Transfer laying of hands out of 1.08

Skullmster

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Hello everyone. So I was doing a "theoretical best" barb that could have existed on B.net. This has pluses and minuses. One of the minuses is that patch 1.07 was never on B.net. So I need to go with 1.08 for certain items, including laying of hands. In 1.08 it has 450% ed to demon compared to the 350% for the rest of the patches. I thought it had fire absorb 50%, but after finding one in 1.08, it seems that it is indeed fire resist like the rest of the patches as well. The issue is that every time I bring the character in a new patch, including 1.09 it changes the ED to 350%. Does anyone know of a patch that might work to forward the item to and have it keep the stat? Thank you in advance.
 
Ha I remember running into that years ago and doing the same thing. The reason why is prior to 1.09, %X damage to demons/undead displayed different, going off what the total damage would be rather than what it's adding. So the gloves are no different, they just display the stat different in that patch. "450% Damage to Demons" is displayed as "+350% Damage to Demons" in 1.09 (notice how there is no + in front of the 450).

Regarding true theoretical best, all the disabled crafting recipes in single player worked on battle.net, but allegedly required one extra item (any item) so some recipes didn't work, but most did. Thus, you could craft rings with skill points and cannot be frozen among others. The battle.net version of 1.08 was not the same version we have in single player, it's more like the 1.07.47/48 beta and had some better aspects to it.
 
Thank you so much! Wow that is a huge time saver as I was trying every patch version to see if there was a conversion problem or a way to cheese it in.

Woah I never knew that! I stopped playing D2 before the expansion and picked it back up after 1.11, so I really missed 1.08 and 1.09. Though from what I understood 1.08 was only up for about six months. I really wish I could get my hands on the battle net version now just to see what kind of nutty things I could craft. I saw a ring in one of the item packs that had amp damage on striking and open wounds. Could it have been from 1.08?

Well it's been interesting finding the theoretical best because if I had stuck solely to single player then I would have had some of the epic crafts and beta items but keeping it to battle net I have access to hybrid runewords, btals, etc... So has been really fun, especially when I can put my barb up against an eight player uber
 
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That makes it even more bonkers that the 08 items were found in the first place
As you've seen for yourself, you basically *won't* find them either as 1.08 has abysmal drop rates on top of the broken MF. Racking is pretty much the only option. As for how people got them on battle.net, my understanding is that many of the super rare elite uniques like Arkaine's Valor and Windforce were actually imported during 1.09 via a hack, and they tried to make them look legit, but some of them had extra stats like 4 sockets. This is consistent with the fact that they were all deleted during the 1.10 ruststorm and none are alive today. Some of the easier uniques like 08 Valk though still exist on the NL realms and are perm, so I imagine those were found in abundance. People likely never hoarded because they had no idea everything was about to be nerfed by 1.09.
I really wish I could get my hands on the battle net version now just to see what kind of nutty things I could craft.
Same. I was in pre-school when 1.08 was live and missed out. From what I understand, the main differences were:
  • All the class crafts/rare crafts worked online, but required one extra item (any item). We know with 100% certainty that battle.net uses a different file for cube recipes. It uses CubeServer.txt whereas offline uses CubeMain.txt. My theory is that they didn't have a column to explicitly disable recipes for CubeServer.txt, so they quickly went through and added 1 to the required item count of all the recipes they wanted to disable. The recipes still ended up working though, just requiring any item as the recipe used no specific value. We know with certainty that these recipes worked, because they were listed on diabloii.net, there were screenshots and posts of them, and blizzard mentioned how they disabled them in the 1.09 patch notes.
  • The "1.09" runewords were actually introduced during the 1.07 beta test, patch 1.07.47/48. These were available online during 1.08, the only differences being a slight difference with White and Leaf. 1.09 brought them offline to single player.
I've also heard people mentioned something about magic find forcing qualities or the rejuv buyback bug. However they were likely confusing them with the earlier 1.07 versions. My theory is that when the beta test concluded, the official realms stuck with the final patch from the beta test, which would have been 1.07.48. Single player on the other hand got a slightly newer update made, the actual 1.08.

