals decrep range.

If this speculation is true then I guess what I've learned is that killing a > normal fire enchanted with a melee char is ill advised and particularly when you've got amp or decrepify cast on you (certain death unless perhaps very high pdr and resist gear is present).

It seems to me that this type of skill shouldnt use your adjusted max hp based on bo and spirit.

Also, just a thought... what if the damage is inadvertently based on monster hp and player scaling for CE that was in the beta applies to this somehow and wasn't changed when CE was changed. That would make it an uber explosion given the amount of hp uniques can have in an 8 ppl game. That's probably just my paranioa talking as its certainly within reason that the damage was all phyiscal, bartuc rolled 100 and decrepify made it a kill.

I must admit there is some humor value in the "screw you for killing me" from these creatures regardless of how practical within the game it may be.