New version developement

[Al-T]

Piece of advice for you Montex....stop doing the "crisis management" form of modding and releasing patches each time someone reports a problem. Go and do thorough testing of your own and only release an update when you are satisfied there are no major bugs/issues. That way, any time you release a "patch" there should be less problems discovered by other players.

Take a look at Metalstorm for the way to approach making a Mod. I am not suggesting you go to the same extremes for Zy-El but at least consider being more methodical in your approach.

Of course, this is only "my advice" so feel free to completely ignore it

[Montex]

the point is there were too many bug is the initial release thus i kinda had to do "crisis management" form of modding...
And i think i will have to continue like this for a bit longer until the game becomes playable without a need to report bug every day.
Area sizes: while playing Pure Grind 2 and having to clean an area in a single run i didn't have that much fun myself...
Al wrote some area clearing times to be 5-10 hours. Eberhardt getting lost while using M@ph@ck. Miracles do happen
Random area (like Den, caves, crypts, etc. lava river) size is controlled by 1 number so that is really easy to change if you really want those to stay as they used to be.
Potions: normal potions heal more and thus they cost more as well and thus i had to raise rej cost too. Instead of having super healing at act 1 and moving to full rej at act 2 id rather expect people to depend on rej from NM at least. I wonder how much life / mana you have to have to depend on % healing.
Giants: they seem to be fun now. Though i haven't reached frosties yet. While their health wasnt changed from 4.4 (unless i messed up with math somewhere) the decrease of summon power and the fact that summons do not scale with player settings may have made them OP. I always had serious trouble with frost giants with zon in earlier versions myself.
I know for sure that i have messed up with monster elemental damage while porting from 1.09 to 1.10 since the monster table format changed by quite a bit between those two versions. That may not be that visible in normal but NM / Hell would be affected more if you are fast enough to get there before i fix that.

[Al-T]

...Area sizes: while playing Pure Grind 2 and having to clean an area in a single run i didn't have that much fun myself...
Al wrote some area clearing times to be 5-10 hours....

I don't remember an area that took 10 hours...6 yes but not 10....even I would have lost the will to live What you need to remember also is, that was under very extremely strict "Tournament Rules" and playing a

Squishy Sorceress

....it doesn't take anywhere near that long when playing "normally". If you are not playing a tournament, you don't need to clear all areas anyway, which further reduces the time it takes .

btw...my offer to look into using the "ExtendedLevels" plugin in 2 to 3 months from now still stands....then you will see large areas ("Extended Arreat Summit, River of Flame and Tal Rasha's True Tomb?"....."Pygmy Postage Stamps contained within Pygmy Postage Stamps, contained within..."). Only joking, I'll keep it real but how would you like a new "Insanity Level" populated with just Immortals

[Montex]

to be honest I'm thinking about Big Dude Land
Dragons would be another alternative.
Size? That depends on what you want to achieve. The old Tristram map with right amount of invisible spawners might me as fun as the seemingly endless area.

[Eberhardt]

Potions: normal potions heal more and thus they cost more as well and thus i had to raise rej cost too. Instead of having super healing at act 1 and moving to full rej at act 2 id rather expect people to depend on rej from NM at least. I wonder how much life / mana you have to have to depend on % healing.

The point of full rej is that they heal instantly both hp and mana. Since you can carry 16 potions in your belt at maximum I prefer to use them only on serious occasion. Perfect gameplay to me is no need to resort to potions at all - that goes for any class/build. And I didn't use any until I got stuck with -

Giants: they seem to be fun now. Though i haven't reached frosties yet. While their health wasnt changed from 4.4 (unless i messed up with math somewhere) the decrease of summon power and the fact that summons do not scale with player settings may have made them OP.

They've always been fun. Like cyclops - one stomp and you're dead. It doesn't seem to be the case because now they seem to prefer to kill you slowly with their auras And as for summons - if their stats read correctly, 45k damage is more than good for any situation on normal difficulty. They tear apart duriel, mefisto, diablo at a moment's notice. Frost giants pause a problem even at players 1. Well, to be quite clear, the problem is not that they kill you too fast. The biggest problems I've had with were umberhulks and Fac Darren with his minions. Frost giants don't kill (unless you just stand there), the problem is that killing them is a pointless excercise and is no fun at all. Unlike bosses they don't drop anything special nor do they give enough exp to make killing them worthwhile.

a picture worth thousands of words

[Al-T]

to be honest I'm thinking about Big Dude Land
Dragons would be another alternative.
Size? That depends on what you want to achieve. The old Tristram map with right amount of invisible spawners might me as fun as the seemingly endless area.

That appears to be the beauty of the "ExtendedLevels" plugin....we can have all of the above

[Eberhardt]

Well, I just have to ask. Has anyone reached act 5? I have problems with frost giants/demon tricksters and I'm starting to doubt if it's an actual problem or just me . Tricksters do away with your hp in seconds, their attack appear to be fire but they deal physical damage that can't be blocked. No matter how much you have, a swarm of them will rip you to pieces. I wrote about frost giants. Now combine those two. You talked about an area populated by Immortals? well, I want you to pass Frozen Tundra first

[Al-T]

Eberhardt...have you ever completed version 4.4C or any previous versions of Zy-El?

