1.00 News, Info and Gossip

Well i muled some tps and javalins and now im getting ready to get them to hell. How long did you guys need to get a team of 8 untwinked to hell act 4? Im curious. I will try to do it as fast as possible. Hope i can do it in under 20 hours.
Took a while, but the good news is that some of the act bosses drop based on how many players need the quest (I think), so you should get pretty well geared in reasonable time.

I don't remember how long it took, I just remember that NM and Hell was a LOT easier than I had anticipated, and thus took much less time than anticipated as well.

It pays to include at least one sorc and two barbarians amongst the mules. Clear the entrance to the area with the main char, then move these three (or two if you're using sorc or barb) into that area as soon as it is safe. They'll get exp if partied, so you can level them alongside main char, saving a lot of trouble later on. Especially for NM and hell, where you may want high level static and/or BO to help. Beware, BO has diminishing returns and no synergies to extend timer.

Haven't really tried amazons in 1.00 just because WW barb with pike is so stupid good...
@helvete That's what I thought & I agree with your comment. A bit cheesy, but it is basically just twinking.
thx for the help guys, another speed related question, i remember picking up a horadric malus in normal and when i was in hell i droped it and got the quest there. Is it possible to for instance take eyes brains etc that are left over and using these in nm and hell. That would save a some time i think.
That is possible, and was common back in the day. Patch 1.10 blocked this, I think, along with restrictions on where you can portal.

As I understand, durimules is OK around here, so saving quest items should be along the same lines. I believe this isn't very far off regular twinking either, and it has definitely been done in the past. Even crafting quest items in 1.07 for the zero level req and vastly overpowered stats.

Cheesy, yes. Part of the game, yes. I don't remember reading a rule prohibiting this, but just to be sure, either re-read the rules, or check with a mod. @maxicek would be the mod with the final say, I'm pretty sure.

By the way. You're doing exactly what you should be doing: Asking before doing. That helps build trust, which is pretty much the foundation of this entire community. Keep it up!

EDIT: I don't remember if the completion of certain quests will destroy related quest items on characters in game / partied. 1.10+ sure does. 1.09 and earlier is very likely different in some way(s).

Oh, and good luck on your 1.00 journey! Mastering the game in that patch is difficult, but can be extremely rewarding with its sick rares with low lvl req, almost free SoJs, massive goldfind, strength on boots etc.
Yes, that is OK. Once you get to NM it is pretty easy though, so not sure there is a need.
Levelling to 30 in 1.00 is one of the harder things I have done in D2. Good luck with your journey.
About leveling:

The same rule as in 1.10+ applies -. the level difference. Lvl 1 characters get poor exp from lvl 7+ monsters. So just bring the mules you want to build on into the same area you're clearing (after it's safe).

After lvl 25, the above rule does not apply when killing higher level monsters.

ANY monster death provides experience. Even maggot eggs dying by themselves. This can be abused to make unpartied characters gain players8 exp by spawning a lot of eggs while no one is partied, but everyone is in the same area.

Big maggots are gold. From lvl 14(ish) you can level very fast in the Canyon of the Magi by leaving big ones, while killing young and have the eggs pop by themselves.

Same for River of Flame hell, except you want all characters partied.

A lvl 40 char can beat hell if properly attired. For real.
On the maggots subject, is there any trick to get them to lay eggs quicker?

I just do a circuit, RoF WP to CoD and repeat normally.
There seems to be a trick, but I never quite figured it. I think they like town portals. Maybe @Fruit can see what makes them tick.
How do you guys use a barb to lvl with maggots at a low lvl. I use ce and maggot lair mainly. But i hear everybody talk about barbs. cant seem to get that to work at a low lvl.
People are talking mostly about lvl 30+ barb in RoF.

I've did canyon maggots at earlier levels but gosh is it slow and inefficient for awhile. I probably had my barb push too far ahead initially, though I don't quite remember.
yeah i think i have a super nice way to get to 24 quickly, maybe ill make a little video. im not good at explaining it in text but im sure anybody doing a untwinked run needs to know the maggot lair exp farm method. Its really good. I dont get that people would use a barb at selfrushing. But maybe i'm missing something^^
barb is extremely good for NM and hell RoF. Before you get whirlwind everything is slow... sorc has no easy access to mana pots, and barbs are single target. IIRC I leveled my barb to almost 30 from council and started using leap attack for higher dmg.
Does anyone understand how the monster HP bar overflow (where monsters seem to start at low HP, and suddenly seem to heal to full after taking some damage) works? My best guess is that something odd would happen if the game tried to display damage on a huge life bar (e.g. the bar wouldn't budge), so it splits it up in this really confusing way, but I'm curious if anyone knows the actual mechanics behind it.
Not entirely sure, but I reckon the HP may not match up client/server side. I've only had this happen in MP games, so there may be something buggy going on there as well.
One more question - were there any changes for Sorceresses between versions in Classic, other than the star bug -> short radius -> wide radius, and Andariel having her fire resist fixed? I don't see anything in patch notes, but dunno if there were unlisted/subtle changes across versions.
Is it in your stash?
Nope, it was consumed by the cube
WTF! Does it still work outside town?
 
