Battle Tactics & Cunning Plans

15 Jan - Gris's wares - TeRR0RNauT

About how hellfire determines which items gris/adria and wirt should carry.

A lot of warriors have complained about only being offered bows, and rogue's did so about sword. This is caused by the way Hellfire offers items . It goes something like this..

1. Check which items the buyer wear/carries and make sure you offer a lot of things he/she doesn't have.

2. Make sure that items which you offer, and which the buyer already has are a little bit better then the same weapon of the buyer.

3. If the buyer has much cash give better weapons so if you have a warrior with good equipment the game will think you really need a bow and a staff for instance . And it will offer those you won't get much swords..... so the trick is to buy other weapons too instead of letting that spare cash lie around buy a bow...

I bought good types of most weapons and have been trying this out and I have gotten a King's Bastard Sword of Haste, an obsidian ring and amulet of the zodiac, some obsidian of the heavens and some dragons of the zodiac stuff. The trick is to buy more expensive items and of all types (bows, flails, mauls, axes, helms, swords, shields, armor). You'll be getting better and better stuff instead of that endless supply of crappy bows.......

15 Jan - Mana shield/C.O.W - Monty

1. C.O.W. - I have passed items to characters on OTHER difficulty levels, so I don't understand why everyone is saying that you need to be on the same difficulty level. If you look at the registry modification, there is only one key for the C.O.W., indicating to me that you could pass through any difficulty level you want....

2. Mana/Mana Shield point - Mana Shield NEVER goes down. Once you acquire it, mana shield always stays the same. So, getting new levels of Mana Shield is almost pointless (except for the bovine plate subtraction for
example).

15 Jan - Spell levels - David T. Jones

As I seem to remember from playing Diablo last year, the Mana Shield spells mana requirement never decreases. Reading more spell books has the effect of reducing the damage taken when successfully attacked with the Mana Shield active.

Also, when other spell books are read, sometimes mana goes down, sometimes damage or the spells effectiveness goes up.

15 Jan - Spells magic use - Pestilence

Spell levels on "Mana Shield: -3% Damage taken (Max 25%)" Quote from the official strategy guide to Diablo. Btw, ya'll comment on spell levles and stuff of the old diablo ask on the site i can answer most with this book. All the old diablo stuff is explained very well in this book. So basically Paul no matter how many times you read that book the mana won't go down. Just the damage taken. Adios.

15 Jan - Spells magic use - Jonathan Geisler

Certain spells take just as much magic at lower levels as higher levels. In fact most spells after level 15 have the same mana requirement and damage. I think only Nova, Fireball, Emmolation take advantage of the 16-20 spell levels. I WISH APOCO DID!

15 Jan - Gris's selling criteria - Flux

After my own experiences with what Pepin stocks (never offering me elixirs once I was full of a particular type) and seeing what I was getting from Gris and Wirt, and seeing other players comments on the subject, I experimented for a while last night, and had some amazing success. (see attached pics for sample Griswold offerings) - Pic 1 & 2

Basically, the game scans your inventory and equipped items when you start a new game, and then offers you items at Gris and Wirt based on what you already have. They try to offer you stuff around the quality of your items, but prefer to offer you more of the lower quality stuff. So if you had very good armor and shield and rings, you would be offered lots of cheap axes and flails and helms, etc, but very few armor or shields or rings. However, any of the items you had quality of that were offered to you would tend to be very nice quality themselves.

So the secret is to carry a very nice quality item in each of the 10 categories, (Armor, helm, rings, amulet, axe, maul, flail, bow, sword, shield) and to upgrade to anything higher priced in those categories whenever possible. Then play or keep creating new games just for the goodies. The improvement in items is amazingly quick. For example if you had everything of kings quality, but no maul or shield, you would start a new game and get maybe 1 each of the other types of items, and about 7 mauls and 6 shields, all of lame quality. Then as you upgraded those, you would start to get 15 very nice items every time.

The 2 pics attached are from the SAME 15 item list from Gris, and these are not exceptionally good items. Once I had everything upgraded, I was seeing average of 2 zod items per game, usually one of them being ob/zod or dragon/zod.

