1.13 Public Test Realm online!

[scrcrw]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

As for the window mode related stuff, its all pretty moot for me. I don't just want a larger window size, I want a larger resolution. I eventually stopped playing Diablo II back in the day because I couldn't stand the claustrophobic resolution (even 800x600 is awful). When I discovered a mod I assume I can't mention here, new life was breathed back into the game. Suddenly, Diablo was fun again.

I am very disappointed (not surprised, just disappointed, because they should have done it long ago) that Blizzard didn't code something along those lines in as part of the official game. Heck, restrict it to solo play if unfair advantages is a concern. As it is, I can't start using 1.13 (and need to roll my install back to 1.12 now) until that mod is compatible with it. Playing 800x600 to test the patch was downright painful.

Even for singleplayer, enabling higher resolutions would probably require a lot of work. You might have noticed yourself that the AI only works within the usual 800x600 (+ a bit) and monsters farther away just stand around (while you can already attack them, e.g. with LS), i.e. just upping the resolution results in a broken game. This might be not so apparent at smaller resolutions, but in the cow level at 1920x1200 it's pretty obvious.
Basically every resolution would need a specialized AI. Enabling just 1024x768 would most likely already require more effort than Blizzard is willing to put in.

D2 at 1920x1200 looks incredibly great though, especially for a 10 year old game. I'd recommend trying it to anyone with a large enough screen (just for looking around, not for playing - back up your save files before etc).

 

[omgwtfbbqpwned]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

By the way, I found two essences of suffering. What do you do with them? Get a few and cube them?

Get two more and cube 'em. Then you can re-spec some more.

As for re-spec, I'm okay with it. You played a character as a Skelliemancer and then switched at level 85 after you killed Hell Baal into a Meleemancer? Well, good for you, mention that in your mat/pat thread and you'll get more ughs than if I were to post a mat/pat thread.

The only real issue I see right now is that the growing population of PvPers could turn to 1.09 --> 1.13 for easy level 9x, or for any other situation where a higher level character would be very beneficial (I was considering re-making all my MFers in 1.09 and then bringing them to 1.13).

This would be really cheesey, imho. Not RC cheesey, which saves you an upmost of 3 hours of gameplay cheesey, not beta runeword cheesey, because anyone who's actually gone back in pre1.10, replay an entire character untwinked, get decent gear, start up a rush crew and rush for an Ohm will know the amount of time it takes, and heck, not even LK, self-rush, etc. cheesey, which all require over 10 hours to get somewhere unless you get lucky.

On a time scale, getting to level 99 would be dropped from several months of boring grinding to something quite doable. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not against this to the point where I'll start e-picketing. I just think it's cheesey.

 

[UllaV]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

By the way, I found two essences of suffering. What do you do with them? Get a few and cube them?

Get two more and cube 'em. Then you can re-spec some more.

Actually there are four kind of essence and you need one of each in the cube. IIRC they are:

Essence of Suffering (Andariel/Duriel)
Essence of Hatred (Mephisto)
Essence of Terror (Diablo)
Essence of Destruction (Baal)

Ulla

 

[Tubba Blubba]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

What a bother.

 

[Pyrohemia1]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

A little bit of additional information I have calculated regarding runes because I was curious myself and calculated it, and then thought that I would share.

The improvement in the drop rate for runes Gul and Vex is small in 1.13 so a fair bit of this improvement comes from higher runes.

Odds of one rune Gul+ when a source that can drop Zod runes (i.e. highest rune tier) drops a rune:
1.12a: 1 in 838
1.13: 1 in 458

This second comparison can be mostly attributed to the increase in the drops of Ohm and Lo runes as their chance is roughly 1.77 times greater.

Odds for Ohm+ when a source that can drop Zod runes drops a rune:
1.12a: 1 in 1596
1.13: 1 in 734

1596/1.77 ~= 902


(No implicit or implied guarantees of accuracy, I might have made a mistake. :jig

 

[Tubba Blubba]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Damn. That's not bad at all. Wouldn't this make the Council very efficient for rune hunting?

 

[omgwtfbbqpwned]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

^ Yeah, according to Corrupted's calculations, 1.13 Council could score you a HR between Ohm to Cham every ~35 (IIRC) hours of gameplay with a GG Horker.

 

[Tubba Blubba]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Strafashahahahasfahfsafah. Wonder if I should keep leveling my Frenzier or focus on my Whirler instead so that he can hit the Council a bit better (He's 87, aiming at 92). Should be easier now that there's no Iron Maiden to worry about.

 

[veryfakename]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

This is more a marketing and money making idea, so I don't see Blizzard changing this at all. When someone buys the game and plays single player, there is little information the company can gather other than X number of units were sold. When people play BNET, they can gather much more information including...

