I'm playing this game yet again

[T-hawk]

Not worth another thread, but I wrote two more articles about various stuff. Some of this was mentioned here and there in my reports or this or other threads, so I wanted to clean it all up for presentation.

http://dos486.com/diablo/probability/

http://dos486.com/diablo/grid/

[KingOfPain]

The answer is because randomness is clumpy. Some of the Shakos will clump up so that one character will be so lucky as to find multiple in those first 600 runs. And the Shakos that clump together for the lucky character means they are clumping away from the less lucky characters. They need to do extra runs to balance out against the lucky characters who find multiples.

Is this like quantum entanglement? Probability in game-drop RNG speaks big data, mean little to individual player results. Perfect example with the Shako too: Found 8 before the first season, but only one in season one. Sure season one was only 6 months after one year of release, but.

The Tile Grid Guide is definitely a good Variant piece. (That reminded me how Charis tweaked the math for the devs at Bliz to corrected the star shaped Nova.) I have also done a study of the grid on Classic D A study of Campfire and in the DFiles.

This sums up the gap


While this sums up casting directions, and the margin of error


Although I have a vague idea on Tornado and Twister's travel patterns, I will be interested in your takes on them.


.

[T-hawk]

Yeah, that D1 gif is the same principle, a fire wall or flame wave that's diagonal to the grid will skip tiles, like bishops bound to a color on a chess board.

It was Static Field that was star-shaped, not Nova. Actually anything with an instantaneous area-of-effect, which includes Static, Corpse Explosion, and curses; but not Nova which is comprised of moving missiles.

I think Tornado and Twister simply move the same way as Charged Bolt, although it looks different because they pierce and keep going through a target. I don't have any particular insight compared to any other source.

[KingOfPain]

Ah right. Found his original alert about it thanks to the old Network54 RB forum

* They NERFED/Fixed the SF "Star Shape", but... I'm not sure they did it right. I think they chopped off the 'spikes'. SF, Holy Freeze, and many other AOE skills are going to be a **LOT** less effective now. You'll need to be right on top of foes for the skills to work, and low lvl ones in particular are so short it's a joke. This is highly annoying - hardcore strat fans go to the work of testing how radius is calculated, report an interesting result, and with no testing or thought, Blizz "fixes" it, leaving much more important changes not worked on.

[T-hawk]

Right, I remember that part. The implementation was correct after the fix - skills had their stated range in yards, with each tile being 1/3 of a yard. But that was too small for gameplay. So then they then fixed the fix by doubling the now-circular (actually octagonal) area, by redefining the size of a tile - this is why each tile is 2/3 of a yard instead of 1/3 to this day.

So much of D2 was defined by bugs and accidents - like the entire existence of the hammerdin class. Maybe there's an article to write about that sometime too, although it's not really of any value for playing, just historically.

[Kylearan]

Catching up on you Act 3 report...

Got some inspiration out of it (as usual, I guess ). I previously found Mind Blast more annyoing than helpful, but you make a good point about the duration overlap. I'll try it out again in more depth, I think. Oh, and I never thought about using CoS on the Zakarum healer monsters, as I normally teleport directly to them and kill them first thing. But I have to remember that for situations where this would be too dangerous.

Too bad about your sorceress, I would have loved to read more about her, definitely a cool character. She did have a melee merc, right? As soon as I see dolls, I tend to run and cower behind my merc's back, and I'm also so paranoid that I cease attacking in any way for a couple of seconds until I'm really sure I haven't overlooked any dolls near me. (I feel completely silly and embarrassed when doing this with my barb...)

You mentioned you had planned to upgrade a Spirit Shroud. I'm curious, for whom would it have been, a merc or a main char? (I'm debating to upgrade one for my assassin to replace my Rockfleece, until the forge drops hopefully allow me to craft a better armor.)

[T-hawk]

Yeah, she had a Defiance merc, so did everyone on that team, except the barb who had a barb merc to wield a Vile Husk sword for CTC Amplify. I keep finding that Defiance mercs tank much better than anything else, and the defense is often useful for the player character too.

The upgraded Spirit Shroud would have been for the either the claw assassin (who can't use a shield to get cannot-be-frozen from Rhyme) or the werewolf druid (who would have swapped out his Rhyme for higher resists, either 3 diamonds or Moser's shield.) Would have depended on what else I had available for them at the time.

[T-hawk]

The usefulness of Mind Blast depends a lot on the particular assassin build. For an area-of-effect attacker (traps, Phoenix Strike), it tends to be annoying, as the attacks don't affect the converted monsters so you have to do it again to clean them up after they un-convert. For a single target attacker (Dragon Talon, Dragon Claw, Blade Fury), it's great to disable a swath of monsters until you can get to them.

For an upgraded Spirit Shroud, I also previously used that on my first smiter (who died, and low cold resist was likely a factor, so maybe he would have been better with resists in the armor slot), and on my kicker assassin so she could use a +skills claw off-hand instead of Rhyme. Does your assassin have cannot-be-frozen anywhere else? - I forgot who has your Raven Frost. If not then I think I would take an upgraded Shroud over Rockfleece, particularly if you have a socket quest available to throw in a resist rune or a ruby for life.

[T-hawk]

Hey again everyone. If anyone wants something to read in these quiet forum days, here you go. I actually did this team format yet again, my sixth run through it. I was playing much more sporadically in real time every now and then, and now finally came to the end, so here you go.

http://dos486.com/diablo/starteam6/

[Boro]

I didn't know about the large shield movement penalty!

For curiosity's sake, how long did your shopping trips take for the javelin gloves, ITD kris, and ITD claw? Then for the Fireball staff and for the white runeword base.