Herald - questions

1 - When the message "A

Herald is Hunting you in “X” appear, does it mean that the

Herald already spawned somewhere in the area or it mean just that he is very close to spawn (maybe together with the next mob that will spawn)?

2 - After the message "A

Herald is Hunting you in “X”, if X stop being terrorized before

Herald spawn (or at least before I find it), can I still find/fight it in the now non-terrorized area?

3 - Is there any way to confirm that the

Herald had already spawned?
(in my last run, I thought I killed it without notice, as I had covered almost all map and still didn't find it, but on the last corner of the area it ended up spawning, but I almost leave the game just before that....)

4 - Is there any way to confirm that the

Herald was killed?
(in my last run, I lose the track of the

Herald after I first engaged it, and never saw it again, and I'm not sure if one of my minions killed it off-screen or if it just ran away and i could not find it again - even after double check the area...)

OBS: it was my 1st

Herald

1. I thought when that message appears; the

Herald has been spawned at that point.

2. I think you can find the

Herald, but it is no longer a

Herald nor has

Herald drop table as it is normal elite.

3. Dont think so unless they added a command like how to check uber diablo step.

4. Again, dont think so.

1. When the message ”A

Herald is hunting you in <zone>” is logged, it means that the

Herald is already spawned somewhere (within a ~2 screen radius of your location when the message appeared).

All the details about how heralds work can be found in the following article by Pavke:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/commen ... cs_sunder/

2. Not sure about this one actually.

3. See 1.

4. I think if the number of heralds you’ve killed in the same game is fewer than 5, then you can tell via which tier the next one is. Only killed heralds cause the next one’s tier to advance. There are 5 tiers, after the 5th they’re all ”

Herald of

Terror”, so I don’t think it’s possible to confirm that it’s actually been killed after you’ve reached the highest tier, only when you’re still on a lower tier.

EDIT: added some more info

Also, I think there might be a bug where no

Herald can be found despite the ”a

Herald is hunting you” message. I’m not 100% sure though. There has been reports of this and I’d assume that at least in some of these cases the person simply didn’t scout well enough, but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s always the case. For example, at least one person reported that a

Herald

Blood Hawk or

Willowisp in act 3 flew off into the jungle and vanished.

Frog Demon mobs can jump into the water. Etc. Some accounts of missing heralds have sounded fairly convincing, but I haven’t seen any video evidence. It happened to me personally once but I disregarded as it as due to not scouting well enough.

For 2) I haven't tested it with heralds but spawned terrorized monsters stay and you can kill them after the tz has rotated (and still get the better loot). I often experienced this when doing trav runs.

Didn't test again, but at least on previous versions, only monsters close to you (1-2 screens from where you were when TZ ended) remain with TZ status.
I tried once

Teleport all around

Arcane Sanctuary when TZ time was ending to spawn everybody , but when TZ ended and I started killing, only the closer monsters remained TZ

atari wrote: 2 days ago

For 2) I haven't tested it with heralds but spawned terrorized monsters stay and you can kill them after the tz has rotated (and still get the better loot). I often experienced this when doing trav runs.

For 2: Heralds, once triggered, will stay and can be killed after the zone is no longer terrorized. Tested that a couple of times myself.

ShadowHeart wrote: 2 days ago

Also, I think there might be a bug where no

Herald can be found despite the ”a

Herald is hunting you” message. I’m not 100% sure though. There has been reports of this and I’d assume that at least in some of these cases the person simply didn’t scout well enough, but I’m not entirely convinced that it’s always the case. For example, at least one person reported that a

Herald

Blood Hawk or

Willowisp in act 3 flew off into the jungle and vanished.

Frog Demon mobs can jump into the water. Etc. Some accounts of missing heralds have sounded fairly convincing, but I haven’t seen any video evidence. It happened to me personally once but I disregarded as it as due to not scouting well enough.

I can 100% confirm this happening several times. 2 instances this occurred in Throne. The 1st time the message appeared it was on the last wave 5, I did not look. Second time I got the message one was hunting me, I jumped around the Throne but none was to be found. I seem to remember a 3rd instance occurred the one time I used shards. I got the message one was hunting me, but none was found.

