Any Diablo/Hellfire Elitists feel strongly on any of these subjects?

#1. Can SP Unique items be used as birthday gifts and imported into a SP game (via an item importer) in a SP game where they do not show? For example, could you ask for an Undead Crown as your birthday gift when you turn clevel 10, even if you did not get the Leo Quest? Admitted, this items have no listed qlevel, but if you have ventured past the dungeon level where they "could" have appeared (had you gotten the quest) would you then be able to request the item?

#2. Almost the same question as #1, but regarding MP games -- could you import a Single Player Unique into your MP game? For example, the Empyrean Band has "of thieves" associated with it, and is the only (?) Unique which does so. Really could help with those fire-arrow traps in Cats. Could you choose to import an Undead Crown into MP, since the life-stealing abilities "stack" with other lifestealing items, while the life-stealing on the HoS doesn't? Griswold's Edge?

#3. What about items that are "impossible" to find (according to Jarulf)? Would they be allowable? I've seen listed on an item's inventory the Armor of Gloom and Jarulfs Guide says it is impossible to find in Hellfire. Allowable or no? What about an RoE? -- exists in Diablo (pretty common, actually) yet can't be found in HF. Allowable or no?

Just wondering.

Attika

I know some RBD folks still have dinosaurs of a computer ;-) , so you might want to see this post.

I remember one of you mirrored the file as well, I might ask that favor again. :P The guy paying for the sevenlances.com webspace is a bit fed up of late, so I'm not sure how long he will keep supporting it.

Oh, and so long, and thanks for all the fish, or something like that. The nuts and scum at RBD have always been the true lifeblood of Diablo for me. The Asylum is where I really got started down the road of legitness and respectful communication online. (What a strange place to learn that eh? h34r: ) I spent alot of time making 7L mod because I got fed up of people not playing variants in RBD games, but I ended up actually playing the mod myself very little. I couldn't make a replacement for you guys and the variant way.

Moreover than that though, it amazes me how this place maintains integrity in games without following any real rules. Juggernauts like the Basin need 100 pages of rules and vigilant admins to weed out the less savory folks, LL games have never really been safe from the occasional jerk, and le private realm has the downside of being private and keeping alot of good folks out. (let's be honest, the RBD pass isn't that hard to get. :P ) Somehow you've assembled such a great group here that not only have I never seen a single bonified greifer, people would constantly fight over the *other* guy getting the phat l3wt, and item "lottos" were completely unheard of.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but keep on fighting the good fight, :war: spread the message of creative play through the variant way to new horizons, and keep the frank, informal, yet selfless playstyle going strong. Ciao Guys. :wub:

Are we ready for the ultimate challenge?

What makes Beyond Naked Characters the Ultimate Challenge - Difficulty Setting
No, this is not what you think; it goes beyond Normal, Nightmare or Hell games. Among other player definable difficulty settings (Vit pump, item Twink, Skills choice), the most potent game altering setting is the use of Mercenaries and/or Minions. The ability to hire/cast a meat shield, who when properly equipped is almost un-killable, makes many heavily restricted builds possible.

Imagine playing naked with a restricted set of skills, no mercenary or minions. The fact that you are naked with no one to help you also forces you to distribute your stat points differently than your cookie cutter naked builds. To top it off, every monster in the game becomes a minion of an aura enchanted boss, and, your everyday aura enchanted boss becomes a double enchanted boss.

This variant requires high level of tactics and skill. It requires tight cooperation with your teammate(s) – your hostiled partner(s) who is out to hurt you. If you are ready for the Ultimate challenge… if you are ready to go Beyond, read on…

Welcome to the Beyond Naked Characters BN(X)!

TAGS – BN(x)
BNAmz – Amazon
BNAsn – Assassin
BNB – Barbarian
BND – Druid
BNN – Necromancer
BNP- Paladin
BNS – Sorceress


RULES - The rules are simple.
Naked - Naked means naked, no items equipped (see WEAPONS for exceptions), and no charms in inventory.

Beyond Naked - means you have to play with at least one partner, in hostile mode. Each of the players must use at least one skill that harms their partners, whether it is an always-on aura, or a curse, or a duration skill (such as Thunder Storm, Plague Javelin) that hurts partners.


What is Beyond Naked (BN)?
In Classic Diablo, there are cursed items a character can wear that would hinder a character’s abilities. These cursed items can take away some or all your mana, your hit points, minus all attributes, or add to the damage taken, etc. Essentially, you are better off naked, you are Beyond Naked when you use these items. CD BNs pride themselves on the “best” cursed items they can find.

D2 BNs will pride themselves on the partners they travel with! Although there are no cursed items in Diablo2 (and expansions), Classic Diablo BNs can never go as far Beyond as D2 BNs can. In fact, D2 BNs can be too cursed to be playable. For example, a BNS running Thunder Storm (although very low slvl TS would be acceptable with high lvl chars), or casting Iron Maiden with melee BNs in party. It is of major concern how much curse is too cursed.

