New d2 patch

[Sick thoughts]

when the 1.13 patch comes out for diablo 2 will this complicate things for your mod?

[Vendanna]

when the 1.13 patch comes out for diablo 2 will this complicate things for your mod?

Well, I think that nef will not port the mod to 1.13. (if they release it and it isn't a sucky patch) Most of the heavy changes are on the code just to remove the bugs blizzard added in each sucessive version of the game.

Count that the ones that are doing the patch, won't probably fix what its already fixed, but add more bugs in the process. It sums that the trouble to move it to 1.13 is at the moment not in the scope of the developers.

Sorry for the delay (if you read this). We are currently busy with real life works and those always come first, so we will inform when we continue with the developing.

Sincerely yours. --==Vendanna==--

[Nefarius]

Well, if they add anything meaningful in that patch we either already had it before or could implement it, like what happened with v1.12's only feature

[DemonicAngel]

Now that the patch is out (or at least out on the test realms), do any of the features seem worthy of being necessary to add?

[Super_jew]

I have only found 5 new items in the misc file and 1 new cube recipe

this is Misc

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Twisted Essence of Suffering	Twisted Essence of Suffering		0	100	0	0	1	0	0	1	10000		tes	fng	tes	16	1	1	0	0	0	flpgsb	invtes			0	xxx			0	0	ques		item_rare	12	item_rare	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0			0	-1															0	0	0	non	0					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255			0	0	0	xxx	xxx						0
Charged Essense of Hatred	Charged Essense of Hatred		0	100	0	0	1	0	0	1	10000		ceh	eyz	ceh	16	1	1	0	0	0	flpgsy	invceh			0	xxx			0	0	ques		item_rare	12	item_rare	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0			0	-1															0	0	0	non	0					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255			0	0	0	xxx	xxx						0
Burning Essence of Terror	Burning Essence of Terror		0	100	0	0	1	0	0	1	10000		bet	fng	bet	16	1	1	0	0	0	flpgsr	invbet			0	xxx			0	0	ques		item_rare	12	item_rare	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0			0	-1															0	0	0	non	0					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255			0	0	0	xxx	xxx						0
Festering Essence of Destruction	Festering Essence of Destruction		0	100	0	0	1	0	0	1	10000		fed	brz	fed	16	1	1	0	0	0	flpgsg	invfed			0	xxx			0	0	ques		item_rare	12	item_rare	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0			0	-1															0	0	0	non	0					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255					255			0	0	0	xxx	xxx						0

this is cube main

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Token of Absolution	1			100					4	tes	ceh	bet	fed				toa																																																																																							0

[Nefarius]

Now that the patch is out (or at least out on the test realms), do any of the features seem worthy of being necessary to add?

Other then the patch fixing but a single gameplay related bug (which was related to the uber quest...) theres really nothing of relevance there, considering a resolution increase (and windowed D3D!) are going to be implemented anyway.

---

As for those misc items, we will grab their graphics but thats about it, their devs seam to treat D2 as a MMO systematically ignoring the SP community, nonwithstanding the fact that of the active 100K bnet "players" 95K are spam bots, but this comes at no real surprise. I could pound this into the ground with criticism and witty comments but as it stands this is so irrelevant (no real bug fixes etc) that I only owe it my ignorance, if anything.

I like how they again don't bother to fix the boss event garbage and just reduce the FE damage, the incompetence displayed by this deed is unrivaled.

[Hans]

[edit] Removed comment

[Nefarius]

I had to do it, I couldn't resist

A new Mystery has been revealed!

- Players of Hell Difficulty Realm games are hereby warned once again,
that a series of new and challenging tests await you! The answer lies
within Diablo's Bosses, which span across the world from the Den of Evil
to the Throne of Destruction... Irrelevant


Major Bugs

- Fixed an item dupe bug. Irrelevant
- Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater. Irrelevant for MetalStorm


Minor Bugs

- Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal). Irrelevant
- The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the window loses and then regains focus. Wastes more cpu
- Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in windowed mode when it lost focus. We got a ingame TOGGLE in a new GUI to control if the window should minimize or not! Some people may want the window to minimize if you intentionally click outside of it, such as when your boss enters the office etc
- Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn't center properly when it was created. Rather irrelevant