You can definitely still kill a spawned

Herald after a TZ ends. In fact, since RotW, any spawned enemies in Tzones will stay terrorized, even if you leave the area.

A good tip if tombs or something is about to end is to quickly

Teleport through all tombs to spawn everything, then kill them all after

I used

Western Worldstone Shard (my 1st one), and after cleared all Act 1 (as L96 TZ), I fought 8 Heralds in total
Is this an average amount of Heralds for the "full Act 1"?


(and dropped no shard )

fredkid wrote: 16 hours ago

I used

Western Worldstone Shard (my 1st one), and after cleared all Act 1 (as L96 TZ), I fought 8 Heralds in total
Is this an average amount of Heralds for the "full Act 1"?

It’s pretty much impossible to 100% accurately calculate this (due to the complexity of how it depends not just on how many elites you’ve killed but also on how much you’ve already scouted, i.e. how many normal monsters you’ve already spawned). The closest you can get is to calculate the average number of ires that will be drawn and just assume that each ire will be converted to a

Herald. This is what Pavke did for the calculations in his article (which I linked earlier, did you read it? it has lots of info!).

The average for a full act 1 clears
is 4.40 ires drawn, you can find all the details in the article.

justinman114 wrote: 2 days ago

You can definitely still kill a spawned

Herald after a TZ ends. In fact, since RotW, any spawned enemies in Tzones will stay terrorized, even if you leave the area.

A good tip if tombs or something is about to end is to quickly

Teleport through all tombs to spawn everything, then kill them all after

Interesting. Last night I was doing Palace Cellar and drew the

Herald at xx:59, 1 minute before TZ change, and there ended up being no

Herald.

I did notice the zone staying terrorized. It's very obvious if you happen to be doing early act normal TZ because super healing/mana potions continue to drop.

I can't say for sure about #2, but I had an experience where

Frozen River was terrorized, and I found the

Herald (t2

Herald, I think) right before rotation to a new tzone, and ended up dying. When i went to recover the body, the zone does not have the same darkness as when you first enter a terrorized zone, but the monsters around still seemed to have the terrorized mark. So it may be that once they spawn and you have located them, they keep the

Herald mark even after the tzone rotates. May be a different story if you get the message but don't run into them and the

Terror zone changes. honestly not sure. it was just a surprise spawn for me at the last minute and it was a bunch of cursed hell witches, and I just wanted to recover my body. was pleasantly surprised to find they still had the terrorized logo on their health bars. they didn't drop anything of note so maybe the

Herald mark remains but they are not actually heralds? who knows

My crazy theory is the more often you hunt heralds, the less often they spawn.

The spawn rates of heralds definitely went way down for me the more often I'd engage in

Herald farming. From something like 5+ heralds per act to just 2-3 per act.

I remember my second

Herald run ever, I got as high as 10+ heralds in just act1 + random

Terror zones. Nowadays I just don't see numbers anywhere close to that anymore.

That's just RNG. The problem with heralds lies with the law of large numbers.

People like to complain about drop rates (me included) but the fact of the matter is even with low drop rates you'll always find something, given you kill enough monsters. It's why WSK/CS and Cows are so popular.

The problem becomes when in addition to low drop rate you have low spawn rate. Either spawn rate needs to be increased for heralds, or they need to have better drop tables, and in keeping with D2's drop philosophy, I'd prefer to have the former.

You can min max

Herald spawning with respect to its mechanics (Pavke reddit post with all details was already linked by ShadowHeart above).