No, just visual bug I guess. Tomes also don't work when inside the cube, even if you have them hotkeyed
I've run into many hotkey bugs over the years involving tomes. They never seem to actually let you spawn a portal, though
Just tried the following: tome with 4 scrolls, and the arrows into bolts recipe. the tome gets eaten by the cube during transmute, and my 4 scrolls are still on the hotkey. out of town i can repeatedly "cast" the tome and get a casting animation but nothing else. i'll have to document this is video form later today after work
I've never used that recipe but believe I've had the same problem (and others) before. Probably multiple ways to cause it.

Not just 1.00, either
Oh, wasn't aware these bugs exist later on i've only ever noticed them in pre-LOD. i'd be interested to know when they were fixed.

if you ever wanted an hour long video of trying to find errors in the programming:


warning: contains japanese shoegaze music and literally ten minutes of me picking the cube up and then throwing it back onto the ground repeatedly
Im cruzing 1.00 and came upon a weapon that does nice dmg. Im wondering if this would be as good as a pike. because i never see people use this weapon type.
Perfect King's + Merciless would provide a 2.98 multiplier on damage.

That axe has 2.87 :eek:

The main downside is that Ancient Axes only have a range of 1, but IIRC they're unaffected by the damage bug that plagues most 2-handed weapons. If so, this is far more damaging than even the best possible Pike, so if you don't mind the poor range it's fantastic. If Ancient Axes are subject to the ED% bug in 1.00, it may be worth porting forward to 1.04, where Whirlwind's search radius is much friendlier to low-range weapons - or just build a Charger and one-shot everything :D
Ill certainly test it vs a pike, maybe in p8 its handy for lvling its a cool axe for certain. Dont know what the knockback will do though^^ A charger is always an option for sure. Ill test and report on the axe.
Damn, hell of an axe. I prefer the extra range some other weapons have to offer, but against smaller groups, and especially single-target, that axe is very hard to beat. If I'd find something like that, I'd just make a Barbarian for it out of principle. :p


Maybe handy to know that min and max get separate rolls in pre-LoD patches. Before I realized it myself, I figured something was bugged, and wasted my time looking for a display/calculation bug. :<

If you're referring to the lousy two-handed sword damage; all two-handed melee weapons are subject to it. I'm not so sure it's really a bug, but just a calculation decision that wasn't really thought through. It doesn't really hurt "pure" two-handed weapons so much, though. (Or were you referring to something else?)
I was thinking of the issue that impacted (at least) bows, mauls, and off-weapon ED% damage sources in 1.00, where the ED% was applied to an unused 1-1 one-handed damage stat. I wasn't sure if it also applied to polearms and axes; the only weapon class that I know escaped unscathed were spears.
The 1-1 is not unused, which is exactly the problem; +%ED is applied to one-handed damage, but for those specific weapons (Maul and such), the one-handed damage is really low in the weapons.txt file, so the bug is just a small error there. The bow bug is a different one, where the +%ED is not applied at all (bug in the missile code). Finally, the off-weapon +%ED also is not really the same; I assume they meant for the +%ED to get applied to the weapon, but in stead it is applied to the armor itself, which have 0-0 damage. But afaik the damage is correctly displayed for melee weapons, so that Ancient Axe really does deal disgusting damage. :p
Hi Guys ! After som struggle, I successfully get a Diablo 1.00 version to work (thanks to Trenshaws version) !
But now, some old rule comes back to me : you have to beat diablo in SP before you can create a HC character.

As I want to play HC imediately, is it possible to share a D2s file, to save me some time ? I didn't see it's not allowed in the forum rules post, so I guess it's alright.

I can't wait to give 1.00 a try !! :)
@Chaostar
I'll trust you for reading the rules. :p Here's a save of mine, it's a HC char that's in Nightmare, so I assume that should unlock HC for you. Hopefully.
Thank you very much @Fruit !! It works !
Oh my god the 480x600 resolution ! :D:eek::p
At this point it's the other way around for me. Played so much pre-LoD that whenever I play LoD, it feels like I'm running the game with a zoom-mod. :D But yeah, pre-LoD can feel kind of claustrophobic. :E
I've been playing for 40mn and, wow, I feel like it's a mod !
- no drops !
- it's really hard. My sorc had a NDE at the beginning of the stony field :eek:
- shift+clic on potion doesn't move to the belt
- no "repair all" button
- ligthning stike in the cold plains ! it doesn't exist any more, is it ?
- fought an aura enchanted monster : I still had the curse on me a few seconds after he died !
...

I love it !! :p
Glad to hear Patch 1.00 is finally running ;)

And yes, be aware of Rakanishu in the stony field, his lightning
forces are very mighty ...
Hey everyone. Wanted to join in on the discussion as I've been playing 1.00 lately.
Firstly, I absolutely love it. I've just finished Normal and have been running Cow King for a few days now trying to gear my characters for Nightmare and beyond.
I've had a pretty good luck with pikes for my barb.
l84aRrp.jpg


Interestingly enough, next day after this one dropped, another failed unique pike dropped from CK, and it was completely identical to this one. Same name, same damage, same modifiers. Even the AR and +MaxDamage rolls were the same. I didn't save the second one, unfortunately, so I cannot send it forward and check fingerprint. Have anybody encountered anything like that?
Yes, there is discussion elsewhere in this thread about it. Most versions of classic are capable of this, but it's most evident when running cow king in 1.00 and 1.01. Wasn't it fixed in 1.06?
Hello!

I wish to start playing hardcore in 1.00. However, creating a HC character is not allowed until the player has beaten the game on normal difficulty. Is there any way around this?