One of these days I'd like to mod the game to play with those recipes as there were a lot of cool ones like class skills on rings and such. I really hate how the game focused so much on uniques/runewords in newer patches as it kills the random aspect. 1.07/1.08 were an interesting transition point where crafts dominated.
 
As you've seen for yourself, you basically *won't* find them either as 1.08 has abysmal drop rates on top of the broken MF. Racking is pretty much the only option. As for how people got them on battle.net, my understanding is that many of the super rare elite uniques like Arkaine's Valor and Windforce were actually imported during 1.09 via a hack, and they tried to make them look legit, but some of them had extra stats like 4 sockets. This is consistent with the fact that they were all deleted during the 1.10 ruststorm and none are alive today. Some of the easier uniques like 08 Valk though still exist on the NL realms and are perm, so I imagine those were found in abundance. People likely never hoarded because they had no idea everything was about to be nerfed by 1.09.

Same. I was in pre-school when 1.08 was live and missed out. From what I understand, the main differences were:
  • All the class crafts/rare crafts worked online, but required one extra item (any item). We know with 100% certainty that battle.net uses a different file for cube recipes. It uses CubeServer.txt whereas offline uses CubeMain.txt. My theory is that they didn't have a column to explicitly disable recipes for CubeServer.txt, so they quickly went through and added 1 to the required item count of all the recipes they wanted to disable. The recipes still ended up working though, just requiring any item as the recipe used no specific value. We know with certainty that these recipes worked, because they were listed on diabloii.net, there were screenshots and posts of them, and blizzard mentioned how they disabled them in the 1.09 patch notes.
  • The "1.09" runewords were actually introduced during the 1.07 beta test, patch 1.07.47/48. These were available online during 1.08, the only differences being a slight difference with White and Leaf. 1.09 brought them offline to single player.
I've also heard people mentioned something about magic find forcing qualities or the rejuv buyback bug. However they were likely confusing them with the earlier 1.07 versions. My theory is that when the beta test concluded, the official realms stuck with the final patch from the beta test, which would have been 1.07.48. Single player on the other hand got a slightly newer update made, the actual 1.08.

One of these days I'd like to mod the game to play with those recipes as there were a lot of cool ones like class skills on rings and such. I really hate how the game focused so much on uniques/runewords in newer patches as it kills the random aspect. 1.07/1.08 were an interesting transition point where crafts dominated.
ya they had alot of cool stuff for crafts sad that it never happened. the rune words was sapos to work differently and i think was made for classic like damge/hp rather then lod. some with other items were all made around classic. lod just messed things up... but the skills needed a big re balance thow.

they buffed some of the items here and there but sorta was meh.

even 1.07/1.08 runes didn't work right witch is why people say 1.09 is the true lod patch but imo its too easy... 1.10 changed that...more team like or was the idea.

the scaling of hp vs player count didn't really work right.

i just remember online that i could go thow normal with singon set and get level 25 by act 5 and remember finding rare 6/5 skill helm were not that hard or i just got lukey who knows.

dosent 1.07 have gg laying of hands?
 
As you've seen for yourself, you basically *won't* find them either as 1.08 has abysmal drop rates on top of the broken MF. Racking is pretty much the only option. As for how people got them on battle.net, my understanding is that many of the super rare elite uniques like Arkaine's Valor and Windforce were actually imported during 1.09 via a hack, and they tried to make them look legit, but some of them had extra stats like 4 sockets. This is consistent with the fact that they were all deleted during the 1.10 ruststorm and none are alive today. Some of the easier uniques like 08 Valk though still exist on the NL realms and are perm, so I imagine those were found in abundance. People likely never hoarded because they had no idea everything was about to be nerfed by 1.09.
It completely makes sense that a lot of the Arkaine's Valor and Windforce items were imported in. From what I read the time traveler's vortex is that the racks were capped at qlvl 75, but I remember reading an entire guide on racking to get Windforce. The fact that you are saying that B.net used essentially 1.07.48 patch instead of 1.08 I really have no idea anymore! What I can say based on my experience is that people would have been less likely to just junk any new unique in 1.08 as they were new and possibly valuable to trade. Add to the fact that storage space had multiplied, I would be hard pressed to believe they let any uniques found by any means go into the abyss. I would think they were being horded *if* found, but for a completely different reason. How many people even knew the item stats had changed is another question entirely.

