>> He very suddenly went from going out of his way for exp in act 3 to never slowing for exp at all in acts 4-5. Could be streamlined probably, but would likely only be a min or so at most.
there's a reason why he did what he did. You don't get much exp in act4 before level 25. Watch his a4 video and see how much his exp bar rises.
(yeah, he got a bit too much exp overall, but it's difficult to predict and it was meant to be a test-run anyway)
A Leaf staff (TirRal) needs level 19, by then the only useful mods were +6 warmth. It's probably better to just socket as many Tir runes as you can find.
>> main issue I saw was not getting a staff that had +3 lightning.
he got a +2 at the beginning of act4. Getting +3 or getting it earlier wasn't an option if you watch his gold.
>> +3 chbolt/+3 warmth/+3 teleport
by the time you can use teleport, you don't need chbolt-charges ;)
>> +1 fire/lightning skills and +3 to charged bolt/warmth/lightning would be nice
but impossible. two hand staves cannot have +x to a skilltree, and +1 sorc isn't available until level 30. (by then, a TASer should have switched to a spirit sword and Visceratuant anyway). you'll want
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 2 mana, 3 energy with level 1
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 1 maek, 3 energy with level 2
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, 1 maek, 6 energy with level 3
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, +3 static, 1 maek, 6 energy with level 6
+3 chbolt, +3 warmth, +3 static, 1 maek, 10 energy with level 9
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 static, 5 maek, 10 energy with level 12
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 static, 4 socks with 4 Tir runes with level 13
+3 lightning, +3 warmth, +3 teleport, 4 socks with 4 Tir runes with level 18 (maybe +3 chain lightning instead of lightning). Possibly even one damage-staff and a teleport-staff on your second slot.
eternaljwh:
>> Cows have relatively good loottables. Not everything can drop everything.
baal, his waves and other monsters in act5 can drop as much as cows or even more. Once you killed baal, you should have everything you need that can be dropped there. The only additional items you could get on the cow level after killing baal is the cow king set, which you neither need nor want. Please look up the drop chances.
>> Why only forty? Hell Ancients (to get into the Worldstone Keep) required 60, I thought.
sorry, 60 of course, but those 17-18 levels on hell shouldn't be too much of a problem either. You're 41 after ancients, probably 42 or 43 after baal, that'll work out fine.
I'd actually vote for a full-quest-run, just to make the leveling time a bit more interesting.
>> Phoenix Strike.
unfortunately quite worthless on later nightmare and hell, you need 2 to 4 attacks to trigger something that'll still do only mediocre damage. It's a fine spell for casual playing through end of norm and nightmare, but that's it.
Twelvepack:
>> You mentioned that damage>plant speed, but there are 2 things wrong with that statement.
I just meant that speed-weapons like the flail you suggested are wrong. Go for damage first. Of course you can still get max-speed with the right items, but your primary concern is damage. 1 or 2 frames of plant- or cast-speed won't save much if you need another hit to bring the enemy down. If another skill-level allows you to kill higher monsters, that's usually a good choice.
Traps will disappear when you move about 1.5 screens away from them, if you want to get exp and still keep moving, monsters shouldn't take too long to die.
>> There is one huge issue yet to be addressed-- immunities.
a list of the required (immune) enemies is in my first post in this thread.
By the time we reach the first ones, we can have a merc with 5K dam/second, 100%CB, 100% DS against 5 to 10K life and maybe ~50% phys reduction. Teleport onto them, merc starts hitting immediately, should be down less than a second later. d'uh. It'll take longer to pick up the items needed to equip the merc in the first place.
A handful of required immunes won't be the deciding factor on the total time.
oh, traps without synergies aren't that strong either, excluding DS (which I admit is a pretty good skill the sorc wouldn't have).
Derakon:
>> Of course, odds are that any TAS solutions would need to be special-coded on a per-game basis
yes, they would. Absolutely.
Also, cast speed does nothing for assassin (for traps at least) so the key for her will be getting high IAS weapons, as this affects the rate you drop traps. The unique flail comes to mind as a good choice because its 20% ias on an already vfast weapon (a total of -30 attack speed).
that way of calculating attack speeds was outdated before assassins even existed. IAS calculation is a bit more complex. And anyway, damage > plant speed, so you'll want claws with skills. Two of them. Blade talons aren't slow anyway.
Then again, a sorc does have her share of fire&forget-spells: firewall, blizzard, both of them anything but weak. Also, the sorc can afford staying a while to kill enemies, she makes up for it when teleporting to the next group.
The earliest run-boots are Hsarus, level 3, 20%. Vidala's Fetlock is lvl 14, but would be an upgrade to 30%. Cow Kings Boots are 30% at level 13, but you won't have them by then. ;)
Static charges have never been possible. There are "cast static on strike" or "..on hit", which you could manipulate to fire off each time, the first one available is Hwanin's Refuge, level 30. (Actually, the whole cow king set, level 25, but you need to go out of your way to get it and it covers three slots with otherwise crappy items). Anyway, you won't get static until it's capped at 25%, and against bosses in singleplayer, crushing blow is equally effective - put Strength on your merc (lvl 25), manipulate to trigger 100% and down goes the boss. (actually, CB is halved against bosses, but your a2-mercs fast attack speeds make up for it).
