DiabloFans

Gotcha. Will that break the current wiki? I don't really want to kill what's already been done. My goal was just to make a couple of pages that would have item comparisons in an easier-to-read format. I think drawing on actual source data is more elegant than typing information manually for each page, but it wouldn't really be a huge amount of stuff. Maybe it's easier to make a page of "raw item values" that other templates can draw on, rather than re-making all of the existing templates?

The goal as far as I'm concerned is to make some pages of "Here are all of the shields that can have 3 or more sockets" or "This is a list of pole arms that can have 4 or more sockets" - that sort of thing.

This isn't so much about string bow-a-zon play, but I have tremendous success with Amazons using Lightning Fury as my primary attack and Ice Arrow as my secondary. Sounds crazy, but it's easy enough to switch weapons (and selected skills) with the W key. The build requires some gear, but it's HC-ready, Hell-ready, and a monster would need to be immune to physical, immune to cold, and immune to lightning in order to be unkillable. Cold Aura merc is a must-have for this to slow enemies and keep them away. Also, the Delirium rune word is simply a godsend for all ranged builds.

20 Lightning Fury
20 Valk
20 Freezing arrow
20 Cold Arrow (just for the bonus damage to Freezing arrow)
1 point each in: Inner Sight, Slow Missiles, Decoy, Dodge, Avoid, Evade (pre-reqs for Valk)
1 point each in: Critical Strike, Penetrate (pre-reqs for Pierce)
1 point in Ice arrow (pre-req for Freezing Arrow)
1 point each in: Poison Jav, Lightning Bolt, Plague Jav (pre-reqs for Lightning Fury)
All the rest of your points should go into Pierce. In fact, if you want to lean on Lightning Fury instead of Freezing Arrow, I'd max pierce once Cold Arrow is at 10 so you can get up to 100% pierce, which is godly with Lightning Fury.

A buriza has 100% pierce and is a great weapon until you can get near that number without it, then you can switch to a rune word bow of your choice.
Titan's Revenge and eventually Thunderstroke are the must-haves for javelins.

For play:
Le the Valk and your Act 2 Merc tank for you. Stay behind them and blow stuff up. Put as many points in vit as you feel comfortable with, and then max the heck out of dex. You want to be around 300 dex as an endgame goal to get loads of physical damage in addition to your skills. Put no points in Energy (use lots of mana pots). Look at the gear you want to use and plan Strength accordingly. Get a frost merc once you hit nightmare is amazing, before then use a defense merc. For gear, you want to focus on +skills as much as possible. With a relatively weak play schedule and the more common gear, I found it fairly easy to get up to +11 javelin skills / +9 bow skills. Once you're annihilating everything, start upgrading to -resist stuffs. If you can get an insight pole arm for your merc, you'll be able to ditch the mana pots and the extra healing pots, though rarely needed, just might save your life. This build takes little to no damage because of range, speed of kills, and the two badass tanks. it's my preferred build for farming Hell Cows.

You've done great things here, Sixen! Good luck with EG, and I'm sure I'll see you around.

Quote from Verity

Don't forget! You can now respec a characters skills and attributes!

"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."

In addition, the Hell difficulty bosses sometimes drop "Essence" items. Combining all of the essences in the Horadric Cube will create an item that, when used, resets your skills and attributes just like the Den of Evil reset.

the new spam filter is amazing.

type in:
/filtermsg
and then whatever key words (or phrases) you want to filter. Any message containing those words will not be displayed.

So, if there's a bot spamming "www.somediablotfarmbotsite.com is great, lots of items!"

you can
/filtermsg www.somediablofarmbotsite.com
and that line of text will never again appear (nor any other line containing that website).

OR

you can
/filtermsg lots of items!
and message that contains the exact phrase "lots of items!" somewhere in the text will not be displayed.

With fewer than 10 filters, I'm only seeing bots join and leave my games now.

Quote from apples

the iron golem *should* stay with you just like a merc should. however there are some theories and rumors about the lvl at which your golem is. such as, if you equip a +3 iron golem head, and summon your golem, then switch to homunculus, does the golem lose that +3 lvls? some say yes, and some say no.

the golems do not actually do that much damage, and fire golems are really just used in pvp more for their holy fire aura to ping 1 hp opponents. the best merc would be either a prayer merc or might merc. you want as much crushing blow on him as you can get since he will likely be your main boss killer (ce and nova are pretty slow against diablo and baal). holy frost will only cause monster bodies to shatter into ice and melt, thus taking away corpses for ce or summons. if you need crowd control, attract, terror, confuse and decrep can work if you get stuck in a pinch.

