Diablo II Lord of Destruction patch 1.13

[AstroManLuca]

This is a big patch. Lots of fixes and balance changes.

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=21730644778&sid=3000

A new Mystery has been revealed!

- Players of Hell Difficulty Realm games are hereby warned once again,
that a series of new and challenging tests await you! The answer lies
within Diablo's Bosses, which span across the world from the Den of Evil
to the Throne of Destruction...


Major Bugs

- Fixed an item dupe bug.
- Video improvements for Intel Mac machines with OS 10.5 or greater.


Minor Bugs

- Uber Mephisto now checks for both Uber Baal and Uber Diablo to be killed before spawning summoned minions (Before he would only check for Uber Baal).
- The game will no longer stop and then restart the game music after the window loses and then regains focus.
- Fixed an issue where the game window would minimize when running in windowed mode when it lost focus.
- Fixed an issue where the game window wouldn't center properly when it was created.

Specific changes/improvements

- Respecialization is now possible! Completing the 'Den of Evil' quest will now additionally reward 1 free respec which can be saved. Players who have already completed this quest should receive 1 free respec in Hell difficulty.
- Increased the drop rate of high runes.
- Support for blit scaling in windowed mode. The game can now be maximized to the largest 4:3 resolution supported (hooray widescreen users).
- Some rare drop items now have an orange color. i.e. Runes and items required for Uber Tristam.
- Modified the gold bank limit to be a flat cap not bound by level.
- Nightmare/Hell WilloWisps champions/uniques have had their damage greatly reduced.
- Removed the requirements to create a hardcore character.
- Greatly reduced the explosion damage dealt by Fire Enchanted monsters.
- Uber Mephisto and Uber Baal's summoned minions no longer give experience.
- Removed Oblivion Knight's Iron Maiden curse.
- Hellfire Torch Firestorm proc rate has been reduced to 5%.
- Users can now toggle the display of text over the Health and Mana globes by clicking on the bottom area of each orb.
- Updated two Act 5 mercenary names to Klar and Tryneus.
- When creating a single player game, pressing the 'Enter' key now automatically creates a Hell difficulty game if possible.
- When creating a game, each difficulty button is now bound to a unique key: Normal 'R', Nightmare 'N', and Hell 'H'.
- The 'Enter Chat' Button in the battle.net waiting room is now bound to the 'Enter' key.
- Added the windows system buttons to the game window (MIN, MAX, CLOSE).
- Added new command line parameter '-nofixaspect' which allows users to not fix the aspect ratio to 4:3 when maximizing windowed mode. This lets the game 'stretch' to fill your monitor.
- Added support for '-sndbkg' command line switch. This enables sound in background.
- Added support for '-nosound', '-window', and '-windowed' command line options.


Revised Skill balance for Player Character classes


Amazon

-Immolation Arrow - Increased radius of Explosion effect by 33% and Immolation effect by 50%.
-Immolation Arrow - Explosion effect damage increased by 20%.
-Immolation Arrow - Increased base duration by 33%.


Assassin

-Shadow Master - Increased resistance range per point from 5-80 to 5-90.


Barbarian

-Whirlwind - Reduced initial mana cost by 50%.
-Masteries - Changed critical strike chance from 0-25 to 0-35.


Paladin

-Blessed Hammer - No longer ignores resistances of undead and demons.


Druid

-Werebear - Damage bonus increased by 15% across all ranks.
-Werebear - Increased health by 25% and armor by 1% per point.
-Shockwave - Synergy from Maul adds 5% damage per point.


Necromancer

-Blood Golem - Removed negative shared life effect (player no longer loses life when golem takes damage).
-Corpse Explosion - Increased base damage dealt from 60% - 100% to 70% - 120% of corpses health.
-Poison Nova - Increased base damage by 15%.


Sorceress

-Firewall - Synergy receives 1% damage per point of Inferno and Blaze and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Blaze - Synergy receives 2% damage per point of Firewall and 4% per point of Warmth.
-Hydra - Increased base damage by 15% per rank.
-Hydra - Increased base speed of Hydra projectile.
-Hydra - Reduced cooldown by 25%.
-Lightning Mastery - Reduced overall effect by 15%.

I bolded the things that I think would make a big difference. Seriously... re-specialization? Reducing some of the insane damage from FE and Burning Souls? No more Iron Maiden? NERFED HAMMERDINS??? Seems pretty crazy.

And of course Corpse Explosion, which was already powerful, is now even more powerful! Sounds like fun. God damn, now I might actually want to play again. Yikes.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Hard to believe a game nearly 10 years old is still getting patches. Wildly popular game or not, that's amazing for a non-MMO with no monthly fees.