Specific changes/improvements

- Respecialization is now possible! Completing the 'Den of Evil' quest will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in Hell difficulty. Useless for our purposes, in a vanilla context all it does is make cookiecutters easier to make
- Increased the drop rate of high runes. Irrelevant for our purposes.
- Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users). I do hope they mean higher resolution and not just scaling, as the later is done by modern GFX cards automatically...
- Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items required for Uber Tristam. Mousepad should sue blizzard
- Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level. Cool, so now I can also mule gold for free, oh wait, gold is irrelevant since gamble is crap
- Nightmare/Hell WilloWisps champions/uniques have had their damage greatly reduced. The underlaying bug that applied to all monsters isn't heard of I guess
- Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character. Regedit, granted this restriction was redundant
- Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters. Which doesn't fix the event bug, awesome.
- Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal's summoned minions no longer give experience. Irrelevant
- Removed Oblivion Knight's Iron Maiden curse. The only thing that required some strategy is gone now, good job
- Hellfire Torch Firestorm proc rate has been reduced to 5%. I smell a hardcode, as they can't change the stats of existing items
- Users can now toggle the display of text over the Health and Mana globes by clicking on the bottom area of each orb. Lets copy from hacks
- Updated two Act 5 mercenary names to Klar and Tryneus. Irrelevant
- When creating a single player game, pressing the 'Enter' key now automatically creates a Hell difficulty game if possible. Irrelevant
- When creating a game, each difficulty button is now bound to a unique key: Normal 'R', Nightmare 'N', and Hell 'H'. Irrelevant
- The 'Enter Chat' Button in the battle.net waiting room is now bound to the 'Enter' key. Irrelevant
- Added the windows system buttons to the game window (MIN, MAX, CLOSE). I had those controls for a couple of years now, you know
- Added new command line parameter '-nofixaspect' which allows users to not fix the aspect ratio to 4:3 when maximizing windowed mode. This lets the game 'stretch' to fill your monitor. See comment under resolution
- Added support for '-sndbkg' command line switch. This enables sound in background. Enables usage of more cpu
- Added support for '-nosound', '-window', and '-windowed' command line options. Irrelevant


Revised Skill balance for Player Character classes


Amazon

-Immolation Arrow - Increased radius of Explosion effect by 33% and Immolation effect by 50%.
-Immolation Arrow - Explosion effect damage increased by 20%.
-Immolation Arrow - Increased base duration by 33%.

While it is nice that they try and fix this, the problem was the casting delay, not the damage, not the AoE



Assassin

-Shadow Master - Increased resistance range per point from 5-80 to 5-90.

Did the most powerful summon really require a buff, it can cast Fade, so why not make the AI more likely to use it if it isn't already effected? How about fixing the broken kick skills due to a missing switch case? It's just one line of code guys...


Barbarian

-Whirlwind - Reduced initial mana cost by 50%.
-Masteries - Changed critical strike chance from 0-25 to 0-35.

The reason the barb is weak is because monsters had HP designed to balance Meteor's 25K hits in addition to tons of physical resist added to nerf amazons way back when, not the barb's own damage


Paladin

-Blessed Hammer - No longer ignores resistances of undead and demons.

It should only have ignored undead resists to start with


Druid

-Werebear - Damage bonus increased by 15% across all ranks.
-Werebear - Increased health by 25% and armor by 1% per point.
-Shockwave - Synergy from Maul adds 5% damage per point.

How about fixing the bug that makes most druid melee skills roll the attacker-defender routine twice and thus be twice as unlikely to hit a target?


Necromancer

-Blood Golem - Removed negative shared life effect (player no longer loses life when golem takes damage).
-Corpse Explosion - Increased base damage dealt from 60% - 100% to 70% - 120% of corpses health.
-Poison Nova - Increased base damage by 15%.

Removed the only reason blood golem was interesting (ie a dual sided share), boosted a skill that was overpowered to start with, sigh


Sorceress

-Firewall - Synergy receives 1% damage per point of Inferno and Blaze and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Blaze - Synergy receives 2% damage per point of Firewall and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Hydra - Increased base damage by 15% per rank.
-Hydra - Increased base speed of Hydra projectile.
-Hydra - Reduced cooldown by 25%.
-Lightning Mastery - Reduced overall effect by 15%.

