Newbie takes on D2 for the first time

[KingOfPain]

I've never heard of drinking a lot of potions to extend the duration being considered an exploit.  It's always been common advice to do that with poison-antidote potions before the act 1 boss.

I don't think I know of anything at all in D2 that's considered an exploit, unless any item-duplicating bugs still exist.

I guess you don't venture in public games much, to thinks Bliz have closed all the exploits. p

I would hardly think potion stacking works as the devs intended but I could be wrong.

Everyone from RB (that I have played with) did this....
Just as this nice feature for the devs to put in so all our mules have extra storage space, and be able to cube upgrade gems and runes, and make rune words on the spot



Oh yeah. Swap Weapon is also useful if you don't normally use it, you can carry extra drops if you don't want to visit town right away

[haphazard1]

Started exploration of the monastery. Completed the quest to retrieve the Horadric hammer for Charsi, and now have a reward to imbue an object. Not quite sure what that means, other than Cain saying it will provide some positive random benefit. Is this best used on something already good to produce something even better, or on a quality base item to make it magical? Maybe this reward is best saved for later, when I am likely to have something better to use it on?

The smith I had been warned about got several lightning bolts in the face, and was not much trouble although it took a while to die. Less annoying than some of the random bosses, especially the cold enchanted ones.

A question: I found a chipped skull. It seems to be a socketable item, and the 'chipped' tag makes me think it will be like gems and better grades are possible. Do I treat it like another kind of gem, or is there something else I should do with it? The potential socketed boosts are nice -- enhanced life/mana replenish or steal could be very useful.

Cain offered a helpful hint (and Kashya reinforced it) that Andariel can be attacked with fire. Might be useful, will have to see. I am pretty sure I have a number of levels still to go through the Jail and Catacombs before finding the demon queen.

[T-hawk]

Like half of D2's mechanics came from unintended bugs.  The entire hammerdin class (Blessed Hammer working with Concentration aura) was a bug.  So is the Holy Shield skill that turned out to multiply all defense (not just the shield).  The star-shaped area-of-effect was an early bug, which fixing basically doubled the size of all area effects, but you're not going to call every use of any AoE skill an exploit.  Bowazons tripled in power after fixing a bug that %damage modifiers didn't work on bow weapons.  The attack speed of weredruids or Whirlwind or anybody dual-wielding is determined by an amazing pile of bugs on top of bugs (the speed can be drastically different if you just switch the two weapons between your hands.)  Enchant sorceresses work thanks to a bug that Enchant double-multiplies your melee fire damage (like +200% applies twice ending up with 9x the base damage!)

I think it's entirely futile to pick out any of that as exploits, the game mechanics are the game mechanics.  I think you're using exploit to mean things like hacking the game client to do illegal behavior that the server still doesn't guard against. I'm sure that still happens in public games but that's not really what I meant; without external tampering I don't think the program does anything that really qualifies as an exploit.

On weapon switching - what Boro means is cases where you swap out some vital piece of defensive equipment (most often a shield with resistances, or life) and start charging into battle without realizing what you're missing...

[T-hawk]

For the imbue quest reward, you give Charsi any nonmagical (white) item, and she makes it a rare of the same base type with random affixes.  Usually the best target is a class-specific item (sorceress orb), since those aren't available from the most common source of rare items of most other types (gambling and crafting.)  The affixes on the imbued item depend on your level so it's better to wait some; the most important ones are available by roughly character level 50 I think.  For a weapon, the base type is critical (high base damage), but for an orb the base type is essentially irrelevant (there's some arcane details about slightly different affix levels available.)

The skull is just another type of gem.  The life/mana replenish is terrible, the amounts are tiny and take forever to refill anything.  For some classes, leech (in a physical weapon) is OK, but that won't do anything for a sorcreress.

Andariel has -50% (negative) fire resistance, which is nice to take advantage of but it's not like an auto-win.

