Preview: The 1.10 Readme (sarcasm)

[Caän]

The 1.10 readme, retrieved from the future by Caän's Probability Engine. This program checks the subject's history and uses it to predict the future based on what happened in the past ^^

Additions

-Added 48 previously inactivated Runewords. Those Runewords range from completely useless (43), almost useless (1), average (1) and ubergodly (3). Well... you were complaining about the lack of Runewords. You now have them. Enjoy that Jah-Zod-Cham bow with 9% chance to cast level 1 Bone Spirit when struck, 5% faster hit recovery and +3 life after each demon kill.
-Nerfed 80% of the godly uniques. Left the remaining 20% godly.
-Disabled Crafting recipes entirely. Only trace of them now is on the promotional page on our web site and in the LoD manual. You know, they were actually an undocumented feature of the game.
-Runes are now highlighted purple on the ground. Just so you know we actually did something constructive after all.
-The graphics and sound for the Minions of Destruction boss pack will now get pre-loaded before the fight. This will cause the game to freeze for 10 seconds until the data is loaded for all clients, after which it will run at hyperspeed for another 10 seconds, causing 3 characters to run headlong into Lister's claws, 2 others to shoot randomly into the wall until Lister gibs them, and 2 more to bite the dust against the extra strong fanaticism moon lord mob they were fighting in Nihlathak's Temple. Heck, you wanted the loading lag problem fixed, right?

Major bugs

-Added a new character type, Ladder characters. Characters created as Ladder characters will enjoy 4 days of actual ladder race before the first Baal runner hits 99, 1 week of h!ck-and-dupe-free play before a couple of Frozenstein running item farmers will start to spread the super-duper socketed elite thunder mauls and accompanying runes for the new and uberpowerful Agony runeword, and 1 ladder reset after six months before we give up on LoD and leave the ladder there to rot.
-Fixed all known hacks and dupe exploits. Now you all will cheer wildly just as you cheered wildly at the arrival of the xpack expecting the end of all hacks and dupes. Where the elite items in LoD were intended to get rid of the duped lances and SoJs, the new runewords and uniques in 1.10 are now intended to get rid of the duped ethereal socketed elite items made into runewords with duped runes then hacked to remove the runes but keep the runeword bonuses and socketed again with godly duped bugged jewels and duped Zods and other uber runes. Can't say we aren't making any progress, eh?
-Fixed bug where Rare items would only get three bonuses after the first Rare in a game only had three bonuses. Now you can actually find that 6-bonus rare elite balrog skin you always dreamed about with 4% chance to cast level 1 Charged Bolt when struck, +9% enhanced defense, 4% fire resistance, poison length -25%, +3 to life and 33 charges of level 2 Holy Bolt. Good thing we fixed all possible hacks or dupes of these godly items would flood the realms, dwarfing Smoke and Lionheart and trampling all over Guardian Angel and Duriel's Shell and Spirit Shroud and Arkaine's Valor and Skin of the Vipermagi.
-Fixed a bug where poison damage items would lower total poison damage. Jeez... if we multiply them, people complain. If we add them up, people complain. This poison thing is harder than we thought. (Note to Geoff: NO poison in World of Warcraft. We've given up enough free time fixing poison bugs already) So we just made poison useless. That should stop the whining.
-Items with piercing will no longer affect Guided Arrow. We fixed this by making sure that arrows will no longer do any damage after they pierce once. A job well done ^_^

Minor bugs

-Fixed a bug where if a character tried to equip his or her hireling with a circlet of Chain Lightning for which the hireling met the strength requirement but not the required level, with the hireling out of range, while damage reflection from an item of Thorns killed a stygian doll at the exact same moment as a nearby character picked up a Minor Health Potion and a Paladin gave him or her the Cleansing aura, would cause a crash on an AMD-600 with 128 Mb of RAM, RIVA TNT-2 video card, a Hayes 56.6 modem, if the system time was between Oct 16, 1072 and Oct 19, 1072. (note to Geoff: did we fix the chain lightning cast bug?)
-Fixed Eth bug in weapons. Damn, we were stupid. That "reduce-ac" property in gems.txt sets monster defense to the specified amount, not subtract the specified amount. I guess that's what we got for not having looked at LoD for half a year.
-Fixed the ungodly powerful lightning hose EXPLOIT where players could CH3AT by equipping an Act 1 merc with +amazon or +all items. This was not what we wanted them to be, so we took this H@CK out. Evil CH3ATERS! (improve Lightning Strike? No... we wanted that skill to suck. That is an intentional balance issue. Got it? Thanks)