Why didn't you nerf Meteor? Did people really use lightning skills for offense on a sorceress at all since v1.10? Why nerf Lightning Mastery?

[kingpin]

I think the person handling the D2 patch is likely an intern.

You are wrong about that. They have a team who handle there old games called "legacy team" (it's been official posted on their forum from blizz representants). They aren't just dedicated to Diablo 2. We should in fact be happy they still care about the game.

Bash diablo like some do is for sure nothing good for us. How can we ever be accepted from Blizzard's side as modders if we keep bash them? For me it's an easy answer why Warcraft have more acceptable modding from their side than diablo ever will have.

I'm sure people will/can find stuff in nef's mod that he done wrong. Everything is subjective views on your own. Sometimes it's better for your own if you keep it for yourself.

[Hans]

Sorry about that I will edit my comment.

Did not mean to be a bash against Blizzard.

[Nefarius]

I'm sure people will/can find stuff in nef's mod that he done wrong. Everything is subjective views on your own. Sometimes it's better for your own if you keep it for yourself.

Of course people can and will find stuff in this project, I highly doubt I ever even hinted anything else will be the case.

My Own Mess
- Fixed some flag garbage with the spell target eval that remained there from an earlier test.
- Some more flag mess in some code dated back to 2006, fixed now.
- Auto-requip of ammo now works properly again, in fact it's even improved now
- Some new triggers used a frame delta value, which was due to new research proven to be inaccurate, they now store the counter on the unit itself.

I actually repeatedly talk about it ya know

But the similarities do stop there, the reason I go after that stuff is because it's half assed, when proper solutions are very easy to implement with source (unless their source is a terrible mess), there simply is no excuse to "fix" some of the things the way they did, sorry. Reminds me alot of how the critical hit bug on the barb "couldn't be fixed" when it was just returning a constant 100 instead of a stat value.

WillOWisps -> access the array properly instead of doing nDamage = nMonstats->EDmg[0] do EDmg
Event Bugs -> pass event id to timeout func, it even has params for that, instead of passing 0

Instead add a hardcode to reduce willowisp boss damage (...) and divide FE damage further. Great.

[kingpin]

But the similarities do stop there, the reason I go after that stuff is because it's half assed, when proper solutions are very easy to implement with source (unless their source is a terrible mess), there simply is no excuse to "fix" some of the things the way they did, sorry. Reminds me alot of how the critical hit bug on the barb "couldn't be fixed" when it was just returning a constant 100 instead of a stat value.

Well, it's a difference between someone who spend 6-8 years debug their code and guys who got old projects handed over to them in a small team. Who knows how long time they got to dig into the actual code? both you and me knows how much code it is involved in D2 and thats nothing you just go look into and fix the solution without spend endless of hours to understand what they actually have done. The worse thing is look into other peoples code and try understand the reason behind their "logic" and even your own solutions to the bugs may cause other bugs you don't have any clue of. So, would you like others come and bash and laugh at your work when they find stuff you made wrong and after you tried solve it and failed they bash you again? no, I don't think you would like that.

[Joel]

there is no excuse to being sloppy at any poitn of a comemrcial software product line.

Blizzard was and still is one of the worst pit of bad coder I ever saw (baring some industrial stuff I saw at work). Add to that they have no idea of what is a proper customer relationship, they pretty much can go to hell with any of their half-assed patch.

And with respect to "ourbugfixcausebug", fact is that, with a proper unit test bases system, well, they don't. Problem is blizzard employees surely mistake unit test for meal pause.

[Radamer]

But the similarities do stop there, the reason I go after that stuff is because it's half assed, when proper solutions are very easy to implement with source (unless their source is a terrible mess), there simply is no excuse to "fix" some of the things the way they did, sorry. Reminds me alot of how the critical hit bug on the barb "couldn't be fixed" when it was just returning a constant 100 instead of a stat value.