Honestly, I don't think that's a huge consideration. I mean, I don't see many people ditching Realms for Solo if the realms-only stuff is put in solo. People also plays realms for, well, playing with other people. Letting people like me who prefer to play solo have some of the extra fun stuff shouldn't make a difference.

I have seen a few guides out there (I'm not going to name names but they are on other forums than the single player forum on diii.net) that suggest that you just get rushed to hell difficulty and rushed to a higher level. Once you are level 80+ you can spend your stat and skill points as described in the guide. There is no mention of leveling through the game at all and if there is the author notes that most will get rushed anyway. This to me is kind of sad, but I'm glad that in single player at least we can choose which patch we play.

Agreed! It's very hard to find advice on Diablo at times, because most advice assumes you'll get those clvl 30 skills maxed out in no time at all, and *then* you can use the build like it was intended. There's really no thought given to what it's like to actually play the game to get to that point. Then there's assuming that at a minimum you have (or traded for) all sorts of uniques that drop at a rate of like one in a million or runewords that are virtually impossible to put together yourself.

Well, anyway, it's not like this patch makes anything worse for me, in fact it has some really good improvements. The bad stuff is just same old same old, rather than anything newly introduced here.

 

[DZJB]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Don't know if I should post this here on in the HELP sticky, but here it goes anyways:

'Cause I'm at home for the holidays and some time after that, I decided to install D2 on my desktop. What I did was install D2 + the expansion, get the RRM+RWM .rar file and put it in it's place and install GoMule. After that, I loaded up D2 (which worked), and installed 1.12, en then changed gateway to classic beta to load up 1.13. For some reason I get an error after trying to download a patch, which I think is caused by RRM/RWM, so that the .mpq files are transferred to Diablo II\RedRuneMod\ instead to the main dir of D2. So I cut and pasted them (both of them, 1.12 and the 1.12 -> 1.13 patches) in the main dir.

After that I moves my chars and stashes in their right folders and loaded things up. I got an error when loading a char with an essence in his inventory: inventory data error. I collected those essences on my laptop, where everything does work fine.

Anyone know what causes this? My version of D2 reads 1.13 on startup, and I can get the new amounts of gold in my stash, so 1.13 seems to work. As soon as I move the essence in a stash (.d2x) I can load the char again. Weird stuff.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Akara's respec option doesn't show on the screen, though I can select it.

 

[veryfakename]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Even for singleplayer, enabling higher resolutions would probably require a lot of work. You might have noticed yourself that the AI only works within the usual 800x600 (+ a bit) and monsters farther away just stand around (while you can already attack them, e.g. with LS), i.e. just upping the resolution results in a broken game. This might be not so apparent at smaller resolutions, but in the cow level at 1920x1200 it's pretty obvious.
Basically every resolution would need a specialized AI. Enabling just 1024x768 would most likely already require more effort than Blizzard is willing to put in.

There's plenty that attacks you from outside that range too, so I don't much mind. =P Personally, I play 1680x1050 (on a 1920x1200 monitor but this way I can see what other programs are doing in the corners) but even a couple notches down would really help. I know Bliz isn't going to put any effort into changing AI for higher resolutions but it still really needs it anyway. I just simply can't enjoy the game at the built-in resolutions.

 

[QibingZero]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

I'm not really surprised Blizzard is moving toward making a game of theirs more accessible - that's their modus operandi these days more than ever. I do worry a bit for their future releases (since I've enjoyed the previous ones so much), but that's another topic altogether.

I guess I'm among the crowd that sees respeccing as a big deal. What is now the purpose of my multiple 85+ sorcs? If I were starting over, I would simply build a strong leveling sorc, turn it into a MF sorc in hell, and by the time I can get an Infinity, go Lightning and easily tear apart the game as I see fit. No need for playing through the game again. No need for ever making another sorc. Obviously many of us feel this takes away a lot of the fun of things, which is why we restrict ourselves with SP, tournament challenges, etc in the first place.

My immediate thought is 'How many of us would be still playing D2 by now if character respecs were available from the very beginning?'. Would a SP community have emerged, with 'no respecs' as a rule? It's hard to imagine that it would have, because respeccing would seem like a fundamental part of the game itself (especially if offered as often as it seems to be). Everything would have felt so much easier, accomplishments would be lessened, and many of us would have not taken the time to be so involved. It's only because it is being introduced so much later that we're able to say 'If you don't like it, don't use it'. It's only because of the re-playability of the original game that we're even still here to argue over it.

And it's hard to argue that respeccing does not drastically take away from the replay value of the game. Much of D2 is indeed the journey through, and playing a different build gives us a reason to go through the game once more. It gives us a different perspective on how difficult monsters and areas are, and at the end of the journey we might just have a powerful character to play around with too. With the ability to respec, the motivation for doing this is nearly wiped out. You may have 7 guardians, but why would you ever have 51? This is a cruel joke in the face of accomplishments like that of Nightfish.