All I could find was a registry edit (add DWORD AllowHardcore with value 1 to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Blizzard Entertainment\Diablo II), which doesn't seem to work, there's no checkbox for HC in the character creation screen. Or am I missing something?

I tried searching all over the forums and Google, but that's all I could find.
 
Unless a nice friendly forum member sends you a SC character, no way I know of in Classic.
Ah, okay, thanks! I'll prepare to do things the hard way.
That Frozen Orb video is beautiful :cool:
I was curious about how Barbarian Masteries are calculated and displayed, since it was mentioned that Mastery bonuses are multiplicative (in addition to the 2% criticals/level). This Jarulf post confirmed what I was looking for:
  1. Mastery ED% is multiplicative, a la old Strafe/GA
  2. Also like Strafe/GA, the LCS displays the damage as if it were additive
Since there's no easy rule for manually calculating weapon damage like there was for slvl 20 Strafe (bow damage times dex bonus times two), I wondered if there was a way to find a single number to multiply pre-Mastery damage by (weapon times strength plus combat skill) and get an average damage.

Critical hits can be treated as a final multiplier of (1+critrate) on damage:
Code:
Where c=critrate and d=damage, the expected value of damage is:
2cd + (1-c)d
2cd + (d - cd)
cd + d
d(1+c)

So the 2% crit/slvl adds a multiplier of (1+.02 * slvl) to damage. Not bad! The ED% (25% + 5%/slvl) is also multiplicative, so we have two multipliers applied by Mastery:
Code:
(.05s + 1.25)(.02s + 1)
.001s^2 + .075s + 1.25
An exponent - how exciting! :D Punching in values of s, we get...
Code:
1   1.326
5   1.65
10  2.1
15  2.6
20  3.15
25  3.75
The .001 coefficient on the s^2 keeps it from getting too exciting, regrettably :p Subtract .02 from each of these multipliers for Mace/Sword/Axe Masteries - I'll never understand the discrepancy.

So, in short, at slvl 20 Mastery, the rule-of-thumb for calculating final average damage is:
(base weapon) * (Strength/100 + WW) * 3.15
cow king running 101

find a map like this
View attachment 15475

then learn how to keep consistent movement patterns and things until you can force many failed uniques like this
View attachment 15476
or this
View attachment 15477

keep doing this and you'll be rich both from the rares that end up being good, but also sell all the crap ancient armors and winged helms, death masks, etc for 20-25k apiece. use all that gold to gamble for whatever, usually low cost high reward stuff like 7k for a tarnhelm or 7k for a regular belt, all the boots under 20k, or the unique bone shield for casters
cow king running 101: 1% life bulb
I've been talking with fruit about Classic 1.00 and learned a few things about the way the game deals with MF that isn't really mentioned anywhere (or not correctly or only in bits and pieces). So using this as sort of a notepad:

1. Monster Levels and MF

I deleted all the NPCs, Pets and 'dummys' from the monstats.txt and isolated Diablo into a separate row. Then I took the maximum and minimum over the monster levels in Normal, Nightmare and Hell. None of them were higher than Diablo's level minus 3 and hence Diablo is the highest level monster in any difficulty. Here's a table, the max is just Diablo's levels:

NormalNightmareHell
Min12651
Max406590
Looking through the setitems.txt and uniqueitems.txt with fruit and consulting GalaXyHaXz' affix tables gives the following maximum MF setup:


SlotItemMF
HelmTarnhelm49%
Body-0%
ShieldMilabrega's20%
WeaponGull50%
AmuletMagic48%
RingsMagic32%
GlovesMagic34%
BeltGoldwrap30%
BootsMagic34%
Which makes for a total of 329% MF. EDIT: fruit just reprimanded me: A barb can get 30% more by dual-wielding Gull's, so his max MF is 359%.



This information is relevant because MF and mlvl are the ONLY variables when it comes to MF in classic.


2. Breakpoints

Just like in 1.10+ there is a point where some of the chances can 'bottom out', i.e. every item is at least of a certain quality when it drops.
  • Every monster of lvl at least 24 will only drop normal items of normal quality or higher (no more low quality stuff). As minimum mlvl in NM is 26 this means no more low quality drops in NM and higher.
  • Every monster of lvl at least 48 will only drop exceptional items of superior quality or higher (no more normal quality stuff). As minimum mlvl in H is 40 this means no more normal quality drops in H.
  • No monster can drop low quality exceptional items.
  • If you have 151 MF then every exceptional drop from a monster will be at least magic quality (obviously not throwing weapons) and your chance at rare quality will take a sudden (very noticeable) dip. The chance at a rare with less than 151 MF is significantly higher. (There's somewhat of a jump)
Otherwise there is no point where the chance at a certain quality all of a sudden becomes 100% because you equipped a certain amount of MF or because a monster is high lvl enough.


3. Maelstrom, where can I find it and why did Treeharl lie to us???

In his guide Treeharl lists the best place to find Maelstrom as the Arcane Sanctuary with tons of MF. Now I don't know where he got that one from but it seems very likely that none of the regulars, minions and champions/uniques or even the Summoner can drop it. With what fruit told me about how drops work the only monster there that could drop Maelstrom is either a Flying Scimitar from a trap or not a monster at all: a chest.

