Tournament Central

[Billybgame]

Oh...sorry.

Hmm....now sometimes I'll notice a color, if more garish...but many times it's hard to tell. And, seemingly, you can't even see some items. What about rings, ammys etc, that you don't see?

Geez....I hardly ever look at it.....I'd have no idea what color....throw a dart! Or choose my favorite color, I guess.

[Cheveyo]

That you don't see on your character, you mean? Doesn't matter, still gotta stick to the color theme. So your gloves, shoes, belts, and jewelry also must be green on a green character.

* actually do rings and amulets ever spawn green? 'cause I'm not sure I've ever seen any...


As for what colors specifically, I'm thinking the basic gem set plus orange, so Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, White, and Black, rolling brown items in with Orange.

That said, Billy, if you're like me you've probably got a collection of sets and uniques in your stash, so I'd pick a class and flip through that to try to find a best color choice.

[Billybgame]

But, you don't know these colors, without adorning, right? Sounds awfully time consuming:(

[Cheveyo]

Um... The item icon on the inventory screen has a color, you can go by that <_<

[Nameless]

Interesting idea, but I can see several problems:

First, defining the colors and recognizing them are a bit difficult. There are some 4 different shades of red that aren't always easy to tell apart. Does "red" include all the shades or not. If yes, then it's a much more useful color than orange, since there is only one shade of that (or two if you count the more "brown" variety). There are different shades of yellow, plus shades of "gold" that look similar.

Second, the different colors do not appear nearly equally enough. If you choose "neutral" (no color), then you can use all runewords, crafted items (as long as you don't put a gem into the first socket) or blank items with jewels. You couldn't use any charms, though.

[Cheveyo]

Yeah "neutral" is distinctly a non-option. Non-colored items are only allowed as beginning placeholders, and with the runewords that qualify for other colors such as aforementioned Leaf. Allowing a "neutral" choice just seems to go against the entire spirit of the challenge.

Although note that you'd lose AFAIK every single Unique and (almost) every Set if you went neutral. I think you've got Tara's set for neutral and that's it.

In fact, that runeword exception may help compensate for the imbalanced colors. Green in particular seems too sparse to me.

Orange could be dropped easily enough. I thought it was more common, but that may just be my weird Rare luck. It doesn't quite fit with the others anyway since it's not a gem color.


The number of different shades doesn't matter nearly as much as their distribution, though; if you have thirty shades of red that combined have a 60-in-300 chance of appearing, and one shade of purple with a 70-in-300 chance, the purple is more useful*. And if anything, blue seems more common than red for most items I've been getting.


* this is of course before you consider what those mods are.


... actually, Blue's really too common on sets. Arcanna, Milabrega, Anduin, Blackwing, Barbarian Merc... Maybe some that I don't have compensate though.

[Billybgame]

I'm doing a long needed cleanup of all my tourney characters stashes into my shared stash....which has led me once again into thinking of how we could make a tournament based around Coupons and ES items. Not sure if it's feasible, or how we could do it, but if we could pull it off, it'd be interesting and fun, I think. I think those Coupon created items go largely unused in ES, if not altogether. And, some are useful. Just tourney food for thought to throw out there.

Edit:

Surprised I never got an ounce of feedback on this....playing my Rares character and continuing my process of trying to complete all vanilla uniques with coupons, reminded me of this idea.

I think a tourney based on vanilla uniques might be interesting. Would it be too hard? Feasible? Whites and blues and socketables until you get vanilla uniques? Rerunning, of course, as it would take a lot of play to find enough of them.

Thoughts please.

[Nameless]

It's an interesting idea to do a tourney with the LoD coupons, and I would like to have a tourney where harsh equipment rules make the main difficulty. The biggest problems I see are:

* It takes a long time to get any LoD uniques from the coupons. Unless you're very lucky, you can't expect to have ANY items before mid/late normal and getting items that are actually useful for the build you're going for may take much longer. A single character will be unlikely to get more than a handful of exceptional items without a CRAZY amount of farming.
(I've been collecting coupons since I started playing the R series and by now I have all normal, most exeptional items and just a handful of elite items; might have been more if I had not turned a part of the coupons to wildcards for decipherer points, but still. We're talking about taking several dozen character most/all the way to Hell Baal here.)

* Especially the normal LoD uniques are pretty crappy. The extra socket and the +1 All Skills for Rings/Ammys makes up for part of that, but still...

