info request:

[Flux]

So, we're working on a d2 wiki which will eventually have everything you can imagine in it. Info for everything; all the combined knowledge in these forums and elsewhere. (The current, largely outdated site content pages will go away once the wiki's live.)

I've been working on it for a few weeks, and most of the basic pages are up. I'm doing the monster pages now, and if anyone can point me to useful info on a couple of things, I'd appreciate it. I need a list of possible TC drops by monster type, and if anyone's excavated information on monster spell damage, regular monsters and bosses too, that would be great.

For instance:
I want a column in the first table for max TC drop, ideally armor/weapons and also the max runes TC. So every monster will have something like: Armor 33/Weapons 33/Runes 9, and those will be linked to the appropriate TC pages (which do not yet exist in quality form, but will in the near-future).

It would also be nice to have some monster spell damage: there's nothing about that on Blizz's pages, and the Melee Damage 1/Melee Damage 2 info is basically useless for the spell-using bosses and monsters. There are now rough pages for every superunique, act boss, and uber boss in the game,
but it would be nice to polish those up with some more comprehensive information.

Also, has anyone compiled a list of all the areas in the game, with the monsters that can possibly spawn there? Blizz has nice maps of the 5 acts, and I want to do something along those lines, but with far more info, including individual pages for every area with monsters found there, general level info, quests, dungeons, superuniques, min/max boss packs per level, etc.


Needless to say with a wiki, anyone who wants to get involved is welcome to. I'll be admining the thing, but as vast a base of knowledge as has been accumulated about d2 by now, there's no way one person can remember, track down, research, or input it all. The wiki isn't ready to be officially debuted yet, but we're hoping some forum regulars will want to help add info while we get it ready for launch. Your forum account is your wiki account, so anyone who can post here is already good to go.

Thanks; reply or insert questions here, or just DIY in the wiki, if that's how you ride.

[Orphan]

For instance:
I want a column in the first table for max TC drop, ideally armor/weapons and also the max runes TC. So every monster will have something like: Armor 33/Weapons 33/Runes 9, and those will be linked to the appropriate TC pages (which do not yet exist in quality form, but will in the near-future).

In theory someone might be better off using ATMA for that, because the maximum TC that a monster can drop from is dependent on their mlvl, and the mlvl of a monster is dependent on the area level in NM and Hell, and because of the guest monsters feature then you have a situation where the same monster can spawn in multiple areas and thus have multiple max TC's depending on it's mlvl.

An example is the Dark Lancer, which can spawn in the Tamoe Highland (up to armo69), Ancients Way (armo84) and Frozen River (armo87). Of course, if you get a unique Dark Lancer in the Ancient's Way then it can get up to armo87 because of it's higher mlvl again :wink3:

It would also be nice to have some monster spell damage: there's nothing about that on Blizz's pages, and the Melee Damage 1/Melee Damage 2 info is basically useless for the spell-using bosses and monsters. There are now rough pages for every superunique, act boss, and uber boss in the game,
but it would be nice to polish those up with some more comprehensive information.

I'd be willing to help tackle this, but it's in a similiar boat as above in that the damage of the spells is dependent on the level of the monster, which means again it's dependent on the area the monster spawns in, and with guest monsters on NM and Hell this can mean a few different combinations for each of the possibilities. I think if it was done it would need to show the damage per level, in a table like structure:

Lvl Damage
1 1-4
2 2-6
3 3-8

Act bosses and such would be easier though since they remain a constant mlvl on each difficulty.

[Kijya]

As for maps, how about listing all possible maps for those areas that have a limited number of possible spawns in their detailed info page?

[Flux]

As for maps, how about listing all possible maps for those areas that have a limited number of possible spawns in their detailed info page?

i'm not entirely sure what you mean, but yes. good idea. I'd like the wiki to have everything, eventually. For instance, now there are pages for unique rings, unique amulets, etc. Just the names and stats. Long term I hope there will be individual pages for every item of note in the entire game. It's obvious how much could be added to the SoJ page, but ridiculously minute details are what game wikis are all about. Item changes in patches, links to strategy guides that recommend the item, build types that it works well with, comparable items in comparison, etc.

So yes, for maps and levels, anything you can think of would be good. The minimum is quests, superuniques there, dungeon levels, etc. ideally such a page would answer every question a person might ask about that area. General size, layout possibilities, min/max boss packs, builds it's popular/unpopular for, monsters that can spawn there, monsters that can only spawn there as bosses, average number of chests and their level, and on and on. Which is exactly why I'm talking up the wiki now while I'm putting up the basic pages, and hoping others with more specialized or technical knowledge will help out with the bells and whistles.

[ProfessionalBerg]

Hmm, interesting project.

The monster skill damage can be found out by looking at the skills.txt and skilldesc.txt (I don't remember exactly which ones), as well as monstats.txt or something. Will be quite alot of work...

[EDIT]: Also, could I ask to get the privilege of writing quest pages? I will try to include everything I know about them. Not right now, but maybe in the evening I can start. Or maybe tomorrow...

[Flux]

Hmm, interesting project.

The monster skill damage can be found out by looking at the skills.txt and skilldesc.txt (I don't remember exactly which ones), as well as monstats.txt or something. Will be quite alot of work...

[EDIT]: Also, could I ask to get the privilege of writing quest pages? I will try to include everything I know about them. Not right now, but maybe in the evening I can start. Or maybe tomorrow...

