More DII questions

edited July 2001 in Gaming

Comments

  • edited December 1969
    OK, I'm nearly 1/2 the way through Act II solo and have a question or two. First, in the non-expansion DII, is there ANY way to heal your hires except by visiting a healer? I thought wells did but apparently not! The guard dudes you can hire in Act II are growing fairly useless without healing and I'm too lazy to head back to town a lot to fix them up. Am I missing something? I didn't have this problem in Act I because the rouge/amazon hires use their ranged weapons well enough.

    I also assume you can't equip them with anything useful you find (nothing in the docs about that at least). I'm finding that although it was initially neat to have these guys running around with you, with standard equipment they don't do enough damage usually to be continually effective.
    Also, the hire NPC for Act II suggests you hire a bunch of his guys, but I can only seem to hire one (next one replaces the one you just hired). Is that the limit? I noticed that Necros can have lots of followers (is there a limit there too?) but are others limited to just one hire?

    Thanks...


    charon.gif
  • edited December 1969
    ...and one more

    I was just reading that you get to play the harder difficultly levels after fininshing the game on Normal. But the manual seems to imply that only the character you finished can replay it at the higher difficulties. Is this so? Is is insane to play Nightmare or Hell starting at 1st level? I feel like the game is too easy so far to have much fun replaying to this point from the start with a different character at Normal diff (in solo at least... I know, I know... hop on-line ;)



    charon.gif
  • edited December 1969
    Answers

    Question 1: Nope. Mercs in non-XP DII suck. Most people only bought them to feed to Duriel so he wouldn't smack them in lag. In the XP you can drag potions to their picture, and in 1.09 XP you'll be able to shift-click potions in your belt to heal them.

    Q2: In the XP you can equip them with weapons, helms, and armor (And the A3 merc with a shield). Nuttin in CDII (Classic DII).

    Q3: Only one merc. Necros can have revives, skeletons, and one golem limited by the level of the skill involved. Druids in the XP can have a bear or 3 wolves.

    Q4: Realistically it's functionally impossible to play the melee classes from level 1 in Nightmare. The problem is a hidden to hit/get hit multiplier that is level dependant which makes the creatures in NM deadly to melee characters not of their level. Also you get 5% experience for kills outside a 5 level window of your level, so you'd be level 1 for a good while. So, No, you can't start level 1s in NM, though you can twink them there with some effort and some friends.

    Anything else? ;-)

    Ramses II
  • edited December 1969
    Yeah...
    Anything else? ;-)
    Once upon a time you posted a URL of a Lurker Lounge article about twinking. The URL never worked for me, and searching that site, I can't find anything.

    Twinking is one notch lower than stealing candy from children and duplicating copyrighted material in my book. My ego demands that I find reinforcement for my absolutist stance. Any clue where I might find that article? (Google doesn't have it cached)

    _/ C
  • edited December 1969
    What the hell is twinking? [nt]


  • edited December 1969
    giving powerful items to characters who would have no chance of getting them on their own [nt]


  • edited December 1969
    Re: Yeah...

    Yeah - what Bloodrain says......what the frell is twinking?

    Stern's Quadruplets (yeah, that's right)
    sternhardt.jpg
  • edited December 1969
    Unfortunately

    I think the author had a disagreement with something about the way the LL posted it, because when it was removed it was *removed* and no trace was left. A brief search of the LL reveals nothing either. It was a good article actually, and I bet that on some smaller DII site somewhere it's still available. If I run across it I'll post it.

    Twinking has actually gotten much tougher in the XP because all the uniques have level requirements, and even the old uniques were updated to have them. Even so people gamble good rare circlets and dual leech gloves to twink to lower level characters.

    Something else helps make twinking less useful, in the XP there's a good area to get experience between level 25-40, which there was not in CDII, so people can actually shoot up the levels in high quality drop areas and get good items. Twinking is still a problem, but much less so than before when a sorceress would start with two SoJs and a have 600 mana with frosties by level 10.

    Ramses II
  • edited December 1969
    Some twinking notes :-)

    Twinking is giving advantages to low end characters they wouldn't normally have. In DII you used to be able to give the best unique ring in the game to a level one character, and it was good enough for mana using characters that the game would more or less lose all challenge for the first 30 levels. This is fixed now by having a level 29 requirement on the ring.

    However other forms of twinking include having a very low level character in a party of highers as they complete quests. There are several reasons to do this, buying elite socketed items among them.

