Another article on Diablo II has been posted, this one on Gamecenter. It's mostly a bunch of smart-ass replies to emails they got about an editorial they posted a few days ago, saying how bad it was that Bliz made game changes in the v1.03 patch. Post wacky stuff, ask for feedback, insult those who give it. Interesting strategy.
We've updated around a 20 new quick strategy tips, these for the Paladin and Necromancer and Barbarian. A wide-variety of topics are covered for all three characters, including skill tips, strategies for various tough monsters, PvP, and much more.
Also, some people using MIE5.0 have had lock up problems in our Strategy Section. If you've had those problems in the past, try looking at any of the Paladin, Barbarian, or Necromancer quick tips, or the main Strategy page: we believe we've fixed the problem now. Let us know how it goes, good or bad, if you please. We'll reformat the rest of the pages in Strategy if things appear to be working propertly for everyone now.
Blizzard have released a new patch for the Mac version taking it to version 1.03b. There are no update notes on this patch on Blizzard's patch page so please drop us a note on any changes from v1.03 and we will update our patch page. The 3.7mb patch can be downloaded here.
CGO has an article on Diablo II, with a lot of tips and basic strategies on how to play. Likely nothing you don't already know if you've been playing for a while, but you can take a look at it for yourself right here. Thanks to Alton of Warcraftiii.net for the tip.
This week's terrific Cinematic shot is one of those images that flashes by, but stays in your mind. Where at first glance it appeared to be set in The Tavern, this shot actually features The Dark Wanderer in the encampment outside Lut Gholein at the beginning of his final, tragic transformation. This is a shot of mystery and visual elegance. Our captioned image is right here.
A few tasty morsels on Darkness for you to savour.
An NPC updated, read all about the basically worthless town guards that are hireables in Act Two.
A new Monster of the Day has appeared, and it's Treehead Woodfist, a SuperUnique you get every single game in the Dark Woods. Mr. Extra Fast Extra Strong himself, and you can check out his full stats and even sound effects right here.
And something interesting is on the Darkness main page, a short article listing the rarest monsters of Diablo II. The opposites of Fallen and Fetish and Zombies, these are monsters that you hardly ever see in the game. There are five uncommon selections, including Giant Mosquitos and Froggies. Info about them and three others can be yours...
We've nearly had to put in a new wing on the HardCore Graveyard, with 20 more fresh ones just added. The world of Diablo II is apparently a pretty dangerous place, as we're getting heaps of Graveyard submissions, and have over 80 more yet to post. With so many more coming in that we have time to post, we're being selective, posting mostly over Clvl 20, and only ones that have pretty good info as well. They are being posted in the order they were received, and we're up through Monday, so if you sent one before Tuesday and it's not up now, go play a new HC to a higher level before you lag out or screw up and die horribly. ;) Submission info is at the bottom of the page, if you wish to join the party.
Blizzard has posted their MP3 of the Week, with more tasty Diablo II music. Today we have "Rogue" music heard in the Encampment in Act One, somewhat inspired by the town music of Diablo I. The principle instuments are a 12 string guitar and a dulcimer, and you can read the full liner notes by the composer, Matt Uelmen. If you wish to DL this music, we have links to the mp3 on our server and on Blizzard, for both Mac and PC. Click right here, and it's at the top of the table.
A couple of posts were made on the Realm Status Forum late Wednesday evening. The first is a repost, a sort of mini-FAQ addressing current technical issues with Battle.net. The second informs us of a recent boost in server capacity on the European Realm, which should do good things, including making your socks whiter and keeping your sandwich hot, just the way you like it.
And in a post elsewhere, Geoff Fraizer of Blizzard gives some info about what to do if your realm character seems to have vanished.
Another batch of Quick Tips are up, today covering the Sorceress and Amazon. You can see clever ways to use Teleport, Impale, Magic Arrow, start up a Bowazon, and much more. Again thanks to strategy guy Lanth for much of the work on these, and we'll have more quick tips tomorrow, and articles and full guides coming soon.
Both UK and US charts have been updated today, once again showing quite a difference in Diablo II sales. Diablo II still tops the PC Data US charts for week ending 29th of July and on this side of the pond Diablo II has held onto 4th place in the ELSPA UK charts for the second week. Icewind Dale which was at number 3 in the UK charts ahead of Diablo II last week has now slipped to number 7. A full list of the UK charts can be found over at Gamerush.com.
