Beaten hard on normal (scratch that - pwned them with sorc)

[Scharnvirk]

Hello, fresh player back to D1 - and the mod is awesome! But as an experienced Diablo-franchise player who has beaten everything in each game on each difficulty I am not even close to defeating uh, entry bosses on Diablo's level...

Generally it looks like I am failing a gear check. I play a rogue, die in 3 hits and generally each melee boss easily puts me into a stunlock, and they all seem to either charge, have slow or hordes of respawning minions. If I change my items to faster hit recovery ones (valor and such), I die in 1 hit so that does not matter much

My current level is 26, dps around 200 and hp around 300. Build is mostly dex and some vit, as I usually did on rogue.

Generally the only thing that works at all is phasing + multishot to increase dps, but I simply run out of potions before dealing any significant damage and I am too slow to "reload" from backpack while chased by boss and his minions.

Izual was completely untouchable. I could have 1000dps and 1000hp and it would not change the situation at all, because evading freeze is barely possible and fighting in freeze is impossible. I still killed him with clever positioning of firewalls, but it took me good 10 tries or so. The same strategy worked for Doomlord Gam'ar, but this time it was far, far harder. I don''t think that spamming lightning walls and praying for the mob to get stuck is what I'd call a fun fight, though...

I'd expect such difficulty from nightmare up, and not normal, but this is what we got so I have to adapt. What should I do now? Farm some levels? Focus on dps or hp? Altough hp seems to not matter much with bosses like Bloodlord The Destroyer whose attack speed ramps up so badly that no amount of hit recovery speed will help.

And btw - my map of the stars turned red, I guess that's bad. What happens now?

[rightclick]

if you don't wish to spend too much time farming, maybe you could switch to a melee character. they have far better dps and survivability. With the items you get from your current rogue it shouldn't take too long to build up an assassin from scratch.

[Scharnvirk]

You mean my rogue is unable to kill a mid-boss with normal progress of the game? If so, the mod was not playtested enough and has scaling issues.

Fight with Lazarus was a total breeze and it was 5 minutes before experiencing such extreme difficulty.

I am not sure which level should I have, though. Maybe two missing levels are all I require and I simply pushed too far? Altough generally I'd say that all the new bosses are simply overdone compared to the rest of the content. Come on, firing ~10-shot widespread ice blasts salvos one after another without any cooldown? Undefeatable stunlock?

I don't want to play melee character, just not my thing. I have A LOT of books stashed though, so rerolling a sorceror could work.

[SomeThingEviL]

I think the problem is this game dose not have a Run. So with a ranged player you cant kite the enemy's. And with No multi-player you don't have a tank to keep the enemy's off you.

I think the maker of the mod should make a toggle key to run 20% faster in the dungeons and see if this help the ranged player keep some distance form the enemy and get a chance to fire off some shots.

It might need to be 40% speed increase if 20% dose not help enough.

This would also just make the game a lot more fun because its a little slow and not everyone has time to waste walking in a game.

I was trying to kill the butcher with a second character (My main is a warrior), A sorcerer and was having trouble because he was just too fast and I never could cast a spell.

But I was also way too low level. But my spells where strong and if I could just hit him a few times I could have killed him.

[Scharnvirk]

Right now playing a Sorcerer with all the books gathered on Rogue (altough she had used up a lot of them, too). It is like, 1% of the difficulty. I entered Leoric's tomb with lvl 2 fireball and chain lightning, and entire fight - including the big skelly and all his minion took literally 10 seconds. About 5 fireballs and 3 chain lightnings. Tada, finito.

On rogue I was constantly kiting Leoric and entire fight took about 10 minutes.

Diablo 1 was never balanced, though. Picking a character was equivalent to picking difficulty level, Sorcerer being the easiest and Warrior the hardest. This mod however, brings hell-level difficulty to normal and does it without any sort of a warning. I am sure I won't have any serious trouble with the Sorcerer, but Rogue is a lost cause.

...and on Assassin I couldn't clear the well quest because a single Flesh Clan was untouchable

I still maintain that the mod is pure awesome. When it comes to balancing, though, it is a failure - just like original D1 was.

[Kirase]

Guess you can really cut it down to item dependency.

Sorcerer just completely bypasses any kind of item dependancy by beeing ranged and only needing spell books to do decent damage on normal mode.

Once you collected some items with your sorcerer that can be used by your rogue you will see that the rogue gets good pretty quick too.

[Scharnvirk]

The problem is sadly a bit more broader. Every single run of Sorcerer is a level up for him, because it is guaranteed to find or buy some books from Adria - even for more rarely used spells.

Other characters get upgrades relatively rarely, because most of class items are unusable (all normal-speed bows, bows without added elemental damage unless ubermods like king's and so on).

Because Sorcerer does not depend on items as much as other classes, he can focus on maxing resists without gimping his power. Other classes - sorry, tough luck.

