Just a quick question regarding super unique MI’s. Are all prefix/item combinations possible or are there any exceptions?
I’m trying to get gloves/boots from the corrosive leviathan with the “Anguish” prefix and even after several hundered kills I haven’t found a single one of those. All other prefixes seem to drop just fine.
Since the Honorherald/Stormforged combo can still drop, I don’t think it has anything to do with double dipping prevention.
I haven’t seen an “Oathkeeper” prefix on the super uniques so far, must be one of the newer ones. Since this is the second question regarding MI’s affixes, maybe it would be a good idea to publish an up-to-date list that contains all possible combinations. It seems the sheer number of variations are getting to a point where it’s hard to keep track otherwise.
Maybe we also need to talk about the balance of these items. The bow posted above is level 10 and gives a wide variety of bonuses like flat damage, leech, %dmg, %stats, AR and a range of +x skills. Hardly any of the regular lvl10 uniques can compare to that and especially when it comes to armor pieces I pretty much stopped picking up other stuff cause I can comfortably rely solely on these.
I think they were originally introduced more as stop-gap items and not a be-all and end-all solution. If you focus on one particular prefix though, you can push your main skills to heights where only the most op sets can still keep up. Yes, sets often give the coveted +all skills modifier, but mostly at stage 4 or 5. If you compare that to the super unique items, those can net you 2-4 points per skill and item instead. I’d argue that if your build generally focuses on few skills and only 1-2 attack skills, you’ll probably be better of with the MI’s 90% of the time. Unless you need the unique modifiers from sets like Palashia of course.
I’ve seen stats like +8% max resists, +300AR, crazy high flat mana regen (16-20), shield block chance up to +16% and attack speed up to +17% (again, per item!). If you stack these you’ll be hard pressed to find a set that will net you anywhere near as much.
You could of course argue to just ignore these, but the thing is, I really like them. I like the fact that you can mix and match without being tied to a specific set, but they made a large portion of my stash obsolete. I don’t want to ruin the fun for anybody, but maybe they need to be toned down just a little bit to be more in line with the rest of the available gear. The super uniques aren’t tough mobs like world bosses or ubers, so it seems weird that they drop some of the best gear in game.
Each patch they’re being toned down a little.
What gives them the long list of stats is that, more often then not, the affixes dont line up. As in, fire+physical focused prefix with a lightning+cold focused suffix on a poison item, or something. This gets you a lot of several stats with longer lists.
The amount of prefixes (and MIs) is too small imo to sort everything into “guaranteed matching” affixes.
Stats like 8% max resists though shouldnt be on any single item though.
Regardless, from what I’ve seen people say about them is that they’re great fillers, while looking for your absolute bis piece.
The randomness of the affixes makes it a good farming option to keep getting the ultimate combination.
Rough estimate from the top of my head, there are about 40-45 prefixes for the MIs. Some specifc only to weapons, and some exclusive to the hell versions.
The suffixes just use some of the basic GD ones.
Anguish is a prefix you should be able to find on corrosive leviathans gear.
Wow, 40 prefixes is more than I expected. I have farmed those for days and still only found 30 different ones, namely: Beelzebub, Blazeherald, Bloodherald, Censored, Chromatic, Cruel, Destruction, Dodgelord, Doomherald, Fearherald, Frostherald, Godly, Hatred, Heirophant, Honorhead, Hammerhead, Instigator, Manadrinker, Pain, Scourgeherald, Shieldmaiden, Soulherald, Shrike, Siegfried, Sprinter, Stoneherald, Stormherald, Terror, Weird, Wodan
I agree, they are fantastic fillers, but some actually seem to border on bis items. Just an example, my lvl91 sorceress uses Nova as the main skill, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have a single item in my stash which would outperform this one:
Even if we assume that Insight is only up 50% of the time, we’re looking at 24% crit, 337% lightning damage, 221 AR, 7 flat and 58% mana regen, 22% MS, 8% max lightning res and +4 to Nova. That’s quite something for a pair of boots to be honest.
Granted, not every single skill is covered by the MI’s, but many are, so with enough patience you could find perfect pieces that would most likely outperform most sets by quite a margin. I really like these and also the randomness of them, but especially early on they seem to provide too many bonuses at once. And their level req is much lower than most endgame sets, 80-83 is so much more easily attainable than 90-94.