We are diligently keeping the Patch Page up to date, and have just put up the freshest version for your reading pleasure. You'll find about a half-dozen updates, and a whole new section in there. By the way, no word on when Patch 1.04 is due, nor exactly what it will contain. Will it plumb the depths of mystery, as its predecessor certainly has? Only time will tell. For now, review the latest info on Version 1.03, by clicking here.
We've added another 14 dead to the Hardcore Graveyard, bringing the body count to 25. Over 80 people sent them in yesterday, and lots more today, so there will be a dozen or so going up every day for a while. We are exercising some standards: if the caption supplied is very short or incomplete, or the character is under Clvl 20 or so, we might not post it, with so many others waiting their turn. Thanks to everyone who has sent them in so far... we thrill to your anguish. ;)
Thanks to Osiris, Alexander, and Lord Fiale for tips on the reviews.
And lastly, some more hacking info. In regards to the news item we posted about this a few days ago, many people have written in with their own horror stories of getting screwed with some worm or virus or Trojan Horse from using game hacks. This is definitely a consideration, as such mostly-anonymous programs distributed on backalley FTPs can quite likely have various viruses or other problems with them, either inserted by the original author, or added in by someone afterwards, who then redistributes it. So be aware that you are taking a risk with trainers and other unknown origin 3rd party programs.
Have you lost a character on Battle.net? No, we don't mean the ones taken down by Duriel or smited by 400 massing Wraiths in Hell Difficulty. We mean the "Player Not Found" kind, or the sort where you no longer see the character on the selection screen. If you've experienced either of these problems, read this post on the Technical Support Forum, and pray for a resurrection (of the non-Paladin type).
We've updated a dozen new Quick Tips to our Strategy Section. Today's batch includes eight on the Barbarian, and several more Miscellaneous Tips. Thanks to Lanthanide, our new Strategy Sections assistant, for doing the sorting and HTML on most of these. We'll have more new Quick Tips every day this week, as we work though the rather huge backlog of them that were sent in recently, as well as some other strategy goodies coming soon.
Geoff Fraizer is back at it today, with a fat batch of forum post replies. Here are some of the more interesting ones:
Four of the Diablo II forums have gone away, Geoff announces here. There are a few replies down the chain explaining why.
Lances (exceptional pikes) never drop due to a bug in the item generation. It was hoped this would be fixed in v1.03, but it doesn't appear to have been gotten to yet.
While not a change to how shields work, the different % blocking they do for different characters is being added to the display on the Blizzard Online D2 Guide.
A plea for a change in the Corpse Explosion nerfing gets a cut and paste reply from Geoff.
What will be fixed in v1.04? Geoff says we'll have to wait and see. We've heard that it will be more gameplay stuff, with of course some technical and bug fixing also
Some confusion about how poison skills and gems work is not exactly cleared up here.
Blizzard has updated their Patch Information page, with more information on the changes in Patch 1.03. Apparently their typewriter ribbon broke last time, so they weren't able to get all the facts on the page. ;p This update is brand new, so we've not had a chance to compare it to what we've been receiving in droves from site visitors. We'll amend our Patch Page as soon as we've had time to analyze the analysis. In the meantime, Blizzard's update may be found right here.
Update: And now, with more amendments that the U.S. Constitution, we encourage you to look over the Patch Page, where you can see many reflections of Blizzard's documentation changes and corrections. We've still many areas of speculation, and some "Confirmed Changes" not yet officially stated, but we're progressing in our detective work, and again thank those many who have helped us with this project.
We've updated the Hardcore Graveyard page with another 10 lucky characters. They range from Clvl 51 down to Clvl 2, and normally we wouldn't post one under Clvl 10, but this one is more amusing than most. The total body count is now eleven, so go take a look and mourn, or giggle, or feel overconfident and know that there's just no way your char will ever die like the rest of them. Info to submit your own fatality to the list is on the page.
3DGaming.Net have posted up a review of Blizzard's Barbarian Action Figure. If you are thinking of looking for a new beefy buddy for the your Action Man or GI.Joe, this review will give you an idea of what to expect. To fully test the plastic hunk, 3DGN tried everything under the sun, including direct linking their Barb with a Quake 2 soldier in a futile attempt to get a multiplayer action figure game up and running.
