New Diablo Clone mechanics revealed for Resurrected 2.4

Amethia83 wrote: 2 years ago

I think anni is overrated anyway(It's a good item but the hype is just too much) and i'm a bit glad to see this item coming down a notch. If people don't sell SoJ to vendor, then we won't see d clone and it might make this item just as rare, we will see. the way it was before was too profitable. Now it becomes more like the old way, minus the dupes

That's a hell of a difference though.

The old way (as in..the current way but in the original) worked fine to cash in on random runs because there was so many duped SoJs that plenty of people didn't care and just vendored as many as it took when they wanted to kill dclone.

With no dupes however, SoJs are and will remain multiple orders of magnitude more rare and with that exponentially less likely to be vendored. That likelihood is even further decreased by the fact that you don't have to buy in but will benefit from anyone else doing it without ever offering anything up yourself. People are inherently egoistic after all.

If they had replaced SoJs with standards of heroes then yeah, we'd see regular walks as there is no other use or value for them. But SoJs without dupes? Again, I remain very curious to see how many people will ever vendor theirs but realistically, I would expect dc walks to become significantly more rare than they've ever been in the OG days, SoJ value to drop to slightly above "actual use value" (so probably in line with a bk4/bk5, give or take) and anni value to possibly even go up, simply because the walks should be pretty darn rare.

But, I will happily be proven wrong on that assumption. Wouldn't mind seeing runs on a regular basis again.
And annoying as the constant region hopping will be..still beats the hell out of ip tracing.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Either way, @Teebling : Any chance you have someone savvy on your team to hook into the new command and get a live tracker for each region/game type going on the site here?

That would be awesome but it's not possible unfortunately.

There is still no public API for D2R, so I can't request the the data from that.
They also disallowed analysing TCP/IP packets in D2R, so the route of making a mod to send data to the site is also out of the question.

Only way it would work with the tooling available right now would be either a person in each region manually monitoring for progress changes and updating something on the site, or using an automated bot to do the job (but that would break ToS) in each region.

Unless anyone else has any ideas? I'd love to have progress bars/trackers on the site here, but as you can see Blizz have made it very difficult to engineer.

Bummer.

Feared as much but I never looked into how they handle packet interception nowadays. Was worth a shot.

Either way, I'm inclined to say we probably have a few people here who'd be happy to regularly update a manual tracker if that becomes a thing. Reach a decent critical mass and it'd be almost as accurate as automated tracking as well. I tend to have this site open in the background while playing anyways and would expect to check the status upon each game login. Not much of an ask to update a tracker interface here at the same time.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Either way, I'm inclined to say we probably have a few people here who'd be happy to regularly update a manual tracker if that becomes a thing.

Suppose there was a simple UI block on the homepage or elsewhere, where you could select a 'progress tier' from a dropdown, and then hit a green button saying 'Report', and it would write a row to the database with some details (reporter, time, progress level, and a few other bits and bobs), that would allow me to render a progress bars for each region. That is possible.

But it still doesn't change the fact that it will be outdated and lag behind realtime, won't be updated when he despawns, and be totally dependant on people submitting reports. For example if I found the tracker, saw it was supposedly tier 3 in the NA region, then login and find that it's not at tier 3, the tool would be worthless to me as a player would it not?

Just being super cynical here - any solution would be an improvement but there's a danger that it would actually be misinformative too.

Teebling wrote: 2 years ago

Only way it would work with the tooling available right now would be either a person in each region manually monitoring for progress changes and updating something on the site, or using an automated bot to do the job (but that would break ToS) in each region.

Unless anyone else has any ideas? I'd love to have progress bars/trackers on the site here, but as you can see Blizz have made it very difficult to engineer.

What about a semi-manual way: a real player is playing the game, uses /uberdiablo command and takes a screenshot. Then a locally run script or macro (or "bot", if you call it so) reads the screenshot (it can monitor the screenshots folder for the new ones), OCRs it and uploads data to the public data base.

Ultimately, I think it also boils down to how detailed the messaging/command they add is.

Say they let you check the exact progress and me checking it gives me "83 of 125 SoJs sold", then I could update an ideally central and quick to update interface here with that 83.

Now, realistically, not all updates will be caught. Ever. So it may remain at 83 for a while even though the actual sold has moved up to 87 or something. However, given enough people supporting it it should stay fairly close to accurate. And close is enough since you typically wouldn't go "oh, 1 SoJ missing, ok, let me boot up and log in" but would anticipate it and go "alright, getting close and highest current count is in this region so bound to happen here soon - let me make a game and wait".