So I'm pretty sure the whole Maelstrom from AS thing is not good advice :p In the spirit of that: did anyone ever find a Maelstrom in 1.00 Classic?

From what fruit told me the only monsters that seem capable of dropping Maelstrom are Quest Andariel, Flying Scimitars and a bunch of monsters appearing from the Outer Cloister to the end of Act 1 as well as Burning Dead Mages and some Unravelers in act 2 (Hollow Ones). Also some nest has yew wand in its TC, but I don't know whether they can drop anything.


4. Uniques/Champs and SUs

According to fruit all Uniques and Champions drop one magic item and one potion except for Act 4 where they have a 12,5% chance to drop a rare and a potion instead. It looks like this might be true for SUs as well. So no uniques or sets from those guys either.




I will try to write out some stuff about the MF as fruit told it to me soon and hopefully that will make Classic MF less of a mystery :D
Here's the write up promised in the previous post, sorry for the double post but this isn't exactly spam ;)

Everything below was debugged by @Fruit, I did the write up and the calculations but obviously without him that would not have been possible! So thanks to fruit for doing all of this work! :) (all so we can find those exceptional rare polearms! :eek:)

All of the below refers to minions and regular monsters ONLY. All sorts of quest drops are hardcoded and so are champion/unique/SU drops. To add insult to injury the aforementioned code is compromised mostly of spaghetti (I'm echoing fruit's thoughts on the matter here ;) ) One can use the stuff in part 4. of the previous post as a very rough outline but there are some more complicated exceptions to that (and of course it should read that champions drop 'magic items or gold' , not just magic items)

***

First off I will present an outline of a monster drop:
  1. The monster is killed.
  2. The chance to drop is taken into account. If this step is unsuccessful the algorithm terminates.
  3. There is a 5% to do a good drop and a 95% to do a regular drop.
  4. If the good drop was chosen the monster will pick one item from one a 'good' TC.
  5. If the regular drop chosen the monster will pick one item from one of the four TCs specified in its monstats.txt entry.
  6. If the difficulty is NM or Hell and the item has an exceptional version there is a chance for it to be upgraded to exceptional.
  7. The quality of the chosen item is determined.
This excludes one important step. At some point the game will check if the monster is actually capable of dropping the item type that was selected. It does so by comparing monster level with quality level. If this check fails it will attempt to drop an item of the same 'type' instead. So for example if the monster can't drop a Pike the game tries to find another spear type weapon to drop. This is not described here but also isn't a huge problem since most monsters in NM can drop most normal items, all monsters in Hell can drop all normal items and most monsters in Hell can drop most exceptional items. (Might be forthcoming, no idea ;))

Also to anyone new to classic: there is no step in which ethereality is decided, there were simply no ethereal items back then.

Here is a loose collection of explanations regarding this process:


The Chance to Drop

When a monsters is killed the game first checks whether they even drop an item. The chance for this is given by:
Code:
% Chance to drop = min{20*Players+Bonus;90}
where Players is the number of all alive players within the game (no matter where they are or whether they are partied) and Bonus is the value of the column 'SpawnPctBonus' in the 'monstats.txt' belonging to the monster that was just killed.

A few notes are in order:
1) The maximum chance to drop is 90% and no more than five players are ever needed to reach this maximum.
2) The fifth player is worth at most 10% chance to drop whereas the players before him are worth up to 20% each.

Only a few select monsters have SpawnPctBonus specified at all, so the number of exceptions can be counted on one hand:
View attachment 53600
The 'Specter' class of wraiths spawns in the 'Arcane Sanctuary', the 'Ghoul Lord' class of vampires spawns in the 'Tomb of Tal Rasha' levels as well as the 'Arcane Sanctuary' and finally 'Nest' refers to all four nest variants in the game. (Foul Crow, Blood Hawk, Black Vulture and Cloud Stalker)


Treasure Classes

As in later versions of D2 there is a 'TreasureClass.txt' (from now on shortened to 'TC.txt') in which certain drop patterns are specified. For all intents and purposes the rows of this .txt are the TCs and we can use those terms interchangeably.

Some of the many differences to the modern .txt are these:
1) There are no 'Group' and 'Level' columns since there is no TC upgrade process in Classic.
2) A TC may not refer to another TC. This means that each TC is basically a list of items. In particular there are no armo and weap TCs to collect a lot of item types under one neat header.
3) The actual 'TC.txt' does not reference the items by their ingame name but rather by their internal code, e.g. 'hax' instead of 'Hand Axe'. This can be fixed by using the 'vlookup' function in excel to match the item codes to the item names since those are stored together in the 'weapons.txt'/'armor.txt'.
4) There is no weight system yet so if an item is supposed to drop twice as often as the other members of its TC the item has to be listed twice. In particular every entry in a TC is equally likely. This is incredibly clunkly and causes the first seven columns of each chest TC to be just 'gld' which is the item code for gold.
5) The four rows for quality factors from the 'TCex.txt' are not present yet (the quality selection is somewhat easier in this patch)
6) There are no exceptional items listed in the 'TC.txt' at all. Exceptional drops are instead handled in step 6 of the drop process which decides whether a normal item upgrades to exceptional before being dropped.
7) No 'nodrop' column, see the previous section for the chance to drop.

