I'm playing this game yet again

[T-hawk]

A footnote: I spent a while last night investigating an interesting bug.  It happens with the barb, wielding two Honor axes.  It happens if his strength (125) is such that the +10 strength from both Honors is needed to support them (requires 145.)  This is wild: upon weapon-switching to the Honors, they are redded out and don't appear on the character - but they still work.  The barb appears barehanded, and the Frenzy skill icon is redded out -- but it still works, the weapon damage is dealt, and Frenzy's run speed and AR both apply.

Even more wild: while in this state, holding down the button to attack continuously with Frenzy makes the barb swing with only the primary weapon, but clicking for separate attacks makes him swing with both.  I tested this with an item editor to put 100% CTC of different skills on each axe to see which was doing the hitting.

I'm pretty sure I've figured out what's happening.  Frenzy runs server-side, but barehanded normal attack runs client side. The faster client-side attack finishes first, and the client keeps interrupting the mid-progress server-side Frenzy sequence with a new attack before it gets as far as the second swing.  If that interruption doesn't happen, then the second swing does.  And upon weapon-switching, the client-side program checks to see if one weapon's +strength can support itself; but server-side adds both weapons' strength before checking.

What tipped me off to look for this was the resistance values on the character screen, which inexplicably jumped higher on weapon-switching back and forth - this was Natural Resistance getting boosted by the +skills on Honor, indicating that the weapons were active and functional.  And what tipped me off to look for the primary-secondary weapon swings was that testing had showed the durability dropped a lot more on the first one, but still did drop a little on the second.

This bug is sort of known; I remember reading about it somewhere a long time ago, and I found one video that shows it happening but doesn't give any details.  It's impossible to search for it, terms like "barehanded strength bug" are too vague and instead just run into the more well known bug in PvP where an item supported by charms isn't shown to other clients.

This is exploitable: you can make use of the faster barehanded swing while having the weapon still function.  You can also have the Frenzy attacks all be with one weapon, and so allocate the second slot for speed or skills instead.  I have no qualms about exploiting such a bug (there are so many that work against the player that I'll take a positive one), but ultimately I decided not to here.  I have enough IAS gear that Frenzy already attacks as fast as the maximum speed for the barehanded animation (6 frames), and I have an equal pair of weapons so that there's not really anything to take advantage of in the second slot.  (It would be hilarious to put Blade of Ali Baba there for the magic-find, but it's slow and does factor in to the combined weapon speed modifier.)  Finally, the right-click-drag method of driving melee doesn't work in this configuration, the barb runs past monsters instead of attacking since the client thinks the skill is redded out.  So it's best to play this straight and just spend the extra 10 strength points so that one Honor supports both and everything functions normally.

[T-hawk]

So yeah, it goes faster when you're not full-clearing the acts, there's not really any more treasure we need and not much future left to use it anyway.  But we'll start with this from act three hell:

   

FUCK again.  This project is becoming a lot less successful than I'd planned.

My shadow had been at the center of that boss pack (Might + Cursed).  I was correctly on the outskirts launching meteors on a minion so that they'd hit the boss too (because the ITD claw works on minions but not the boss.)  Then the shadow died at the same instant Cloak of Shadows went down and the pack swarmed me in an instant.  I even hit a rejuve in time but then they dealt another 1700 damage in a blink.

But the real root cause here: my merc had had the bug triggered where monsters start ignoring him, and that's why the pack swarmed me instead of him.  That merc bug happens routinely (probably about a third of the time by the end of an act), and I'm generally happy to just let it, since I don't want to have to pack up everything in town and re-enter a game to fix it, and often it's even favorable to have the merc in that state, particularly in big fights like the Travincal council and act bosses.  Well, it bit me back bigtime here.

In all honesty, I got fatigued of driving Phoenix Strike.  It takes a lot of effort to alternate charge-release constantly and target the correct charge you want each time.  The meteors are a grind too since they take so long to land and you have to hold your ground until they do or they'll miss when the monster moves.  I wasn't at peak sharpness when this happened after four hours of driving Phoenix through the act, and paid the price.

Finally, this makes me talk about player count.  I was still playing at players-3 in the Durance, which was also a mistake.  I've actually done that with everyone on this team all through hell difficulty so far, always at least p3.  I have weird feelings here, that playing on p3 is the real game.  If a character has to stick at p1 then they're a wimp, but p3 is the benchmark that if a character can handle, they could probably also go all the way to p8 if they had to for some reason (and in fact has happened often when I went to p8 for a super chest and forgot to switch back.)  Also p1 is just so scarce on item drops, but p3 gives much more (1.6x) and is the sweet spot for loot that I was still chasing, compared to p5 and up which are more marginal on added drops.

