Rogue Revival Team Launch

[Occhidiangela]

In the interest of minding our knitting . . .

1. I started Revived_Redhead last night, the first DII I have played since March. She is at the Stony Field, Normal, and can't seem to get her Rogue killed. Will work a bit harder on making sure that Elly, that catty wench --who looks so to die for in her snug, body hugging North Beach Leather ensemble (hell, she is so hot, she makes beige look good!) -- meet up with a lady killer. Then, the Revived Redhead can wow them all with her own righteous looks!

2. "Very funny, Scotty, now beam back my clothes!!"

Ah yes, the Lt Ahura fantasy series, I subscribed to that journal back in the day. Classy, exotic, gorgeous, dressed to cause death by heart attack in all red blooded males over the age of 60. Deadly beauty . . . uh, where was I? *wipes brow* Right, my clothes . . .

3. If I catch up, and can overcome the fashion impaired stage, I am a Red Rogue, Weapon Two will be S/S combo, probably some version of curved sword. Will reveal skill choices when they become an issue, in about . . . ACT III.

One short bow with a chipped emerald and a chipped topaz, and a chipped amethyst, will take me quite a ways in Act I and most likely parts of Act II, or I ain't a rogue . . . will be seeking the perfect two socketed scimitar or cutlass in the desert, I think . . .

Occhi

Well, after last night, the team is at the Stony Field.... in Nightmare I too did not anticipate that we would be moving this quickly through the game, but I have a feeling it is going to slow down somewhat as we encounter the nasties of the higher difficulties. Like fighting an LEB Coldcrow, a CEB mana burn rogue archer, and a CEB skel boss at the same time. Or fighting a cursed Rak, another CEB archer, and a goat boss together. Or dealing with a cursed ES Rogue archer camping the entrance to the cave. Or Bishibosh camping the WP. Those fight definitely took a little longer than normal. Partly from having to pick up all the gold and potions lying in neat, conspicuous little piles and trying to scrub the blood and dirt out of our skirts

dahton

[Sirian]

Don't celebrate too soon. We're peaking now. Enchant maxing, mlvl curve not yet leaving us behind, no nasty boss combos... Truth be told, we left a lot of roguely corpses on the ground last night in the opening of A1Nt. I managed to avoid waking up in town, but many among our team needed to make some, ah, adjustments in order to adapt to changing times. Seems they got rather used to me doing heavy tanking, and when I stopped, the existing patterns shifted. The 4-dot run is going to be heroically difficult.

- Sirian

[Sirian]

So far we are batting an unbelievable 1.000 on attendance. Through seven sessions and all of Normal, nobody has missed a night. (This not counting Jaffa, who is currently out but warned of a two-week absence before we began.) Nobody has been significantly late without warning in advance.

The TeamSpeak server helps a lot. Cy went without one night last week and seemed shocked that he felt the lack.

This may not bode well for a slot opening any time soon. I am pleased with all of our team members and have not the slightest intention of squeezing anybody out. However, if you are having a good time solo, and you're in place if someone does bow out, you'd surely be welcomed into the fold. Please don't be mad if that never happens.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

What we really need is to decide upon some tactics, and then follow them rigorously.

I would say that strategy must come first.

I don't know why others are going the way they go when the party splits. I always have a reason for choosing a certain path. Most often the reason is covering the entire area with the least amount of doubling back and the most amount of "cleared space" into which I can fall back if needed. Do not fight on more fronts than are necessary, that's my motto. Sometimes the reason is to seek the most defensible ground first or to avoid dangerous ground. My path choices arise out of playing lots of hardcore single player.

When others head off in a different direction, I usually do not end up following. I may even go it alone to work an area by myself and catch up later. Some players will see me split off and double back to follow. I have not died when by myself, even with players 8 in effect, so it may be that folks figure I can take care of myself. I'm not sure who has thought to wonder why I went a different way, although perhaps after last night's run through the Cave, when all the dead and dying had to make their way down through my lukewarm portal in the corner (because all the other portals were HOT), they will start to wonder.

The moment the party splits... if there's a valid strategic reason to split (sometimes there is) then nothing is lost. If not, then we're dividing our strength. That's the first order of business. If folks are in a hurry and picking directions arbitrarily, then we're splitting the party arbitrarily.