In short:

1. Kill uniques until ire is drawn which means each newly spawning monster has a chance to be converted to
   Herald.
2. Just run through unexplored areas (can be other map/act) without killing uniques until
   Herald spawns. Spawn distance is about 2 screens, you get the hunting message once it spawns. Most times it is "in front" of you as this is where game spawns most mobs. Try to memorize the skipped unique mob locations during this.
3. Kill the
   Herald to advance the tier, then go back to killing uniques (quick farm the ones you memorized) until ire is drawn again. You can draw ire multiple times and it does stack, but this may spawn several Heralds of same tier, so better avoid until you reach T5.
4. Once T5 is reached, you can pretty much free farm uniques and even stack ire but keep spawning mechanic in mind. Make a mind map of fully explored (depleted) areas. I found it useful to reserve areas with low unique counts (i.e.
   Den of Evil) and/or easy/weak mob types entirely for
   Herald spawning.

Found this to provide double-digit Heralds per game pretty consistently.

Oh, and very important if you play online: make your game through Lobby with name and password, so you can rejoin your fully terrorized game after a connection loss or save/quit/rejoin to get your body quickly in case of Death.

So... I got almost double the average

ShadowHeart wrote: 9 hours ago

fredkid wrote: 16 hours ago

I used

Western Worldstone Shard (my 1st one), and after cleared all Act 1 (as L96 TZ), I fought 8 Heralds in total
Is this an average amount of Heralds for the "full Act 1"?

It’s pretty much impossible to 100% accurately calculate this (due to the complexity of how it depends not just on how many elites you’ve killed but also on how much you’ve already scouted, i.e. how many normal monsters you’ve already spawned). The closest you can get is to calculate the average number of ires that will be drawn and just assume that each ire will be converted to a

Herald. This is what Pavke did for the calculations in his article (which I linked earlier, did you read it? it has lots of info!).

The average for a full act 1 clears
is 4.40 ires drawn, you can find all the details in the article.

ShadowHeart wrote: 2 days ago

Also, I think there might be a bug where no

Herald can be found despite the ”a

Herald is hunting you” message. I’m not 100% sure though.

This is 100% a thing. Ive had this happen twice at least,

Herald was hunting and I cleaned everywhere the area it was supposed to be hunting and nothing was found. Once on the way to

Baal and once at

Travincal.

R0b0yt0 wrote: 9 hours ago

justinman114 wrote: 2 days ago

You can definitely still kill a spawned

Herald after a TZ ends. In fact, since RotW, any spawned enemies in Tzones will stay terrorized, even if you leave the area.

A good tip if tombs or something is about to end is to quickly

Teleport through all tombs to spawn everything, then kill them all after

Interesting. Last night I was doing Palace Cellar and drew the

Herald at xx:59, 1 minute before TZ change, and there ended up being no

Herald.

I did notice the zone staying terrorized. It's very obvious if you happen to be doing early act normal TZ because super healing/mana potions continue to drop.

If you draw the Ire and a TZ ends, you have to go to the next TZ to try and spawn the

Herald. This is because it turns a random terrorized mob (that hasn't spawned yet) into the

Herald. You can still kill any TZ enemies that are spawned in the current zone and draw more Ire from them, but they will not turn into Heralds.

justinman114 wrote: 2 hours ago

R0b0yt0 wrote: 9 hours ago

justinman114 wrote: 2 days ago

You can definitely still kill a spawned

Herald after a TZ ends. In fact, since RotW, any spawned enemies in Tzones will stay terrorized, even if you leave the area.

A good tip if tombs or something is about to end is to quickly

Teleport through all tombs to spawn everything, then kill them all after

Interesting. Last night I was doing Palace Cellar and drew the

Herald at xx:59, 1 minute before TZ change, and there ended up being no

Herald.

I did notice the zone staying terrorized. It's very obvious if you happen to be doing early act normal TZ because super healing/mana potions continue to drop.

If you draw the Ire and a TZ ends, you have to go to the next TZ to try and spawn the

Herald. This is because it turns a random terrorized mob (that hasn't spawned yet) into the

Herald. You can still kill any TZ enemies that are spawned in the current zone and draw more Ire from them, but they will not turn into Heralds.

I mistyped that. I said "drew the

Herald" which is a combination of drawing ire and the

Herald hunting.

It was 110% "the

Herald is hunting you". Can't miss the sound when playing with headphones.