Just an idea: is there a way for items to gradually unlock bonuses like some skills do, where stage 10 gives another ability and stage 20 the final one? That way, you could distribute the most powerful modifiers a bit, so that the full potential only unlocks for example at lvl 94, but you can already use it at lvl 83.
I’ll have to double check on that one. To prevent too much power creep, I’ve removed all skill modifiers from the affixes except for the weapon slots. So these boots shouldnt be possible, unless it’s an old one from before the patch.
Or its using weapon affixes (which also have slightly higher numbers) which case itll have to be patched out.
Getting that affix combo is a lucky one, and I didnt mind it being BiS. You’ll usually be farming quite long till you have a combo that strong. Similar to regular GD, the perfect double MI will be BiS, but it’s a long time farming those.
As far as the stages go, I don’t know exactly what you mean, but I dont think items can grow as you use them.
(There are a lot more affixes if you also count the new ones for the specific set MIs and the ToA specific rares)
He’s talking about skills that level up on an item similar to powers in the passive tree you assign to skills. And skills that unlock after so much experience is gained, but on items instead.
Personally I’ve really enjoyed that rares are opened up and you can find some super bizarre combos! Rares were a rather fun aspect of D2 and glad they seem to have more dominance in the last few patches of this mod.
Ah, I always thought previous item stats get automatically overwritten once a new update is applied. The boots might very well be from an earlier patch, can’t really remember when I found those. That means we have lots and lots of legacy items in our stash then? Is it possible to identify those at a glance? Cause I really want to play with the intended balance, but don’t feel like starting from scratch with every new update.
And D2ModPlayer is right, that’s exactly what I was referring to. It’s probably not possible, but it could regulate some of the excess power early on. The reason why I think this would be a good idea are items like this, which I just found, so it’s from the current patch. +4 to one skill seems way too strong at level 10, especially in combination with other good stats. There are hardly any uniques at that level range, let alone this powerful:
On an unrelated note, I started a new char and found out that D1 Diablo doesn’t engage in combat if you stay outside of his melee range. So you can do ring-a-round the rosie and as long as you don’t stand right next to him, he won’t retaliate. I tried it with different ranged skills on several chars, nothing seems to trigger him into attacking. This makes the fight very easy, while the D2 Diablo attacks on sight, you can’t walk him around like a dog on a leash . Is the D1 behaviour intended?
Another minor problem: Coldworm the Burrower (Far Oasis Boss) does always spawn at player level, regardless of difficulty. My sorc is lvl 92, the screenshot was just made in normal mode. Same happens in nightmare, which makes it impossible to get a low level MI belt.
Known and intended. Has to do with it being an enemy that is stuck in place, so this one gets placed as if it’s an object, rather than a monster spawn.
Regarding the MIs and prefixes. I was mistaken there, some still do have a skill modifier. I have removed skill modifiers that come from prefixes though…
I see what you mean with the pants, and others. I’m aware of it and these kind of items will slightly change over time. Other than the +4, it’s not that good though.
As for D1, I havent noticed this. If you stay at a distance, he should simply use his charge attack which one-shot many people with low armor/physical resists quite often. I guess you’ve found the sweet spot range where he doesnt use any? 
Yes, that’s why I go in close with the D1 version, as he one shots me.
Fair enough, I just wanted to highlight some of these 
I messed around with kiting some more and it seems that many bosses can be bugged out like that. The exceptions being casters like Mephisto and adds. The rest did follow me around, until they got an initial hit in. With enough runspeed you can even trail fast mobs like Hephasto.
Here are some video shorts, the only ones attacking were the adds (except when Andariel caught up to me 
).
Andariel:
Izual:
Hephasto (he at least tried to catch up once):
D2 Diablo:
I’m not a big fan of stuns and traps, but every boss should have the means to attack properly. Maybe give them a gap-closer if they don’t have one and make it so they actually use it regularly 
Since I’m close to finishing my retaliation char, I decided to take a shot at actually finishing the Trial of Ancients. So here’s my feedback.
The mob difficulty seems to ramp up very hard at a certain point. Like you’re going from fighting one act boss and some trash mobs to going up against 2-3 WB and then 2-3 ubers over a rather short span. This makes the beginning kind of boring and the middle maybe a bit too difficult I think. The last couple of stages were evenly paced, no complaints there.