WEAPONS
In Classic Diablo, BNMs are not allowed any non-cursed items whatsoever since they are magic users. BNRs and BNWs are allowed to use any weapons because they depend on weapons for dishing out damage…

A BN(x) would have to decide at birth if it is going to be Melee or Range class. Melee includes anyone who has to make direct contact to deal out damage. All others are considered as Range.

Ranger
Bow users - are allowed all bows. Druids would have to decide to use the bow for melee or range, but not both.
Throwers - are allowed all throwing weapons. If you use throwing weapons for melee, then you are a meleer and throwing is not allowed.
All other Rangers – No items allowed, period.


Meleer – No items allowed other than your chosen weapon type at birth. Meleer has to decide on its major attack skill and stick with his weapon type of choice.
Smiters - are allowed to use all shields.
Kick Asn - are allowed all boots
All other melee class can use all weapons.

Why the distinction for the bow users and throwers? I am thinking that melee class BNs should be allowed to use plain non-magical shields. Your opinions would be appreciated.


Although BNs can mix and match with other BNs, it is preferred to prearrange a team and decide on the skills/curses each players should use, to avoid duplicated curses and to avoid doing too much combined damage to partners. It is recommended that all BNs should have multiple curses of different strengths (if possible) so it can integrate into any BN team more seamlessly.


ACCEPTABLE PRACTICES
Curse may be turned off when there is no monster in sight.
Party up for quest bosses (before killing blow)
Party up for super unique bosses for exp sharing (before killing blow)
Letting the lower clvl BN make the killing blow for exp.
Wearing a broken belt to hold more drinks is acceptable. This variant is not a test of drinking from inventory skill.
Certain minion will be allowed for traffic control, which will be discussed under each class.


BASIC PVP INFO
When attacking other players, all damage of attacks and spells are cut in half. Minions do 1/4 damage except for Skeletons which do more damage. Some spells are special cased, such as Paladin Thorns, which will only do 1/10th the damage against other players. The duration of poison, cold, are not affected unless the player has equipment that relates to those elemental attacks.

Valkyries, Hirelings, Skeletons, and Golems will attack other players when Hostile. Minion's damage will be cut in half when attacking other players.



This covers the general objectives for D2 BN(x). As always, comments will be much appreciated.


KoP

PS: This has been long over due so I thought I would break this in parts and hope to be making individual posts covering each of the seven classes as to their role in Beyond Nakedness as I find the time. Please feel free to add to the sub threads, even before I do. TIA

Edit one - added in 2 more acceptable practices
Edit two - Added Basic PvP info

I noticed that the results for Epic 39: Division of Labor (the specialists game) never got posted to the main site. Here they are again:

Conquest victories:
Ridgelake - 1280 AD
Sirian - 1814 AD

Domination victories:
Chiron004 - 770 AD
Bihary - 1040 AD
Griselda - 1710 AD
Kabuki - 1784 AD

Diplomatic victory:
Bede - 1868 AD

Single-city cultural victory:
Jabah - 1866 AD

National culture victories:
Justus - 1475 AD
Charis - 1838 AD

Space Race victories:
Kylearan - 1774 AD
Dark Savant - 1788 AD
Charis - 1838 AD
Sir Bugsy - 1997 AD

Loss:
Dwip (Space race), 1957 AD

Congrats to Ridgelake, Chiron004, Bede, Jabah, Justus, Kylearan, and everyone else who played.

Here's an debatable quote from Moorgard, the EQ2 community manager (whatever that means).

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/boa...scending&page=3

Quote:Because at the end of the day, nobody wants to be the worst and weakest example of their profession; they want to be the best and strongest. But there can't be one without the other, and we're not particularly keen on creating such a situation in the early life of a brand new game.

I was wondering what you guys use for taking screen shots of Master of Orion while using DosBox. My method of hitting print screen then saving to paint is somewhat unsatisfactory.

So what to-be-released-games are you all keeping an eye on? It seems like a very fallow period these days. (A run through KoTOR cured me of D2 a while back.)

Among the MMORPGs, World of Warcraft and EverquestII both look promising -- if it turns out that I can stand to play anything of that genre (and perhaps EQII will be better than WoW, despite SOE's poor record, who knows). The GuildWars open alpha during E3 was lots of fun, but GW may well be primarily a competitive PvP game, which -- like FPSs -- isn't my preference. Flagship studios -- another set of ex-Blizzard refugees -- is developing something or other, as described in this informative link

http://www.gamer.nl/viewdoc/1261

but whatever it is, it won't be out for quite a while. Anything else?

p.s. as someone once told me, and with apologies to anyone here who may be from the Netherlands--it's just a joke for crying out loud: "Dutch isn't a language, it's a throat disease."

Imperium Three - Head of the Class is now open. Click here for more information.

-Griselda

The Slackers team on Sun night seems to have had little trouble making its way through the game so far. I originally intended to make the team variant version of this tough, but not too tough, and I think it has succeeded in that regard. However, back in 1.09 I played a slacker-esque variant that was much more restritive -- almost insanely so. I played a hardcore trappassin with base stats, no gear other than some charms she found herself, no more than 1 point per skill, and no mercenary. She managed to defeat Diablo on Normal diff before I gave up on her. The reason? Too darn tedious to keep going. She had no mana ball to speak of, and so was 100% reliant on mana potions to be able to do anything... but in 1.09, you couldn't buy mana potions. She would have to farm easier areas where she could punch her way through the game to find enough mana potions to tackle the harder areas where punching was just too dangerous. It took an entire day of gaming to get from the Pandemonium Fortress to the City of the Damned waypoint.