Other than that, I echo the sentiments of previous posters who are excited about some aspects of the patch (rune drops, some skill rebalances), and disappointed with others (lots of skills still not working correctly, enemy IM removed rather than rebalanced).

 

[Calamityy]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Strafashahahahasfahfsafah. Wonder if I should keep leveling my Frenzier or focus on my Whirler instead so that he can hit the Council a bit better (He's 87, aiming at 92). Should be easier now that there's no Iron Maiden to worry about.

Why choose? Just pick the one that's a higher level, get him to where desired, and respec him... :whistling:


New runes drop rates are nice. More runes if you MF alot...

 

[Tubba Blubba]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Why choose? Just pick the one that's a higher level, get him to where desired, and respec him... :whistling:


New runes drop rates are nice. More runes if you MF alot...

Point made. But GentleHurricane has kind of grown on me, I don't want to betray him.

 

[EmperorMoo]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Last night:

18.00: Drink a beer
18.20: Drink a beer

Repeat at 20min intervals until 11pm.

23.00 Wife goes to bed
23.00.01 pm I boot laptop with D2 installed
23.03.01 pm Patch D2 to 1.13
01.00ish Go to bed

0900 today: Wake up and realise I hadn't copied chars to a safe location, therefore I am now running 1.13beta permanently.

Anyone else done this? No - thought not...

 

[veryfakename]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

And it's hard to argue that respeccing does not drastically take away from the replay value of the game. Much of D2 is indeed the journey through, and playing a different build gives us a reason to go through the game once more. It gives us a different perspective on how difficult monsters and areas are, and at the end of the journey we might just have a powerful character to play around with too. With the ability to respec, the motivation for doing this is nearly wiped out. You may have 7 guardians, but why would you ever have 51? This is a cruel joke in the face of accomplishments like that of Nightfish.

Given that gear is just about as important as stats and skills, what's stopping someone from saying the same thing about twinking new characters or using ATMA to trade that Tal Rasha's set from one sorc to the next ad infinitum? When virtually every build of a certain character type is suggesting the same gear every single time, there's already a strong push towards homogeneity, and yet we've survived and still play. And many still play untwinked.

So yeah, it *is* optional, and it *is* coming almost ten years after the game came out. We talk talk about "what if" it had been there from the start, but it wasn't. At this point, most anyone still playing Diablo had been playing it for years and isn't going to suddenly get bored because there's optional respecs.

 

[The Lord of Darkness]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Ok, I've played this a couple days and the euphoria of something new has worn off so I can think about this more clearly. I've done a complete 180. This patch is pretty pathetic because of the respecs. 1 respec I can deal with but 3 complete overhauls is way way too much. Hopefully they will tone it down to 1 upon final release.

OT: The World Event is a complete joke, why stop at 3 respecs eh? Again, something needs to change here but I doubt it will.

IM being removed, Blessed Hammer being tweaked, orange runes, and HR drop rates being increased are the only things good that has come out of this.

Pretty disappointing but not surprising.

 

[UllaV]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

And it's hard to argue that respeccing does not drastically take away from the replay value of the game. Much of D2 is indeed the journey through, and playing a different build gives us a reason to go through the game once more. It gives us a different perspective on how difficult monsters and areas are, and at the end of the journey we might just have a powerful character to play around with too. With the ability to respec, the motivation for doing this is nearly wiped out. You may have 7 guardians, but why would you ever have 51? This is a cruel joke in the face of accomplishments like that of Nightfish.

Point made. But GentleHurricane has kind of grown on me, I don't want to betray him.

You said it yourself and Tubba Blubba's sentiments says it louder. We're still gonna build 51 or 134 guardians because we love to play the game. And part of that love is when building the characters they grow on us.

I've had characters build by other persons; I cannot play them. There is no feel how to play that character. I'm not sure if there are people who can respec a 99 level character to a totally different build and play them but I wouldn't try. Maybe it's because I play HC only. I wouldn't be sure not to kill them.

But anyways. Sombody wrote that this patch is a marketing ploy and as such I can understand it. Make monsters easier, spells stronger and allow respecing might open up the situation where people play the normal and nigtmare levels insted of getting rushed through.

Ulla

 

[Calamityy]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

It seems like the respec is split depending on your playstyle.

If you like to just make tons of builds- everything you can think of and then some, and just Mat/Pat/Guardian them, then yea, respec is your enemy.

But to players who want to use characters to level as high as possible, they'll feel different. Run one thing for a bit with one build, change to be more efficient somewhere else, etc, etc, and eventually you might even get 99, despite how hard leveling is. (After 1.09 anyways). Maybe the respec could also have been one idea on this? For players who just want to stay with one character?

 

[ioupain]

Re: 1.13 Public Test Realm online!

Does anyone know the details of the World Event? The Lord of Darkness mentioned it was a complete joke ... but what is it?