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oniwara

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Old D2 player here, started at launch at a friends LAN party and been enjoying a few runs from time to time.

Amazing job on Cactus, i always wanted to play early classic but never managed to navigate the technicalities until i found it! Installation was smooth.

Currently leveling a Sorceress on 1.05b. Trucking in the Arcane Sanctuary atm!

If that's ok, let me take advantage of this introduction post to ask a confirmation about a couple things.

The only way to mule in 1.05b is launching several instances of the game via cactus and hosting tcp ip to swap gear from a character to the other? ATMA V seems to only work for 1.07+, is there an older version i could use?

I found the purediablo and diablolurker guides via links on the forums here, are there other specific 1.05 guide i could find? Are the 1.0 or 1.09 guides any use for 1.05b? Looking for tips re leveling, builds, etc. My knowledge is close to zero!

Thanks!
 
Welcome to the forum @oniwara, I'm glad you are finding Cactus useful and that everything went smoothly!

As for your questions:

1. TCP/IP is the only way to mule in pre 1.07. There are no other muling applications that I'm aware of for these versions.
2. 1.00 guides will be the closest when it comes to 1.05b. The changes between 1.00 and 1.05b aren't massively different besides stability/bug fix improvements that were made, some base item types didn't drop in earlier versions, and there were some balance changes with multiple skills (like the super strong 1.00 Barb WW, several necromancer skills, etc), and things like the Cow Level being able to be opened even if King was killed, which allows you to to efficiently farm for rares by just killing the cow king forever. I personally play 1.05b since I wanted a more general stable game experience at the expense of the rest, but it really depends what you want and what your goals are. There is definitely nothing wrong with going with 1.00 and enjoying its peculiarities. 1.07+ guides will pretty much be useless since pre lod is (IMO) completely different experience and game balance than lod (even classic in lod versions is very different than original classic).
 
Hey!

Thanks for the confirmation, I landed on 1.05b after reading through the forums here actually, it seemed like the best compromise of balance, stability and original classic spirit. It is much rougher than the runs i sometimes do on later versions for sure. The sorceress is a bit of a pain mana wise but the gameplay is great and much more involved. Glacial Spike at lvl18 changed my life after many levels of heavy mana struggle!

I am gathering info here and there, like about crafting those insane (bugged?) Mana Per Kill rings, the recipe i found seems different than the one that worked in game, i am wondering if i'm using the wrong one (only got some cold resist, hard to come by gems!). Things like that arent easy to find/confirm. The recipes are mostly the same with those from 1.0?
Also i read Magic Find is not super useful and does not work on champs/uniques/bosses?

In any case, having a blast! Cool to see there's a community going. Is there a discord of d2 time travellers?
 
- Bugged MPK ring is exclusively a 1.07 thing, it doesn't exist in any other version.
- That's correct, magic find and things like crushing blow only works on white monsters. From my understand, this was an explicit design decision that was changed when LoD came out (1.07+). I can see the logic in it though so I'm not against it. It's definitely adds a more difficult feeling to the game. So those melee boss fights in prelod are ruthless :D.

You can check out my 1.05b Barb's Normal A4 run (and adventure) here.

- There is no discord channel and I actually deleted my discord account around 2018. When I started the forum, I actually explicitly wrote about Discord. You can take a look at that here.
 
Your take on discord is very fair, i think it shines for certain types of games/activities more than for others. I have often struggled trying to find pieces of information for certain games, especially single player games. Forums do make people try to be more cohesive.

Thanks for the precision on MPK rings, gonna save my sapphires and max Warmth it is then i guess!

Just killed Diablo on Normal difficulty with my lvl23 eponym sorceress. I have a lot more questions to ask but I think i'm going to carry on for now and see if i hit any brickwall before laying them out (in a proper post!).

Cheers!
 
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That sounds good. Good luck and have fun. You'll also want to eventually find a Spectral Shard, since that has MPK properties on it (and FCR). Damn, I love Diablo II. So many good memories, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug lmfao!
 
Interesting!

Is gambling with a character at the appropriate level (25 in the case of the Spectral Shard) the best way to farm for a specific item? If i outlevel the Spectral Shard will i still be able to gamble for it later? I can't say I am showered with gold atm, I could afford two blades and i'm broke!
 
Not sure about that, I never really got into researching the specific levels for optimally gambling stuff, so my knowledge on that subject is limited.
 
Welcome to the forum, @oniwara! I'm glad you found us. There is a gold mine of D2 knowledge here. 😁

@fearedbliss and @galaxyhaxz have often been like my own personal encyclopedias, lol.

To answer your question on gambling though -- in LoD, there is a minimum level and an optimal level to gamble for certain items, but yes, you'll still have a chance to gamble for Spectral Shard once you've passed that threshold. And I think the same is true for classic.

The following quote is from this page: Gambling

  • Once you've unlocked all the item types at level 48, the items shown will be the same from then on. However, as you reach higher Character Levels, more Magic Prefixes and Suffixes will show up on items Gambled and you'll have a better chance to get Exceptional and Elite items.
Click to expand...
 
Oh, and another thought... assuming you aren't against forwarding items... gambling in 1.00 is pretty dope. ;)
 
Manny said:
Oh, and another thought... assuming you aren't against forwarding items... gambling in 1.00 is pretty dope. ;)
Click to expand...
Hello and thanks!

I am on 1.05b atm, is gambling the same here as on 1.00? I am not sure how forwarding works with Cactus, copying a character savefile from a platform folder to another one?

But i understand i can just level up and come back later to gamble for the spectral shard. It seems even on 1.05b the chances to get it arent too bad (3%? or so?).

My lvl24 sorceress' Nightmare adventures are quite rough! I'm not sure if i should power through (with probably lots of deaths / no leveling up) or pause and get some xp. A bit of both i guess. Mana scarcity is real. 1.14 LoD throne room xp farming post acts formed bad habits for sure!