Anyway, I don't have much to say on any of the other characters, they're pretty well set.  The paladin had a blast wiping packs of undead dolls in the sewers and Durance.  The werebear and barb are reliably durable with high life totals and leech.  The bowazon is the one I'm concerned about; similar to the late phoenixsin, she was also bad about having close calls in the Durance, with two separate cursed extra strong cold enchanted doll bosses, got hit to a sliver (about a third) of life like four times between them, while the chilling made trying to run away perilous, but I did hit a rejuve in time every time.

   

Arkaine's Valor!  Awesome score from Mephisto there, and fills the one slot on the whole team where I most wanted improvement, the barb's armor slot, huge defense and life and skills.  Worth giving up Smoke's resists to make up elsewhere, including that the +skills gives a bit back itself via Natural Resistance, plus he had a socket quest available to throw in a resist-all jewel.  The strength requirement was almost a major headache - it needs 10 more than he had, and he only gained one level during the act, and I didn't have any extra strength charms on hand... but the saving grace was the Lam Esen quest for exactly the 5 more stat points he needed.

   

Here's a very cool piece!  Hand of Blessed Light is super overlooked, with those properties of a weird hybrid of melee damage and spellcasting for little-used skills... which is exactly what this paladin is!  Although, without upgrading, it's not really quite good enough for melee, barely over half the damage of Butcher's Pupil.  But it's totally worth keeping on switch for Fist mode (which will happen bigtime in Chaos Sanctuary), since his switch slot isn't occupied by much anyway, only a Black flail for crushing blow on act bosses which can easily be kept in stash instead.

I would love to upgrade Hand of Blessed Light to use as his main weapon - it would be just about the same damage as Butcher's after factoring in the +skills to Vengeance, and the Butcher's could pass back over to the barb too.  Thing is, I'm juuust short of the runes to do it.  The upgrade needs a Pul, and what I've got is 2 Lem, 1 Fal, 4 Ko, 2 Lum (after the assassin died with one), 3 Io.  Anything from Ko on up is enough to cube the whole stack up to a Pul, so I'm going to have the paladin take possession of all those going into act four and hope the hellforge delivers.

Nothing worth using besides those and a life leech ring or two.  A few random drops: Sandstorm Trek boots, I understand this is popular but I don't really see why; decent stats, but no resists or magic find and only 20% run speed.  Atma's Wail armor, same, doesn't really seem to do much of anything.  Demon's Arch throwing spear, cool but not of any use here.  Cubed a skill charm, with a life suffix even... necromancer summoning skills.  

That's all for now, act 4 next, only four characters still going.

[superdeath]

That's all for now, act 4 next, only four characters still going.

/knock on wood

[Boro]

That's all for now, act 4 next, only four characters still going.

This feels oddly appropriate.

[T-hawk]

Act 4 done quick this week, one character per night.  I did keep playing on players-3, and full-cleared some areas when I liked the monster mix (particularly the paladin drawing an all-undead spawn in Plains of Despair again), and all of River of Flame and Chaos Sanctuary for everyone (you kinda have to do that last anyway to clear space to fight the seal bosses.)  That was a slog particularly for the bowazon, with two-thirds of Chaos immune to fire, which took almost an hour, but she got it done, and with no real danger moments always firing from long range.  And the paladin had his greatest moment of glory, blasting through Chaos Sanctuary's undead with Fist of the Heavens, powered up with that Hand of Blessed Light scepter on switch.

The hellforge mostly busted again: Ist, Lem, Ko, Lum.  The Ist is nice, but other than that, I actually got better runes from random drops, both two more Lem and two more Ko.  (All three Lems came in the same game, for the bowazon.  Randomness is clumpy.)

The resulting total is 5 Lem, 1 Fal, 7 Ko, 4 Lum after cubing one from Ios.  That's actually enough to cube up to two Puls which could go all the way to one Um.  I could make a Crescent Moon for either the paladin or barb, or a Duress for the barb.  But nah, I really do want to upgrade Hand of Blessed Light.  It's just so cool, a perfect fit of that weird niche weapon to this build, a matchup I'd never be doing again.  It's massive how high the skills go on the spellcasting attacks - level 33 Holy Bolt gets up over 5000 damage.  The melee damage of HOBL is about a quarter less than Butcher's, but it's a fast base so can get to one frame breakpoint faster (with Shael after the last socket quest), which plus the +skills for Vengeance comes to just about the same dps.  And this move means the Butcher's can also pass back over to the barb to help him too.