* Blue ES items are generally WAY better than most LoD uniques (normal ones, at least), especially if you count/allow Starter Weapon or Skill Tab reroll recipes.
A very important point would be when a player HAS to switch to a LoD unique, especially for the weapon slot. When he makes any weapon? When he makes any weapon of the correct category (1h, 2h, bow), of the correct group (swords) or the exact weapon type (Flail).
There are no normal uniques for throwing weapons or Claws, what would a character built for such weapons do?

[thepsycho2]

The rares one seemed to be pretty good. The only hitch I run into is my busy lifestyle. There are some times where I *have* to close D2 in the middle of an act, which kinda makes full-clearing a little unbalanced. Another shot at the immortal tournament would be nice though, but the cripple factor would be that you cannot transfer at all (putting items into shared is ok, but not taking out of shared stash). Anything that doesn't have to do with running one-time in an act would be fine with me.

I also have not seen a spellcaster tournament as of recent. A pure caster tournament which would rate on average damage, experience, progress, equipment(?), amount of gold found (we can divide this by a certain number of course), and finally a multiplier(?).

A score multiplier would be nice for such. I am very unsure of the maths involved so I may need some help to make this field level. One thing should be certain though, that spells involving poison should not be counted unless we can somehow level that off too.

edit: experience and gold would be divided off separately. progress would be completion of acts and the Domain in the difficulty. But how would damages be treated?

Multiplier would go down on dying of course (-0.1), so what should we do to increase the multiplier? Beating the Domain would be one of them (+0.15). Finding all the lv.40-tier and all lv.80-tier unique charms would (separately) increase it as well (+0.05 for both). We could also throw in something about the equipment as well, esp. the lv.70 set equipment which is tough to find (+0.1). And difficulty completion would give incentive (+0.05).

I think we can use a general multiplier that starts at 1. However, a one-run character who doesn't die and achieves all of this will have a multiplier of 1.8 ...

I'll try to meditate more on this and try some balancing on the maths, but most importantly, I could use some ideas! Let me know if you have any.

EDIT 2: I think I got this down. We shave off the last four digits of the stored gold and the last five digits of experience. Thinking of the progress score could be such:
Normal = *1, Nightmare = *3, Hell = *6
Act 1 (exc. Secret Cow Level) = 50
Act 2 (exc. Lost Farm) = 100
Act 3 (exc. Marsh of Pain) = 150
Act 4 = 200
Act 5 (exc. Naraku 1) = 250
All Waypoints = 250 (would make 1000 for finding all the waypoints).
If you miss a waypoint, you can't get an all waypoint bonus until you find it.

That would net 1000 in Normal, 3000 in Nightmare (=4000), and 6000 in Hell (=10,000). We could multiply this by character level by shaving off the second digit. So if you are level 48, multiply by 4.
______________________________________
I would suggest bringing a spreadsheet with you.

Start with Average Damage, this can be left alone.
Experience, divide by 10,000.
Gold, divide by 1,000.
Progress, multiply by the current level which is divided by 10.

Take all this and multiply by the multiplier (which begins at 1) and you have the total score.

If this would work, or if anyone has other ideas which could be incorporated into the mess, tell me.

edited: threw away experience

Update: What if someone doesn't have access to a casting skill yet? Should we stick to just using regular attack? Come to think of it, there are only a few classes that have access to casting skills at level 1. But what about the rest?

[Lucifer666]

How about All Uniques??? I have read that many never made a Golden Hero(All Uniques equiped),doesnt matter if they wear LOD ir ES uniques as long as they are tottaly golden...

[Billybgame]

How about All Uniques??? I have read that many never made a Golden Hero(All Uniques equiped),doesnt matter if they wear LOD ir ES uniques as long as they are tottaly golden...

I do not believe we ever had an "all uniques" tourney.....you know...that is an idea......you could do a tourney that is a combo ES unique/vanilla unique tourney. You could use ES uniques in a slot, but only up until you can fill that slot with vanilla uniques created from coupons.

Food for thought............

[thepsycho2]

How about All Uniques??? I have read that many never made a Golden Hero(All Uniques equiped),doesnt matter if they wear LOD ir ES uniques as long as they are tottaly golden...

I do not believe we ever had an "all uniques" tourney.....you know...that is an idea......you could do a tourney that is a combo ES unique/vanilla unique tourney. You could use ES uniques in a slot, but only up until you can fill that slot with vanilla uniques created from coupons.

Food for thought............

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. But how are we going to score between ES and Vanilla uniques? I would play it considering it isn't about marathon running. (Would the run style be like the sets tourney?)