Same. I was in pre-school when 1.08 was live and missed out. From what I understand, the main differences were:
  • All the class crafts/rare crafts worked online, but required one extra item (any item). We know with 100% certainty that battle.net uses a different file for cube recipes. It uses CubeServer.txt whereas offline uses CubeMain.txt. My theory is that they didn't have a column to explicitly disable recipes for CubeServer.txt, so they quickly went through and added 1 to the required item count of all the recipes they wanted to disable. The recipes still ended up working though, just requiring any item as the recipe used no specific value. We know with certainty that these recipes worked, because they were listed on diabloii.net, there were screenshots and posts of them, and blizzard mentioned how they disabled them in the 1.09 patch notes.
  • The "1.09" runewords were actually introduced during the 1.07 beta test, patch 1.07.47/48. These were available online during 1.08, the only differences being a slight difference with White and Leaf. 1.09 brought them offline to single player.
I've also heard people mentioned something about magic find forcing qualities or the rejuv buyback bug. However they were likely confusing them with the earlier 1.07 versions. My theory is that when the beta test concluded, the official realms stuck with the final patch from the beta test, which would have been 1.07.48. Single player on the other hand got a slightly newer update made, the actual 1.08.

One of these days I'd like to mod the game to play with those recipes as there were a lot of cool ones like class skills on rings and such. I really hate how the game focused so much on uniques/runewords in newer patches as it kills the random aspect. 1.07/1.08 were an interesting transition point where crafts dominated.
The fact that you were in pre-school when this came out is insane. I really appreciate that you dove into the weeds with the with the how and why, especially to this patch. I've seen a lot of people want to pass it over as just not worth it. If I could mod, this is the patch I would have modded for sure. Ironically though the drop rates would be skewed just for the purposes of transferring the items out of the patch.

  • I never knew that either. It would make sense that they would add 1 to the required item and call it a day. I really wish we had that version of Cubeserver.txt. I think it's fortunate that someone put up 1.07.47 so we can compare it at least.
  • I mean in terms of legit magic find the ghosts were probably the only real way to get the proper magic find needed to farm 1.08 properly enough.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if your theory was correct on the patches. It would mean they always knew that 1.08 was a stop gap between 1.07 and 1.09 and they had to release the expansion at the deadline. I mean the game shipped out with 1.07 and updated to 1.08 day one. If all those factors are true, then 1.07.48 was stable enough for B.net and 1.08 was stable enough for single player. Don't change anymore since it works, until patch 1.09 can fix it for the direction they were going in. Though with runewords being available in the betas, I think that was the inevitable direction they were going in personally.
That would be so cool if you got it working like that again. As for me I always wanted to mod 1.08 to have exceedingly high drops of the purposes of seeing the items and crafts. The problem is that I have zero skills to mod the game... and all my previous attempts have ended in failure, including just editing the drops themselves haha.
ya they had alot of cool stuff for crafts sad that it never happened. the rune words was sapos to work differently and i think was made for classic like damge/hp rather then lod. some with other items were all made around classic. lod just messed things up... but the skills needed a big re balance thow.

they buffed some of the items here and there but sorta was meh.

even 1.07/1.08 runes didn't work right witch is why people say 1.09 is the true lod patch but imo its too easy... 1.10 changed that...more team like or was the idea.

the scaling of hp vs player count didn't really work right.

i just remember online that i could go thow normal with singon set and get level 25 by act 5 and remember finding rare 6/5 skill helm were not that hard or i just got lukey who knows.

dosent 1.07 have gg laying of hands?
I think that D2 then and now really depended on how lucky you get with your item drops! In terms of difficulty though, when I first played it was on open B.net since it was a little before DSL and wifi definitely wasn't a thing. So, when I was online, I tied up the phone line and ran the risk of someone booting me off when they picked up the phone. Having a character I could play on single player and battle.net was more important. The change between mostly closed battle.net didn't happen until the somewhere during the time I stopped playing. From what I still remember the game being punishing, but I believe the difference between normal, nm, and hell are much harder now than they were.