[KingOfPain]

Like half of D2's mechanics came from unintended bugs.  The entire hammerdin class (Blessed Hammer working with Concentration aura) was a bug.  So is the Holy Shield skill that turned out to multiply all defense (not just the shield).  The star-shaped area-of-effect was an early bug, which fixing basically doubled the size of all area effects, but you're not going to call every use of any AoE skill an exploit.  Bowazons tripled in power after fixing a bug that %damage modifiers didn't work on bow weapons.  The attack speed of weredruids or Whirlwind or anybody dual-wielding is determined by an amazing pile of bugs on top of bugs (the speed can be drastically different if you just switch the two weapons between your hands.)  Enchant sorceresses work thanks to a bug that Enchant double-multiplies your melee fire damage (like +200% applies twice ending up with 9x the base damage!)

I think it's entirely futile to pick out any of that as exploits, the game mechanics are the game mechanics.  I think you're using exploit to mean things like hacking the game client to do illegal behavior that the server still doesn't guard against.  I'm sure that still happens in public games but that's not really what I meant; without external tampering I don't think the program does anything that really qualifies as an exploit.

On weapon switching - what Boro means is cases where you swap out some vital piece of defensive equipment (most often a shield with resistances, or life) and start charging into battle without realizing what you're missing...

A lot of this comes down to intent, doesn't it?

So many years ago, Sirian wrote something like 5 pages against twinking at the Lounge and I happened to be driving down to San Fran, an 18 hours drive, so I had a lot of time to think up a 5 pages debate and wrote it during pit stops. But I thought better than posting it. I knew if I posted my reply I wouldn't have the time to carry on the debate in all due respect.

But, we do that all the time here at RBD. Some of our variants are twinked to the teeth. One of mine, GoGoGadgetz, uses some of the best gears all the way; and had the community pooling to get me items I lacked. Yet, he uses no stat points except to equip the items, and no skill points at all. Twinking turns out to be a okay and had the whole RB community behind it. It is all about the intent.

[haphazard1]

Found my first set (green) item, and then another (from a different set) almost immediately after. Wonder what the odds of that were? The chances of ever seeing another item from the same set (either one) drop are presumably very small. Neither is something I would use for itself, sadly.

[KingOfPain]

It's a sign, start up the Mule train!

Actually, that can be an obsession to collect all the sets, or sets of unique items. The drop rates aren't too bad except some of the highest end items which is to be expected.

Later, or soon, you will be sick of seeing Isenhart set items....

[haphazard1]

A lot of exploration and fighting my way through the zones of the monastery eventually led to the fourth level of the catacombs and the lair of Andariel. A fierce battle followed, with multiple rejuve potions consumed to sustain health and mana. Fortunately I had brought most of a belt full (plus a couple antidote potions in one slot), and the demon was slain just before I ran out of potions. She did not drop anything useful, sadly, although the various stuff brought good prices from the merchants.

My sorceress is now in the port city of Lut Gholein, talking to the locals and learning of their troubles. And there seem to be plenty of troubles to go around....

I see that almost everything available from the armor and weapons merchant requires more strength than I have. Not a good sign for the future. Some stat points will have to go into strength soon.

A couple questions:

- Do percent faster casting bonus items stack?
- Similarly, do percent faster hit recovery items stack?

Act II begins...I wonder how big a step up in difficulty it will be?

[Boro]

my real real scíry problem with weapon swaps was that I used things like frozen lrb and teleport on right click. One swap, and instead of shooting at the boss pack I teleported into their group. two deaths were scored that way before I unbound the hotkey.

[haphazard1]

Boro, ouch on that story. Primary and secondary actions swapping with the gear makes sense and is very useful, but if you think you are doing one thing and get a totally different result...not good.

I am currently using the primary set up for general enemies and crowd control, with the seconday set up for fighting tough bosses. Seems to be working well so far, but I will probably screw it up at some point.