Another major update to our Patch 1.03 Analysis Page is posted this early morning. We've further details on Confirmed Changes, many new inclusions on Reported Changes, a couple of possible new bugs (although maybe not, we hasten to add), and a "Things to Try & Questions to Answer" wishlist of matters we'd like to know more about. The e-mails are continuing to flow in, so we can promise another update later today/tonight. In the meantime, settle in for a Monday morning mulling over on the Patch Page.
We have a new section opening today, and there's space for you inside! Not that you really want to be there. It's our Hardcore Character Graveyard. HC characters live fast and die young, but they don't have to be forgotten once they succumb to the ravages of the dungeons. You can tap out some info about them and the bottomless well of tragedy that was their death, include a screenie, and we'll add your very own headstone to the cemetery. We have our first lucky winner there now, to give you an idea of the format, so take a look and if you have one to send in, go right ahead, or think of us when next bad luck strikes. You can submit yours here, and yes, it was very, very sad, but life goes on. Well, for the rest of my characters anyway.
Many people have been emailing about this, so we're posting something on it as a public service. Just in case anyone doesn't know, there are tons of character editors, cheats, hacks, trainers, item generators, and other such programs that work just fine with Diablo II single player or open characters. (Not on Realm Characters though.) Many people use them to play around with a Clvl 99 char, or to see a skill with tons of points in it, which is not a big deal, but some people are trying to pass these off as real chars, or even sell them on eBay. Obviously it would be foolish to pay real money for a hacked character, especially one that you could have made yourself in 5 minutes with a freely-available program. So sad to say, you should be suspicious of any characters or items in an open game, and certainly of any open chars or items for sale on eBay or other such sites.
A new TenSpot on Gamespot has been posted, and it asks you to think about your favorite game world. Sanctuary, the world of Diablo I and II is listed, as is Azeroth, from Warcraft, and for show they have a bunch of the the drab, meaningless worlds slapped together for numerous other, lesser games as well. You can of course vote for your favorite, and even put in comments as to why. Be sure they are good comments, like these. Thanks to Houdini for the tip.
Darkness has upped another MotD for us. This time it's the big act 4 nasty, the Balrog. Returning from Diablo I, but improved over time to be less annoying. No more of the, "Now ve are mincing around in zircles; toasting at you vith our wussy Infernos. You can not keel us vith bows, Girlieman." old style, more direct punishment, though they still have Inferno and look much the same. Full info about all three species and all of their stats can be seen here.
A few new posts on the Battle.net forums from Blizzard employees that are worth a read:
A post makes some points about the drastic patch changes, especially the lack of proper documentation about them, but takes the argument a bit too far, as Geoff points out.
Some complaints about the info in the manual not matching how things work in the actual game are replied to by Geoff here. Keep in mind that for pretty obvious reasons, game packaging has to be printed in advance, and every game has last minute changes that create mistakes in the manual or the pictures on the box.
And a post has been made on the Tech Support forum about the changes to graphics and display in the v1.03 patch, giving suggestions to ensure top visual quality, and asking for feedback and facts if you have problems with it. Of course if you are like many people (including me) and think the v1.03 graphics in Glide are far too dark and oversaturated to play with, you've probably reverted them to the v1.02 style already.
GameSpot had a poll last week on which game's cinematics were best. Out of six nominees, three were BFD (Blizzard Film Department) products, and not surprisingly those three films finished in First (Diablo II, with 54%), Second (StarCraft, with 17%), and Third (BroodWar, with 10%) Place. Reader comments are posted now, including two about Diablo II, which you may read as bit one and bit two.
Thanks to our visitors and their excellent observational and e-mail skills :), we have a good-sized listing of changes wrought by today's patch, which brought us to Diablo II Version 1.03. We have a long list of "Confirmed" changes, including many not yet reported on the Blizzard site. In addition, we have a "Reported" section for those that sound feasible but are not yet fully proven. Find the skinny in our Patch 1.03 Analysis, and if you have other changes to report, follow the e-mail link on that page, or this one here. Brownies of Thanks to all who helped us with this project; they are listed on the Analysis page.
Update: Lots and lots of additions, clarifications and updates to the Patch Analysis Page, all marked for your ease. We encourage you to keep current by revisiting the page, and please continue to send your observations, as we intend to update frequently. Thanks again to all who are contributing to the page.
