Diablo II

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Actually it was just 9% since I forgot I upgraded one item for better resistance.



Now I need some runeword - cube help.

1 Ort Rune + 1 Amn Rune + 1 Perfect Sapphire + Normal (Basic) Rare Weapon = Exceptional Rare Weapon
The item type is upgraded.


That will allow me to upgrade my nerco wand without losing any of the bonuses right?
I have a normal one that gives +1 to all summons skills and some other good stuff like 50% flee and 60+ charges of terror. It's pretty sweet.

 

Precisely. Any bonuses, spells, modifiers will stay exactly the same as what they were before. However, as with all item upgrades the required level you need to be to use the item may increase. Provided your level is already around 40 though, it shouldn't be a problem. For future reference, it is also possible that the strength and/or dexterity requirements increase when you upgrade a weapon or armor. However, in the case of necro wands, the item requirements are so low for strength and dexterity that it definitely shouldn't be a problem.

One more small point - Unless you are actually using the wand in combat - as in wading into battle a whacking enemies on the head with it - you're not going to benefit from upgrading it. The only thing the cube recipe will do is increase the amount of damage the wand does when you hit with it. If you rarely enter melee combat, you won't really see much added benefit.

(Although, since none of the components of that receipe are particularly rare, if you just want an exceptional weapon, what the heck.)

 

Is there anyway to upgrade a socketed basic plain item?

I got a plain crown with two nice sockets for:

Lore
2 Socket Helms Ort + Sol
+1 To All Skill Levels
+10 To Energy
+2 To Mana After Each Kill
Lightning Resist +30%
Damage Reduced By 7
+2 To Light Radius


Still need a Sol rune but can I upgrade it with the sockets?

 

If it's just a plain item, there's nothing you can do with it. Runewords can only be made from items that have their name in gray. The upgradable items are the ones with their name in yellow (rares) and their name in gold (uniques). You cannot do anything with blue (magic) or green (set) items either. However, I see nothing wrong with making Lore in an non-upgraded crown.

Just as the only thing that will increase by upgrading the wand was weapon damage, the only thing you increase by upgrading the crown is defense (and a significant increase in minimum strength to wear the item). I don't remember what the name of an upgraded crown is (grand crown? Maybe corona?), but the strength requirement is well over 100, which may be a problem for a necromancer, who generally does not sink a ton of points into strength. The point is even if you could upgrade the item, you probably wouldn't want to as the extra defense provided by the upgraded crown is only going to marginally improve your chances of avoiding damage.

Here are things I would consider upgrading:

Melee Weapons: For a melee oriented character, upgrading thier weapon is always worth while. They kill things by doing damage with their weapon (as opposed to spells or summoned creatures), and so a decent rare upgraded into an exceptional rare will usually carry them a long way through hell difficulty.

Body Armor: Provided you have the strength to wear it of course. Some of the strength requirements get quite high indeed. Upgraded ancient armor (called Chaos Armor) has a strength requirement of 170 - which exceeds what most builds invest in stength. There are lighter armors however that provide nice defense. A breast plate (upgradable to a cuirass) and light plate (upgradable to mage plate) have strength requirements of right around 100 - which is much more attainable.

Other armor pieces (gloves, boots, shield, helm): But only if you are a paladin specializing in holy shield and/or defiance, a barbarian specializing in shout and/or concentrate, and/or iron skin, or a druid who maxes out werebear. And here's why: Once you get to hell difficulty, the attack rating of monsters goes through the roof. You need several thousand in defense to have a decent chance of not getting hit. The builds I listed above are the only ones that have a realistic chance of getting several thousand defense, because they have skills that greatly multiply the defense rating of all of their equipment.

On the other hand, if you have a character with a defense of about 1000, upgrading a helm or shield to increase your defense to 1100 will affect your chance to be hit by less than 1%. It's just not worth it. Instead of an enemy having a 75% chance to hit you in melee, it will now have a 74% chance to hit you (if you are lucky - it may stay 75%). The difference between 1000 defense and 2000 defense is not all that noticable either, so increasing your defense by 100 is worth virtually nothing.

The builds I listed above have skills that increase defense by 300% or more, so that 100 increase becomes 300, in addition to all the other pieces of armor having triple defense as well, which makes it more worth while to upgrade ancillary armor pieces. General rule of thumb regarding defense: Unless you get your defense to around 5000, marginally improving your defense by 100 is going to do very little to enhance your performance.

 

Actually, if you have a non-magical socketed helm with two sockets, take it to Charsi if you haven't used her Imbue Item offer after the Horadric Malus uest in Act one. If you like the way it comes out, then put the Ort and Sol Rune in the helmet and you're all set...

