Diablo II single player questions

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Sorry - I didn't see this post earlier.

The odds of the Countess dropping a key are actually fairly high (about 7%). So while it certainly shouldn't be expected that she would drop keys on consecutive runs, it isn't as impossible as it initially sounds. Getting a Lum rune from a chest is pure luck though.

Regarding Guardian Angel, it's not that unusual for Hell Andarial to drop that. (Or perhaps you meant that it was weird I just mentioned the armor and then you saw it dropped?) Guardian Angel is an exceptional unique armor - not an elite unique armor. Hell Andarial can drop any exceptional unique in the game.

 

Hmm. Never played on Hell. Is the shwag better because of the difficulty? Do you get more unique items / sets?

 

Well, crushing blow isn't a mod that can spawn on gloves randomly, so you wouldn't get one with magic or rare versions. I know of no set gloves that give crushing blow. I can think of two uniques that give crushing blow, neither or which are practical equipment for most characters.

The first is Venom Grip, which is the unique demonhide gloves. They give just 5% chance of a crushing blow, but the other stats are rather humble for this item. They increase your maximum poison resistance by 5%, gives you +30% poison resistance, along with 5% life steal. Not bad, but you can probably find more useful mods (without the crushing blow) on a rare.

The other option is Steelrend. They offer a much better 10% chance for a crushing blow, along with 60% increased damage, +20 to strength, and +200 to defense. All of which are great, except for the fact that you need 185 strength to equip them, and most builds don't invest that much. Also they are the unique ogre gauntlets, an elite item, meaning that they are also much harder to find than the excpetional Venom Grip.

So the easiest way of getting crushing blow on gloves is to make yourself a pair. (Are you aware of crafted items?) The crafting recipe in question that we'd be interested in is for blood gloves: Magical (as in blue name) heavy gloves + Nef Rune + Perfect Ruby + Jewel (any junk jewel will do) generate the crafted item (name appears in orange) with the following modifiers:

1%-4% life steal
+10-20 life
5%-10% chance of crushing blow
1-4 other randomized modifiers

Some other notes:

The exceptional and elite versions of heavy gloves (sharkskin and vampirebone, respectively) also work for the recipe, but they must be magic (blue) quality.

Of the three "preset" modifiers of life steal, crushing blow, and +life, the exact output is randomized and all occur with equal probability. (For example the gloves won't say 1%-4% life steal, they will say either 1%, 2%, 3% or 4% life steal, and there's an equal 1 in 4 chance of any one of those occuring. It's possible to get the maximum life steal, with the minimum crushing blow and +life, or vice versa, or any combination in between.)

While a jewel is necessary in the recipe, it can literally be any kind of jewel - even one dropped in the Blood Mor of Act 1 is fine - it has no effect on the output item.

However, the character doing the crafting does has a big effect on the outcome of the item. Specifically in the last line of "1-4 other random mods". You are allowed any modifiers than can appear on magic gloves that have an affix level equal to or lower than your character level. Also, the higher the character's level, the greater the chance of getting the maximum number of 4 additional modifiers. Obviously, this means that higher level characters produce higher quality crafted items, because they have more potential mods available to them, and have a higher chance of getting 4 bonus mods as opposed to a lower amount.

Finally, life steal is a mod that can appear on gloves. (In fact, gloves with life steal are quite popular and quite common.) And it is possible for one of the randomly generated mods to be life steal. In such a case the life steal is added to whatever percentage originally generated on the item, and can result in a item with massive life leech. If, for example your gloves generated with 4% life leech as one of the preset mods, and you generated the "of the lampry" suffix as a random mod (7% life leech), you'd have a pair of gloves with 11% life leech on them.

Edit: @DR - Yes, but that's because most monsters on normal cannot drop the high level items. Item types are broken down into three general categories: normal items, exceptional items, and elite items. Generally speaking, monsters on normal difficulty can only drop normal items, monsters on nightmare difficulty can drop exceptional items (but of course can stil drop nomal ones) while monsters on hell difficulty can drop any item type from normal all the way up to elite. So it's not so much that your chances improve all that much of landing a specifc set or unique item, but rather there are more set and unique items that a monster can potentially drop, and thus your chances of getting any set or unique improve.

 

There are tons of crafting recipes. There are blood, caster, safety, and hit power recipes for weapons, helms, armor, gloves, boots, belts, rings, and amulets. So everything really.

They all require a very specific input item. For example, to make blood armor you must use magic plate mail (or the exceptional or elite version of plate mail). You cannot make a "better" blood armor by using ancient armor instead.

Also, all of the recipes require a jewel of any type, a fairly low level rune (the highest rune required for any recipe is Sol) along with a specific color perfect gem. Blood recipes require perfect rubies, caster recipes use perfect amethysts (I don't know why they don't use perfect sapphires for the caster recipes, but for some reason hit power recipies use sapphires) while the safety recipes use perfect emeralds.