The more vague the message is however, the less accurate it would obviously become and the more of a difference delayed entry may make.
So for example if they add messaging along the lines of
- "dclone is far away" [0-40]
- "dclone woke up from his nap and is contemplating spanking some mortals while sipping his morning coffee" [41-80]
- "dclone left his house and is on the way" [81-120]
- "yeah, he shoulda been here half an hour ago..any day now!" [121-spawn]
then if someone happens to check at 79 or 80 and updates a tracker here accordingly, all while dclone then spawns in the very early range, there's a decent chance you'd miss it even within a relatively short time window.

I'm just thinking back to the olden days here. Back then, we initially had a few manual online trackers and they actually ended up being surprisingly accurate. And that was across a plethora of IPs that were annoying as f to even find for each update. Compared to that, this would be child's play.
The main difficulty back then was that if noone caught the actual walk, you never knew when the next one would be because the SoJ counter just kept going up and didn't reset with each walk. Hopefully, that's not true for the new messaging.

Well to get things started, let's see if we can reproduce the messages in the PTR and take it from there guys. Any volunteers?

Teebling wrote: 2 years ago

Well to get things started, let's see if we can reproduce the messages in the PTR and take it from there guys. Any volunteers?

I'll be spending some time on there starting tomorrow. Will record what I find.
Fingers crossed they have a char with more than 1 SoJ on it to duplicate this time so it doesn't take 100+ reboots to get enough for a full cycle

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Fingers crossed they have a char with more than 1 SoJ on it to duplicate this time so it doesn't take 100+ reboots to get enough for a full cycle

Hope so, otherwise it will be a chore to spawn him lol.

Back in the announcement of the PTR they said they might have an NPC or chat command to spawn items to help testing. I hope they are still planning to bring this to the PTR eventually as the current template characters really don't have a lot as you know.

Teebling wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Fingers crossed they have a char with more than 1 SoJ on it to duplicate this time so it doesn't take 100+ reboots to get enough for a full cycle

Hope so, otherwise it will be a chore to spawn him lol.

Back in the announcement of the PTR they said they might have an NPC or chat command to spawn items to help testing. I hope they are still planning to bring this to the PTR eventually as the current template characters really don't have a lot as you know.

Very true. That would make things a lot easier (not just for DClone).

Though you are/were at least able to clone individual base characters over and over again to multiply whatever they had. Really only needed that for skillers and more runes last round. But now..I guess SoJs as well. If they offer more than 1 or 2 on a char, I'll go ahead and complete a full cycle at some quiet time, just to make sure all message options are covered. If not..well, I'll probably still do that, I'll just be significantly more annoyed.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

Again, I remain very curious to see how many people will ever vendor theirs but realistically, I would expect dc walks to become significantly more rare than they've ever been in the OG days

If you're playing in a multiplayer game and a message appears that "x" sojs have been sold, won't every person leave the game and create their own? This doesn't even take into account the people with multiple accounts. I don't know if dclone walks become more rare than they were in the OG days, but I do know that when they occur, they're going to flood the market with 10x the number of annis that used to be produced from a dclone walk. What will this mean for the value of an soj? I'm not sure.

I have never tried to join an anni farm in d2r. I feel like with this new method either the soj sales will need to be organized, or become far less common. Why would anyone vendor an soj, only to find out that d clone walked while they were sleeping or at work. I don’t anticipate ever selling an soj, and just traded my extras while the prices are still hot.

Thinking about it more, I feel like clone walks might be easier this time. The old method, that existed before the multiboxers took it away, was you'd contribute a couple of SoJs to somebody in a private discord, and that person would dump them all and try to fit everybody into the same limited server IP range. Now, there will be a chat command to ask the server 'yo how many more SoJs do we need to sell?'. And it will be region-wide so no one person can monopolize it.

zZorceressTraderz wrote: 2 years ago

Why would anyone vendor an soj, only to find out that d clone walked while they were sleeping or at work. I don’t anticipate ever selling an soj, and just traded my extras while the prices are still hot.

And that's why I think there would still be organized walks. Somebody would run the 'how many more SoJs do we need lads?' command in battlenet, and then you'd find that many people willing to all sell their SoJs at the same time and force a clone spawn while everybody is online. It wouldn't make sense to sell your SoJ solo because odds are you'd just be flushing it without seeing an actual clone spawn. But if you found another ~100 people who all wanted an anni, and everybody bought in with an SoJ, you could force a spawn since it will be region-wide.