Good to know. I've been using Fire Golem because of the synergy with LR, but the build I saw recommended earth golem for the slowing effect. I'll probably end up with the might merc.

In other news, the lightning sorc is pretty fun. Level 40 and already over 1k max damage (sure, sure, 500 damage on average, but still!).

Edit: Now I'm level 70 with +4 lightning skills from items and I'm over 5k max damage. Pretty much 1-shotting any non-boss creatures in nightmare.

Quote from Kickin_It

Quote from kahdrick

Edit: Okay, I've made myself a Wiki user profile (why are there two separate logins for forums and wiki editing?) and I'm going to start compiling some lists. Please let me know if I screw anything up and how I can fix it!

Yup, the log-in's for the forums and the wiki aren't connected.

Also, don't worry about screwing up; it's a wiki! There's nothing you can do that can't be undone.

You have no idea of the pain this statement will cause in the wrong hands.

Fortunately, I have the right hands! Or hand. One of them. The other is a left.

The list format doesn't seem to work with the Diablo II item pages. I know the data is there somewhere, since I can display it in the picture-box format used within the current D2 items pages, but I can't figure out how to use that data in the creation of a table similar to what's been done for the D3 pages. What am I missing?

Quote from Apoc

Good questions Kahdrick. You're right, it doesn't quite have the architecture that wowhead uses to make it's information accessible, but our wiki is searchable in some limited ways. For example, while the main namespace is not searchable for item terms because almost all the items get transcluded in, you will need to perform a search specifically in the Data namespace by using the advanced search options:

(anything with +damage to Wizards only)
http://www.diablowik...Advanced+search

As long as we're consistent with the naming on the attributes, they should be searchable if you know the terms to look for.

There are also item lists that we create for ease of comparison: Wand_List. For now it's just a compilation of items within the same class comparing basic stats. If you wanted to know which items deal fire damage for example that's a little harder, but if you think it's going to be useful you might want to create a list for that for others to use.

Finally, you can also use google to search specifically our items Data section by using the search terms:
site:www.diablowiki.com/Data:items "Fire Damage"
It's not reliable because not all the pages have been crawled by google, but that might improve over time.

Thanks Apoc! This is exactly the sort of information I was looking for. I didn't even know about the advanced search, or that you could use Google to search such a limited scope as one website. Very cool.

I'm not sure if I'll have time (or be able to make such pretty pages as you fellas), but I'll see about learning wiki-speak and then try to make pages for the lists I more commonly look up, too. I mean, I'm making the lists already anyway, right?

Edit: Okay, I've made myself a Wiki user profile (why are there two separate logins for forums and wiki editing?) and I'm going to start compiling some lists. Please let me know if I screw anything up and how I can fix it!

Hi Gang!

First I'd like to thank you all for such great work on the various wikis. You all really do a phenomenal job.

Second, I have a feature request: I'd like to be able to show and compare all items that share a particular attribute (or set of attributes).

I'm not sure if this is something that can be implemented within the wiki at all, or if this would need a separate tool created, but I often find that while I'm looking for ideal gear for my D2 characters, I want to make lists of - for example - all items that provide an aura. Or all items that have a "proc on hit" ability. Or all items with % magic find. Or resist fire. And so forth. Right now, there's really no way to do this. You're stuck looking through literally every item and just writing down the ones you like. It's slow and clunky.

In fantasy dreamland:
I'd like to see a search similar to wowhead.com's item search filters, combined with a paper-doll system such as the one at chardev.org, with the ability to save and/or export wish lists.

In reality:
I'm fairly certain that the wiki is just a collection of cross-linked pages and not an actual database, but since it inherently is able to search for text terms, is there a way to parse that for specific phrases in order to fake a database-esque behavior and auto-generate a "disambiguation" page that would list all item pages which contained the term that you searched for? Maybe something as simple as being able to limit the search to item pages only?