 

It's a great plan except: 1) Socketed items cannot be imbued. The imbue quest can only be applied to white items - although superior, cracked, low quality, damaged, etc., all work, and the resulting rare item has normal durability (unless one of the mods it gets enhances its durability) 2) Even if socketed items could be imbued, the imbued helm would now be a rare item, and thus unable to contain a runeword. (Note: Rares can contain sockets, but even if you have the right number of sockets on the item, a rare can NEVER have a runeword - you'll just get the effects of the rune itself if you insert it into the rare. There may be a mod in single player that allows rares to contain runewords, but it is not within the parameters of the normal game.)

EDIT: My level 74 Necro found found the unique kraken shell "Leviathan" last night. Woot! The strength requirement far exceeds my necro's ability to actually wear it, but it will serve some future paladin/druid/barbarian well. The armor looks green in the inventory display, so I'm assuming it will also look green when it is equipped - which would be pretty cool.

 

How do you save your items for another character?

 

PlugY or ATMA would be my first guess

 

If you are single player, ATMA is the most used program. If you play online (as I do) it's also pretty easy. After about 5 minutes your game becomes semi-permanent on battlenet, in the sense that after you save and exit the game, you have about a minute or so before battlenet actually deletes the game. In the one minute or so, it is possible to rejoin the game with another character. So you take the item, thow it on the ground, and then rejoin the same game (you have to remember the name and password of the game obviously) with the character you want to give the item to. The key is to be in a new game at least 5 minutes before you drop your items and save and exit. If you do it in a brand new game, battlenet deletes the game as soon as you save and exit.

Alternatively, if you are worried that you will lose the item if you save and exit the game, you can join another game that other people are playing and do the same thing (remembering the name of the game of course). There is no risk of the game being deleted in this case as there are people actively playing, but this method does require some risk as well. First of all, since there are other people in the game, it is possible that someone comes by your item that you left on the ground and picks it up. It's usually a good idea to go to some remote area of town where other players wouldn't just wander by if you use this method. The other potential problem with this method is that a game on battlenet has a maximum number of 8 players in the game. It is possible that you drop your item on the ground, save and exit, and then other player(s) join while you're getting your other character, and the game is full when you try to rejoin.

 

Do any of the people posting to this thread do any modding?
Reason i ask this question is i was wondering how hard it is to implement creatures from an IE game(icewind dale) into the Dialbo II engine.
The reason i asked that question is i have noticed that the D2 mod i'm playing has the Verbeeg giants, the wererats(or werebadgers?) & the sherincal half-dragon character models from IWD in it. I was just wondering how difficult/easy that was to implement.

 

% find magic items question

I found a necklace that gives +1 to all my Nerco skills and +35% to find Magic items.
With two other items I have around 60%.

Now that I'm up from my lame 9% I can't get runes (or gems much) to drop any more. More magic weapons and armor drop though. Should I take off the items if I want runes, or are runes magic items too and I'm just having bad luck.



---------- Added 21 hours, 19 minutes and 46 seconds later... ----------

OK I'm gonna finish up my Nerco game on Normal and fire up a Barbarian.

All you Barb fans out there have any pointers how to play him.

 

High Strength and high dex. Just tank with a weapon in each hand. Barbarians can wield a two hand sword in each hand. This ony works for Swords however. Dual Swing will likely be your bread and butter for a long time...

---------- Added 0 hours, 1 minutes and 10 seconds later... ----------

Oh, and when you decide which weapon you use, a third to a half od your skill points should go into that class mastery until you get at least 20 levels there...

 

Hah! got an Email about the mod that the maker uses infinitum to put IE animations into Diablo2!
Had to go the website to check out the various creature sprites & there are a bunch of them!!
http://infinitum.planetdiablo.gamespy.com/anims-deva.php

Just encountered a frikkin Frost Giant!(They hit REALLY hard!!)
AH feels like the dales have fallen into the Diablo universe.

 

You're just having bad luck. The only thing that magic find affects is the odds that a given item is normal (white), magic (blue), rare (yellow), set (green) or unique (gold). It does not change the freqency of what types of items drop.

Item generation is very complicated, but for the purposes of this discussion the game decides what type of item to drop (for example a short sword) before it decides on the item's quality (whether the short sword is normal, magic, rare, etc). This is necessary because some items (like runes and gems - but also things like arrows, keys, potions, etc) only come in the white variety, while other items (jewels, rings, amulets) must be at least magical quality. So whether you have 0% or 1000% magic find should not effect the number of runes or gems you get.

 

Doesn't magic find percentage affect the quality of the runes or gems themselves though? For example, let's say the game decides to drop an emerald, does MF affect if you get a chipped or a flawed emerald?

 

This is a simple answer, but a complicated explanation.

Simple answer: no

Explanation: All items in the game are broken down into treasure classes. When you kill a creature, there is a list of treasure classes that the creature can drop from (or it can drop nothing). Magic find does not affect which treasure class a creature can drop from. The specific order is pick a treasure class, pick an item within that treasure class, and finally determine if that item is normal, magic, rare, etc (if applicable to the selected item). The only part of that three step process that magic find affects is the third and final step.

