Omfg Help!
- Thread starter Sokar Rostau
- Start date
NacRuno
Member
Arreat_mercenary said:
Yes i get your point, and as i said my fishy was also my first char so it was also untwinked. What i am suggesting is only damage and resists matter for now and you should do your best in those two areas (crushing blow depends on your luck so if you don't have you don't have, nothing to do). For damage you give him the most damaging wep you have, nothing much to do here, but for resists you need to look at your (and the vendor's as suggested) stash carefully, defense is not a deal as diablo will hit him no matter what the defense is.
And don't worry about gear with your fishy, and you are actually looking for gear for other chars with the fishy so you know what you are doing. By the time my fishy became a Patriarch, he was still wielding a magical wand and shrunken head.
jiansonz
New member
@NacRuno:
Crushing Blow gear is very very unlikely at this stage. He could make a Strength weapon, true, but I think that is waste at this time.
@Arreat_mercenary
No, what you should do here is to buy a wand with + to Iron Maiden, then just keep that going and feed him golems non-stop. Don´t bother resurrecting the merc, don´t bother getting new skellies.
It does not matter if Diablo kills the golems in 1 second, just keep them coming. They only cost 15 mana or something like that, that´s peanuts.
Stock up on a couple of greater mana potions from Jamella. Cast the golems "on" Diablo so he doesn´t get any ideas about coming after you. If you slip up and miss a golem casting or Diablo tries to be smart and ignore the golem for a while and a Lightning Inferno or a Firestorm is coming, just MOVE! Then feed him another golem.
Since act bosses do bonus damage against minions and IM returns 200% damage already at level 1, those cold-hand smacks he will be doing to the golem will hurt him a LOT.
This techinque is not hard to perform once you get the hang of it. It works very nicely against all the act bosses.
Good luck!
Crushing Blow gear is very very unlikely at this stage. He could make a Strength weapon, true, but I think that is waste at this time.
@Arreat_mercenary
No, what you should do here is to buy a wand with + to Iron Maiden, then just keep that going and feed him golems non-stop. Don´t bother resurrecting the merc, don´t bother getting new skellies.
It does not matter if Diablo kills the golems in 1 second, just keep them coming. They only cost 15 mana or something like that, that´s peanuts.
Stock up on a couple of greater mana potions from Jamella. Cast the golems "on" Diablo so he doesn´t get any ideas about coming after you. If you slip up and miss a golem casting or Diablo tries to be smart and ignore the golem for a while and a Lightning Inferno or a Firestorm is coming, just MOVE! Then feed him another golem.
Since act bosses do bonus damage against minions and IM returns 200% damage already at level 1, those cold-hand smacks he will be doing to the golem will hurt him a LOT.
This techinque is not hard to perform once you get the hang of it. It works very nicely against all the act bosses.
Good luck!
Arreat_mercenary
New member
Of course!!!!
It was as easy as Iron Maiden! how stup** of me, great idea jiansonz, you really helped :thumbsup:
It was as easy as Iron Maiden! how stup** of me, great idea jiansonz, you really helped :thumbsup:
Sokar Rostau
New member
OK, I think some of you might have misunderstood me. For starters, on Bnet I play Asia - no dupes and in comparison to other realms incredibly expensive (1 Ber = 25-30 Ist). I do not build cookie cutters, my one and only Hammerdin is lvl 44, I prefer uncommon builds like my Palazons and ES melee Enchantress, my Baal MFer is a Trapsin, I am therefore used to thinking about my fights and using skills such as Decoy and Valk strategically. I am also accustomed (especially Season 3) to playing untwinked on Bnet because I am too lazy to trade.
My main point was that had Blizzard released D2 without Bnet, it would not be the bestseller it was, and it certainly would not still be selling in stores (a few days before Xmas I saw two Battlechests sold at EBGames within 10 minutes).
It took me four months, on Bnet, to gather the runes required to make a Fortitude for my Palazon. In fact I was aiming for CoH but it took so long to get the runes that Blizz released the 23 new runewords and a cheaper (and better) option became available. I did this by saving all but six runes I found (those 6 became Passion and Rhyme). To do the same in SP is a physical impossibility.