I disagree with the guardian rogues up front (hydra). That's a good strategy in some situations, especially anything involving skeleton archers and mages. What I think is better in general is for experienced traffic controllers to take the lead. How quickly can each player recognize the threat level of a given situation? How often do they gauge incorrectly? (If you died, you got it wrong.) If a full blown hairball develops, can they lead a portion of the uber mob away from the team without getting themselves killed? Can they occupy the attention of a nasty boss or a monster pack? Can they operate safely behind the lines? Can they establish a safe zone in another part of the level?

Watching how folks dealt with suicide minions in Act Five (or, more accurately, ignored suicide minions and let them detonate themselves) gave me an indication of where people are with strategic situational awareness. The focus for now seems to be more on offense than defense. We may have to flip that around to be successful when the going gets tough.

The key thing in a large team, in my experience, is less about knowing what to do and more about knowing what NOT to do. Even without friendly fire, we can be our own worst enemies if our actions are uncoordinated. The first example of that was my shiver armor in A2N. I could tank almost any number of beetles safely IF PEOPLE WOULD ONLY STOP SHOOTING. I called for that time and again and some either did not understand or were not able to discern the difference between normal tanking and strategic use of shiver armor. I'm not much of a heavy handed taskmaster. If folks do things that will get me killed, I back off. I do not sit in silence and say nothing, but I will only explain my position a couple of times, then it's up to others to get along. If they don't, I'll let them take the lead. If they get killed a bunch of times vs monsters that are not taking me down... Maybe a new opening will present itself to try again at getting folks onto one page. If others establish that they can lead and not lead the team into trouble, then I will follow. I don't have to lead for the sake of control. But if others walk into trouble or gauge threats incorrectly, if they offer ineffective instructions... I figure people will come back around and end up following me more often.

I will not go in for ultra-conservative play, though. Waking one mini-batch at a time and luring them out, slaughtering them, then waking another... That's not true to the Four Rogues runs I remember from D1. You've got teleport. If you don't already know, learn how to use it effectively.

EXPECT CHAOS. I am going to stir the ants' nest from time to time, just for the joy of mastering the chaos. If you want to understand my thinking in terms of traffic control, reread Ember's nightmare run.


People need to die some. That's my belief. Dying is only an embarrassment if you aren't doing your best or you make the same mistakes over and over. Character death is the ultimate teacher. If you never die, you're not taking enough risks or you're playing with too much power. If you die lots and lots, hopefully you are also learning a lot. In order to skirt the edge, which is what we're doing with this team variant -- and going to be doing more and more of it -- you have to know your own limits pretty well. If you don't know them yet, or don't know enough about the enemy yet, you have to experience the game more, including deaths. What can you handle? What can't you handle? What shouldn't you do when a teammate is doing X? What shouldn't you do against that type of boss when your teammates are in harm's way?


Spiderdrake got into it with me during the original Diablo II Elemental Strike Team run because I would not boss everybody around. He thought some players were making bad moves and he wanted me to correct them, to lead by micromanaging. I prefer to lead by example. Some people get along better with that than others. Not everyone has the same set of abilities. I try to learn whom I can trust with which situations, and then I'll lean on them in those cases. If I don't ever follow you into battle in a sticky situation or I fall back when you arrive on a scene, it may mean I don't trust whatever it is you're doing. Are you doing something that increases my danger? Maybe not, but it could be worth your time to ask the question and look for an answer.

That's the ultimate strategy: trust. When you can trust that your sisters won't get you killed, the rest will take care of itself.


- Sirian

[Hawkmoon]

Okay, so as a practical matter, shall we rotate the duties of walking point for a while, to establish who is already a good traffic controller and who, shall we say, needs a bit more experience?

I'm just asking for a bit more order amongst the chaos - even if we don't go the slow route I advocated earlier, we still ought to get into the habit of not swarming every which way.

[dathon]

Part of my problem has been my complete lack of experience in playing online. I'm used to Single Player, where I always know where the monsters are, where I am, how much life I ACTUALLY have, etc. And most importantly, I can wait to the last second to walk/run/teleport away. I'm still trying learning to gauge how much cushion I need to compensate for the lag. Perhaps choosing a tanky role with a fragile character was a bit of on my part given this, but one of my goals for this little adventure was to stretch myself. I've played a lot of ranged/minion characters, and wanted to brush up on my tactical hand-to-hand skills, at least while that was still possible.

