New Diablo II Patch Finally Revealed

colaco writes "After more than a year waiting for the 1.10 patch, Diablo II gamers now have an inside scoop at changes that it will implement. Most of the info on new items and gameplay rules (eg: ladder characters) have been available on Arreat Summit for the past few hours, and are now displayed on DiabloII.net. Blizzard has also offered some clarification. Sources inside Blizzard indicate that more info will be given at E3."

Comments

Please notice!

[Jugalator]

Much of the stats on diabloii.net for unique items, runewords, set items and skills are all wildly inaccurate. I have so far heard two Blizzard representatives saying they were "WAY wrong" and "ancient data". The leak of information was unintentional and an unfortunate side-effect of a mistake during the web server upgrade process. The leaked patch data seem to be from 1.10 in an early stage of development, likely even before their Quality Assurance team has tested the stuff for balancing, since they are still doing it.

So... Before you complain about the items and runewords being too powerful (there have been some complaints like this) and that the Necro/Druid didn't get their necessary skill changes, remember that much (most?) of the "revealed" data on the diabloii.net site is simply incorrect or missing.

For correct information, check Arreat Summit (official Diablo II information site) and the information that will be released during/after E3 (i.e. May 13 - 16 or shortly after).

Re:wow

[Jugalator]

The skill system will be drastically changed so you'll be able to create new viable character builds with the use of new skill synergy bonuses. The gameplay will also be more challenging and get more random monsters. Ladder characters will be introduced.

IMHO, a patch unlike any scope I've seen before. Thankfully, the patch won't change its its game genre (Action RPG, i.e. "killing everything that moves"), so those of us who bought Diablo II for what it offered back then won't be screwed.

Re:Linux??? Linux ???

[Jugalator]

Does it run on Linux?

Does it? Does it run on Linux???

Yeah. Under Wine.

Check this out:
http://www.latte.ca/D2LOD/

Re:Too little too late

[Peyna]

84,000 people playing 40,000 games of Diablo 2 right now; I've seen numbers well above 100,000 playing at any one time, so I guess a lot of people still like it.

Blizzard not the only great company out there

[LPetrazickis]

The guys at Paradox Entertainment, the makers of Europa Universalis II and Hearts of Iron, also release patches years after the original game had come out while working without pay. Now, that's what I call true gamer geek spirit.:)

Re:Hacking ruined Diablo II

[asink]

Whoa... A minority of players cheat on DII? That is new to me. I've been playing for well over 2 years now, and at the very least over 95% of the players use maphack. A cheat. Hacks, dupes, trojans, and otherwise malicious cheats are now and have been a part of the culture of DII for a _very_ long time. Nonmalicious cheats simply added another element to the game, and gave me more code to play with! It is sad that this drove you away, but why not just go with the flow?

To answer another question altogether, Blizz has to 'fix' the hacking not because they are dedicated, but because major news sites have picked up on the enormous hacking community. Syadasti was on TechTV a long time ago that covered his mephbot, and Slashdot posted info about d2jsp, a javascript parser for diabloii. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there have been other damaging news coverage. They certainly have never been in a hurry to fix dupes or the easily detected hacked items. I don't claim to know anything for sure, but I started cheating because I had played long enough to know that blizz doesn't really care.

Re:I'd like to point out...

[afidel]

Don't bother, the top ladder characters will be built using teams playing a group of characters 24X7 until they get one to level 99, basically they build the team to level 80+, then they repeatadly kill everything in a level except for a boss, work the boss down to a few hps, then the char they are trying to get to 99 comes in and kills the boss. They use a couple teams so that the target char can jump from game to game repeatadly killing bosses. Last time I played they had level 99 done in under 36 hours.

Suggestions for Diablo 3/new patches

[petrus4]

>Keep your repetitive games that haven't changed
>since 94 (or whenever Warcraft 2 was released),
>you fucks. You'll get no money from me until you

This is true. I'm not boycotting Blizzard, but to a large extent *gameplay wise* Diablo 2 as it currently stands is mainstream RPG lite. The LOD game expansion only really made the game worth looking at..."Classic" Diablo 2 was almost completely unplayable to my mind, due to very rapid onset of boredom. The game is phenomenally well packaged, with outstanding MAX work, it's true...including raising the bar as far as in-game cinematics are concerned...and it's also true that on a purely stat level, some of the weapons are nice...but I can't remember the last RPG I've seen for the PC that didn't have substantially better gameplay than D2...It's mind-numbingly repetitive for my money.

The annoying thing is, that while they got some things right, it could have been a much better game than it was...Some ideas for Diablo 3:- (assuming it ever happens, of course)

• License and adapt the AI used in Black and White from Lionhead. Applied in a dedicated sense to D2's hirelings, you could end up with skilled trackers who know the terrain of the different areas, and could dramatically increase their use of tactics over time. This way as well as different NPCs being more expensive when having more life/skill points, you could also make them more expensive based on their level of knowledge of the terrain and tactics employed when dealing with specific monsters. Best of all, because it's a dedicated scenario with only a limited number of creatures, you don't need to worry about the AI needing to be too open-ended. If you were really scared of that, you could have specialist hirelings who were better at/only knew how to deal with certain kinds of monsters, so that players who were having difficulty in certain areas could say simply hire the NPC to get through that specific area. The possibilities are endless. Hell, you could even go really crazy and apply this to the monsters if you wanted to, although unless you grew a template for each of those, the monsters probably wouldn't live long enough to get good.
• Make the hirelings' inventory possibilities as complete as the real players. While Battle.net and multiplayer capabilities do of course exist, there are always going to be people who play single player games. Coupled with the above suggestion, this would give single players a party member with very close to human functionality in some areas.
• Study some of the other RPGs that have come out since. Many of them use if nothing else, much more complex animation sequences for sword moves for example. You could have for example a scenario where in a town there is a magic training NPC and a weapons training NPC. Assuming a person has enough money/xp/whatever, they could go to each one of these teaching npcs. Probably what you'd perhaps want to do is devise a series of forms/groups of related moves in different tiers/levels, and then based on char level or money, the character could work through each one. For primarily non-magic using characters, to me focussing on mundane moves that can then be optionally augmented with elemental boosts would be the best way to go there. The Assassin has a basic example of what I'm talking about here...but a lot more can and should be done with it.
• Inject atmosphere back into the game. D1 was a truly fantastic game in terms of the environments/music/overall feel...by contrast, although some of it is equally great, a lot of D2's areas are sterile to the point where you almost need Prozac to get through them. This is an intangible, and it's difficult to describe exactly what I mean here...but I think the main thing to remember here is that less is more. Looking at it, one of the main reasons why Diablo 1 was as good as it was is because it was almost exactly the right length...D2 would probably be dramatically improved IMHO by nixing Act 2 in particular altogether.

Blizzard obviously