Playing the game the way Blizzard states, on AS, the way it is supposed to be played means that, with the exception of a couple of builds, one cannot plan a character. I don't mean that building an uber Hammerdin is impossible (maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I don't care). My Tesladin needs Crescent Moon, he is currently using Hellplague (in NM Act 4), if I don't get an Um rune at HF I have wasted my time. I could cube up the runes to make an Um but that would mean emptying my backpack of charms - Even making Passion without HF requires filling the stash with runes...and low grade gems. If I want to craft (I have been making Blood items) I also require Perfect gems and jewels which means filling more space with flawless gems.
You can forget about high level sets, like Trang, Sazabi, Disciple and Naj, (arguably the weakest of the high sets (well maybe not Trang)), never mind Tal or IK - Sigon is hard enough to find.
Look, the thing is, that before I went on Bnet (and learned to play D2) I had gotten bored of playing for 5-6 hours a day for 18 months and had actually spent time reading (not a bad thing). Once on Bnet my playing doubled and tripled and I still have never owned most of the items that many Bnet Brats consider essential. I am not having a go at you SPer's, I am merely pointing out that D2SP is a shadow of Bnet (and most of Bnet is ruined). Of all the dozens of items in the game only a fraction of them are available in SP. I am willing to bet that in the history of this forum no more than 2-3 legit Zod runes have ever been found. It's no wonder that so many people use character builders and item modifiers. All Blizzard have to do is make a Universal Stash and not only would people have no reason to cheat but they would make a good SP game great - the way it should be.
On a different note, my Tesladin has traded in his 9% Lightning Resist Demonhide Armour for a Rare Light Plate and has Skystrike, Silkweave and a +1 Necro Summoning/+21 life GC if someone wants to trade or I can find a mule game but there's other threads for that...
My main point was that had Blizzard released D2 without Bnet, it would not be the bestseller it was, and it certainly would not still be selling in stores (a few days before Xmas I saw two Battlechests sold at EBGames within 10 minutes).
It took me four months, on Bnet, to gather the runes required to make a Fortitude for my Palazon. In fact I was aiming for CoH but it took so long to get the runes that Blizz released the 23 new runewords and a cheaper (and better) option became available. I did this by saving all but six runes I found (those 6 became Passion and Rhyme). To do the same in SP is a physical impossibility.
Playing the game the way Blizzard states, on AS, the way it is supposed to be played means that, with the exception of a couple of builds, one cannot plan a character. I don't mean that building an uber Hammerdin is impossible (maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I don't care). My Tesladin needs Crescent Moon, he is currently using Hellplague (in NM Act 4), if I don't get an Um rune at HF I have wasted my time. I could cube up the runes to make an Um but that would mean emptying my backpack of charms - Even making Passion without HF requires filling the stash with runes...and low grade gems. If I want to craft (I have been making Blood items) I also require Perfect gems and jewels which means filling more space with flawless gems.
You can forget about high level sets, like Trang, Sazabi, Disciple and Naj, (arguably the weakest of the high sets (well maybe not Trang)), never mind Tal or IK - Sigon is hard enough to find.
Look, the thing is, that before I went on Bnet (and learned to play D2) I had gotten bored of playing for 5-6 hours a day for 18 months and had actually spent time reading (not a bad thing). Once on Bnet my playing doubled and tripled and I still have never owned most of the items that many Bnet Brats consider essential. I am not having a go at you SPer's, I am merely pointing out that D2SP is a shadow of Bnet (and most of Bnet is ruined). Of all the dozens of items in the game only a fraction of them are available in SP. I am willing to bet that in the history of this forum no more than 2-3 legit Zod runes have ever been found. It's no wonder that so many people use character builders and item modifiers. All Blizzard have to do is make a Universal Stash and not only would people have no reason to cheat but they would make a good SP game great - the way it should be.
On a different note, my Tesladin has traded in his 9% Lightning Resist Demonhide Armour for a Rare Light Plate and has Skystrike, Silkweave and a +1 Necro Summoning/+21 life GC if someone wants to trade or I can find a mule game but there's other threads for that...
Thanks for the follow up. I thought maybe we scared you off. :wink3:
After reading this second post, it occurs to me that you either don't know about the SP item muling program called ATMA, or don't really understand what it does.
As to your guess on the number of legit Zods found by members of this forum, you're a bit low. I put it at 5-7, which is still sickening.
You're also a bit off the mark on the ability to play untwinked SP and plan characters. We absolutely CAN do that here. You see, we just don't plan for uber weapons. The planning is in skill distribution, general weapon/armor planning (we use crafted items, etc), mercenary knowledge and tactics. We've seen literally hundreds of untwinked HC guardians here.