Sorcerer has the widest skill range (because all spells are de facto his skills), other characters have just five and from what I have seen, they are generally not that powerful. Except for sorcerer, who has built-in mana shield, immunity break (!!!) and God knows what else later on
Sure, everybody can use spells, but it can't be compared with Sorcerer's efficiency.

AoE. It is nice that Rogue got few skills that add AoE, but their mana cost is quite prohibitive. I can clear full room of mobs of my level in two-three casts of chain lightning, the same feat for Rogue requires many, many mana potions, time and danger.

All these are not a flaw of the mod, though - it is the design of the very Diablo 1 core game itself. Without a total overhaul, which was done in D2, I think that it is completely impossible to balance core D1 gameplay. Sorcerer will remain on top. He has most survivability, single damage DPS, AoE DPS, is easiest to level up (free books everywhere), relies less on gear, has only one resource and has arguably easiest build to follow. Oh, and mobility too. I am not sure if there is any aspect in which any character is better. Ok, Rogue's character portrait is nicier, but that's all

[Kirase]

Ive got the feeling that the barbarian has higher damage potential.
Started leveling one now, ofc using items that ive found with my sorcerer. Anyways on lvl 28 he already hits for ~270 damage on normal hits.
Inner fire boosting his dps to 700 already.
Could be that this damage progress falls off later on, i dont know, but atm he just hits like a truck and iam very ok with how he is doing.

[riesa]

Scharnvirk, Necro is also an immunity break char, but he's dealing with immunes ONLY with -res staves. And necro is something between improved sorc and brick wall low mage. You can build him max MAG to have all spells as his skills, like you said it, with minions to shield you, or max VIT to deal with mobs with minions AND spells. So Sorc is not only easy char.

Rouge is a specfic char. She was my fav till i get to nightmare. I have 38clvl, ~600hp, ~220armor, ~1100 dps and can't get killed Diablo there. I know i'm noob but... All the time i get him to ~1/3hp and i'm dead... Rouge is mighty but need to have some skill (and gear ofc).

[Scharnvirk]

I tried necro but didn't really understand his raise skill; the mob didn't seem to follow me and died almost immediately. I thought it was a bug and ditched the char altogether

[Ugily]

I tried necro but didn't really understand his raise skill; the mob didn't seem to follow me and died almost immediately.

Keep your undead army raised. Raise new skeletons next to enemies and let them do the dirty work. Blast away with spells from a safe distance. Skeletons will generally stay near the necro, but revives will go after any enemy nearby. Keeping a pet golem alive with Heal Other is good tactic also.

[SomeThingEviL]

Ya my previous post was a little premature.I'm at the final level now and fighting some of these uber bosses and they are way over the top. Just having more run speed would not be that much of a help.

I just really hate how slow you are so that's something I would really like to see fixed. But ya there's a lot more to the unbalanced-ness of the last few bosses.

[Scharnvirk]

Don't worry, I am going there for a revenge... so far Chain Lightning lvl 8, Fireball lvl 9, all utility spells (stone curse, teleport, firewall and whatnot), ~450 mana + 100 hp.

Most mobs die in one cast. In fact most rooms full of mobs die in one cast as well, until the room is too big and some don't get hit at all.

Bosses?

Fights which took me multiple tries before and many many minutes now last somewhere between 1 to 3 seconds, altough one was hard: I had to switch to fireball and *gasp* AIM! For full 5 seconds or so... and even used TWO potions!

So far the only deaths were on early pre-mana shield levels and once when the spell ended and I opened a chest with a tiny little nova hidden inside. Ugh.

Unless final bosses are tetra-immune they should not be too much of an issue.

Given the speed in which the Sorcerer kills stuff with chain lightning, I'd estimate his DPS to be about... 5k? for a SINGLE TARGET.

[Davias]

I have played this mod since it's release and I have made some similar experience. I began with a rogue some months ago and was squashed like a beetle, when I reached the last level the first time.

My Mage was better, after a few levels he smashed all enemies and bosses with stacking fire and lightening walls. Nice to farm some items, but kind of lame in my opinion. This changed somewhat in nightmare difficulty. And it was a few patches ago.

My last character was a warrior and I beat the bosses on normal with the same tactic as my mage: stacking fire, and lighting walls.

All characters were played without items from the stash in the beginning.

Maybe some bosses could be altered somehow, to fit the strengths and weaknesses of the characters better.

...and the speed is ok in my opinion. One thing I love about Diablo 1 is the slower speed. I find this crazy runspeed in Diablo 2 and some newer games like Torchlight annoying. In Diablo 1 the atmosphere is essential and a faster gamespeed would ruin it.

[Scharnvirk]

You could remove mana shield and reduce all magic damage to 20% and the Sorcerer would be still way over the top. That's how insanely powerful he is, altough this is for normal where there are no immunites really.