Kudos to Blizzard.

 

[Jeeebus]

"big" patch lol.

It was nice of Blizz to address things the players really cared about, like barb dropping, aura stacking, tppk, etc. etc. Oh wait...

About the only good thing in there is no more uber leveling.

It's a weird patch because there's a few items in there that seem to be attempts at anti-botting, but then they go and remove iron maiden from oblivion knights, which was probably the biggest impediment to botting chaos sanctuary.

 

[AstroManLuca]

"big" patch lol.

It was nice of Blizz to address things the players really cared about, like barb dropping, aura stacking, tppk, etc. etc. Oh wait...

About the only good thing in there is no more uber leveling.

It's a weird patch because there's a few items in there that seem to be attempts at anti-botting, but then they go and remove iron maiden from oblivion knights, which was probably the biggest impediment to botting chaos sanctuary.

I guess you're right. Thing is I actually never really played D2 online. A little bit here and there, but I did a lot of single player. Thus I never had to worry about cheaters.

If I did, though, I definitely would have wanted to see some new system to combat cheating. The changes are nice, but they'd have to completely overhaul their online system in order to actually stop the level of hacking and modding people do.

 

[Fallengod]

Yeah thats alot of changes. Im glad they finally somewhat nerfed hammerdians. So overpowered....

I see they removed experience from the uber minions. This is a huge change and will probably make some people angry lol.

Some of those changes are funny. Like the corpse explosion used to be really powerful many patches ago, but then they nerfed it so people stopped playing necro. Looks like they added it back now lol.

I wonder what this new mystery is though. Everytime they say something like that, the game gets harder.

 

[Kromis]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2031823

Just in case the mods want to fuse the two threads together

 

[Jeeebus]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2031750

Just in case the mods want to fuse the two threads together

why would the mods want to fuse a thread about a new patch in D2 with a thread about how expensive WC3 is?

Why don't we merge the Dragon Age difficulty thread with the "I suck at Modern Warfare 2 online" thread?

 

[Maximilian]

why would the mods want to fuse a thread about a new patch in D2 with a thread about how expensive WC3 is?

Why don't we merge the Dragon Age difficulty thread with the "I suck at Modern Warfare 2 online" thread?

Lmao

 

[Occam11]

Reinstalling D2 now.

 

[konakona]

I was looking for changes pertaining d2 classic, since thats' all I play.

But seriously, Jeeebus totally hit the nail on its head: who the farq cares about the rest when TPPK is still rampant? That's more than half of the reason why the game is all but dead. I am almost smelling conspiracy theory how they go out of their way to punish players that use innocuous tools like maphack to ease the pain of tedious leveling and turn a blind eye on something so disruptive and damaging like TPPK. This is why I made an account (and still have one) that has a four letter word and blizzard in it. Sure, why wouldn't they wanna do everything to make sure this game is dead, it's not subscription based and probably has an archaic profit model destined for fail (compared to modern MMORPG's which are cash cows, that is). The less useless d2 players they have, the more resources they would have to put into more profitable stuff like WoW.

 

[waffleironhead]

see the poisonmancer gets some love

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Pathetic patch

I have all the respect for Blizzard for the wonderful games they make, but they should have just called it quits after 1.10 really, instead of making a half assed attempt that ignored the major issues going on with Diablo 2

And none of it sounds hard to fix... The skill balance changes are particularly laughable, why did they pick those skills? Did that patch team ever play Diablo 2 online post 1.10? LOL I think not... Just to give an example, why is the amazong immolation arrow buffed, BUT HER SPEAR SKILLS STILL SUCK HARDCORE? Did blizzard not notice NO ONE made spearazons because they were useless? (fend cancel bug, low damage, etc)

Then you have the pathetic Druid fire spells, and the horrible synergies, like how a fire claw werebear needs to max the said fire spells to be any good, but then you cant use those spells in werebear form, so LOL FAIL Blizzard, FAIL

And why the hell is enigma still in the game?

Hmpf... Not like I was gonna go back to D2, the game has been dead for some years already, specially the Hardcore community due to the rampant TPPKs

I think the best gift they could give to old time D2 players was to return D2 classic back to pre lod days, 1.06 at least, now that was awesome... Lod was never that good, it took more away from the game than it added

Seems to be a trend in Blizzard games actually, the original game is awesome, but they keep breaking the game with expansions, lol

 

[shortylickens]

Diablo 3 is about a year or so away, and Diablo 2 has been out for a LONG time. You guys should be damn grateful they choose to support it at all, instead of whining.
I wish about 50 of my favorite games got support like this. Have you tried getting Magic: The Gathering running under Windows XP? ITS A FUCKING BITCH!