So yeah, considering this will still encourage community interaction to trigger spawns, I feel like it's going to play out better than I originally thought.

Beardozer wrote: 2 years ago

Thinking about it more, I feel like clone walks might be easier this time. The old method, that existed before the multiboxers took it away, was you'd contribute a couple of SoJs to somebody in a private discord, and that person would dump them all and try to fit everybody into the same limited server IP range. Now, there will be a chat command to ask the server 'yo how many more SoJs do we need to sell?'. And it will be region-wide so no one person can monopolize it.

zZorceressTraderz wrote: 2 years ago

Why would anyone vendor an soj, only to find out that d clone walked while they were sleeping or at work. I don’t anticipate ever selling an soj, and just traded my extras while the prices are still hot.

And that's why I think there would still be organized walks. Somebody would run the 'how many more SoJs do we need lads?' command in battlenet, and then you'd find that many people willing to all sell their SoJs at the same time and force a clone spawn while everybody is online. It wouldn't make sense to sell your SoJ solo because odds are you'd just be flushing it without seeing an actual clone spawn. But if you found another ~100 people who all wanted an anni, and everybody bought in with an SoJ, you could force a spawn since it will be region-wide.

So yeah, considering this will still encourage community interaction to trigger spawns, I feel like it's going to play out better than I originally thought.

I'm inclined to agree with that.
Ultimately, it boils down to "what value do people assign an SoJ as an SoJ, compared to getting an Anni that everyone else will also get at that time?". That's the question that'll answer "will walks still happen and how often?".

Then again, most folks seem to agree that SoJs aren't BiS for most builds (though I personally consider it BiS for a couple of mine) so that should make it easier.

In my Opinion it's good to make it easier to get Anni.

Could also work like it is in Single player.

Selling 1 SoJ for an Anni is enough in my Opinion.

Biggest part of Playerbase just mind the Anni topic as long as they need to get 1 by themselves.
After that point it's basicly forgotten unless they rolled it crappy.

i'm guessing the big dick jsp users who bought all the soj will wanna sell them at a time of the day when there is very few people online and multibox several accounts to maximise the profits.

I just ran into the

Diablo Clone in PTR /

Cold Plains Act 1 Hell. I am testing with an Amazon, using the provided

Windforce (shaeled). I used a Hyrda Bow provided and made a Faith with level 14 Fana, and placed it on a rogue. I was able to damage but not kill the clone, and he didn't kill my build either. He quickly took out my rogue and

Valkyrie, and after a time I gave up with no success. The new

Strafe stats look good but there is no way to tell how good with the base items provided. It didn't help that some of my resistances were low. Here is a screenshot of the stats.

I was able to beat uber diablo with a bowazon but it was very difficult, you really gotta keep the pressure on and tank his spells quite often to be hitting enough to beat his regen. I had on dracs,

Ohm'd gface, gore riders with

Shael'd

Windforce, highlord, Treachery. It would have worked better with a 15 max dmg/15ias jewel in gface. I wouldn't recommend it, it took quite a while to do.

Guided Arrow was the only thing that hit him.

Strafe would just miss like 90% of the time even with 5-10k attack rating. Plus you can bend a

Guided Arrow around a tree while diablo shoots his lightning and fire into the tree. Also my diablo appeared in place of

Nihlathak without the diablo walks the earth message, it still said "

Terror is about to be unleashed upon Sanctuary" when i used /uberdiablo both before and after he appeared and was defeated.

worstd2playerever wrote: 2 years ago

I was able to beat
Uber Diablo with a bowazon but it was very difficult

I'm not sure how they differ but this wasn't Uber Diablo, it was the

Diablo Clone, the one that drops the

Annihilus. I had no problem surviving the encounter it's just that the rate of damage was too slow because of his life regen.

Strafe was hitting him. I also tried

Magic Arrow which didn't do any better. I will try again tomorrow afternoon when I have more time.

I think I'm being stalked, because I just encountered him for a second time, also in the

Cold Plains (Cave). You can tell when he arrives because everything shakes like it does in the

Chaos Sanctuary. This time my

Valkyrie tanked him which kept my rogue alive. My issue is that I run low on mana which chews up my potions. I probably could've kept jumping into a way point and refilling, but it would've taken all night.

Remember folks, this build is only a few hours old. I don't have any options for obtaining better items, because this version of PTR will be over before I can get them.

yeah i meant

Diablo Clone, it was

Frigid Highlands not

Uber Tristram