Currently there is no clear structure or way to format skills in the wiki. We have a monster page design and an item page design, but no skill page design, and hundreds of skills pages are as of yet not even created.
The best format so far in my opinion has been done by Seth for the Sorceress skills. Here's an example:
The image to the right with the highlighted skill is brilliant I think, but the text could be better formatted by being included in a template. A clear skill picture in the upper left corner, clear boxes thatt detail class, level requirement a basic description, not to mention a skill progression table much like what Arreat Sumit uses for their skills: http://wiki.diablofans.com/index.php/Hydra
What else could be included do you all think? Perhaps we could have a section that links to items that provide bonuses to this skill? That would be a helpgful addition I think. Anything else you can think of?
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I wouldn't mind a good template getting developed for skill pages. It would help make them all uniform and clear. It's just having to go through and fit that template around 60 skill pages (the Sorceress ones) could prove tedious, although I'll gladly do it (along with anyone else that might want to help).
Well Arreat displays how the skill changes as you levels up the skill ,which is a great help in knowing how many points to spend. We should also include a field for showing where dminishing skills cap (Conviction at 130% and Lower Resist at 67% for example). That's something which Arreat is missing.
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Oh, yes, I see... Hm. That would be a good addition. Where would we get information on the diminishing return caps for skills, though? Would that just be analytical work?
Oh, yes, I see... Hm. Where would we get information on the diminishing return caps for skills, though? Would that just be analytical work?
Well that might prove trickier than I though. It's definatel in the files, but I coulnd't say for certain why the cutoffs are where they are. But they seem to be 70% for lower resist and 150 for Conviction.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
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PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
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Well, if you're sure you can at least do it for most of the skills, that should be good enough. If there are ones you can't find, there could always just be a guesstimate with an asterisk next to it to tell the reader so, or it could just be omitted for the time being.
What constitutes a diminishing return cap for a skill page though? For conviction it is easy because it hard locks at 150, but most other skills continue to increase at much lower rates.
For example, critical strike, every point below 7 increases the value at least 3 percent, between 7 and 13 is 2-3 percent, and every point after 13 is 1 or less. For all practical purposes, the skill caps out at 77% at level 42. What parts of this information should be on the wiki? For this skill it seems to have 2 split points, through the second is much harsher.
What constitutes a diminishing return cap for a skill page though? For conviction it is easy because it hard locks at 150, but most other skills continue to increase at much lower rates.
For example, critical strike, every point below 7 increases the value at least 3 percent, between 7 and 13 is 2-3 percent, and every point after 13 is 1 or less. For all practical purposes, the skill caps out at 77% at level 42. What parts of this information should be on the wiki? For this skill it seems to have 2 split points, through the second is much harsher.
Well the actual limit for critical strike is 80% it appears. There are no calculations present in skills.txt however. I'll need to look around and see if I can find the actual calculations somewhere. It seems they are natural logarithms though.
As for what to put up, I'm thinking for skills that do have these diminishing increases, we'll simply put in the top value, and the amount of skills points required to get there. Of course that may well be outside of the 20 range, but since we will definately include a table listing all levels up to 20, it shouldn't be that hard for a reader to figure out that if 20 points give 68% while 60 points give 80%, there's no need to spend all that much on it if you have +skill items. The first 20 levels are the most important anyway.
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
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You probably already have something similar, but I found a small tool that let me Copy-paste a table from The Summit, and it returns the data but separated by pipes, nice and simple to throw into a table: http://excel2wiki.net/ I'm not a fan of having to insert large amounts of formatting manually so that seems pretty useful to me, and let me build a table quickly and easily.
I threw together a test/sample table in a few mins on my Talk Page (Wasn't sure where to do a test/sample page.) Obviously color standards would help, but I don't think it looks half-bad. Can maybe split it into two groups of 10 like Seth has on the older Hydra page, but I don't think that's necessary. If it goes towards the bottom of the skill page, the long 20 table shouldn't interfere with anything.
Phrozen, for the +skills items, do you mean things like Enigma adding to teleport or Bloodletter adding to sword mastery & whirlwind? It might be good for the few skills that can cross classes via runewords to have a special note signifying this, with the item page linked of course.
The only other thing I can think of, is if you're doing a template is to include fields for whether a skill is Active or Passive, and the damage school. (School is actually already used on the new hydra page.)
I threw together a test/sample table in a few mins on my Talk Page (Wasn't sure where to do a test/sample page.)
You can crete your own sandbox for that. On you user page, create a link saying [[/Sandbox]]. Follow the link and create your own personal page to use for testing. That's how I usually test large templates without messing around with the rest of the wiki.
Quote from "Rousse" »
Obviously color standards would help, but I don't think it looks half-bad. Can maybe split it into two groups of 10 like Seth has on the older Hydra page, but I don't think that's necessary. If it goes towards the bottom of the skill page, the long 20 table shouldn't interfere with anything.