Believe it or not, the limiting factor in your ability to craft items is usually the rune. While Nef is not by any means an uncommon rune, it's not like you have dozens of them lying around. Jewels drop all the time, and any of them will do. Since you only need a magic item you can usually buy one from a vendor (all the mods are reset anyway, so it doesn't make any difference at all what the original weapon properties are - just make sure you buy at least an exceptional). Holding onto flawless gems and upgrading them to perfect is fairly painless.

The reason people invest in crafting is for the four random mods you can get. The base three preset mods (which vary from one item to the next - not all blood items give crushing blow for example) are usually OK, but not great mods, and alone would not be enough to use the item. Combining those three OK mods with some potentially great random mods is what gives these items the ability to be some of the best stuff in the game. You can theoretically craft an item with 7 modifiers on it. I don't know what to call that item, but something like an "uber rare" sounds about right. (Standard rares cannot have more than 6 modifiers.)

EDIT: Oh, and while I find the thought of crafting appealing, I probably won't deliberately try to do more recipes for blood gloves than normal for my paladin (who is currently level 15 - just two levels away from the launch point). With the current setup, I already have a 50% chance of landing a crushing blow, meaning that I should be landing 2.5 crushing blows per zeal cycle. Slightly more CB would not significantly increase the damage output. Furthermore, I am going to need some resistances out of my gloves no matter what I do, so not only would I need a good roll for CB, I'd also need to get some pretty specific random modifiers for them to be really useful.

Overall, I think that belts, boots, rings, and gloves make the best crafting options, as those item slots have the most flexibility in choices. Your weapon, body armor, and shield are usually selected to fulfill specific functions (like shields are selected based on their chance to block and resistances) that would be unlikely to occur by chance on a crafted item. Helms would be a possibility, other than the fact that circlet class headgear can attain modifiers unavailable on all other helms, and thus are the headgear of choice for every class other than barbarians and druids. (Of course, seeing as how barbarians and druids use class-specific helms, they wouldn't craft helms either.) Amulets also are picked for resistances and +skills, and again, those mods are unlikely to occur by chance on a random mod.

 

I hit level 17 last night, right before I went up against Andariel. Killed her in just 5 zeal cycles! It was one of the few times my merc didn't die, because Andariel wasn't around long enough to poison her.

However, I have found another potential disadvantage with this character: neither my current equipment, nor the equipment I intend to use have life or mana leech on them. That means I definitely need to spend my first socket quest on my mighty scepter and stick a perfect skull in it. (If I get lucky and get two sockets, I won't necessarily need two perfect skulls - maybe an increase damage jewel for the other, or a shael rune to make the scepter even faster.)

I really only need one socket quest with this guy, so my other two quests will be spent on my necro's equipment to bump his mf a little more. The only socketable items are weapon, body armor, shield, and helm. I will spend the one quest on my weapon. My shield is already socketed, and thus I cannot socket it further. That leaves the helm and armor, but what, realistically, would I gain by socketing them? Sure I can throw a perfect topaz in them, but adding additional ptopazes to my necro's equipment is a better investment. I could add some prubies to add to my life, but if everything goes as planned, this character will get well over 1000 life, and won't really benefit for the extra 80 or so I can gain from the prubies. So this character will also donate his socket quests to my necro to maximize his magic finding abilities - which is just another good reason to try him out.

 

Nostalgia kicked in and I justed started a single player fishymancer as well. Used to play exclusively in battlenet but with all my friends no longer playing, I dont see the need to play in battlenet any longer.

 

Well, no great find over the weekend. I'm advancing my paladin slowly, because I am still devoting some of my time to magic finding with my necro (who is still level 87, and probably will remain at level 87 for quite some time). Anyway, my paladin is up to level 26, and is in Act III, normal difficulty. While I started progressing much faster once I started using Milabrega's Regalia, this character doesn't really take off until my level gets into the 40s. There are two pieces of end-game equipment that I can begin using in the 30s - the helm and amulet. All the other pieces of equipment have level requirements between 41 and 47. (It's hard to believe, but the highest item level requirement is on the boots of all things - Gore Riders have a level requirement of 47!)

I also realized I made a miscalculation in trying to figure out how much resistance I need. It's true that with Guardian Angel I will need to stack a total of 190% resist all to max my resistances. I have a rare amulet that will give me resist all 20% (resist lightning is actually 34% - the rest are 20%) and my pally shield is now filled with diamonds giving a monster 120% resist all (I thought it was going to be 118%, but there was actually 44% resist all on the base shield). So I thought I had 140% of the 190% I needed for hell difficulty. What I failed to initially consider is that by the time I get to hell difficulty, I will have completed Malah's quest twice, and thus I will have another 20% resist all that I didn't previously account for. That means I'll only need 30% resist all between the two rings, belt and gloves, and that's much easier to get than 50% resist all. Ideally, I can get the 30% resist all between the belt, gloves and some miscellaneous charms, which would free up my two ring spots for whatever else I'd like (ideally, a dwarf star and raven frost).