[Lucifer666]

I think that for many that endless farming and rerolling of normal to exceptional and exceptional to elite coupons is going to be a bit more of a letdown...I say more points for ES uniques as you dont really have that good uniques from LOD,what theres actualy 5 or 6 nice ones all the others are c**p...

[thepsycho2]

It is actually dependant on class, what is actually used. Personally, I found a couple odd-end vanilla uniques to be even better (since it is pre-socketed), esp. the jewelry which tacks on an extra +1 skills. Eye of Etlich is actually useful now for early-on casters: at lv.15, it's the earliest you are getting +2 all skills, at the lack of most things though..

[Lucifer666]

Yea but besides rings/ammys nothing appeals to me...I actually totaly forgot about them...
hehehe...since i'm mostly using rares and crafts in normal gaming...

[Nameless]

I'd kind of really like to do a LoD unique tourney.

Here are some ideas about the rules:

I'd povide a mule character with one of most/all normal coupons (possibly also a smattering of exceptional ones) so players can get things rolling more quickly.

You could use LoD uniques, possibly one LoD runeword (the high-end RWs blow most uniques out of the water so I'd like to limit that). You could also use regular magic (blue; no skilltab jewelry or starter weapon recipes) and white/gray (socketed, but no RWs or Gemwords) items. Items that are not LoD uniques can not be forged, dstoned or socketed. Charms are not limited (Vet charm can have a runeword, ...), unique charms and jewels can be used.

Scoring would be based on progress (waypoints and quests), number of LoD uniques made and number of LoD uniques worn. Possibly also on LoD runes made.

Comments please. If there is interest, I'd develop the rules further.

[Lucifer666]

I'm Interested...although with LOD uniques...i thought i left them behind when i started playing ES...

edit: also i'm against giving anybody ANY advantage...you want it you find it...

edit 2: also maybe it would be more interesting if it was Hard Core only???

edit 3: also i think that those high end runewords from LOD are no threat,cuz after 2 years and more of playing this great mod i still didnt find not one Jah decal and have only 2 Ber and 0 Zod...

[Billybgame]

Glad to see all the discussion on this idea....be good to have a new one going when the Rares tourney flame officially goes out. Or, my Assassin dies

Hardcore would work for me....haven't played much of that, for awhile.

Yeah, I'm not sure about bringing in coupons from prior play. Do we all have a good stable of them? If so, maybe we could say everyone can use one pre-owned of each normal and exceptional coupons. Just a thought, but it might work. Otherwise, it could be real hard to ever get to exceptionals, I fear. Still could be. But, if we used this rule, you could at least use the 5 normals to an exceptional to increase your exceptionals supply.

I wouldn't fear about this being too hard....compared to the Rares tourney, it'd be easy! Agreed....some of the vanilla Uniques, with two sockets, can be awfully good items, with the nice things you can socket them with.

[Nameless]

Without getting a starter set of coupons, most characters would not get any LoD uniques until late normal, let alone get ones that fit their build.

Of course, we could say that everybody can dip into their own stash of coupons, but I feel that this wouldn't be fair. Not everybody collects them, many people will just cube them up into decipherers or sell them. Some people will have an almost complete set, others will have hardly any.
So I think that it would be fair to hand out mule characters, then everybody starts with exactly the same set of coupons.

[Lucifer666]

OK...what coupons do you have in mind??? Also i think it would be unfair to give out more then 2 pieces of equipment that way and you would have to change those slots while in normal...

[Nameless]

I'd only give out ONE of each type. So you have to find at least a second one (and have found a few spare ones for a wildcard) or two of a type before you can make any unique. And you couldn't turn any of the "starter" coupons into a wildcard either.

[Lucifer666]

Nice...for a moment i was afraid that you'll be giving out too much...OK...sound fine to me...

[Billybgame]

Yeah, that sounds like a good plan.....if we can make the exact same starter kit of coupons for every player, that would work good.

Just hoping we can pull that off. You look at the Rares tourney, and there are so many that started, but never even posted one progress post, after that.

Maybe we could state you can run the Blood Moor and Den of Evil up to level 12, then you post, and get your Coupon gift bag:)

[Lucifer666]

I have been looking at the Craftsman tourny thread and I would like to be a part of the next one,if you decide to throw one in near future, some crafts can have really sick mods and it's looking very atractive to me...

[Billybgame]

I have been looking at the Craftsman tourny thread and I would like to be a part of the next one,if you decide to throw one in near future, some crafts can have really sick mods and it's looking very atractive to me...

If I'm not mistaken the Craftsman tournies have always been Hans' baby. One thing at at time, though.....I'd like to get going further on our vanilla Uniques idea.