The Slackers Sunday night team was in part inspired by this earlier character, and in part formulated at the end of 1.09 with the intention that the characters could be molded in 1.10 into whatever we wanted to play once the patch came around. Well, migration to the ladder nixed the latter part of the idea, but the team game proved to be popular nonetheless. Still, with 1.10 adding the ability to buy mana potions back into the game, I decided I wanted to try something closer to the original concept again. Hence was born AssIsGrass, my suicidally slacking assassin. This time I chose to make a couple of changes to the formula, the biggest one of which is that the character is Softcore, not Hardcore, of which I got enough with FoS.

So here's a draft of my proposed Slacker variant. I want to make this variant very tough, but not outright impossible. I'm not aiming quite at an Infirm Irene level of challenge here, but I don't want to be too far off that mark either. I would like to solicit suggestions in this regard, especially from others with experience playing heavily restricted characters. Two factors to consider are the ability to do enough damage to break monster regen, and one-hit-kill potential. The former is a significant factor, given the possibilities for substantial +skills or granted skills from twinked gear, which I don't want to expressly disallow -- part of the fun of collecting gear is making use of it for unusual builds, and I don't want to shut that option out. At the same time, I want to structure the variant in such a way that twinking specific gear is not required for the character to progress, with the caveat that some slacker characters will of course be more gear-dependent than others.

Note that according to these rules, the Slackers of the Sun night team variant are over-acheivers as Slackers go. Please post your thoughts and comments!


----------------------------------------------------------------

Slacker Variant v1.01:

Go down to the beach some day, and you'll see lots of full-grown Slackers wandering around with nothing much in particular to do. Where do they come from? Why do they look so relaxed? Well, adult Slackers come from baby Slackers, of course, and they look so relaxed because they've already bested the worst Diablo and his buddies could throw at them!

There are 3 versions of the Slacker presented here. None of these subclasses are very much given to studying or exercise, and approach life in a very laid back manner. If they run into trouble that proves to be too tough to handle, they simply say 'Whatever', pick themselves up, and continue on their way. The Geek Slacker is the default version, which tends toward having some nifty toys and can pick up some skills intuitively, but is pretty wimpy physically. The Nudist Slacker eschews all forms of visible gear, but is relatively buff as she must have some stuff to show off. The Stoner Slacker is also relatively buff physically and has access to a variety of nifty toys, mainly stolen from her Geek peers, but years of abuse of The Weed have left their toll, and she tends to be slow to pick up even the most rudimentary skills. A growing Slacker can "grow out" of one subclass and change to a different subclass, providing that they can still meet all the criteria of the new subclass for the relevant age bracket.

Slackers tend to prefer the company of other Slackers, or similarly challenged folk. They prefer not to associate with anyone that can show them up by blazing through Diablo's minions faster than they can.

Here's the Slacker life cycle:

A. Slacker Infant
Goal: Defeat at least one Act Boss of your choice. The further you can get, the better!

• Complete Nudity (including jewellry & charms)
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Stoner: You are allowed non-visible gear, but may not allocate skill points at all.
  

• Visibly Nude (no visible gear incl. weapon/shield), with no exceptional/elite items
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Stoner: You are allowed any gear you can equip, but may not allocate skill points.
  

• Gear allowed, but no exceptional/elite items
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Nudist: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you must remain visibly nude
  
• Stoner: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you may not allocate skill points.
  

• Gear allowed, but no elite items
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill, except two skills which may be up to slvl 10
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Nudist: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you must remain visibly nude
  
• Stoner: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you may not have more than 1 point in any skill
  

• Gear allowed, but no elite items
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill, except three skills which may be up to slvl 10
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Nudist: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you must remain visibly nude
  
• Stoner: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you may only have one skill that is up to slvl 10
  

• Gear allowed
  
• No stat points allocated
  
• No more than 1 skill point per skill, except four skills which may be up to slvl 10
  
• No mercenary
  
• Must complete all act quests before advancing to subsequent acts
  
• Nudist: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you must remain visibly nude
  
• Stoner: At any point you may have allocated up to 1/2 the stat points you have ever received, but you may only have two skills that are up to slvl 10
  

Hey--

Last I checked, this one was not updated for D2X. There are now class specific helms (i.e., jawbone caps) that are white (normal) or grey (socketed), but may have +BAR skills on them, similar to staffs, scepters, and wands in D2.

My gut tells me that a true BAR would not wear any cap that pluses up his skills via some juju, but I'd like to hear from some of the folks who started and have played the variant.

Second question--another one that is more significant with D2X. What is the rule on mercs? Do Barbarians have a weakness for rogues?

Thanks for the help

BamBam(BAR), Slayer of Griswold