(P.S. Are you sure there are no dupes on Asia? :scratch: )
After reading this second post, it occurs to me that you either don't know about the SP item muling program called ATMA, or don't really understand what it does.
ATMA is neither of these bad programs you mention, and is simply what you asked for - a universal stash extension. Third party, yes, but not a cheat by 99.5% of people's definition, including the admins of this site. ATMA is one of the main reasons SP is still the great game it has been for all of these years.Sokar Rostau said:
As to your guess on the number of legit Zods found by members of this forum, you're a bit low. I put it at 5-7, which is still sickening.
You're also a bit off the mark on the ability to play untwinked SP and plan characters. We absolutely CAN do that here. You see, we just don't plan for uber weapons. The planning is in skill distribution, general weapon/armor planning (we use crafted items, etc), mercenary knowledge and tactics. We've seen literally hundreds of untwinked HC guardians here.
(P.S. Are you sure there are no dupes on Asia? :scratch: )
I think he mentioned in the first post that he's a Mac user so he can't use ATMA, but there are other muling/stashing alternatives. Nevertheless, I find the way Blizzard intended for SP to be played (untwinked, no muling, finite stash) to be odd since it precludes the great majority of sets, uniques, and runewords from ever being used. Oh, and there are definitely dupes on the Asian realm just like the rest of Bnet (not saying that everyone uses them, just that they exist).
Sokar Rostau
New member
Kabal knows where I'm coming from.
Yes I know about ATMA, I would kill for it, but there is no Mac version. My point was that without this 3rd party program you are literally forced to use some sort of cheat program or play on Bnet if you ever want to acquire something so simple as Tal set or a "medium" runeword like Delirium. Until recently I could not understand why someone would want one of those character builders or item creators out there. Now I understand the frustration that led to them in the first place.
I am a big user of oSkills, and am quite certain that I am one of the very few people that actually understand their uses ie if you intend to use an oSkill item like Passion, there's no point using it on a Pala or Barb and it's a waste of runes if you don't back up your oSkill with plenty of +All Skills items. A example of this would be a CtA Strafer. By using the life boost from CtA you can afford to pump Dex safe in the knowledge that, even with no points in Vit, you will still have an acceptable lifespan. The problem is that this is impossible to achieve in SP without ATMA or online trading - it's possible that you MIGHT get one or two runes from NM and Hell HF, but the amount of time it would take to find/cube up an Ohm rune makes it unrealistic to say the least. Now extend that to the high end rune words, OK so there's a couple of BotD's out there...but without ATMA your chance of EVER making that runeword is diminished eightfold - first you need to find that Zod on the Character that can use it and then you need to find it when that character is a suitable build. What about Last Wish? It's infinitely more likely that someone will find a Zod than 3 Jah, Sur and Ber needed for that.
SP players, without ATMA or online trading (the way Blizzard designed the game, according to AS), are limited to about 1/3 of all the items in the game.
When I mentioned planning characters I meant it like this. My favourite build is the Palazon - an Amazon designed to make the best use of Passion. I have refined the build, over the last two years or so, to the ideal items, which, in Bnet terms, are not that expensive. In fact the most expensive item, Fortitude, is the latest piece of equipment added to her arsenal and it is quite possible to finish Hell in Eth Rattlecage (I know because I did it). However, this build requires specific items to use Passion - she needs +All Skills items and %dam/AR to demons/undead. Without these items (again almost any armour is good) the build is not mush use because many Hell level monsters regenerate faster than she can damage them (without Fortitude it takes a Palazon a minimum of one hour to clear Hell Cows because they are neither demon or undead). This build can't be made on SP. A similar, weaker, build can be achieved, but not a real, optimized, Palazon. I have never found a Seraph's Hymn on Bnet, either using an 850% MF Sorc or a 300% Trapsin...how am I to find one with a <100% Amazon using a melee weapon? What about if the Hell HF drops me a Gul? Oh goody I can make Principle, yay for me.
I will use the SP trade thread here to achieve what I want, but my point still stands. Remove Bnet and ATMA from the equation and D2 would never have been the best seller it was in the first place and it certainly would not still be on the shelves of EBGames etc.
