Diablo II Complete Adventure Mod - Please Try It!

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Hi guys,

For just under 2 years I've been developing a Diablo II mod on and off (mostly off!). So, I finally did a little polishing up and thought I'd release it to the world. I'd appreciate it if any of you guys would try it out and let me know what you think. It comes with a script to launch it that will keep your savegames separate, so you shouldnt need to worry about savegame corruption, but please make a backup of your savegames just in case (I cant see how it would interact with them, but you never know).

The mod isnt a total conversion or anything, it just adds a whole bunch of new items and rebalances the game a bit. And extends the maximum character level to 150. I'll quote from the readme to elaborate. Link is at the bottom.

Thanks to Taluntain and the Sorcerers place for hosting the file, and thanks to the Phrozen Keep for the knowledge to develop the mod.

Link to Download

Edit: Posted readme as of latest version of mod available for download. Change log is posted in this thread, currently the last post. Tal, I hope you guys dont mind me updating the first post with the latest correct information? Let me know if you would prefer it if I left the first post as is and just posted news on any subsequent versions later.

 

Well, I play on Battlenet, so unfortunately, I won't be able to use your mod. The one question I have is have you made anything more difficult? It seems like everything you have done is in the player's favor, and you've actually reduced the difficulty of hell monsters. For me, that would be a major turn off. If I can get through the game on hell difficulty the way it is, I would want a greater challenge, not a reduced one.

 

Yeah, most of what I have done has been in the players favour. Of course, I cant be sure how difficult my mod makes Hell, because I've extended the monster levels to 150 as well. In practice it might be more difficult than I expect.

The point was really to allow the game to be more fun singleplayer and local multiplayer. If Hell has been nerfed to insignificance I'll boost the difficulty again. I remember playing Hell with a hammerdin, and just dying so often it lost its appeal. I could never get anywhere. I mean, on the one hand I was starved of experience because of the experience penalty (dumbest idea ever), and on the other hand, when I died, which was frequent, I lost a good chunk of experience. And good items were so rare it was hard to find anything worth having.

I'll do some play testing myself, hopefully I can make it to hell difficulty and see for myself how hard it is. Ideally, I'd like it to be hard but not tear-your-hair out hard. I think any character should be able to kill hell baal solo, even if it is difficult and results in a lot of deaths. But it should never be impossible.

If my experience or memories of hell difficulty are completely off and its not as hard as I think, I'll rebalance the mod.

 

I think any well designed character should be able to do so. A person who doesn't have a good plan and spreads his skill points all over the place and didn't have a designed path for his character should not be able to kill hell Baal.

 

True, I agree. Normal baal yes, hell baal no way.

The main point of the mod was to make the nicer kit available and decrease the frustration from dying. And scrolls - no reason for them to be restricted items. Hell should hopefully be a bit easier than it was before, but not so easy that its a cakewalk (it should never be a cakewalk).

 

I wish I'd known about your mod last week... I've already got my games running. Would have added a bit of spice. Do I need to start a new game to try the mod, or will it wrote on characters that are mid-game (or even mid-act)? From the description of what gets changed I'm assuming not.

Also, is your mod compatible with PlugY?

 

Yeah, its compatible with PlugY. You can take characters across, be warned that its a one way process. The other thing to be aware of is that your character will gain several levels. That may or may not be a bad thing depending on how you view it.

 

I'll need to think about this before I switch my characters across then. I may restart my Necro to take advantage of it but I fear gaining several levels will unbalance my Paladin at this stage. I'll definitely try it with a Sorceress though, especially since the higher level cap and therefore more skill points means I could experiment with a completely different build this time.

 

Cool, let me know how you get on. You can always copy your Necro and Paladin across, the save folders are kept separate.

 

An interesting build to try here would be a fire claws druid build. Fire claws has a ton of synergies in the elemental tree, and while you can never max out those synerigies and still max out both lycanthropy and either werewolf or werebear (although with a fire claws druid the bear would be your better option), you can now with a level cap of 150.

 

The mod kinda forces you to broaden your skill selection slightly, because of its max skill cap of 25 as opposed to 30. 30 is what the skill cap would be if I scaled it linearly with the max character level, but I decided to try 25.

What kind of builds do people usually use for Bowazons? I have a level 74 amazon, and using PlugY to reset her skills I was able to try several builds. The only builds that seem to work for me are those that use either lightning strike or lightning fury. Bow skills just dont seem to do enough damage.

Is there something I'm missing?