You or anyone can have the privilege of working on any pages you like. Wikis are democracy in action. Or perhaps mob rule? At any rate, the quests pages are actually fairly up to date. I wikified the old quest pages I wrote for v1.09, and updated a few of the references and tips, and did a new special quests page, and a pandemonium event page (with info taken entirely from some forum posts here abouts, since I've not played on the realms in years and had no first hand exp). They can, of course, be further updated and improved; all I really changed were multiple references to which bosses were potentially MSLE, since that used to matter and no longer does.

[stephan]

I've seen some obvious mistakes in a few places, and a few things that are IMO too much of an opinion to be in a Wiki. Thing is, I would like to help out to correct it, but I'm not sure if my corrections should be discussed and if so, where?

I have no prior experience with writing in a Wiki.

[Orphan]

I guess another question that should be asked is whether we're only doing 1.11 data?

[Flux]

A lot of the pages in the wiki now were just cut and paste from old dii.net content pages. They'll all be updated and improved over time, but I'm worrying more about getting the skeleton of essential pages up before I start doing editing on older pages. That being said, absolutely I want to fix wrong/outdated figures and such (I did all the char skills pages from scratch since the old ones were versions ago), but if something's just old in the comments on a page (quite a few of which I wrote upwards of 8 years ago), that's not as high a priority. Also, in my experience with wikis (I set up the one on the network Hellgate site.) casual readers are much more likely to fix a few errors here and there, typos, old references, etc, than they are to create whole new pages with screenshots and tables and such.

Pages are very quick and rough in many cases now; check out any of the main character pages, for instance; they could (and will) all greatly increase in size, content, scope, and value. I just had to get the most basic info up and move on with so many other pages to create.

As for style, Elly started off working on the Amazon section of the wiki, and converted a number of strategy guides over. I've not added any more yet, since I'm not sure how we're going to handle that aspect of things. Wikis don't usually hold strategies, since they are by definition "opinion," rather than encyclopedia info. (There's opinion on the other pages, but hopefully it's consensus, uncontroversial, useful tip type opinion.) We are simultaneously working on a whole redesign for the entire d2 site, and as part of that we'll have a new, web2.0 style strategy section (amongst other things) so it should all be far easier to update, more cohesive, and an improvement over the old strategy section, and the ongoing "links to forum posts from a stickied thread in another forum" thing we've got going now. You can check out how strategies and reader journals and user screenshot sections and all those other things are handled with modern website technology on the WoW or HGL sites in the network, if you want a sneak preview. I'm personally quite eager to see the Hardcore Graveyard reborn; that was my favorite feature I ever made up for this site (facts of the day were fun too), and i greatly regret that I just never had/made the time to keep it updated. I still get burial submissions from time to time, despite it not being easily found now, and not updated in like, 7 years. (Pre d2x, at any rate.)


As for d2 patch versions, I'd be happy to have pages for every version of the game, and I'm archiving some of the older version stuff we have on the site now, (check out the Monsters Archive, for state of the art monster info from about a year before the game was released) but my main focus in the hours I have to spend on this is current v1.11 info, since I think that's what most readers (people less expert/knowledgeable about the game than strat forum regulars) are after.


On monster spells and TCs and such, as Orphan points out, it's highly complicated and situational. And it would be great if eventually there were pages in the wiki to explain every bit of that, and people would get the most precise answers from running ATMA. (We're going to be adding a number of calcs in the future, so online script checking should be easier.) However, casual fans of the game aren't going to take that effort, and probably don't care about every last possible detail. So for the basic monster pages, I'm just looking for approximate info, which can link to another page devoted specifically to that topic. I think in that simple a particular monster table it's sufficient to say a given monster's top drop is armor66/weapon66, for instance, and if people really want to know that a champion in one particular area can get up to weap69, they can learn that with further study.

Similarly, it would be helpful to say something like (figures invented for this example) Dark Shaman Guest Monsters on Hell do 39-67 damage with their fireballs. If it's 5% higher or lower than that in some particular situation, then we can explain that more thoroughly on some kind off monster spell damage page, but it's the basic info I'm after, since even if not 100% correct, it's far better than the zero info now listed on monster spell damage.


Also, wikis grow by accretion, like coral reefs before global warming killed them all. Just get up some basic info and people with special knowledge will add to it over time. Which is why I'm doing the monster pages now as basically the AS versions with a few added bits of info. I'd like to have more goodies on them immediately, and I'll go back eventually to add in more facts and figures, but the hours I'd spend researching those things now would be better spent putting up more general purpose wiki pages. Which is why I was hoping someone could point me to a handy list of these things, for the short term?


Also, if anyone has ideas for other pages to add, other info to add to current pages, etc, go for it. it's not the dii.net wiki that you guys get to make suggestions about. It's a d2 wiki; anyone can comment, or just dive in. I'm doing the bulk of the initial work since (to mix a metaphor) it needs a skeleton to get off the ground. I did the same thing with the HGL wiki, and once the game came out and players had info to share, that wiki took on a life of its own. Given that the d2 community is vastly larger than the HGL one was/is/ever will be, and we know far, far more about the game after years of dissecting it, I think the info will grow amazingly.

[ProfessionalBerg]

Actually, scrap that. After thinking about it thoroughly, I realised that I actually don't know as much as I thought I know about DII quests: storyline, tricks etc. Perhaps being a wiki contributor is not my thing...