Dupes on Asia are VERY rare. They do exist, especially Off Ladder, but there are extremely few. Being a comparitively small Realm, almost all the regular players know each other and rumours travel fast. At the end of Season 1 the economy of channel KOR-1 (the Koreans are big traders, almost as big as the Chinese), crashed in less than 36 hours because of a public dupe and the sudden mass influx of duped Ber and Zod runes. Season 2 started about 2 weeks later so it didn't have much effect in the long run and there has ben no such incidence since. All in all, if you trade for a Ber rune on Asia, there is a 90% chance that it is legit (insofar as it was most probably acquired by a bot), rather than the 90% chance it is a dupe you have on other realms. This is reflected in trade values.
Yes I know about ATMA, I would kill for it, but there is no Mac version. My point was that without this 3rd party program you are literally forced to use some sort of cheat program or play on Bnet if you ever want to acquire something so simple as Tal set or a "medium" runeword like Delirium. Until recently I could not understand why someone would want one of those character builders or item creators out there. Now I understand the frustration that led to them in the first place.
I am a big user of oSkills, and am quite certain that I am one of the very few people that actually understand their uses ie if you intend to use an oSkill item like Passion, there's no point using it on a Pala or Barb and it's a waste of runes if you don't back up your oSkill with plenty of +All Skills items. A example of this would be a CtA Strafer. By using the life boost from CtA you can afford to pump Dex safe in the knowledge that, even with no points in Vit, you will still have an acceptable lifespan. The problem is that this is impossible to achieve in SP without ATMA or online trading - it's possible that you MIGHT get one or two runes from NM and Hell HF, but the amount of time it would take to find/cube up an Ohm rune makes it unrealistic to say the least. Now extend that to the high end rune words, OK so there's a couple of BotD's out there...but without ATMA your chance of EVER making that runeword is diminished eightfold - first you need to find that Zod on the Character that can use it and then you need to find it when that character is a suitable build. What about Last Wish? It's infinitely more likely that someone will find a Zod than 3 Jah, Sur and Ber needed for that.
SP players, without ATMA or online trading (the way Blizzard designed the game, according to AS), are limited to about 1/3 of all the items in the game.
When I mentioned planning characters I meant it like this. My favourite build is the Palazon - an Amazon designed to make the best use of Passion. I have refined the build, over the last two years or so, to the ideal items, which, in Bnet terms, are not that expensive. In fact the most expensive item, Fortitude, is the latest piece of equipment added to her arsenal and it is quite possible to finish Hell in Eth Rattlecage (I know because I did it). However, this build requires specific items to use Passion - she needs +All Skills items and %dam/AR to demons/undead. Without these items (again almost any armour is good) the build is not mush use because many Hell level monsters regenerate faster than she can damage them (without Fortitude it takes a Palazon a minimum of one hour to clear Hell Cows because they are neither demon or undead). This build can't be made on SP. A similar, weaker, build can be achieved, but not a real, optimized, Palazon. I have never found a Seraph's Hymn on Bnet, either using an 850% MF Sorc or a 300% Trapsin...how am I to find one with a <100% Amazon using a melee weapon? What about if the Hell HF drops me a Gul? Oh goody I can make Principle, yay for me.
I will use the SP trade thread here to achieve what I want, but my point still stands. Remove Bnet and ATMA from the equation and D2 would never have been the best seller it was in the first place and it certainly would not still be on the shelves of EBGames etc.
Dupes on Asia are VERY rare. They do exist, especially Off Ladder, but there are extremely few. Being a comparitively small Realm, almost all the regular players know each other and rumours travel fast. At the end of Season 1 the economy of channel KOR-1 (the Koreans are big traders, almost as big as the Chinese), crashed in less than 36 hours because of a public dupe and the sudden mass influx of duped Ber and Zod runes. Season 2 started about 2 weeks later so it didn't have much effect in the long run and there has ben no such incidence since. All in all, if you trade for a Ber rune on Asia, there is a 90% chance that it is legit (insofar as it was most probably acquired by a bot), rather than the 90% chance it is a dupe you have on other realms. This is reflected in trade values.
Shagsbeard
New member
Is it just the mood I'm in or do others find this thread full of unsubstatiated opinions and rants against... a game! If you don't find it fun... don't play. If you enjoy it... great! It's true that you will never aquire every item in the game if you play "as blizzard intended". They wanted you to have fun. This game would be utterly pointless if you could have every item you ever wanted.