It depends, perhaps lower resolutions could mess perhaps mess it up. We'll have to test it.
Quote from "Rousse" »
Phrozen, for the +skills items, do you mean things like Enigma adding to teleport or Bloodletter adding to sword mastery & whirlwind? It might be good for the few skills that can cross classes via runewords to have a special note signifying this, with the item page linked of course.
I meant that if I go to the Sorceress teleport page and look at it, there will be a list at the bottom showing what items come with teleport on them (in this case, that's just enigma). Likewise if I go to Summon Skeleton, I will find a complete list of all unique, set and runeword items that have +to Summon skeleton. That way you can easily see what items will benefit your build.
Quote from "Rousse" »
The only other thing I can think of, is if you're doing a template is to include fields for whether a skill is Active or Passive, and the damage school. (School is actually already used on the new hydra page.)
PlugY for Diablo II allows you to reset skills and stats, transfer items between characters in singleplayer, obtain all ladder runewords and do all Uberquests while offline. It is the only way to do all of the above. Please use it.
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I meant that if I go to the Sorceress teleport page and look at it, there will be a list at the bottom showing what items come with teleport on them (in this case, that's just enigma). Likewise if I go to Summon Skeleton, I will find a complete list of all unique, set and runeword items that have +to Summon skeleton. That way you can easily see what items will benefit your build.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking it would be better to leave off class specific item bonuses from the skill pages, IE like wands giving potential bonuses to skeletons. With the exception of skills like Holy Shield, that only appear very rarely on items, I think that might deserve a small note. I don't know if there are any other skills that do that, HS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking it would be better to leave off class specific item bonuses from the skill pages, IE like wands giving potential bonuses to skeletons. With the exception of skills like Holy Shield, that only appear very rarely on items, I think that might deserve a small note. I don't know if there are any other skills that do that, HS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.
That seems sensible. Listing all items with +skeletons just for the necromancer would perhaps be a bit redundant.
But oskills will be included. Good, that gives us a pretty nice list of what is to appear as of now:
Name
Class
Prerequisite skills
Skill details for 20 levels
Skill detail for level where deminishing skills max.
Large image to the right to show where it is positionend in the skill tree.
Skill description
Synergies
Links to oskill items with that particular skill
Anything else?
I'd really like to create a comprehensive template for all of this, but I won't be home again until sunday, so I don't know if I'll be able to do anything about it before then.
Template isn't done, but that's what I've come up with so far.
First obvioius problem, there's no way we'll be able to fit 20 skills on one row for smaller resolutions, and I don't know how it will look on larger yet. The monitor I'm on at the moment (;)) can't display anything bigger than 1024x768, so I'm a bit limited at the moment.
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theres a way you may be able to do it using the picture
having each skill icon link to the specific page
That's not what I meant.
I meant listing 20 levels of damage, range and duration increments on one row won't work for smaller resolutions. How much damage hydra does level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4 etc. It's going to look really bad and mashed up.
On another note though, I was thinking of linking to articles through the skill tab procided on the page. It requires installing a plugin for the wiki software first however, so I'll need to check if we can do that.
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ah will it work if you embed a scroll bar into it so it shows only half of it at the beggining and you can scroll right to see other half (assuming that looks good and acceptable)
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ah will it work if you embed a scroll bar into it so it shows only half of it at the beggining and you can scroll right to see other half (assuming that looks good and acceptable)
Yeah that kind of obstructs the design I think. Then you can't overview everything at once with a glance, you'll have to go in and click back and forth.
There are two solutions that I can think of. Either we split it into two rows, one with 10 skills each, or, we move the skills further down so the image to the right doesn't obstruct the line. The second solution will still be problematic for lower resolutions, however it won't be impossible as it is currently.
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For the spacing you've got going, 20 won't fit in a row next to the pic in 1152x864 or 1280x1024. It looks like 20 would fit under 1400x900, but obviously that would make no sense for anyone viewing it under a dif res. Overall il looks ok under the higher resolutions.
Possible solutions to skill boxes are to list only odd skills 1-19, or do two 10 skill layers. This could be bad for skills with 4 variables though, would look kinda bulky. You could also try to decrease the cell width, but thats probably a bad idea since some skills will be xxx-xxx damage.
Thats all I can come up with at the moment
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The best format so far in my opinion has been done by Seth for the Sorceress skills. Here's an example:
http://wiki.diablofans.com/index.php/Hydra
The image to the right with the highlighted skill is brilliant I think, but the text could be better formatted by being included in a template. A clear skill picture in the upper left corner, clear boxes thatt detail class, level requirement a basic description, not to mention a skill progression table much like what Arreat Sumit uses for their skills: http://wiki.diablofans.com/index.php/Hydra
What else could be included do you all think? Perhaps we could have a section that links to items that provide bonuses to this skill? That would be a helpgful addition I think. Anything else you can think of?