Gems: Chipped, flawed, standard, flawless, and perfect gems are all in different treasure classes. But the different colors of gem are in the same treasure class. For example, chipped rubies, sapphires, diamonds, topazes, emeralds, amethysts and skulls all belong to the lowest treasure class, which means they can be dropped by any creature, even the ones you find in the blood moor of Act 1, normal. The odds of any particular color dropping are the same, except for skulls, which drop with half the frequency as the other six gems. So if the game decides to drop from the chipped gem treasure class, you have a 2 in 13 chance of getting a ruby, sapphire, diamond, topaz, emerald, or amethyst, and a 1 in 13 chance of getting a skull. Since chipped, flawed, standard, flawless and perfect are all in different treasure classes, and magic find does not affect the treasure class selected, magic find does not affect gem drops.

Runes: These are a bit different. The runes are ordered from #1 (most common) to #33 (least common). The runes are broken down into 17 treasure classes, with two runes for the first 16 treasure classes with the final treasure class containing only one rune (#33, Zod, the least common). There is an even 50-50 chance of getting either rune if that treasure class is selected. The lowest rune TC contains the two most common runes (El and Eld), the second TC contains the next two most common runes (Tir and Nef), etc., and there are even odds of which one you get. Just like with gems, since the TC is selected first, and magic find does not affect TC selection, magic find does not affect rune drops.

* In summation, magic find does not help or hurt your ability to find gems or runes, nor does it affect the quality of the gems or runes dropped.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation Aldeth! I had originally thought that Magic Find affects the treasure (I thought normal/magic/rare/etc was a function of treasure class, actually), but I can now see why this isn't the case.

 

Trust me - My explanation is nothing more than Item Generation 101. There is a lot more to it than my limited explanation above. There are TC upgrades for exceptional and elite items, qlevels which affect whether a unqiue or set item can drop even if the appropriate TC is selected, and TC selection (in terms of how the game picks which TC to drop from) is a field in itself. Then, if you want to figure out how the game calculates which modifiers can appear on magic and rare weapons, that's a whole other set of explanations. Item generation is arguably the Diablo series greatest acheivement.

However, upon further consideration, there is one class of items that many people find useful that will be dropped with reduced frequency if you have a high magic find: socketed items. This is because the game checks on whether an item is socketed after it runs through the other checks. Every time an item is selected to drop, the game checks for it's quality in a specific order (assuming the item seleted can come in different qualities): unique, set, rare, magic, superior, normal, low quality. Socketed items (disregarding the possibility of getting the mechanic's, artisan's, or jeweler's prefix on magic items) only occur in normal items (although the item name is gray instead of white if it is socketed). About 2% of regular item drops are socketed. Since having a high magic find reduces the number of normal items that drop, it will, by extension, reduce the number of socketed items that drop.

 

See this is why I like Diablo 2: it's an extremely simple game to play and get into, but under the hood it's very, very complex, and the complexity does show while playing if you look for it.

As for socketed items, that is a bit of a problem. Most of us end up with very good items that increase things we want (+skills, +health, etc) and MF at the same time. Running around without any of them to get low MF (and spawn socketed items) would make the game unduly difficult, unless you keep replacement items with all the good modifiers but no MF.

 

I agree - although it should be noted that it's only a major problem if you are looking for an item with an unusual number of sockets. This is because if you use Larzuk's socketing quest on a normal quality (white) item, the item will receive the max number of sockets it can get.

The problem comes in if you are trying to make a rune word that needs fewer than the maximum number of sockets. For example, if you're trying to make a runeword in a shield that requires two open sockets, Larzuk won't be able to help you, because all the elite shields (and nearly all of the exceptional and normal ones - not that you'd EVER use a socket quest on a normal item) have a maximum number of 3 or 4 sockets. Making a runeword that requires a weapon to have 5 sockets would also be problematic, as most weapons large enough to have 5 open sockets have a maximum of either 4 or 6 sockets. Same thing if you wanted body armor with 3 open sockets, as the max is 4 for most armors.

So in these cases, it would be necessary to actually find the item. As far as socketed items dropping are concerned, the number of sockets you get are random with even odds of any number appearing (up to the maximum allowed by the item). So if a given item has a maximum number of 3 sockets, you should see equal number of 1-socket, 2-socket, and 3-socket versions dropping.

Even when your magic find is very high, you still see a decent number of normal items dropping, so even then it's not an extremely limiting factor. The simple fact is some socketed items with an unusual number of sockets are genuinely rare. Only 2% of item drops for that item type will be socketed, and even then, your odds still might only be 1 in 4 or 1 in 6 of getting the exact number of sockets you want.