    Giving the lower character waypoints they don't have. This is more of a convenience, but if the character level difference is large this can be a substantial twink over the course of a game. We do this in CP games when we're trying to catch a character up to others to play together, but we don't go grab a hell character everytime we need a new WP like some groups do. I always have to have all the wps, which means going out of the way to useless areas like the Halls of the Dead and Great Marsh, but it's a personal quest I enjoy. ;-)

    What's really the worst form of twinking these days is crafting items for low levels, and giving crafting runes/gems/jewels to low level (24 and under) characters. Crafting can turn out some powerful stuff with reasonable level reqs, but until flawless gems and jewels start becoming common it's pretty impractical to do on a regular basis without twinked goods. These days having a low level craft a couple of safety items for himself and his merc can make him nearly invulnerable for normal difficulty, which removes the challenge up to level 45 or so at least. As an example I only recently really started crafting a lot with my level 72 sorceress, and it took considerable resources to create the halfway decent set of boots I'm using. Some people do this at level 18 for whole sets of gear that isn't great for the cost, but is incredibly powerful for their level. They can then pass these on to their next character, and so on.

    This, among other things, is a good reason not to play public Realms games, because almost everyone twinks and they'll be little killing machines while you struggle along with the more natural curve of the game. I've given plenty of items to my other characters but I try to keep it in balance. The game is structured to encourage trading, which I have never done and will never do because of duping, so either you give that good-but-useless-to-this-character item to someone you're playing with or you give it to one of your own, or you sell it. Since I almost always play with other CP I almost always give items away (Ask K about the decent rare druid circlet I gambled on a lucky streak the other day ;-), but some things, especially class specific items, end up muled for X character's later use.

    My rule is, does it enhance or detract from the fun of the game? My old sorceress didn't get her unique rings until level 4x and 5x because it took that long using up almost all my cash to gamble them. I think this made the game more fun for her and certainly more challenging. On the other hand my new Bowazon (43 now) got handed down the unique class specific 'zon bow because it has low damage and is a compromise rather than a super power. Even so, Bowazons are unbalanced for normal difficulty (And weak in hell difficulty) just on the strength of their skills, poison charms (My 'zon found 8 good ones so far herself/in parties which has massively increased her damage), and any hit causes flee item.

    Anyway, do what's most fun for you and your party. I think you'd find that if you were twinked to the gills with safety gear and madly scrambling up the ladder you'd be putting this game back on the shelf in about two weeks from boredom. If, OTOH, you play with a party and try to help each other along with the good gear you come by this game has a lot of potential. Kalli and I (And Storm and FC when they're around) have been banging our way through hell difficulty, and it's challenging and fun for us as a group. We each come to bosses that emphasize the strengths of the others, and with the new immunity structure none of us is carrying the others.

    The real stopper for Storm and I last night was a stone skin, fire immune (Natural), lightning immune, and something else Flayer type boss that spawned with another flayer boss right next to him... who was cold immune, spectral hit, magic resistant and some killer aura. My sorc got swarmed under and Storm had to TP out unsafely, then I trekked back, picked off the minions from across a river aided by taunt from Storm, chewed up the cold immune with hydra, and finally ground down the double immune as best we could. Fun stuff, and that was just one pair of many bosses, and not even LEB at that. ;-)

    Ramses II
  • edited December 1969
    Oh, you make-a me jealous...
    The real stopper for Storm and I last night was a stone skin,
    fire immune (Natural), lightning immune, and something else
    Flayer type boss that spawned with another flayer boss right
    next to him... who was cold immune, spectral hit, magic
    resistant and some killer aura. My sorc got swarmed under and
    Storm had to TP out unsafely, then I trekked back, picked off
    the minions from across a river aided by taunt from Storm,
    chewed up the cold immune with hydra, and finally ground down
    the double immune as best we could. Fun stuff, and that was just
    one pair of many bosses, and not even LEB at that. ;-)
    Oh my! And I won't even have time to think about significant gaming time for at least 3 more weeks. WAAUGH.

    I'll have missed the prime gaming season, alas. Or maybe there'll be less traffic on the server come school daze ...

    _/ C

  • edited December 1969
    no way! traffic goes up!!!

    All us college boys get our phat pipes! even tho the phatness has shrunk now that it's just DSL as opposed to a phat school line =) I'm too busy working in the summer to play, but come school year, then I'll be back ;)

    ~Blackbeard
    Oh my! And I won't even have time to think about significant
    gaming time for at least 3 more weeks. WAAUGH.

    I'll have missed the prime gaming season, alas. Or maybe
    there'll be less traffic on the server come school daze ...

    _/ C
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