Got DAYUM this looks tough! Why do you torture yourself like this ? Very interesting WT!

no clue, to be honest. it's weird to me that they removed LR and IM while keeping in AD. now, AD really is the only dangerous curse there, and by far too. the removal of IM at least made some sense, but removing LR did nothing but make it a lot less dangerous place.
personally i think CS is more fun with IM and LR. :-)


Some farming:

Since the party was underleveled a bit, I did a couple of runs in Act 3 before moving on to Act 4.

A cute surprise.




It's the only belt that gives IAS or MF.
It gives 10 Increased Attack Speed.




Gambled.
There's a 3% chance to gamble a unique item, pretty huge.
Keeping this on a character ensures that the next pair of unique Leather Gloves will "downgrade" to be rare. Sweet.



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 16 2018 03:16am

Gambled.
There's a 5% chance to gamble a set item.
Leather Gloves and Boots are great gamble targets since they are so cheap (2500), so most 1.00 players will see dozens, or even hundreds of Death's Hands and Tancred's Hobnails'.




Sigon's Shield. Sweet.
+1 to all skills and +20% chance to block like in every other patch.




When the people were all at least level 23, they marched on to the hot part of the game.

I'll just keep this in case I find a use for it. It probably will remain in some forgotten stash until the end of times.



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 16 2018 03:36am

I rarely thought of making a screenshot, but at least I have one of the grand entrance. An ugly green thing came to great me. Hi.




First +skill amulet!
Not very useful, but I'll just keep it. Items with +skills don't sell well in earlier patches anyway.




Lord de Seis was a bitch. I saved his seal until the rest of CS had been cleared.
Because of his "Thief" ability (drops potions from your belt on the floor), and the bugs connected to that ability, you're better off emptying your belt before you charge him.
I cheezed the fight and used Static Field from Stot before I went in with the potion-less Hammerdin.
Oblivion Knights deal very high damage, especially if you get hit with Amplify Damage or Lower Resist (which also lowers your magic resistance, thus increasing Bone Spirit damage).
One fun thing though, is that Conviction (that Lord de Seis always spawns with) doesn't actually lower the players' resistances. Nicely bugged in the player's favor.

After that was done, I made a beautiful setup in case I needed an escape. (The portals!)
I believe Diablo only prisons up one town portal at a time, so this prevented problems.
His prisons have very high life in P8 though, so if you do get stuck, you're better off escaping in stead of trying to destroy the prison.



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 16 2018 03:51am

I love this walk thru because of all the history u learn about the game.. It has changed a whole lot since it came out it sounds like.
Keep it up!!!

Lousy drops.
Only the ring I kept, but it was not good enough to show.




Gambled with the money from the lousy loot.
Not bad! The MF is 25-49.
(In the files, it's actually 25-50, but due to a bug it can never reach the maximum.
This is typically referred to as the "n-1 bug", and was already known in 2000.
It also applies to things like the base defense of items, and to gems, of which most had variable stats.)





And suddenly.. it's all over!
I had completely forgotten about (probably) the most lethal bug/oversight that is the combo of Multiple Shot + Lightning Enchanted.
Two Hammers were thrown this skeleton's way, and in return, Mate was electrocuted to death.
Mate insisted on looking cool while kicking ass, but unfortunately, the cool-looking armor was highly conductive.
Although Mate was murdered, luckily his gear was not. It was distributed among the leechers. Sweet!



This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 16 2018 09:33am

And just to explain how badly I got owned:

The way these affixes work is that they all enchant one another. Fairly straightforward.
In this case, LE will enchant the arrow of the skeleton by adding lightning damage to it, while MS will create duplicates of the original arrow, which are in turn are also enchanted by LE. (In earlier patches, MS randomly added either 2 or 4 projectiles, while in later patches it always adds 2.)
The travel path of these duplicates works similarly to the additional projectiles of the Amazon skill Multiple Shot, or the Necromancer skill Teeth, etc.

Similarly, MS will enchant the retaliation part of LE, and it does so just as it does with regular arrows: It creates duplicates, which will behave as additional projectiles.
The trigger property is part of what's duplicated, so even though these duplicates behave as additional projectiles, they are triggered just like the original 8 charged bolts are.
In my case, the Skeleton rolled for 4 additional projectiles, which means MS duplicated the [8 charged bolts] four times.

What this all means in the end, is that when LE retaliation is triggered, besides the regular "ring" of 8 charged bolts, there will be 4 blobs (of 8 charged bolts each) that are fired towards the monster's target.

To illustrate, I've used a Softcore character to show what it looks like.
Firstly, you can see the 5 arrows this skeleton shoots at me. These are simply 5 lightning-enchanted arrows, as you would expect.
Then (it's hard to see) there are four bright blobs coming my way. Each blob is a fat stack of 8 charged bolts.
The blobs were shot my way when I damaged the skeleton with Static Field (you can still see the overlay on the skeleton from SF).

As you can see (more or less), these 4 blobs actually follow the exact same path as those 4 additional lightning-enchanted arrows. The blobs still move at the speed of charged bolts, but follow the path that the arrows follow (rather than zigzaggin' like bolts usually do.)
Last but not least, every bolt has a 5% chance to crit. So if you get hit by 16 bolts, there's a decent chance at least one will deal double damage. And with some bad luck, 2 or more bolts will crit.




And in the case of my Paladin (may a brother rest in piece), the Skeleton was lvl 33, which means each charged bolt dealt 31 damage, which means each stack of bolts dealt 248 damage (minimum).
Considering how close I got to use Hammer on him, I most likely got hit by at least 2 stacks per Hammer, so 32 bolts times 31 damage = 992 damage in ~640 milliseconds (considering my cast speed).
I had ~350 life with ~50 lightning resistance, not quite enough to tank that shit.


Anyway, all nerd shit aside, I was having fun on P8, despite it being quite tough,
but since I only have 7 characters in Nightmare now, I might level a new Paladin and get him back to Nightmare so I can continue the run on P8.

This post was edited by Fruit on Aug 16 2018 09:47am

Rip. I agree, remake pally and keep going.
My educational side isn't satisfied yet

R.I.P.
MSLE was a nasty thing back then.
Without proper MDR you most probably die instantly.
The funny thing what I witnessed during my 1.07 playthrough is that wearing a Skullders armor (25 MDR) I was able to tank these bolts even without max resist. MDR works like a charm against MSLE. OFC you can not obtain that high value in classic, but still a good thing to have.

I really enjoy reading your information packages. I hope you will continue.

This post was edited by -joey- on Aug 16 2018 10:39am

also enjoying this walk, i dont think i ever played 1.00, i do remember pre 1.08 though, when you couldnt buy mana potions, and there were no synergies. game was a lot different back then