I am pretty familiar with the sorceress in terms of gameplay and how to allocate points without respecs while still being operational. All the other classes much less, that's probably going to be the biggest challenge to face in those pre-lod platforms.
 
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Gambling is the same in both 1.00/1.05. You cannot take a character from 1.04-1.06 back to 1.00-1.03 because the item format was changed, you can only go forward. Spectral Shard can be gambled but not found in 1.00 as the base item was not in the drop tables due to a bug, which was fixed in 1.04. You can find it normally in 1.05 if you though.

Being level 24 in nightmare isn't uncommon either. The game was originally designed with a max level of 50 like Diablo 1, so you end up finishing hell around 30-45. They raised it to 99 at the last minute but didn't bother with rebalancing the XP tables, so getting past 70-75 is a major slog and not worth it.

Something to know about pre LoD is that the game is much more doable for everyone. Monsters are less aggressive on hell, no immunities etc. So you don't really have to worry as much about carefully allocating skill points. You can just freely put a few points into things as you go. LoD is what introduced both power creep and difficulty hikes that require you to grind for specific loot and plan out the build.

Cheers and welcome to the forums!
 
Hello @galaxyhaxz,

Thanks for the precision on gambling. To forward a character i can copy the file and paste into a later platform?

I made it to act 3 and grinded a few levels here and there, at 28 now.

Finishing Hell at 30 seems rough. I am scouting the flayer jungle in Nightmare atm, trying to find the dunjeon, I am heavily relying on town portals to refill and lots of deaths during that process. I get swarmed and stunned pretty quickly!

I wonder how Hardcore works!
 
oniwara said:
To forward a character i can copy the file and paste into a later platform?
Click to expand...

Howdy @oniwara,

Yes! When you are ready to forward a character - just copy/paste the character files into the later platform folder. Those character files will automatically be updated to the later patch once you enter Sanctuary. Note that once a character has been transferred to a later patch, they will not be able return to an older patch.
 
Hey again,

Martha is continuing her trip through Hell but has a few questions!

1. Is Blizzard more powerful than Frozen Orb ? Having both at rank2 (1+1 from gear) atm, blizzard feels stronger but I'm not sure how they scale.
2. Is Cold mastery worth it to 17 like later on? Is much less mostly enough? No idea how the mobs resistances are like in 1.05b
3. Is there an experience chart per act? I wasn't getting much exprience at lvl22 in normal Chaos, figured there was some caps at play. I could only find charts post LoD, are they mostly the same?

Thanks!
 
For question 1, I believe Frozen Orb is better, but the mana costs are insane at higher levels. Plus, in pre-Lod patches you have to shoot the orb in a way that the actual orb in the middle won't actually touch monsters. If it does, the visuals will continue (you'll see the orb moving and shooting ice bolts), but the spell will stop dealing any damage. It's very annoying to deal with when there are large packs of monsters. The closer the "ball" comes to touching monsters, the more damage Frozen orb will deal. At least, in my experience.

For question 2, I don't know for sure how it works in these patches, but be aware it is very different than in 1.10+.
In 1.10+, the % shown on the skill is simply a subtraction. So if a monster had 90% cold resist, and your Mastery says it reduces by 30%, then it will be : 90 - 30 = 60 % being the new resistance for the monster.

In 1.09, the % is calculated as a %. So, for the same monster with 90% resist, and Mastery at -30%, the calculation will look like: 90 - (0.3 * 90) = 63% as the new resistance for the monster.

Maybe it works differently in pre-lod patches. But I'd guess it likely works as in 1.09.

For question 3, there is no hard cap as far as I know. It's just that the XP yields in pre-LoD patches are much lower, and there are penalties for when you are too high (or low) level compared to the monsters you kill. When I made a Barb in 1.05, I finished Hell at level 37 if I recall. Most monsters in Hell Chaos Sanctuary are level 80.
 
I actually have a theory about why Frozen Orb appears to be "bugged" prior to 1.09. So there is an unused animation for the orb exploding, which is where the nova of ice bolts release. I suspect that originally, they designed frozen orb to explode upon impacting something. Then they decided it wasn't good enough, because it would quickly disappear and not do enough damage for being so high level, so they decided to remove the explosion. However, given that there are both server and client missiles, it appears they only removed it client side, so whenever the orb collides, it "explodes" server side, but continues going client side. In 1.09 they finally updated it to not explode on the server side.

The only other possibility I see is Frozen Orb was bugged from the very beginning, and they never properly implemented the explosion missile. In the video below, I demonstrate what the original version was probably intended to look like. It both collides and explodes properly.

Fixed Frozen Orb Video
 
I've argued before that potentially Frozen Orb not causing any damage in prelod was actually a feature (and suppose to be like that) since if you go from a thematic perspective, an orb that does "crash into" a monster makes sense that the orb would essentially "collapse" and not cause any further damage. Now the animation feedback animation could be more responsive in alerting the user that "no further damage is being conducted", but yea... I could be rationalizing all of this though. Either way, I recommend everyone to enjoy the bugs and intricacies of each patch environment as a feature of that version and multiverse possibility. What if the PI was 1.32 rather than 3.14? That's a world between 1.00, 1.05b, 1.07, 1.08, 1.09b, 1.10f ..
 
I went with blizzard but made a backup, might level up the FO later and see for myself!

Anyone knows what are the values of Fast/Faster/Fastest cast rate?

A guide says Magefist "Fastest Cast Rate" is 20% FCR but isn't Spectral Shard "Fastest" 50%? or was the Shard boosted to 50% in later expacs (i'm playing 1.05b).

Are the sorceress breakpoints the same as in later patches?

Thanks!
 
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