Many emails and forum posts have highlighted mixed feelings on the 3dfx graphic enhancements in the 1.03 patch. Benny Hsieh has mailed in this handy hint for those who may not prefer the new changes. All you need to do is use the d2glide.dll from version 1.02 and overwrite the version 1.03 file. If you preferred the graphics in 1.02 then download this file [54k] and unzip it to your Diablo II directory, selecting 'yes' to overwrite. If you are unsure about reverting make a backup of your existing d2glide.dll before making these changes. We weren't especially overjoyed with the 3dfx changes so tried this out and it works great. Applying the old dll may affect the playback of cinematics. Thanks again to Benny for this.
The file is 927kb so if you're at work or college you can bung it on a floppy to save you time later. Full readme is here and read the post below for some undocumented changes discovered so far.
A few undocumented changes have been made to skills. Conversion in the Paladin's Combat skills has been changed where the chance to convert has been reduced (stats updated). Corpse Explosion for the Necromancer appears to have been altered also but we have no screenshots with the hover details just yet. But word is that the radius and damage has been reduced with an increase to cost. Revive is now capped at +200% health and the Barbarian's Whirlwind now attacks one monster per animation. If you come across any other stats that have changed with patch 1.03 a screenshot of the hover description would be helpful in keeping the skill stats pages up to date. Thanks to Jared Jamesson, Lokimu and Quinn Lau for these.
Update: On the Diablo II Stragegy Forum, is a post by Geoff Fraizer, outlining changes to chararacter skills that were included in Patch 1.03 but not listed on the documentation. The changes include modifications to Necromancer, Barbarian and Paladin skills - Corpse Explosion, Revive, Whirlwind and Conversion - as well as changes in how experience is gained.
Patch 1.03 is now available for download. Many fixes and improvements have been applied. You can read the full readme here. At present there is an a problem with matching the versions when you try to connect to B.net after grabbing the patch. This will be fixed very soon.
Update:The "Battle.net is unable to properly identify your application version" issue has now been resolved and versions will now match. Thanks to Godslayer for the update.
The mysterious Black Tower Key item we reported earlier this week caused many of you to don your sleuth's hat, mainly to prove it was nothing more than a rumour. As we said before, it was originally found to be a piece of unused art during the closed beta (there's plenty of them tucked away) so there was every possibility it was a cut 'n' paste job. Most everyone was in agreement with that and Shlonglor AKA Geoff Fraizer emailed us to set the record straight:
"The Black Tower Key was a part of a Quest in Act III. You used to need the Key to get into the Durance of Hate but then it was changed to the Compelling Orb Quest. So, some dork has hacked that out of the game and taken some screenshots because it's no longer a part of the game."
Today we have a pretty cool feature; new info about Guild Halls, and better yet, new images of them. The Guild Halls Page has been extensively updated, with the new shots added to it, but if you want direct links, here you go. All three shots appear in two versions; the plain shot, and a mockup, with the shot inserted into a full game screenshot, so you can see just what it would be like if Guild Halls were actually in Diablo II, instead of just rumored to maybe be in a rumored expansion pack. The mockup shots are all linked from the main shots, and from the Guild Halls Page.
The Guild Vault -- storage space in your guild hall, with custom graphics.
The Guild Trophy Case -- The place you would have shown off your best loot to your guild mates.
The Icon Selector -- A very cool image, the look of the page where you would have picked your guild emblem and dual-color scheme.
Keep in mind that all of these are from months ago, back into early 2000, so these shots are not necessarily at all representative of how Guild Halls will be handled when/if they are implemented in Diablo II. But in any event, they are very cool shots to take a look at. Get them while they are hot.
Darkness has updated their daily monster, and it's got "chickeny" sound effects even. The Sand Leaper, a pesky little devil that you'll see in Acts 2 and 4, and as always, there are screenies, full stats on hit points, damage, Defense, and everything else. Click right here.
Affiliate site GameFAQs have updated their Diablo II Barbarian FAQ. The FAQ gives advice on how to distribute your skill points, stat points and how to fight enemies.
Kali has been updated once again taking it to version 2.1b. The new version fixes some minor problems discovered after the release of the v2.1a patch a few days ago. Download the new version right here. Thanks VE.
And coming soon, to a computer near you: Patch 1.03, which will be released by Blizzard in a few hours. Their post, on the Realm Update Forum, says the following:
All Diablo II Realms will be unavailable from 2a.m to 6a.m. PT (GMT-8) in order to update them with the latest patch.
Cross fingers and all goes well, this will make a very significant improvement to Realm issues, and will include corrections to some compatibility problems with video cards and such.