Because of 2) the way that monsters are assigned their TCs is different than later patches as well. They have four columns in the 'monstats.txt' for each difficulty level which specify the TCs they may drop from in that difficulty. If the game decides that the monster does a regular drop (instead of a 'good' one) it will pick one of the four TCs listed here. Each one of them is equally likely however if one of them is 'Null' it will be disregarded and the roll will go over all the ones which are not 'Null'
Some monsters (such as Bone Walls or Maggot babys) only have 'Null' entries here yet they are regularly seen dropping items. This is caused by the good drop.

(A theoretical side note: The game reads the TCs from left to right and stops once it reads a 'Null'. So everything that occurs after a 'Null' is simply disregarded completely, e.g. if it was 'TC1 - Null - TC2 - Null' the game determines that there is one TC, namely TC1 and then drops from that with a chance of 100%)


Good Drops

If the 5% to do a 'good' drop suceeds the game will force a drop from one of five TCs depending on the difficulty/act the monster died in.
View attachment 53601
I rearranged these TCs to resemble those of later patches, so a ten under Armor means that a TC contains ten pieces of armor. Also the 'Weapons' include melee and missile weapons as well as staves but they do NOT contain wands and scepters.

The 7 under the gem categories means that each type of gem (of that quality) occurs exactly once in this TC, this patch does not yet favor 'actual' gems over skulls. In fact none of the gems (except for chipped skulls) occurs in ANY other TC so they are the only way to get gems short of doing Andariel/HF rushes or popping gem shrines without a gem in your inventory.

Do not forget that nodrop factors into the 'good' drop just as with the 'regular' one. So even with 5 players in the game a monster will still only have a 4,5% chance to do their good drop, the remaining percent are split between no drop (10%) and regular drop (85,5%).

Also note that some monsters have the good TCs assigned to their regular TC slots so they may drop from it even if they do a 'regular' drop. The list of such monsters is very short: Cows and Council Members. Naturally they will have the best chances in the game to actually drop gems.


The Exceptional Upgrade

There are no exceptional items listed in any TC, instead the game tries to upgrade the normal items it picked to exceptional. The chances for this to occur are codified in the 'difficultylevels.txt' (where they are wrongly refered to as 'odds') and are 0% in normal, 10% in NM and 20% in Hell.

(Note that this only applies to regular and minion monsters; the chances for an upgrade are different for other drops)

Some of the exceptional upgrades are simply broken, a full list was posted by GalaXyHaXz:

Note that the original post contains a claim that the chance for an exceptional upgrade is simply 25% regardless of difficulty and monster, this is NOT correct.

The most important takeaway from that list is the inability of Lances to drop. In fact nobody has ever found a Lance in 1.00 at all. (There is no exceptional upgrade in the Vendor and Gambling Screens and special monsters use the same exceptional upgrade procedure as regulars)


Wrong Entries in the TC.txt

There are a couple of entries in the 'TC.txt' which refer to item codes that simply don't exist. It's always the same code 'bqv' which is very similar to the codes 'aqv' for 'arrow quiver' and 'cqv' for 'bolt quiver'. Usually a TC has 'aqv' and 'cqv' both and not just one or the other. Now some of the chest TCs have 'aqv' but either have no bolts or have 'bqv' instead of 'cqv'.

However this does not break the respective TCs, rather it means that if the game chooses 'bqv' it will fail to find any such item and just drop nothing instead.


Quality Selection

Once the item type has been selected the game will determine its quality. The process used utilizes different paramters for normal and exceptional items but can be described for both at once. First the game checks whether the players has any MF on, if yes then it will use the MF to do rolls for Unique, Rare, Set and Magic quality in that order. If the player has no MF equipped or all of the MF dependent rolls failed it will go through a second set of rolls including Unique, Rare, Set, Magic, Superior and Normal quality all of which are NOT dependent on MF.

If a roll is successful the game will try to assign the respective quality to the item if possible but if all rolls failed the item will become 'low quality' by default.

Throwing weapons can't spawn with a quality higher than superior so if they roll magic or higher the game will set them back to superior quality. Some items like potions or gems can't have a quality at all in which case the quality roll is discarded altogether after being performed.

The MF dependent rolls (which are performed first if MF is non-zero) each have the following reciprocal chance:
Code:
max{1;[(X-[mlvl/Y])*100/MF]}
while the MF independent rolls have the reciprocal chance:
Code:
max{1;X-[mlvl/Y]}
where X and Y are constants that depend on both the quality the roll tries to determine as well as whether the item type is normal or exceptional. (also [ ] means rounding down)

Here's a full table:
View attachment 53602
If you know the 'itemratio.txt' then some of those values will be familiar to you, namely the values for X agree with those for the quality entries in that file while most of the values for Y agree with the divisor entries. It might look like the game uses this file to determine the values X and Y but according to fruit a lot of them are actually hardcoded and just happen to agree with the entries in 'itemratio.txt'. The divisors for unique, rare and set quality specified in the 'itemratio.txt' are not used at all.


Notes on the quality selection

The first thing worth exploring is the max{1; } occuring in both reciprocal chances since it opens the possibilities for chances to 'bottom out' at 1, i.e. to have a 100% of getting the quality in question (if applicable to the item type). So we are interested in finding out when X-[mlvl/Y] or [(X-[mlvl/Y])*100/MF] are 1 or less.

***

First we consider the MF independent chances where we get:
Code:
X-[mlvl/Y] ≤ 1
iff
X-1 ≤ [mlvl/Y]
iff (X is an integer)
X-1 ≤ mlvl/Y
iff
(X-1)*Y ≤ mlvl
The stuff after the 'iff' is the reasoning behind it.