Demon Tricksters are meant to cast "Life Drain Burn Curse", Frost Giants have massive hitpoints and do insane damage and unless you have a lot of hitpoints, silly damage reduction stats, insane chance to block...etc., etc., etc....that is exactly what will happen...you will die fast As Kato would say "Your powers are weak old man"

[Rahhja]

Eberhardt...have you ever completed version 4.4C or any previous versions of Zy-El?

Demon Tricksters are meant to cast "Life Drain Burn Curse", Frost Giants have massive hitpoints and do insane damage and unless you have a lot of hitpoints, silly damage reduction stats, insane chance to block...etc., etc., etc....that is exactly what will happen...you will die fast As Kato would say "Your powers are weak old man"

This is why we do 100's of Mephisto runs; to get ready for Act 5. You needed megaloaded jewels with HP and Mana. You needed to make Zy-El Artifacts. You needed massive resistance upgrades.

[Eberhardt]

Well, that's sweet but I've been playing zy-el for like 5 years and yes, I completed the game to the point of running suicide levels on all difficulties out of boredom until getting tired of adjusting damage because of rollovers. I even remember when frost giant death animation used to cause game crash. I think diamond drakes crashed the game too because I still expect an error message when one dies.

To the point. Frost giants don't do anywhere close to "insane" damage here. 6k is sustainable with enough life leech and defense. Well, I don't remember them being a problem in zy-el 4.4C as well. Insane? What word will you use to describe darth mauls then? The problem is frost giants' immense hp which is not in proportion to anything else and their regeneration. And holy freeze and being surrounded by tricksters. Tricksters don't cast any life drain burn - unlike those screaming winged ladies - they come in a plenty of varieties (blood witch, stygian harlot, hell temptress) so I don't exactly remember their name. Tricksters just hit like a train - and that is again out of proportion. And I wouldn't say a word if I was sure the area was run multiple times by different people who wouldn't have any complaints. It was not.

Mephisto runs don't yield anything but experience, money and some collector food. Bosses don't drop zy runes or demon keys anymore, only perfect gems. Though I guess Rahhja is simply being sarcastic megaloaded jewels? without zy-el scrolls whose fragments you have to collect across all difficulties in different insanity levels (of course they can be combined so just one dungeon will suffice but we won't mention that)? Well, to pass to the next difficulty you have to complete act 5 for all I know, right?

Ironically, Santuary is downsized making it easier to run. Used to be a challenge. I think I'll have to wait until the rest of the community get to act 5.

EDIT: difficulty completed. Ormus is indeed gone

[Eberhardt]

A separate issue concerning mercs. I noticed that their damage increases very slowly and here's a very interesting bug:
(damage with weapon)

Screenshot019.jpg (31.34 KiB) Viewed 4478 times

(damage without weapon)

Screenshot020.jpg (31.54 KiB) Viewed 4478 times

Also, someone on the russian forum wrote that if you equip a merc with dmg on lvl gear you have to reequip this gear on merc's lvl up or the dmg on lvl bonus won't take effect. I don't have any "legolis" bow to test this out unfortunately.

EDIT: Mini-mauls and small darths don't move or react in suicide sanctum. Banshees don't cast life burn (in fact, no one does except succubus mages and immortals). Vorpal bunnies don't have their attack animation and they don't seem to drop zy-el scroll fragments too (not that I did many runs but it's usually 2-5 of them per run in 4.4).

Also about mercs. Shouldn't their damage be multiplied by dex or str? No matter how much they have, their damage is still very low. Well, they are still useful - they can cast debuffs and freeze but nonetheless, I don't know what to do when it comes to raising a merc's dmg.

[Elafar]

Although I've done only 1 run, in the last chamber after second Duriel, there used to be 3-4 clones of Andariel. In my run there was none.

Also, I've noticed that now is much harder to get good scroll compared to old 4.4 . (good scrolls would be ; +to skill ,add freeze , add to phys dmg, good uniq jewels ) .After almost 2 weeks of playing I've hardly found / rerolled a few worth of mentioning, so if I would need to describe how much worse ? I would say at least five time

[Eberhardt]

People report Decart Cain's clones instead of Andariels. I didn't see them but there's usually a mess so no wonder. I didn't notice anything special about scrolls, they're as usual. I have several with +skills, mouse tails (I just love them) etc. I use them mostly as a crafting material for ChoMs. The most precious in the early game for me are "any charm to magic charm" and "key/chp gem to tall charm 3". I make the Toy runewords that give elemental resinstance, some hp and +1 skills. I reserve close quarters combat until later in the game (like it's hard to kill an immortal with your summons unless you're a necromancer) because there are too many monsters that can just onehit you.

Before I forget: I have two zy-el artifacts dropped from monsters already. Well, I guess drops will get fixed in NM and Hell because it's usually gear you can't equip until you're well 1000+. Monsters rain barlog blades and bloodlord skulls like there's no tomorrow.