You play on a Mac and therefor have no access to ATMA. Well... how about keeping a pen and paper record of the items you have found? That way you could strive for the same Grail that many of us do here... finding all set/unique items in the game. I'm personally down to 48 items yet to be found... and holding steady. If I could find one a day, I'd count myself lucky (extreemely lucky during early March).
You know... some people enjoy playing blackjack. My wife loves it. I find it so incredibly boring that you'd have to pay me to play it. Guess what... I don't play it. I find other things to entertain me.
If D2 bores you, you really need to find a different pastime.
You play on a Mac and therefor have no access to ATMA. Well... how about keeping a pen and paper record of the items you have found? That way you could strive for the same Grail that many of us do here... finding all set/unique items in the game. I'm personally down to 48 items yet to be found... and holding steady. If I could find one a day, I'd count myself lucky (extreemely lucky during early March).
You know... some people enjoy playing blackjack. My wife loves it. I find it so incredibly boring that you'd have to pay me to play it. Guess what... I don't play it. I find other things to entertain me.
If D2 bores you, you really need to find a different pastime.
DeathMaster
New member
Sokar Rostau said:
It is still considered cheating here, if I'm not mistaking.
corax here, guardianed melee untwink sin using the wooden leg as weapon in a tourny, there is no reason why you cannot enjoy the game as it is.
jiansonz
New member
I can now begin to see Sokar´s point. However, the thought that you can´t plan your character is only limited to extreme builds that require very specific (and rare) items. Most builds are certainly not like that. A Tesladin would of course love Crescent Moon, but the build will work quite well without it.
BTW, my Swordmistress Amazon actually was able to make a Passion weapon (Lem rune from NM forge, found a 4s Champion Sword in one of the seven tombs). The Berserk was awesome, even without extra +skills. I can imagine the Zeal would benefit greatly from +skills, though.
Lower your expectations a bit, don´t plan for über gear and just enjoy making progress through the game with fun builds, that´s my advice.
BTW, my Swordmistress Amazon actually was able to make a Passion weapon (Lem rune from NM forge, found a 4s Champion Sword in one of the seven tombs). The Berserk was awesome, even without extra +skills. I can imagine the Zeal would benefit greatly from +skills, though.
Lower your expectations a bit, don´t plan for über gear and just enjoy making progress through the game with fun builds, that´s my advice.
DeathMaster
New member
Hrus said:
I second that, great advice.:thumbsup:
Or if you are hardcore Mac lover, buy the new Mac with intel CPU, you can dual install windows/Linux on it.
I too could not play DII without ATMA. That's the greedy packrat in me, I'd parked one of my characters as early as Act 5 Normal, and others were going very slowly (due to limited inventory space). Under those circumstances, finishing the game would be impossible, let alone MFing.
However...
I certainly do not understand why you sound like you're flaming us SPF members. We do agree with many of your points regarding stash size, trading and muling, hence we use ATMA. Note that Blizzard's intention (no muling, no trading, no extensive stash) holds for B.net as well; it's just B.net players have an easier and in-game solution for that. LOL! Let's not fool ourselves, the stash size is not an intention to force people to make decisions, it's a major screw-up of Bliz! Why else would they make Griswold's set?
The best advice I can give you is to try one of the muling methods mentioned here, or just wait for ATMA-for-Mac. We cannot make Blizzard implement a universal stash no matter what you say here in these forums.
ps. Once one accepts ATMA (and has access to it, of course), B.net seems like what SP seems to you. Trading, storing and twinking would be incredibly difficult with some 50 mule characters that get deleted if you don't play with them every once in a while.
However...
I certainly do not understand why you sound like you're flaming us SPF members. We do agree with many of your points regarding stash size, trading and muling, hence we use ATMA. Note that Blizzard's intention (no muling, no trading, no extensive stash) holds for B.net as well; it's just B.net players have an easier and in-game solution for that. LOL! Let's not fool ourselves, the stash size is not an intention to force people to make decisions, it's a major screw-up of Bliz! Why else would they make Griswold's set?
The best advice I can give you is to try one of the muling methods mentioned here, or just wait for ATMA-for-Mac. We cannot make Blizzard implement a universal stash no matter what you say here in these forums.
ps. Once one accepts ATMA (and has access to it, of course), B.net seems like what SP seems to you. Trading, storing and twinking would be incredibly difficult with some 50 mule characters that get deleted if you don't play with them every once in a while.