Thanks everyone, and I understand if this is beyond the scope of a wiki.

home channel is something I've wanted for a loooong time and it works beautifully! All of your characters share the same home channel, too, and it persists across logins. you don't even have to /go home when you first sign in to chat - it just defaults you to your home channel.

I'm not sure how the ignore list works - if it perma-squelches people or not, but it seems like the spambotters are countering by having hordes of bots. Where I used to get 1 every few minutes in a non-restricted game, I now get an endless stream, keeping the game nearly full all the time (good), but so I can't see a damn thing ever (bad).

Quote from apples

well a pure novenec is pretty terrible at pvm, so usually, as with any truly effective pvmer, you need to hybridise your build. get some summons to serve as meatstack, and invest in a couple points of corpse explosion. you can keep lr as your main curse, which will help ce with fire dmg, but u could also use amp after you get enough corpses. as soon as you can, get an insight merc, and then after your +skills are enough, make an insight iron golem, that will free up your merc for something more of a boss killer.

Thanks Apples

I must profess my ignorance here... how does iron golem work? I've always thought it ate the item and that you then needed a new item every time you summon it... I doubt I'd be able to make a new insight every time I join a game, so I figure there's something to the skill that I don't properly understand.

As for my current play, I've got a single point in all of the summon skills, for future +skills items to take advantage of, but at level 41 I find I really need some serious gear to be able to play at a sustained level. I'm at 11 poison nova, 10 lower resist, 4 poison dagger (probably a mistake this early on), and 1 in all of the pre-req skills, the entire summon tree, and bone armor. I figure I'm done putting points into LR, and from here on out was just going to buff PN and Synergies until it was maxed, but maybe I should buff my imp golem first? I've decided that, while using LR, I should focus on the fire golem as my alt elemental attacker, and was going to get a frost aura act 2 merc.

In theory it all sounds great to me, even as I write this, but the fact of the matter is that I can't kill things that other builds dispatch with ease. Insight will be a big help, to be sure, and once I get Trang gloves and Bramble armor, I'll be in business, but until then I think I'm stuck farming with another class.

So I rolled a poison nova necro... I can see where this class will be powerful eventually, but holy cow this this worthless without good gear. Definitely a bad first class to roll after reset. I'm level 41 and I presently only get 3 combos of lower resist + poison nova (for about 450 damage per nova if lower resist is up and the monster has no base resists) before I'm totally out of mana. Even spamming pots like crazy I have to go back to town constantly, and I can't really solo anything past act 3 (I haven't even tried meph yet, the council almost owned me). I can see where getting better gear, like trang gloves, shield, bramble armor, etc. will really make this build rock, but as a basic MFer it's pretty awful. Plus I was 100% worthless until level 30, almost fully leeching my exp since I couldn't kill a damn thing on my own.

Switching to lightning sorc and life is *much* easier.

I still have dreams of making a procadin conviction/zeal build, but that's possibly the most gear-intensive build imaginable what with the need to stack all of those rune word auras.

The lesson learned here is that the reason pretty much everyone builds a sorcy or pally first is that in bad gear, those are the strongest classes. Ahh well.

Quote from Nightblaze1

Ok, well i've been thinking about this little dilemma I have with the end-game of Diablo 3. So far what it consists of is:

• The challenges of Inferno
• PvP
• Item Farming

Blizzard confirmed in their panels this weekend that there is hidden content for the endgame, and that if endgame really does feel boring to the players, that they are open to (and it sounds like they're already planning) more content to be patched in later.

I'm imagining something similar to the Uber-Tristram from D2.

Quote from Soul

None for me, my sig explains it all lol

6 month resets are freaking stupid In D2, I'd love a year long but to compromise(like bash said earlier in the year and about a poll I never even knew about) is a 9 month ladder season(that seems reasonable)

However, Blizzard seems hell bent on sticking to 6 month resets for that completely and utterly hacked to shit game now

Even after they got a lot of feedback from players from the first poll they took(last year I think).

I'm just not into D2 anymore with all the changes they've done since 1.09...

If there were no bots farming exp and items, then a year long system would seem reasonable, but with the absurd number of bots (and the almost inherent need for them in the game design), more than six months leads to a lot of downtime for the rest of us. Basically, I believe that bot-related power leveling and item farming is what fuels the shorter ladder season.

Well done on your high levels, though! In all these years I've never taken a toon past 88.