The Ist will do exactly the same thing it did for my first team: make a Delirium for the amazon.  She can dish out that crowd control Confuse like crazy, and doesn't get hit into the doll morph much, and can certainly upgrade from the Lore she's still using, including another +skill for Immolation.  This is another reason not to cube everything up to the Um, since Delirium requires spending one of the Lems too.  I have to go find a 3-socket base helm for it somewhere (can't be shopped); Halls of Pain in nightmare is a good place to look that I never cleared yet.

Not a lot of interesting drops in the act, but here goes.  I finally got an elite melee weapon, as I'd wanted to manage among this team of several melee characters:

   

Nord's Tenderizer!  Very nice damage, including cold and target-freeze, and IAS... and... it's... ethereal... goddammit.  Still though, I'm keeping it for the paladin.  My previous Vengeance paladin that made Guardian was twinked with exactly this weapon (non-ethereal), and so it's totally full-circle fitting for this guy to finish off Baal with one legitimately.

And this:

   

I had no idea this existed (Arreat's Face is more common and just better), but I'll take it, a worthwhile upgrade over his IK helm.  This is also another reason to swap the Butcher's Pupil to the barb; giving up the IK helm socketed with two fervor jewels loses some speed, but the IAS on Butcher's makes it back up.

Finally:

   

I rarely show rings, just talk about them, but that's a beautifully nice one for the barb.

That's all for now.  One more chapter left to come.

[Boro]

Almost an hour? That was fast for chaos sanctuary. Good luck for act 5. It looks like fate set up everything for the paladin to succeed.

[superdeath]

For the glory of the Necro.... i hope the pally dies.

[T-hawk]

So not quite as triumphant as the first team, but still a worthy conclusion.

   

Like the first team, I went straight through act 5 strictly on players-1 with minimal clearing.  Although this time I did do the Anya quest with most characters; all except the paladin had either skimped a bit on resists (without a shield), or just to trade out resist charms for life instead.  The Frozen River was somewhat threatening for both the barb and druid, I had to work my way through several overlapping boss packs before I even gained any space from the entrance, but I managed it safely.  Smooth sailing from there for both characters, the Ancients took just two or three tries to roll into harmless mods (spectral hit, extra fast, cold enchanted), and Baal was easy (lengthy without any crushing blow, but trivial with a 2800 life buffer), actually thanks to the appendages which provided continuous plenty of leech-back.

I have to say that Frenzy was pretty underwhelming in the end.  I thought building a barb with two weapons would be more interesting, but it really wasn't, there are no interactions between them, really it just meant I had to get every weapon upgrade twice.  Frenzy's dps just doesn't keep up, even with the skill speed, it's not fast enough.  Whirlwind attacks with a 2-handed weapon at a 4-frame rate... that's just way superior than Frenzy attacking with a 1-hander at 6 frames.  In fact Berserk at 1 point was beating Frenzy's dps against quite a few monster types, anything with physical resistance.  Frenzy's run speed is also underwhelming, fun but not really necessary, all your fighting happens while standing still.  Really the speed is most useful for pulling out of combat quickly (including the merc) and that's about it.  It doesn't really work to jet from pack to pack keeping Frenzy's buff active; I always spend more than six seconds picking through each batch of item drops instead.  The one fun part of Frenzy's speed was popping a TP and cannonballing across town to the vendors.

The bowazon turned out about as good as I expected, though not quite in the way that I had.  I hadn't envisioned the micromanagement of constantly swapping between two bows for fire damage or physical.  But that was the right way to play her given the items that came my way.  With Immolation Arrow, she actually felt like a Buriza zon of old times, firing slowly but heavily.  Her key tactic was to alternate Immolation with constantly respamming recasts of Decoy during each Immolation cooldown timer, to absorb monster attention indefinitely.  Her Strafe side never quite got up to the damage I'd hoped for; no bow short of Windforce or a crazy runeword really measures up; even upgraded Witchwild only got close when the Amplify triggered and when Laying of Hands applied against demons.  But her real killer item was the Delirium, that thing is basically god mode, one trigger of Confuse disables each entire screen of monsters who won't hurt her again.  Or the merc, who never died in the act until the Worldstone bosses.  And I even played more carefully with Delirium on, since avoiding the doll morph is an extra incentive to not get hit, almost even more than actual death.  Anyway, I'm finally satisfied at making Guardian with a real bowazon, hadn't previously without hybridizing.  Her skill build actually ended up all over the place: besides max Strafe, Immolation, and Exploding for synergy, she put 5 points each in a bunch of skills everywhere: Multishot, Guided (mostly to alleviate the mana cost), Valkyrie, Penetrate, Pierce, Decoy.