The only problems are armor, helms, shields, and bows. Gris does not ever sell anything godly, holy, emerald, ruthless, merciless, weird, strange, of the mammoth, whales, or in the slaughter suffix group, and NEVER anything for more than 140k. (no one told him about Auric's amulet, I guess? =( I saw probably 25 items over 139k, but never anything for more than 140k.) So you will never get a really good shield from gris, (the best possible would be ob/lion or awesome/brilliance, for example) or any armor or helms with either of the highest 2 ac modifiers. (does Wirt even ever sell godly full plate? I've never seen it, but certainly everyone on Diablo used to have dupes of it, so it must have come from somewhere. Unless it was all hacked originally, a possibility I'm not willing to discount.)

Also bows, since the best are merciless or strange, and Gris does not offer those. Wirt offers items on the same criteria as Gris, so you could obtain merc/heavens bows and godly/whales helms and emerald/moon shields, you would just have to make a lot more trips, since he's way over across the creek (a long way, even with town jog) and he only offers one item each time, compared to the generous 15 from Gris.

The other risk is the old Diablo duper boredom factor. Since a lot of the fun in Diablo is finding better quality items, if you are already loaded with 2 ob/zods, and dragon/zod, awesome/stars armor, and more, will you have much fun in the dungeon when you know that the odds of finding anything better than what you already own is about .00001%?

One other note, if you are looking for slightly less than top quality items, you will have to scale back what you have. This mainly (only?) effects swords, where most people don't consider great swords to be better than bastard swords, due to the 2 vs. 1-handed trade off. But since the highest priced/best swords are going to be Great Swords, you will need to not carry one of those if you ever hope to get a ksov/ksoh/ksob bastard. Carry the best bastard sword you can find, and get everything else way upgraded, and you will get 8+ swords every new game.

13 Jan - Time factor - Eugene A.K.A. blueice

Yes the time thing is true...I have been doing that most of the time...but instead of using something to stop time or removing the battery u can actually change the year of the present time map of win95 which goes on to the 2080 MAX.

I noticed that the maps do not change after 2010 at least..maybe even earlier but at 2050 I can find a quiet shrine in the 1st level, a Baranar's Star (unique) mace in the second level, outside the Butcher this is true to the maps ..(dunno about the items) for all difficulties normal, NM, Hell. For checking sake...erm..I have verified this with 3 of my friends...it is the same...

And also this change of time is preferably done before starting Hellfire..."AFTER" will not change the map of the time before the change.

13 Jan - Monk's spell level - Chris Weber

I just wanna lose some words on Paul Rocoe´s observations about the spell levels:

All of the spells have a minimum at mana-use ; fireball 10 mana and CL 20 mana for example. You always reach this minimum before you reach the maximum spell-level . so it´s sure possible to reach this minimum at lvl 6 with some spells. But the damage a spell does ( if he does ;-) ) is increased with every lvl until you reach lvl 15 ( base lvl ) . this explains Paul´s observations while increasing his mana-shield-spell ; he reached the mana-minimum at lvl 6 . I just started Diablo and had a look at my lvl 49 - mage ; and yes , even at spell - lvl 19 mana-shield needs 33 mana !! ;-))

13 Jan - Time factor - Schmendrick

I played Hellfire on a normal level with my system time change to 7:30 p.m.. When I entered level 13 and cleared it, I ran into 2 different unique monsters. But they only seem to have magical items (although they were very good items) on them. Maybe the posts were misunderstood (unique monsters, not items), because I found identical situations on level 14 also. When I changed back the time, and started a new game, level 13 did not reward one single decent (magical or unique) item. Since I only tried this one time, I can only conclude that this theory still inconclusive. But the idea has many merits, and requires further testing.

13 Jan - Monk's spell level - Adrian Lee

I read from what Paul Rocoe wrote, there is nothing wrong with the mana shield spell. The mana level remains the same throughout all 15 magical levels. It does that in Diablo as well, with ALL characters, using 33 units of mana to when the spell is cast. The only difference is I believe the mana shield takes up less damage as you upgrade in magic levels.

Just thought I would clear this up.

13 Jan - Time factor - Tri§tan

I tried setting my clock to 7:30 and played a game of Hellfire all the way to laz and I found 4 uniuqe items. then when i quit playing i noticed that i had forgot to change the AM to PM. so it though I was playing at 7:30pm and I still found a good number of uniques.

13 Jan - Monk's spell level - Paul Roscoe

Just something I've noticed about the monk but I haven't noticed about the other classes. When reading a spell book none of the spell's stats (mana, damage) change after the spell level 6. A character of mine has level 12 mana shield it takes 33 mana to cast just the same as it did on spell level 6.

Have I missed something previously or is it something new? I haven't tried the bard character yet.

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