Still, I’m wondering how a non-max block/max evade build is supposed to deal with 4 supercharged wb/ubers at the same time. The arena is tiny, mobs aggro no matter where you stand and there is little to no cover to catch your breath. To me it seems like you need a super-defensive build, cause superior strategy isn’t going to get you anywhere in there. Compare that to the old Shattered Realm arenas, where you normally had the means to break line of sight for a second. Here you can only run around in a circle.
Some of the council member mobs seem to have a completely unreasonable amount of defense. For those my chance to hit showed as 60%, whereas for uber(!) baal it was at 135%. Why would a normal boss mob have probably twice the defense of the final boss, that must be a bug, right?
I really like it for getting the last levels to 100, those are a terrible slog in normal open world grind. Also nice for maxing devotion abilities. But I gotta say, the reward chests are nothing to write home about. I did the whole trial from start to finish in one go and got 5(?) chests which didn’t contain anything I couldn’t also get from a random WB (which takes 30 sec in comparison). Not a single unique component, no high-level rune, just some random uniques I’d never consider to use. For the time invested I think the rewards should be much better. Your char is probably finished anyway by that point, might as well give out some proper stuff.
Also, what’s the fastest way to get trial factions points? For the whole run I got maybe around 300 points, that seems very little and will probably take many, many of these to get to tier 3, even with writs. I’m eyeing a certain augment, but I can’t see myself doing this ad nauseam just for that.
I think doing 100-110 and cashing out was considered to be the fastest for getting the reputation.
And yeah, like GD, defensives over anything else, really.
Not really a bug. It has to do with many monsters using passive abilities that increase with their level. These are aimed to work for how those monsters are in the campaign. In ToA, their levels are much higher (up to 30 levels higher for some I think vs the campaign?). These passives quite often scale exponentially so this results in very high changes in defense.
Bosses, on the other hand, as they’re fixed levels/stats, they dont have these scaling passives, so they’re pretty much the same as always.
I see, that explains it then. If the scaling itself can’t be adjusted, would it be possible to just put a cap on it?
Cause it honestly feels weird that those intermediate mobs give you a harder time than the bosses in the final rounds. Since I obviously was below the minimum threshold with 5700 AR, I’d guess you’d need at least 7000-7500 to even get to 100% there. Those numbers would be very hard to reach if your priority is defense above anything, even with Gul runes (which I’m already using ).
Some more things I noticed:
There’s an inaccessible doorway in Act 6 Level 2 in the upper left corner. Tried walking through it from both sides, teleporting also doesn’t work.
The Dark Elder super unique in Lost City spawns adds that have more than double his own hp. The screen is from NM difficulty and I was not overleveled at that point (see my health pool).
And two descriptions with typos / weird wording:
Intended. Kill him, not the adds. I made them immortal at first bit that caused a different issue. 
Thanks for the reports on those texts, I’ll adjust them as well.
Can you give us the updated max stats for merc auras? I still refer to https://web.archive.org/web/20200520120959/https://www.reignofterrorgd.com/mercenaries when deciding who to pick and just realized that at least for the “Blessed Aim” merc the numbers changed.
On my current level 84 char I’m already surpassing the listed stats when it comes to crit and %AR. And I also get some attack speed, which isn’t mentioned at all on the old cheat sheet.
I’d do it myself, but my only 100 got axed when I had to reinstall everything from scratch.
Not now as I’m nowhere near a PC for a couple of weeks. I might have added it in the patch notes of… 0.6.5.0 or 0.7.0.0
Quite some mercenaries got changed then to be a bit more equal to the act4 ones. So I can recommend out those patch notes.
Thanks, found it mentioned in the 0.7.1.0 Patch notes.
It doesn’t have the numerical changes listed though and since I was working on some D2R wallpapers anyway, I threw together an updated cheat sheet. I tried to make the font big enough that it might just be readable in FullHD, but really it’s meant for bigger 4K displays.
It only lists the auras, there was just no way to fit the full merc info on a single screen. And honestly, the auras are pretty much the only thing I care about at endgame anyway. When your dps is in the millions or even tens of millions, merc damage becomes negligible, so the D1 heroes (no team auras afaik) are present as icons only.
I made two versions with different background pics, here they are:
https://imgur.com/gxWx8Vv
https://imgur.com/j7dhkAZ
Maybe somebody will get some use out of it