Well, it's a difference between someone who spend 6-8 years debug their code and guys who got old projects handed over to them in a small team. Who knows how long time they got to dig into the actual code? both you and me knows how much code it is involved in D2 and thats nothing you just go look into and fix the solution without spend endless of hours to understand what they actually have done. The worse thing is look into other peoples code and try understand the reason behind their "logic" and even your own solutions to the bugs may cause other bugs you don't have any clue of. So, would you like others come and bash and laugh at your work when they find stuff you made wrong and after you tried solve it and failed they bash you again? no, I don't think you would like that.

The difference is that Blizzard has a huge resource that they are blatantly ignoring: their customers. While most customer feedback is messy, Nefarius has provided a substantial list of the bugs and even some pointers for fixing them, which is currently on their forum.

Being a software developer myself, I know that the customer's needs always trump what you think should be done. In Blizzard's case, there seems to be a disconnect between their customers and their developers. They had plenty of time to address all the issues that Nefarius has brought up and instead they did it half-assed, which leaves the original problems intact.

I am certain that Nefarius and the entire Metalstorm team here would be happy to follow up on any bugs we find, once this mod is released. Most Diablo II modders are very good at following up, even though they make no money on these things.

[kingpin]

The difference is that Blizzard has a huge resource that they are blatantly ignoring: their customers. While most customer feedback is messy, Nefarius has provided a substantial list of the bugs and even some pointers for fixing them, which is currently on their forum.

I would ignore post like those that been posted in this thread aswell

It's different how you bring the message and message. In his bug thread list, that's the way to bring the message. But, start bash because it's not done doesn't help either the site or us as players / modders. Also, you have to remember just because one person says something's is a bug it doesn't necessary mean it's an actual bug from game point of view. It's easy see if a calcuation like mana burn is an actual bug. In other cases it's alot harder. It's also noted in his lists that not everything listed in there is actual bugs per vanilla (if I remember it right).

[Radamer]

The difference is that Blizzard has a huge resource that they are blatantly ignoring: their customers. While most customer feedback is messy, Nefarius has provided a substantial list of the bugs and even some pointers for fixing them, which is currently on their forum.

I would ignore post like those that been posted in this thread aswell

It's different how you bring the message and message. In his bug thread list, that's the way to bring the message. But, start bash because it's not done doesn't help either the site or us as players / modders. Also, you have to remember just because one person says something's is a bug it doesn't necessary mean it's an actual bug from game point of view. It's easy see if a calcuation like mana burn is an actual bug. In other cases it's alot harder. It's also noted in his lists that not everything listed in there is actual bugs per vanilla (if I remember it right).

Just a few things are mentioned as probably not being bugs, just poor design in his opinion. When a large number of your customers call it a bug, that's what it is.

A great example is the TPPK "bug" that players keep alluding too. Technically, it isn't a bug, as that is how the game works, but from a gameplay standpoint, it's a nasty bug, especially on hardcore. All Blizzard really had to do to resolve it is allow players to consent to the declared hostility. Seeing as how the game is supposed to be cooperative first, this makes sense from a design standpoint as well.

But yeah, I think I'm probably just going to wait for this mod to be released before I start playing again. I don't really care for Vanilla and 1.13 didn't really peek my interest too much (although respec is great for Single Player since you are much more limited in your equipment selection).

[kingpin]

A great example is the TPPK "bug" that players keep alluding too. Technically, it isn't a bug, as that is how the game works, but from a gameplay standpoint, it's a nasty bug, especially on hardcore. All Blizzard really had to do to resolve it is allow players to consent to the declared hostility. Seeing as how the game is supposed to be cooperative first, this makes sense from a design standpoint as well.

Ye you right it's not a bug. This is more into exploit categori and in a MMO you would probably get banned for us it

[Doombreed-x]

Blizzard disconnects with their community pretty hard sometimes. Even with wow, a while back shadow priests were complaining because they were just being left behind on damage with new content. They provided numbers to back things up, and the response they got at first was "well, we devs think you're fine". 2 tiers of content later, they finally got the love they needed. All those players played for almost a year fully behind on any competitiveness because blizzard "didn't see a problem". They do have to make decisions as to whether the feedback they're getting is useful, and what the real message is, but they also seem to be in their own world sometimes.


[edit] aaaaaand edit to acknowledge thread necromancy. I'm awesome.