 

First of all, almost ALL of my small charms that add resistance have some other modifier on them. In the beginning I hold on to everything that gives you +resists, but once you have your resistances maxed in hell, I start shedding charms that give only resistance in favor of charms that serve a dual purpose (as I find them). I totally agree (especially with the new calculation) that I should have a problem maxing these resists. I look forawrd to going sunbathing in Act III as I stand around gloams. By the time I get to the end of hell difficulty, I'll have 170% of the 190% I need just from the shield, the amulet, and Malah.

Also, while I do not plan on using this character primarily for MFing, all characters can be gamblers, and this guy will be no exception. (Remember that gambling is simply a function of the character's level, and the amount of MF gear a character is carrying - or lack thereof - has no affect on the results.) So I like the idea of having at least half of my total inventory and the horadric cube available to stash stuff I find while killing things. No, I don't pick up every magical cap that falls to the ground, but I pick up all rares, sets and uniques, as well as all things that are worth good money - most armors sell for 35,000 gold even if they are regular white items, as do almost all items that come with +skills. (Strangely assassin claws are the exception in that they usually sell for crap.) Even once you have enough of all the different color gems, it's still worth while picking up every flawless gem you find, as something that's worth 7,500 gold and only takes up a single inventory space is definitely worth while. I never leave rings, amulets, charms, runes, or jewels behind regardless of quality.

EDIT: One more thought on crafting recipes. I found out that if you have a character over level 70, that it is possible to get +3 to skills from a particular tree, as well as +2 to all skills for a particular character on a crafted amulet, thus making crafted amulets very, very useful crafts indeed. Although you'll likely be making the amulet for a different character than the one you're playing (unless you get really lucky and land the tree/class of a character you are playing at that moment). And that's true of any of the recipes, so you theoretically, in addition to all the preset stats, get +3 to summon skills (Necromancer Only) as a random modifier to take just one example, although any of the other 20 skills trees are possibilities.

 

I play on Battlenet, so there's no way I can use what you send me... but that you for the offer.

As far as most of what you crafted being not so great, you have to think of crafting like Charsi's imbue quest. It's basically a way to repeat her quest with different items and the cost of some relatively common ingredients. The output item is dependent upon your character level and the input item, but it's always the equivalent of a rare, with some of the mods being known beforehand.

The odd thing about that craft is you only got 2 bonus modifiers - a very low result if you were using your level 70-something necromancer for the crafting. I would have expected at least 3 once you hit level 70, and 4 is a reasonable expectation. Getting only two bonus modifiers is something you'd expect from a character around level 50.

I got to the first waypoint in Act 4 yesterday. I'm really just trying to get through to Act V where the experience points start to get good again. Act III and IV are a waste of time - you gain all of about 3 or 4 levels going through them.

 

I've worked late the last two days, haven't got home until after 8:00, so I haven't bothered playing lately.

Some other things to consider while crafting - sometimes it's worth making a crafted item even if you aren't interested in the preset modifiers on the craft, because you are always relying on the bonus modifiers anyway.

I'll explain by example. If you make a blood amulet, you're probably making it for a melee character for the life leech. However, if the craft generates a blood amulet with +2 to sorceress skills, it's still a great item, even though it's totally not what you intended when you crafted it. The life leech is useless to your sorceress, but the +2 to skills and possibly another nice bonus mod or two make it outstanding.

Similarly, the caster amulet recipe is dirt cheap (requires a Ral) so it's worth running even if you don't need the bonus mana or mana regeneration. You're looking for the +2 skills bonus, and it doesn't matter what recipe you use to get there. (All the other amulet recipes require a higher rune (either a Thul, Amn or Sol) and are therefore much more expensive than the caster amulet recipe.)

 

IMHO, +2 skills and a nice chunk of resistance is worth 48% MF. +2 skills is actually a pretty significant upgrade for your skeletons, as you also are getting +2 to skeleton mastery and summons resistance.

Let me get this straight - you are actually running around with 20 skeletons, with a merc and a golem to boot?

Act III is easily my least favorite Act. The only thing good about it is that it is the easiest boss run in the game. But actually going through the act - ugh. Just painful.

 

I should try Diablo 2 again. What should I play as? Do I play single player or online? How do I build up skills?

 

It depends what type of character you like to play. If you like to get up close and beat things with a big sword, the Paladin's for you. If you prefer to stay back and rain elemental doom on your enemies, the Sorceress is perfect. Necros are awesome if you like to curse your enemies then watch your undead/golem beat them to death. These are the 3 classes I've tried, and while I love the Sorceress they're all fun to play. Naturally, your choice of skills will entirely depend on which class you decide to play.