Even in an unmodded game, I have to say that Lightning strike is easily one of my favourite skills. The sheer number of hits that the chain lightning does make this skill much better than the sorceress's chain lightning. Its a joy to watch it bounce back and forth.

 

The bowazon skills have the potential to be the highest damaging skills in the game, although you do need to get pierce up to a respectable level and/or get some chance to pierce equipment (available on the some unique items). Once your amazon starts firing arrows that can go through monsters and hit multiple creatures, that's when the damage starts to skyrocket. With a high level of pierce, you can fire an immolation arrow into a pack of enemies and literally set off half a dozen immolation explosions on the screeen with a single arrow. The bowazon also has excellent crowd control skills with multishot and strafe. Most people consdier a bowazon to be a more versatile character than a javazon. (Although javazons typically have better defense and resistances due to their being able to use a shield.)

 

I tried a build with about 65% pierce, maxed immolation arrow, and maxed strafe. I think also a few points into exploding arrow to boost immolation arrow. The damage was pathetic, took much longer to kill things than with lightning strike. Strafe was even worse - the physical damage it did, despite launching 10 arrows, just did nothing.

This might be a pecularity with the monsters in my mod, but it doesnt explain why the javazon had a much easier time (no amazon skills are changed by my mod).

 

What kind of bow were you using? The main source of damage (even when using skills like immolation arrow) are from the physical damage of the bow, not the elemental damage of the skill. If you didn't have a high damage bow, it would go a long way to explain the damage output.

I've played bowazons, and the only time I've ever had an issue of taking a while to kill things was Act V Hell difficulty where the monsters have a ton of life. Everywhere else it wasn't so bad. Of course, my latest bowazon was using a Buriza (the exceptional unique crossbow), so that's definitely high damage.

 

Yeah, that might have been it, my bow was nothing special. It was a rare, but I dont think it was a particularly good rare considering shes at level 74 (act 3 nightmare).

 

Also remember that unlike melee and thrown weapons, missile weapons get a damage bonus based on the character's dexterity, not strength. Most bowazons invest far more into dexterity than the minimum needed to use their bow or xbow. The damage bonus for dexterity is 1% per point of dexterity over 100.

 

Hmmm, not sure what my dex was, dont think it was amazing either. Will have another try tonight. Thanks for the help.

 

I tried to run the mod yesterday but it didn't seem to work. I followed the instructions and extracted the folder into my Diablo 2 directory (keeping the folder organisation intact), ran the mod, and nothing at all happens (exactly as if I hadn't double-clicked). I'm not sure if this is because I've integrated PlugY into the DLL files (as opposed to running it through its executable). I can't think of any other reason why it wouldn't work (using 1.11b).

 

Hmmm, I wouldnt expect PlugY to cause such a problem.

So... say you have Diablo II installed in
CProgram Files\Diablo II
and the mod is in
CProgram Files\Diablo II\Complete Adventure

And inside the Complete Adventure folder, you run the LaunchModeGame.vbs script?

What version of Windows are you using?

There is another option for launching the mod, but please be aware that this will not separate your save game files. In other words, you will see all of your characters in the character select screen, and if you load up a character that you dont want to use with the mod, you might permanently break it (unless you have a backup of course). That being said, it wont affect your regular D2, so you can go back to running the unmodded game without any problems.

Okay... First step is to copy the entire Data folder from the Complete Adventure mod directory to the Diablo II main folder (ie one level down).

Once you have done that, create a shortcut to your Diablo II exe (or the PlugY exe), and add the following to it (without quotes) "-direct -txt"

This tells Diablo to look in the current folder and generate new BIN files from your TXT files, which is what makes the mod first. It basically tells it that the most recent source for information is in its current directory, and after that it will look at your patchd2.mpq file.

This page has a useful screenshot of it, even though its for a different mod.

Now, if you run the shortcut, it will load up my mod, if you run the exe itself, it will load up the unmodded game.

 

Fantastic! Seems to work now. I think the script launcher may have chocked on it because I used the D2gfx Patcher when installing PlugY and the automatic launcher doesn't like something it sees in the game files as a result. Moving the data files and using the command line as you described, your mod runs perfectly now. I checked into my stashes and it seems to have integrated flawlessly with PlugY too. I've backed up my old save files just in case and will see how it handles from now on. I can see straight away how the level requirements have gone down - my level 20 Paladin had 650K experience, now he needs only 500K for the next level! I wonder how the usage of /players 8 affects the experience one gets from your mod too - I'll have to experiment with it.

Anyway I'll give it a shot over the next few days and post my opinion here.