Balance issues

* General

-Certain areas in Act 5 now have random monsters in addition to the normal ones. No more bloodyrunz187, what we will get now are baalrunz556 !!! What? Make Baal and his mobs dangerous? Man... when a character has 6000 life, nothing we can do to make the monsters more dangerous. Get over it. It's by design. LoD was never intended to be challenging in the first place.
-Characters can now only take the portal to the Secret Cow Level once per difficulty level. We almost forgot about town portals, but thought of them just in time to fix this : characters can now only ENTER the Secret Cow Level once per difficulty level. Hope you idiots who don't realize that powerleveling is a part of the game are now satisfied at the removal of this so-called exploit. See you in the Worldstone Keep. ^_^
-Improved the quality of the Nihlathak quest reward. You are now getting a maiden spear with SIX percent to cast level THREE CHAIN LIGHTNING instead of just 2% chance of level 1 Firebolt with your bowazon. Think about the POWER you'll wield! Chain Lightning is a level EIGHTEEN skill!!! Anyway, we feel this change will certainly encourage players to abandon Anya's portal in favor of one rare item. At best this will result in Nihlathak mules just like the imbue mules of old. At worst you won't notice anything. What would you bet on? ^_^
-Reduced the drop quality of certain monster types in Act 5. Hell, maybe if Act 4 is the hardest act in the game, it should have the best drops, right?
-Lower level charged affixes can no longer appear after a certain character level. You wanted to get rid of level 1 Sacrifice appearing on your elite thunder mauls, well it will no longer do so. Cheer up, and remember that the best circlet of Teleportation you can get now has +15% enhanced defense and self-repair.
-The death explosion damage of undead flayers no longer reflects the number of players in the game. Now even Mephisto runners will stand no chance of dying. (Note to Geoff : did we take out the scaling of minions?)
-Hirelings in Nightmare and Hell have higher Hit Points and Defense than before. This change does not retroactively apply to existing hirelings. Buy a new one. ^_^
-We liked the swapping of Jah and Cham rune effects in 1.09. Now we changed the effects of just about every rune below #12. Shael now gives 20% mana recovery rate in a weapon. Enjoy.
-Chance to gamble Uniques and Sets increased from 1/5,000,000 to 1/4,500,000. We believe this will have a fundamental impact on gameplay, just like the increase from 0 to 1/5,000,000 in 1.09.
-Increased chance of light radius bonuses. Heck, we did it in 1.09 with self-repair affixes, right? Consider it our way of reducing the number of Windforces on the realms.

* Necromancer

-Increased hit point bonus of Skeleton Mastery. No damage bonus though, the necro does not need any damage.
-Increased damage and decreased mana cost of Bone Spirit, Poison Nova and Poison Explosion. The latter is still useless, the former two are now the only thing that makes the necro worth playing. Increase skeleton damage? HAH! Do we care? Why did you think skeletal magi have escaped our rigorous four-seconds-of-poison-damage-and-no-more modifications in the expansion?
-Decrepify radius now increases with skill level. We are very sure this will instantly boost the power of the class by a factor three.
-Iron Golem damage will now properly be modified by damage-enhancing properties on non-weapon items. Don't cheer up yet : this was one of a million reasons why Iron Golem sucks, and we did not fix all the other problems.

* Sorceress

-Lowered damage of Fire Wall, Charged Bolt, Nova, Chain Lightning and Blizzard. As usual, we nerfed 3 skills that needed nerfing, and 2 others that didn't. By the way, we like Thunderstorm as it was. ^_^
-Reduced Lightning Mastery to +5% damage up to level 8, +10% damage from 8 to 16, and +60% damage from level 16 on. Increasing returns are a great way to encourage character variety, and also, characters with lower than level 30 Mastery will do less damage. (Geoff: shut up about skill tree charms. I don't wanna lose my nova sorc, that's all).
-Increased duration of Blizzard by 0.2 seconds. Increased mana cost to 140. Now stop whining about random hits.
-Increased Mana regeneration bonus of Warmth. Sorcs have more life than mana almost all the time, and we believe this is the best way to make Energy mean something for a sorc again. (if we are wrong, give us a call. We haven't really tested this)
-Teleport now has a casting delay. You'd never have thought we would do THAT, right?
-Did NOT fix the phantom hit bug with Energy Shield.
-Fixed the Lightning and Chain Lightning casting animation to work correctly with Increased Casting Speed bonuses. That's what we thought we did, at least. Just like we fixed it in 1.08. Actually, it STILL does not work correctly. Now it is boosted by Faster Hit Recovery. ^_^

* Assassin

-Fixed Blade Shield bug where its attacks would hinder your own. The clueless plebeians will now stare at this sentence in amazement, at how we are fixing every little bug there is. However, you know, we don't like Energy Shield, so: see above.
-Fixed various issues with dual-wielding claws and Martial Arts skills. Actually, we fixed one issue, and left the others well alone. Dragon Claw STILL does not work. It is STILL impossible to get one charge of the Fists of Fire, Claws of Thunder and Blades of Ice skills when dual-wielding. The only difference is that now at least the DAMAGE of the secondary claw will be used in a dual-claw attack. Don't count on crushing blow and knockback though. Fixing everything? Hahaha. We are the G0DZ of the gaming world, and really, it does not matter what we do or neglect to do, people will worship us anyway.