Here's a list of the products (X-1)*Y:
View attachment 53603
Since no monster has mlvl bigger than 90 we conclude that there are only three MF independent rolls whose chances bottom out at 100%:
  1. Every normal item dropped by a monster of level 24 or higher will be at least of normal quality. (This applies to all NM monsters)
  2. Every exceptional item dropped by a monster of lvl 48 or higher will be at least of superior quality. (This applies to all Hell monsters)
  3. Every exceptional item dropped by a monster will be at least of normal quality.
This pretty much settles all questions on the superior and normal qualities. It's worth noting that the chance for normal items to pass their superior check reaches its maximum with monster of level at least 80, it's 1 in 7 then, climbing up all the way from 1 in 12 for monsters of level 15 or lower.

Another funny aspect is the MF independent magic quality roll for exceptional item types which has X and Y equal to 3 and 100 respectively, i.e. the reciprocal chance here is 3-[mlvl/100] which is always equal to 3 since there are no monsters of level 100 or above. Hence the chance to pass this roll is always 1 in 3. (no other quality has such a ridiculously high divisor)

***

Now to the more complicated case of the MF dependent chances, here we get:
Code:
[(X-[mlvl/Y])*100/MF] ≤ 1
iff
(X-[mlvl/Y])*100/MF < 2
iff
X-[mlvl/Y] < 2*MF/100
iff
X < (2*MF/100)+[mlvl/Y]
So we're essentially looking for combinations of MF, mlvl and Y s.t. (2*MF/100)+[mlvl/Y] is bigger than X. Now we assume maximal achievable MF and mlvl which are 359% and 90 respectively and calculate this term for all Y which we simply call the test value. This doesn't need a table because there's only three cases altogether:
  1. For unique, rare and set quality (on normal and exceptional items) the test value is 97,18 and the lowest X is 100, so here you never bottom out at a chance of 100%.
  2. For magic quality on normal items the test value is 12,18 and X is 30 so no chance of 100% here either.
  3. For magic quality on exceptional items the test value is 7,18 and X is 3. This is where the fun begins!

***

Our focus is now set on the magic roll for exceptional items which has reciprocal chance max{1;[(3-[mlvl/100])*100/MF]}. Again the term [mlvl/100] is always 0, so the actual reciprocal chance is max{1;[300/MF]} and we see that for MF at least 151 the chance to pass the magical roll is 100% and hence ALL MF independent quality rolls are skipped.

In fact something similar happens at earlier points. The reciprocal chance for magic quality starts at 300 for 1 MF and quickly reduces to 10 for 29 MF. It keeps decreasing at an alarming rate until 151 MF is reached and it becomes 1. Each time it decreases by 1 the chance to fail the magic quality roll (and thus pass to the MF independent rolls) is decreased significantly.

In practice this means that the chance to get a second attempt at a rare/failed unique roll (for your exceptional polearm!) takes a dip everytime you hit one of the MF values where the magical reciprocal chance goes down by 1. At low values of MF this is is usually made up by the increased chance to pass the rare quality check for the MF dependent part. At 151 MF you lose your 'second' chance altogether and this is why the MF folklore of Classic says that 151 MF is a 'bad' MF value to have.

Not all is lost though because there is an MF value over 151 where the chance to get a rare/failed unique roll 'recovers', i.e. is bigger than it was at 150 MF. Since all of these calculations are dependent on mlvl there is no one value of MF where this happens, rather it's different for every monster.

To give just one example: For a monster of level 82 (like an Urdar) the chance to produce a rare or a failed unique (if an exceptional item was picked) is 5,5% at 150 MF and 4,3% at 151 MF. It is less than 5,5% for MF between 151 and 190 and reaches 5,6% at 191 MF. This shows that the gap to 'recovery' is not so big as to make any MF above 150 useless. With the right rares it is absolutely possible to reach 191 MF or more. At 254 MF the chance is already 7,6% which is roughly 38% higher than 5,5%.



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


This is it for now, maybe there will be something about the mechanics of Find Item but fruit already hinted that it might not be good for anything but gems.
Hi all. Been a long time since i've visited or played D2. Burnt myself out doing LK/sewers 2 runs in 1.13. Found this topic...1.00 sounded good so here I am.

I just finished my first set of 8 through normal. It was a blast. A different game. I like it. I had great success using an amazon to level my barb/sorc to 30. 20 in jab 3 in critical strike took me to Nightmare. It is ...absurd how strong that zon was with a Hand of Broc and 5ll/4ml jewelery. It took some time in act 1 to farm the gold for gambling the gloves. Got lucky with the leech jeweley about midway act 1. Shop a spear of the bat ASAP to help power leech for jab. I upgraded to a plain spetum in act 2 and a socketed pike i found act 3 jungle. Filled it up with skulls i had to help leech. Act 4 i bought a lords pike. Other than those purchases i used what dropped. I had 0 fire/cold/light res most of normal.

She was able to leech tank all the act bosses. Needed to drink a few pots, sure. I didn't need to stat or skill the barb/sorc at all. Shopped a 48 light res armor for diablo and put on a 3mdr amulet along with my pretty decent ormus ring that had LL and 2pdr. Leech tanked diablo no problem. I needed healing or rejuv pots to counter the lightning hose damage but I wasnt in danger. Lord de Seis was a lot harder.