Yes 1.07 has the best version of the laying of hands, by a lot. I am trying to keep it B.NET possible, for now at least. I wanted to put some sort of parameters on it. Like theoretically possible for B.net compared to Single Player. I guess if are talking about theoretically possible I could put anything prior to 1.10 from single player since someone managed to combine servers.
 
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From what I read the time traveler's vortex is that the racks were capped at qlvl 75, but I remember reading an entire guide on racking to get Windforce
You can't rack bows and thus Windforce in any patch. Racks were capped at 75 by 1.09. Area levels were actually quite low in pre-LoD, then 1.07 uncapped them, 1.08 very slightly lowered them, 1.09 nerfed them back to similar before pre LoD, 1.10 slightly raised them again. But only 1.07/1.08 had godly area levels where nearly all base items (barring Bows, Staves, Crystal Swords etc.) can be racked.

The only realistic way to get Windforce in 1.08 is to use the Souls Ritual cheat. You could theoretically grind the Icy Cellar (most efficient TC90 area) but you'd be looking at 8 hours a day for 5-6 months. Not exactly fun for an adult with a full time job and obligations, but a teenager armed with energy drinks and a summer break? They do it in 3 :D
I would think they were being horded *if* found, but for a completely different reason
Yeah, some of the really good ones would have been saved. But I more mean that if people were told 1.09 was coming soon and pretty much all crafts and uniques would change, I bet just about every one, even the worse ones, would have been hoarded just in case it was still better than the newer version. I could see some items like 08 Valk or Gaze or even Highlord's being tossed.
I think it's fortunate that someone put up 1.07.47 so we can compare it at least
Wait, 1.07.47 has leaked somewhere? I'm not aware of this. Are you confusing it with the 1.07 which came on the disc? That was 1.07.44. The non-functional battle.net beta CD we have is older, 1.07.41, and doesn't contain runewords or CubeServer.
Don't change anymore since it works, until patch 1.09 can fix it for the direction they were going in
Yep exactly! They crunched like hell to get diablo 2 released, targeting christmas 1999, but pushed it back to summer 2000. I find it very suspicious LoD came out almost exactly on the 1 year anniversary of D2. I suspect they were told that was their deadline. They already planned to revamp all the stupidly OP uniques and such but didn't have time. So they fixed the worst of it, then worked to get 1.09 out asap to do it properly. They really needed 3 more months of development. Similar thing happened with patch 1.00 and 1.01. Really, it's common in the game industry.
 
The only realistic way to get Windforce in 1.08 is to use the Souls Ritual cheat. You could theoretically grind the Icy Cellar (most efficient TC90 area) but you'd be looking at 8 hours a day for 5-6 months. Not exactly fun for an adult with a full time job and obligations, but a teenager armed with energy drinks and a summer break? They do it in 3 :D
For sure! The issue is they would have had to know to hunt that unicorn down!


I could see some items like 08 Valk or Gaze or even Highlord's being tossed.
I choose the (false) ostrich approach and bury my head in the sand so that I believe no 08 Valk, Gaze, or Highlord's were purposefully tossed! Take as someone who lost a 08 Vampgaze during COVID, it's heartbreaking haha.

Wait, 1.07.47 has leaked somewhere? I'm not aware of this. Are you confusing it with the 1.07 which came on the disc? That was 1.07.44. The non-functional battle.net beta CD we have is older, 1.07.41, and doesn't contain runewords or CubeServer.
I was confusing it was 1.07.41, I apologize.... man now I really wish those files MPQs leaked, that would have been awesome.


Yep exactly! They crunched like hell to get diablo 2 released, targeting christmas 1999, but pushed it back to summer 2000. I find it very suspicious LoD came out almost exactly on the 1 year anniversary of D2. I suspect they were told that was their deadline. They already planned to revamp all the stupidly OP uniques and such but didn't have time. So they fixed the worst of it, then worked to get 1.09 out asap to do it properly. They really needed 3 more months of development. Similar thing happened with patch 1.00 and 1.01. Really, it's common in the game industry.
Yeah, listening to David Brevik's talk on the final push of Diablo 2 Classic was really telling about that crunch, like losing the master files. Also, he mentioned that there was meant to be one or two more expansions set for Diablo 2, but they decided to scrap them and jump straight to Diablo 3. I still think losing the data they lost played a huge part in that decision.
 
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