Anyhoo, to make a point out of all of this, I have learned a LOT, even through Normal, so it has been worth it (at least to me). Couple this knowledge with the fact that I won't be tanking as much, hopefully I'll be hearing that blood-curdling scream less

As for tactics, I agree we should not be splitting up as often. I've always held that you never leave a teammate alone, even if they aren't being particularly smart, so I've followed where I didn't think we should be going, but maybe that should stop. I also heartily agree that some discretion on when to hold fire would go a long way to easing the death toll, particularly against the elemental bosses. Cold and Fire is obvious; when the monster is almost dead, hold off until EVERYBODY is out of range. How should we handle LEB's? Perhaps the three strongest ranged attackers take them while eveybody clears off screen? Or those with the highest resistance? Maybe somebody with a cold spell for fast runners?

dathon

[AlanSHB]

Three thoughts.

Alot of my deaths are me standing tanking physical damage to get a better feel for the new level of Eshield I've added. I think I've died once each of the last 4 levels purely from conducting the somewhat arbitrary eshield beating experience. On the upside I'm learning what it's good vs (ranged) and bad vs (inferno variants)

Strategy wise--I took hydra intending to scout--since it's nigh useless in hell at these skill levels. I've since decided to just max enchant and synergies as well as getting eshield and tk--this decision was based on how fast we're blowing through areas...scouting isn't happening, and while that's ok with this many teleporting people in SC, it definitely has made me far more cavalier about dying than I normally am. Right now I'm looking for paths that minimize time spent clearing and allow for maximum teleport potential when deciding to go up down left etc. That's all.

Tactics wise--we need to find the FIB spots on maps and continue to refill them. It's not something that needs to happen every time, but we don't bring mobs to those spots intentionally at the moment, we just slaughter whoever is already there--that will need to change for dots 3 and 4.

Just my thoughts so far,
AlanSHB
AcmeArchery

[Sullla]

Hmm, as far as "strategy" goes, I have been essentially following Sirian's lead as much as possible. The thought process is something like "if Sirian is falling back, maybe I should do so too." That's the only reason I survived against the Infector in the Chaos Sanctuary when I think 5 of our 8 players got killed.

Seeing as how I hadn't played Diablo II in several years, I'm actually quite pleased with how little dying I've managed to accomplish overall. Only death in our last session was from one of my idiot friends sending me an Instant Message (when I specifically had a message up telling people NOT to send me a message - bah!) Aside from not having enough fire/lightning resistance and getting hosed by Diablo multiple times, I died 3 times in Normal difficulty (twice in Act2 with all the lightning bugs, once in Act5, both at least partly due to lag).

Agree completely that we need to stick together more as a group. We were starting to work out a good strategy for the fire/cold enchanted bosses in the last session, with everyone clearing out before killing them. The group now just needs to figure out the right procedure for lightning bosses.

Oh, and Frost Nova's damage is inconsequential, but the chilling effect has already saved my bacon more times than I can count (+50ish run and teleport doesn't hurt either).

[Sirian]

Seriously... Turn Instant Message off for three hours. Log off. Shut it down.

The Infector practically begs to be FIBbed at the entrance. The minions won't break off, and the pack is a bit much to melee with fragile chars. I thought we might be able to avoid raping the AI, though. Scatter, shoot from the edges... Didn't work out. We ended up falling back to the entrance anyway, leaving scattered Rogue bodies along the way.

Next time we'll skip the heroics and proceed straightaway.


- Sirian

[Occhidiangela]

This may not bode well for a slot opening any time soon. I am pleased with all of our team members and have not the slightest intention of squeezing anybody out. However, if you are having a good time solo, and you're in place if someone does bow out, you'd surely be welcomed into the fold. Please don't be mad if that never happens.

- Sirian

I am on board with your last, and fully aware that team may not need a "rogue off the bench" and I indicated my most likely unavailability in the initial comments anyway.

Glad to see all players are arriving, I know how frustrating it can be for teams of less than 8 to get all players to fit schedules together.

Will beetle on through, may or may not ever catch up with you.

Occhi