A couple deaths. Szzark the Burning had me for lunch and the witch doctor and his minions cooked me before I could get a swing off. Lured Szzark to a choke point and was able to leech tank his damage with some pots. Split the docs up and took em down 1 or 2 at a time. Lightning enchanted bosses were parked. No way i could leech tank that with 0 light res.

Found a Torch of Iro in front of the monastery and a Snake Cord in act 4. That surprised me. Andy dropped a skull, Duriel a Goldwrap, Meph a Ripsaw, and Diablo the unique pike, war axe, and war hammer. Diablo also dropped a sweet pike with 120 max, 20/30ias, 9 ll, and a couple other mods. So, with 20 seconds left on the timer I drop the rare pike on the ground for my amazon. She loots it. About 12 seconds left. Game ends. Start a nightmare game and its gone! What a jip!

I drew maggots in river of flame. Decided to get to 29.5 there and get the rest for the barb/sorc in CS. 1 point Fend worked well with a shopped pike of quickness. Amazon is the MVP of normal :D

P.S. I'd post pics but the screenshots I took weren't in my folder. In fact I can't seem to find them anywhere. Is this a 1.00 thing(I doubt it since i've seen pics in this thread)?
They would end up directly into the d2 folder I believe. Search function should reveal this, by doing a search for screenshot*.jpg
When I was running Diablo with Glide I ran into the same problems, for some reason no screenshots are saved when you press the button. The only way I found around this was to press my global print screen button and then paste it in paint.

Screenshots should work just fine without Glide.
 
I have not read this thread yet but I'll ask..

How much ML is needed to lvl30 Barb to keep Whirling? I have 3% from hands and 4% from amulet but that is not enough. He just stops when mana ends.

He has a rare pike with max damage over 100. I won't switch now to 1.00 to check the stats..

m4ke

Edit: And what should I do with one lvl30 Sorc?
Edit2: They have both just completed Normal and I'd like to go for The King.
 
That is so equipment dependent that there's probably no perfect answer. My strategy has been to equip Frostburn instead of Hand of Broc and then herd monsters before whirling. This way you have enough mana for a few whirls and the whirls you do will bring in more mana.

I'd add another 6 characters and let them leech/leech their rewards, especially the Ormus rewards in higher difficulties can produce very nice rings. The mana leech on rings in 1.00 is higher than in later versions while having lower level requirements. And in contrast to 1.07 you can get dual leech.

For King I'd prefer the Barb because he can consistently get the same drops whereas most sorc spells randomize the drops too much (each missile created on a 'segment' updates the segment seed and thus changes drops). However Cow's are still tough at that level for a melee character so I'd advise for some more leveling.
 
I was hopping between 1.07 and 1.00 the last couple of days and decided to "finish" my project of 1.00. Thought I read the 1.00 gossip "real quick" beacuse it was only 3 pages.... oh boy was i fooled!
My story so far: Started a couple of years ago and stopped at Normal Cow King. Last week i went all the way to Hell ROF with my squad and I'm at level 54 with my barb right now. It was a pretty smooth ride until now! Now the leveling begins.
Does anyone have the clean .txt files for 1.00 on hand?
 
Be careful, a lot more stuff is hardcoded in 1.00 and the columns don't necessarily mean what they 'obviously mean'.

Here's all the txts:
 

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For King I'd prefer the Barb because he can consistently get the same drops ....
Can you explain how this is done? My Sorc found a Rare Pike with ML while she was moneyrunning in LK and Barb keeps now Whirling better. I have done some King runs and find it really hard to reproduce the drops. BTW gambled him Frostburns as well.

Now my Barb has a map which drops Pikes, Greaves and Plated Belts mostly but quite random. KIng is in a small pack outside the 'King's area' and I can run there a short distance and kill him Whirling through one pack of cows at first. Still I can't be sure what he drops.

His previous maps weren't even that stable.

And how do you take SS in Classic? Print Screen did nothing. Atleast in game directory is nothing.

m4ke
 
The way fruit explained this to me the drops (and to a degree the spawns of monsters) in Classic are influenced by the order in which you visit 'segments' as well as everything that is 'spawned' on these segments. What's bad about sorc is that for example each shard of FO is counted as a 'spawn'. So just randomly spamming that will change drops and it's harder to get consistent drops.

Barb doesn't have that problem though so you can more easily 'do exactly the same each run' as far as that's achievable. The less monster spawns you have on your way to the King the better. The Ideal map is the one where the red portal opens up inside the King's pen with him right next to it. I think somebody has such a map in a modern patch but I see no reason why it can't exist in an early patch.


I found that Screenshots don't work with glide so I don't use it at all. I still don't get any screenshots saved to the game directory but at least pasting in paint works fine.
 
I get screenshots to my game directory in 1.00 no problem using print screen. It is the only version I have and no version switcher files are used, and I have no mods or modified dll. I play on windowed mode.
 
Enough Cow King for now. Time to push forward. My powerduo is starting ACT III NM. Barb runs to Meph I think. How's that Old Religion quest? It is enough that don't speak to Ashaera after the reward?

m4ke

Edit: One good thing in spending many hours doing King runs. I got s*itloads of chippies to 1.08 =)
 
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Hell A1 beginning now. Den cleared, Raven killed, next Cain. Easy so far.