[Elafar]

Hmmm, then I must have been extremely unlucky...Playing Assa atm, started as expected Mind blasting, then all my free sockets / charms I filled with tir's as many as I could figure out using them in rune words as well. Later I just switched to Trapping. Difficulty -/players 6. Drops are ok, I mean amount of scrolls and jewellery is ok, but my un-luck on rerolling is epic.

I am totally confident that mod balance will eventually get sorted, taking into consideration how mega-huge mod is and how much job is already done, it remains only to continue with supporting Montex and providing him with info / eventually suggestions.

Btw. may I ask you what additional mod you are using while playing zy/el. ? If it is something that I hope it is may I ask you that you send me in e-mail?you can answer me using PM, because mentioning some stuff here is not welcome .

also my e-mail adress is : elafar3@yahoo.co.uk

thx in advance

[Eberhardt]

It kinda reminds me of pre-4.4 zy-el with all the unexpected crashes and those funny bugs like hp rollovers when you couldn't see your actual hp and the red ball was empty oh, and the char selection screen didn't show the real level too so there's a lot to do but I hope it will mature in time and gain the popularity it deserves. I can't wait to partake in a tournament using this mod

On a separate note, there are some NPCs from Lut-Golein in the cow level - Greiz and I think Elzix.

[Eberhardt]

Some balance issues here too in sorceress's skills:

Hydra 210 lvl + Fire Mastery 210 lvl - dmg 18k
Blaze 216 lvl + Fire Mastery 210 lvl - dmg 3 300k

And I'm not sure yet as I haven't leveled my druid properly but it seems that elemental attacks deal too low damage so I have to depend on summons mostly (lvl 151 Hurricane deals ~46k damage, lvl 152 Fissure ~19k while dire wolves deal ~200k and bears ~490k - the same slvl). Unfortunately, there's something wrong with the merc as despite having the crafted 10% lower resist ring she increasingly fails to cast it so it's completely unreliable. Mercs don't seem to be of much help in NM as their damage (and probably AR too) doesn't scale with level.

EDIT: some very funny bug

Easy way to get rich (courtesy of Kenet from the russian forum).

[stingray]

Interesting. Is that money exploit inherent to this patch or the original mod?

[Eberhardt]

There haven't been too many patches so I think it's safe to say it's mod-inherent

Oh, and I thought of something here. 6 years ago I wrote a simple runewords database for zy-el - I just didn't find anything suitable at that time. Now, of course, we have Zerb; however - if runewords change, I could dust off the old code and make a nice 4.5-specific runewords browser This is what it looks like atm:

I didn't distribute it (maybe among a couple of ppl) as I meant it mostly for myself.

[stingray]

I really like that your program has a visual of the runes included. Sure, I don't really need them to create the runeword, but I often times forget which runes have which graphic because I never played Vanilla D2 hard enough to find the higher level runes.

[Al-T]

The socketed throwing knife exploit for 100,000,000 gold (we used to use Perfect Skulls) was fixed by Kato a long time ago in a previous version. It may have been a hardcoded .dll solution which might explain why it has reared it's ugly head again.

@Montex (and everyone else): I think this is now at the stage where it is worthy of recognition on the Wiki. I would be happy to create a new set of pages on the current Wiki devoted to this version and can announce it on the "News Page" also. I'll need your permission to do so though

[bro]

Tim the Enchanter in Catacombs Level 4. Doesn't he belgons to Act 2?

[Eberhardt]

Actually, Tim belongs in one of the insanity levels and that issue seemed to be fixed in patch 11.

A word of warning to all those playing the druid. The old bug with spirit summons (see viewtopic.php?f=53&t=4401&p=45251#p45251 - it's been 12 years!) is there too, so don't push the level of oak sage, heart of wolverine and spirit of barbs beyond 150 or else they get onehit in NM. I haven't checked it in Hell, though.

Mercs get useless as you level - they seem to level up but their damage and their attack rating don't. They are terrific in the beginning of the game - proper damage and accuracy, but later they can't even justify being equipped with CtC rings - they simply miss the targets. I'll try to hire a new one and see if it changes things.

No resistance penalties from leveling up (works for mercs, though).

When making a zy-el scroll from the collector, the points increase instead of decreasing so basically you can make as many as you want.

Most probably, imbalanced skills. I can't say for all classes (I've played the druid all along - he's just my favorite) but looks like some hit much harder than others, all other things equal.

[Elafar]

There have been a few days that Montex didn't give us info on what's going on. I hope he is ok and didn't abandon modding .

[LawofJohn]

I seem to have found abug with Collectors. I cant seem to decrease the amount of points that are in one. I have a collector that has 5100 points, was not really paying attention when i started throwing things in there to make a higher grade one.

On a side note, i thought the collectors capped at 1k? Do they now have unlimted storing capability?

[bro]

Actually, Tim belongs in one of the insanity levels and that issue seemed to be fixed in patch 11.

Got the newest (patch 11). It seems not to be fixed yet.

EDIT:

Multishot is a MANA EATER! At level 16 it shots only 5 arrows and costs 53 mana!