Where is this skill progression table-type-thing?
Edit-
I'll go check the Summit I guess
For example, critical strike, every point below 7 increases the value at least 3 percent, between 7 and 13 is 2-3 percent, and every point after 13 is 1 or less. For all practical purposes, the skill caps out at 77% at level 42. What parts of this information should be on the wiki? For this skill it seems to have 2 split points, through the second is much harsher.
Info came from http://www.d2items.com/skills.php so it may be flawed, but i doubt it.
As for what to put up, I'm thinking for skills that do have these diminishing increases, we'll simply put in the top value, and the amount of skills points required to get there. Of course that may well be outside of the 20 range, but since we will definately include a table listing all levels up to 20, it shouldn't be that hard for a reader to figure out that if 20 points give 68% while 60 points give 80%, there's no need to spend all that much on it if you have +skill items. The first 20 levels are the most important anyway.
You probably already have something similar, but I found a small tool that let me Copy-paste a table from The Summit, and it returns the data but separated by pipes, nice and simple to throw into a table: http://excel2wiki.net/ I'm not a fan of having to insert large amounts of formatting manually so that seems pretty useful to me, and let me build a table quickly and easily.
I threw together a test/sample table in a few mins on my Talk Page (Wasn't sure where to do a test/sample page.) Obviously color standards would help, but I don't think it looks half-bad. Can maybe split it into two groups of 10 like Seth has on the older Hydra page, but I don't think that's necessary. If it goes towards the bottom of the skill page, the long 20 table shouldn't interfere with anything.
Phrozen, for the +skills items, do you mean things like Enigma adding to teleport or Bloodletter adding to sword mastery & whirlwind? It might be good for the few skills that can cross classes via runewords to have a special note signifying this, with the item page linked of course.
The only other thing I can think of, is if you're doing a template is to include fields for whether a skill is Active or Passive, and the damage school. (School is actually already used on the new hydra page.)
It depends, perhaps lower resolutions could mess perhaps mess it up. We'll have to test it.
I meant that if I go to the Sorceress teleport page and look at it, there will be a list at the bottom showing what items come with teleport on them (in this case, that's just enigma). Likewise if I go to Summon Skeleton, I will find a complete list of all unique, set and runeword items that have +to Summon skeleton. That way you can easily see what items will benefit your build.
Definately, those are good suggestions.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking it would be better to leave off class specific item bonuses from the skill pages, IE like wands giving potential bonuses to skeletons. With the exception of skills like Holy Shield, that only appear very rarely on items, I think that might deserve a small note. I don't know if there are any other skills that do that, HS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.
But oskills will be included. Good, that gives us a pretty nice list of what is to appear as of now:
Name
Class
Prerequisite skills
Skill details for 20 levels
Skill detail for level where deminishing skills max.
Large image to the right to show where it is positionend in the skill tree.
Skill description
Synergies
Links to oskill items with that particular skill
Anything else?
I'd really like to create a comprehensive template for all of this, but I won't be home again until sunday, so I don't know if I'll be able to do anything about it before then.
EDIT:
http://wiki.diablofans.com/index.php/Template:Infobox_Skills_%28Diablo_II%29
Template isn't done, but that's what I've come up with so far.
First obvioius problem, there's no way we'll be able to fit 20 skills on one row for smaller resolutions, and I don't know how it will look on larger yet. The monitor I'm on at the moment (;)) can't display anything bigger than 1024x768, so I'm a bit limited at the moment.
theres a way you may be able to do it using the picture
having each skill icon link to the specific page
i think this is possible using photoshop and adding imagemaps to the specific icons.
this is what i mean :
http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/popup/amazon-javelin.html
I meant listing 20 levels of damage, range and duration increments on one row won't work for smaller resolutions. How much damage hydra does level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4 etc. It's going to look really bad and mashed up.
On another note though, I was thinking of linking to articles through the skill tab procided on the page. It requires installing a plugin for the wiki software first however, so I'll need to check if we can do that.
There are two solutions that I can think of. Either we split it into two rows, one with 10 skills each, or, we move the skills further down so the image to the right doesn't obstruct the line. The second solution will still be problematic for lower resolutions, however it won't be impossible as it is currently.
median skills are still not set up yet lol
will be similar though for consistancy
Possible solutions to skill boxes are to list only odd skills 1-19, or do two 10 skill layers. This could be bad for skills with 4 variables though, would look kinda bulky. You could also try to decrease the cell width, but thats probably a bad idea since some skills will be xxx-xxx damage.
Thats all I can come up with at the moment