I want to make a rusher Sorc when I finish Hell with my team. What's the cookie cutter gear setup for rusher Sorc? I remember something like Twitchthroe, Spectral Shard, Sigon's or 3xPDiamond tower shield (which ?) Are those any good?

At the beginning the items must be easy to obtain. How about
- Bladebuckle (Dex, Str, DR)
- Frostburn (Mana)
- Tarnhelm (+Skill)
- Tearhaunch (Res, FRW, Dex, Str)
- some jewelry (no SoJ's yet =)

I know that most of those can be beaten by rares but before those rares.

m4ke
 
@m4ke One thing that sorc rusher can't do is reliably kill Hell Duriel. He can charge while his lair is still loading and you can't do anything about it. That's why I think that best rush setup is to have Barb on standby to kill Duriel. In fact he has a much easier time quickly clearing most areas in Hell, so you can just do Act 2 until the RoF waypoint with Barb in Hell. I've tried CS with Barb, it's doable but he can't do de Seis for fear of crashes, so there Sorc needs to come back into the fold.

For the Sorc rushing in normal/NM you can get away with Lidless Wall which is also something you can gamble relatively quickly once you start doing maggots. In Hell that is going to slow you down too much because everything is dangerous for her if you want to be fast (nothing except de Seis/IM is dangerous for Barb by comparison). Just try to get the fastest fcr Breakpoint and high Mana for Normal/NM and she should be good to go.

The difference between SoJ and no SoJ is insane w.r.t. mana, I would recommend you run Cow King for one, you'll not regret it.


On the items you mentioned:
  • I haven't actually used Spectral Shard at all in Classic although I had it. I used Gull on the sorc instead but I doubt it had a big effect... I was afraid to overstat Dex but in all honesty those few points will not hurt you, she will have very low HP no matter what.
  • Tarnhelm just gives + 1 to all Skills and the MF, it can be good at times but look out for rares, they offer so much more.
  • Twitchthroe only gives 1% IAS.
  • 3xPDiam Tower Shield is a great option for a Sorc in Hell without good rares, you should make yourself one in any case. Don't bother rerolling it, the stats are rerolled everytime you open the character.
  • Blocking is much easier in Classic, no dex needed and clvl doesn't play into it either. What it says on the shield is your block, that simple. The best block shield by far is Sigon's shield, it has maxblock and even gives +1 to all Skills.
 
Thanks for the info. I have still almost all Hell to go with my current team and I will gamble and do King runs and get rares so maybe I'll get something good.

I listed Twitchthroe only because +10 to Dex/Str. That's a huge amount off Nrg =) And if monsters AR is bugged it's the same what Def she has?

Next ring The King drops is SoJ =) What are the Sorc FCR BP's in Classic?

m4ke
 
Energy becomes less of a problem the more rares/SoJs you have. But yeah at the beginning it's a good idea to reserve some points for it. A new sorc is easily rushed and can use less Energy once you have better items.

Yeah, defense is worthless, most monsters get 4xAR from what I can tell.


As a general rule of thumb you can get Classic breakpoints by putting the corresponding 1.07+ Breakpoints into a certain formula:
Code:
f(x)=[a*x/(a+x)]
where 'a' is a constant specific to the type of animation the breakpoints are for. For IAS a=120 and for FCR/FBR/FHR a=150. Then if x is a breakpoint in 1.07+ for that animation the value f(x) will be a breakpoint for the same animation in 1.00. If you convert all of them you will have the breakpoints for 1.00 minus some that are really high and basically can't be reached.

I would be very cautious with applying this to any attack except for those that use the animation of the standard attack (standard attack, multishot, guided arrow, etc.)

There are no diminishing returns on FRW yet so no breakpoints there.
 
@art_vandelay so the King Running it's just like Rack Running? Any monster nearby makes King unstable?

I have had one quite stable map. It dropped Ancient Armors and Light Plates. Now I have couple of them.

And does that mean that I can forget a couple threads with Cow King Drop Patterns? There is no patterns if it is just King and me? And one map can have infinite amount of patterns? I just meat that I don't waste my time.

No SoJ yet :/

m4ke
 
From what fruit told me it also matters 'what' monsters spawn and how many. So for example if in LK your rack segment only spawns one group you will get different results (potentially) for 3 Doom Apes, 1 Vulture Demon or 3 Zakarumites. However in Cows everyone is, you know, a Cow so it should be less random since now only the amount matters.

Also it doesn't matter where on a segment something is spawned and monsters walking onto a tile do not tick it, only those that are spawned directly on top of it. Ultimately the fewer things spawn on the lines separating his segment from the adjacent ones, the better.

You can potentially get a ton of patterns by just ticking CK yourself, like with Hydra/Valkyrie/Decoy or via spell missiles.
 
Ok, thanks. It just feels so random. Drops are really limited yes but they are just too random to hunt for a specific item (SoJ). If I roll map which drops one ring that doesnt mean that more is dropping like in ten days. I have had maps where I can run a very short distance and hit the King first and he is still not stable.

Now I'm rerolling new maps and run those for a moment and roll a new one. I just take what the RNG drops me. Can SoJ even drop in Normal Cows? !!

It's anyway soon a time to push to Act II atleast. Sorc is leaving behind in levels. Barb is 42 and Sorc is only 37. I try to keep her in the area leeching XP.

m4ke
 
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