The werebear had the team's MVP item for sure in his Crescent Moon axe, enabled by that awesomely lucky Um drop from the Countess, never got any others from the hellforge or anywhere else.  The co-MVP was his Duriel's Shell, and with those together he was probably the closest on this team to a real meta build, his 3000 life was never really threatened aside from that one moment in the palace cellar.  And Shockwave is the MVP skill for this whole team too, just can't ever be threatened by a screenful of monsters that are all stunned.  I made the right move going with the full werebear build into Lycanthropy and Shockwave instead of the fire hybrid I'd originally planned.

Paladin: Have I said enough how fun this guy is?  This might have been my favorite character of all time.  Vengeance and Fist are such a beautiful hybrid that complement each other so perfectly.  All the worst situations for melee - unleechable skeletons with shield blocking, mana drain ghosts, archers that won't chase you, greater mummy packs, gloams, oblivion knights - are undead and exactly what Fist obliterates smashingly.  Plus Fist's direct use to pick off things at long range with the lightning, like maggot spawners or dangerous bosses.  Or just to nail things that bounce around a lot - his new trick in act 5 was when I realized that Fist could kill the blinkery demon imp guys in one shot each - mega satisfying revenge for the millions of times I've chased them around with melee characters!  Plus Holy Bolt for directed efficient targeting, or to heal the merc -- actually I did that against one Ancient, who was lightning enchanted, a bit too dangerous to attack together but the holy-bolt healing outraced what the merc took alone.  Cap it all off with the standard Smite to stunlock or crushing-blow something, and this is perhaps the most versatile offensive build in the whole game.  But always vulnerable on defense (actually the team MVP might have been his Shaftstop armor; I don't know if the physical resist ever saved his life but it's quite possible), like all paladins; this build has a very high player skill ceiling which is what I love the most.

I didn't use the ethereal Nord's Tenderizer against Baal; it was more practical to start with Smite and finish him off at range with Fist.  I did use Nord's against the Ancients, which may have made a significant difference in being able to get through their health before my potions ran out.  (He did take about ten attempts to roll the Ancients into manageable modifiers.)  And then I wasn't quite ready yet to drop the curtain on this character, so after Baal I went back and finished clearing most of act 5, including Halls of Anguish/Pain (but not Vaught), except for an unmanageable stairs trap in Drifter Cavern.

Item finds: Ginther's Rift, might have been cool if that came early enough to build the paladin around it and phase blades in general.  Dwarf Star for the third time on this team, why can't that ever be Raven Frost instead, same odds and level but generally better.  Djinn Slayer sword, up to 500 fire damage with fast speed and two sockets for Shaels - that might have been a pretty good physical immune solution for the werebear.  Got both Shadow Killer and Firelizard's Talons unique assassin claws (in the same game for the paladin), hah okay maybe I should have made a claw assassin.  Ravenlore druid elemental helm, the one score from the paladin's post-Baal joyride.  No runes above Shael in the act but we didn't need any.

So four Guardians out of the seven might not be a spectacular result, but ultimately I'm satisfied with it.  The phoenix striker went most of the way through and I experienced all I needed to with that character; I don't have a compulsion to push that build to Guardian, and definitely not to drive that hyperactive skill over again.  The poisonmancer was more unfortunate, but in honesty sitting behind the skeletons was starting to get boring (and why I impatiently overextended into what became his death); I do want to do a pure poisonmancer, but it just doesn't really work without high end gear for minus poison resist. The sorceress was also unfortunate, but ultimately not really anything I hadn't done before.  So I'm not particularly crushed by the fallen heroes who didn't make it.  (Yeah I'm posting that sentiment on 9/11 of all dates.)

So I guess that concludes this saga, thanks for reading along.

[Wyatan]

Nicely done, and thanks for sharing.

Frenzy's dps just doesn't keep up, even with the skill speed, it's not fast enough.  Whirlwind attacks with a 2-handed weapon at a 4-frame rate... that's just way superior than Frenzy attacking with a 1-hander at 6 frames.  

Iirc (but it's been a looong time since I played that game), in the later patches, Double Swing at speed cap is faster than Frenzy. So Frenzy barbs work by charging up Frenzy and then actually using Double Swing.

[Boro]

Congrats, T-Hawk!

Meanwhile I dug out WinniesLegacy and had Baal slap himself silly true Winnie style. It was P3 and neither Volcano nor fissure were doing well enough so I fed him bears.