 

[Kromis]

why would the mods want to fuse a thread about a new patch in D2 with a thread about how expensive WC3 is?

Why don't we merge the Dragon Age difficulty thread with the "I suck at Modern Warfare 2 online" thread?

LMAO! I must have copied and pasted the wrong tab! Thanks for the catch mate!

 

[Joemonkey]

when will they patch in the ability to support a higher resolution than 800x600?

 

[Zenoth]

when will they patch in the ability to support a higher resolution than 800x600?

I think they'd need a completely new textures library for that, they can't just "stretch" the existing ones. I for one was also hoping that they would do it, it's good to support a decade-old (nearly) game, but if you do it... it'd be nice to do it with some basic standards, I don't think anyone still plays most games today at 800x600, unless of course they are obliged to do it due to the game's own resolutions/engine limits.

 

[AstroManLuca]

I think they'd need a completely new textures library for that, they can't just "stretch" the existing ones. I for one was also hoping that they would do it, it's good to support a decade-old (nearly) game, but if you do it... it'd be nice to do it with some basic standards, I don't think anyone still plays most games today at 800x600, unless of course they are obliged to do it due to the game's own resolutions/engine limits.

This, except replace "textures" with "sprites." The reason it is not easy to use a higher resolution is because the game uses sprites for everything. 3D rendered games use 3D models with textures on them, and the models can be rendered at any resolution. Maybe the textures will look bad at too high a resolution, but at least the models would look better. You'd get zero benefit from rendering sprites at a higher resolution, though.

 

[konakona]

Diablo 3 is about a year or so away, and Diablo 2 has been out for a LONG time. You guys should be damn grateful they choose to support it at all, instead of whining.
I wish about 50 of my favorite games got support like this. Have you tried getting Magic: The Gathering running under Windows XP? ITS A FUCKING BITCH!

Not if you follow the history of LOD launch, when they intentionally nerfed everything in classic just so people would buy LOD at all. LAME.

 

[Ayah]

People still play D2?

 

[waffleironhead]

People still play D2?

I reinstalled after the latest ladder reset, but the abundance of bots made things less enjoyable.

 

[Zenoth]

People still play D2?

Tens of thousands still do, not all of them at once of course (unless perhaps during the week-ends), but it's still going on strong enough that Blizzard still finds it a good idea to support it almost a decade later, and lots of people will still be playing it after D3 comes out, and years to follow, even if it means off-line only, Diablo 2 is one of those rare jewels in the video gaming industry that doesn't have to worry about aging.

 

[konakona]

Tens of thousands still do, not all of them at once of course (unless perhaps during the week-ends), but it's still going on strong enough that Blizzard still finds it a good idea to support it almost a decade later, and lots of people will still be playing it after D3 comes out, and years to follow, even if it means off-line only, Diablo 2 is one of those rare jewels in the video gaming industry that doesn't have to worry about aging.

I agree on the rare jewels part, and also grateful about them extending their service of online servers. The thing I simply don't get his how they waste so much energy hunting down totally harmless, innocuous helper tools like maphack, yet do NOTHING about a deadly virus like TPPK, all the while LOD was still relatively hot.

Sorry for repeating myself, but it just can't be stressed enough how stupid the whole thing is. For stuff like duping, I understand how hard it would be for them to do something about it when people just can't get by without already duped items they bought with their own effort. But TPPK? c'mon. To give an analogy, TPPK is like a speedhack in counter-strike, whereas maphack would have been like ventrilo and its likes. They never ban anyone for using TPPK and pissing everyone off, even after multiple hack reports.

 

[TridenT]

Wow. FML. My hammerdin is a worthless piece of shit now. Sad times guys. No uber leveling anymore?

fuck.. Seriously, man fuck. >_< You realize how many people built shit all around hammerdins?

Well Blizz sorcs are unaffected I guess...

It would have been nice to get a lot of new items though.

 

[Fenixgoon]

Wow. FML. My hammerdin is a worthless piece of shit now. Sad times guys. No uber leveling anymore?

fuck.. Seriously, man fuck. >_< You realize how many people built shit all around hammerdins?

Well Blizz sorcs are unaffected I guess...

It would have been nice to get a lot of new items though.

that's what the respec is for. plus the hammers are lame as shit. vengeance FTMFW.

 

[TridenT]

that's what the respec is for. plus the hammers are lame as shit. vengeance FTMFW.

But I can barely magic find with a hammerdin on some places now...