* Paladin

-Zeal now has a damage bonus. Not that it matters, not with the LoD immunities and Vengeance. We single-handedly destroyed the previously very balanced class by making all builds except Vengeance/Conviction useless against phys immunes.
-Fanaticism damage has diminishing returns at higher levels. Was it too powerful? No. Was it pointless to nerf it now? Yes. Was it pointless to nerf revives? Yes. Did we do so? Yes.
-Increased Prayer health regeneration in Nightmare and Hell. (Geoff: take this out, the change is canceled. Pals would then be more than just tanks for our firewall sorcs)

* Barbarian

-Fixed Berserk to not reduce defense when it misses. Or some other weird bug no one had noticed and/or did not care about. Energy shield, what's that? ^_^
-Fixed the Critical Hit bug with various masteries. Man, modmakers have already fixed that in 1.09B, 1.09C AND 1.09D. Why shouldn't we just copy their code and fix it as well? Aren't we good? ^_^

* Druid

-Nerfed FURY. FURY is bad. FURY is evil. Nerfed FURY to hell. It was much more powerful than any other druid skill, so obviously it needed nerfing. Actually, if we follow this reasoning, we should nerf Lower Resist too. Shhhh... we already did once, and for no apparent reason either.
-Increased the damage of Armageddon by 1.7%.
-Otherwise the class is perfectly fine. Heck, no one uses him anyway.

[M6n6M6]

That was good man. I laughed my ass off reading that. Nice job.

[Alkalund]

Very nice!! Perhaps you should repost your Murphy's Laws of Modding on this forum as well, those were hilarious

[The Gizzaa]

Nice job. You should send that to Bliz so they can compare notes

[Caän]

Very nice!! Perhaps you should repost your Murphy's Laws of Modding on this forum as well, those were hilarious

Yup, there are indeed some psychics on these forums. ^_^ That is what I'm doing right now: fishing everything from those 2127 (!) unnamed (argh) saved posts of the old forum. ^^

[Alkalund]

Heheh perhaps I can help you with at least this one <---- Murphy's Modding Laws

I can't seem to find the sequels though

[Phrozen Heart]

LMAO

That had me cracking up like anything and the Murphy's page nearly made me fall out of my chaie

Caan> You wouldn't be interested in doing a regular(ish) feature for the Keep itself in a new "Humor" section I've just thought of setting up? Those two would be a damn good startup

[Alkalund]

A humor section is a great idea Phrozen, these humor jewels must not be lost

It is a sad thing we lost that You know you've been modding WAY too much when... thread... that one was the best ever

[NewbieModder]

Lol. I nearly died of air loss when I read this one:

-Fixed the Lightning and Chain Lightning casting animation to work correctly with Increased Casting Speed bonuses. That's what we thought we did, at least. Just like we fixed it in 1.08. Actually, it STILL does not work correctly. Now it is boosted by Faster Hit Recovery. ^_^

Now i'll read the murphys.....

[deathfile]

LOL

yah a humor section would be a nice addition

[Arcblazer9]

...good stuff.

[Poli]

ROFL... seriously!

I agree that Faster Hit Recovery one was the best..

thanks for a good laugh.

(kinda sad too, considering all this is true.. I swear )

[UndigestedMelon]

Definitely worth making a Humor section. It would get my post count up quite a bit...

If the Humor Section is created, I would seriously appreciate a subdirectory entitled, "Rants." I would contribute quite a bit. I'm known wide and far for my incoherence...

[KillerForm]

why dont you go and make a "Diablo 2 + lod Humor topic"

but i dont really understand the faster hit recovery thing... its just doesnt feets.

[UndigestedMelon]

I'm not familiar with the plural verb form of 'feets', so I'll reply the best I can.

It isn't intended to make sense. It is simply a pun on how Blizzard decides to "fix" things. Sadly, we might find a few of these items in the 1.10 patch....

[Myhrginoc]

This is the D2/LoD humor forum. Seriously, not that much game humor. On the old board, there were off-topic forums...now those forums have their own board, linked at bottom of most pages here.

[Splynn]

Funny stuff.
Perhaps the biggest joke will be if there really is a 1.10 patch
Look how they tried to avoid it with a 1.09d patch

[malice]

if they'd release the danged source we'd be able to come up with a decent and hopefully final fix pretty damn quick i should suppose :p

the problem with working with a big company is that you don't get to work on what you want to, only what the suits tell you to. one can suppose there must be fans of d2 on their own code team, perhaps their just swamped with other work.