Static is an advantage for sorcs on norm games and against multiple enemies (to weaken them before hitting), nothing more, nothing less.
Enigma is level 65, you should have killed Baal hell by then. There are teleport charges, but they're way too expensive to use. Also, the assassin's cast speed is quite slow, teleporting doesn't offer her much speed increase. (it's good to go through walls, but on a straight line, it's barely faster than running).
I love assassins, but in a full game TAS setting, they just don't win.
Edit: teleport-charges are possible on two-hand-staves, level 24. Up to 30 charges. You'd need to make a new staff drop each time they run out (and pick it up), +skill won't help you lower the mana costs, and the issue about slow casting speeds remains. I still doubt it.
oh, suga's test run is here: http://hosted.filefront.com/sugagaga/2258269 - watch it before defending the assassin ;)
You can visit them, you can talk to them, you can kill them. But even if you do, the quest won't be marked as done, and the door to WSK won't open. You also cannot take town portals into WSK until you passed the quest.
Long story short, you cannot bypass that restriction in single player. (unfortunately it's quite easy in the multiplayer modes).
you don't get the concept of "luck manipulation" yet, do you? ;) mana potions can drop whenever you need them, they can also be shopped. All the formulas are known and posted somewhere, it's just a matter of providing the correct "random" numbers.
oh, and there's an unassisted run, proving that teleporting is quite possible: http://speeddemosarchive.com/Diablo2LoD.html
>> exceptions: tarnhelm, chance guards, nagelring, goldwrap, or Lenymo's sash for sorc).
MF equip wouldn't even be needed. But who said uniques? rare and magic items with lots of mana and/or fc is what's needed. If you want skills, tarnhelm and ettlich are the way to go, along with a nice orb or 2h-staff.
>> Cows might be useful after each difficulty to gain items
lemma of luck manipulation: any enemy that CAN drop a useful item WILL drop a useful item. Go wherever your EXP is best. Then again, reaching 40 is all you'll need, so I doubt you'll do much exp-runs after level 20 - you'll reach lvl 25 as you go, from there to 40 is a matter of minutes.
technically, it's already feasible: pick wine (because it's source code is available), hook whatever calls you need (RNG, timing functions, glFinish() or similar) and you're set. The most difficult thing would be to implement a save-state function. Luckily, sound and video are used output-only, the only files that are written are character saves and meaningless logfiles, and there are no network connections. D2 itself is single-threaded, which is a big plus - no idea if wine uses threads internally, wineserver might be painful.
meh, I wish I had time...
for a full run including hell, the sorceress will always win. nothing beats teleport. The assassin just gets Burst of Speed much quicker, making her a good choice for a run through normal mode.
When tool-assisted, the sorc can easily avoid almost any damage - just check where you're teleporting. Enough fast-cast and mana-gear can be manipulated to drop or be gambled.
Early patches included their own RNG, newer patches just use the operating systems RNG - so feel free to hack into that. Can even be used to make enemies miss all their physical attacks, and the sorc dealing maximum damage (lightning skills, anyone?)
There's still the problem of some required immune enemies on hell: council members, the three seal guardians inside the CS, the ancients and the waves before baal. Skilling TWO elements with lvl 40 will be difficult. Or getting enough potions/equip to make your merc kill the immunes.
Thirdly, Stats.They seem to be manipulatable, but to what extent I don't know.
stat gains on levelup are easily manipulatable, just delay killing the last enemy a couple of frames until you get your perfect level up. It's a bit tedious, but not difficult. Life and Mana-gains aren't random though.
You won't get perfect starting stats on your first playthrough. You can't skip the dialogs, but they're still counted towards your time, making it impossible to reach the required time (at least for unassisted players).
looking forward to an encode so I can watch this. :)
ahh, brothers kicking the crap out of each other. reminds me of my childhood.. we were never as awesome as those two, though.
I laughed pretty hard at the first boss kill: "here kitty kitty..." *shove*
about as good as minesweeper is going to get. Some chances for playing around while waiting for tiles to uncover, fast action, not too long to get boring. Yes vote.
One would hope that if you are bothering to dub American TV you could at least pick some of the shows that don't suck.
but those would be expensive, right? We've got quite a few of those cheap channels: old movies, re-runs, cheap dubs, barely own productions, too much commercials.
Oh the other hand you got those channels with their own productions: annoying talk-shows, court-shows where people scream at each other for an hour and other things that make the commercial breaks seem like a pleasant change.
I don't own a TV, and each time I visit my parents and get the chance to watch, I get bored or worse. There may be a few gems here and there, but it seems to me they're becoming increasingly rare.
I don't *prefer* bash, I just deem bash good enough for my needs, and everywhere I log in (home, university, root server, ..) there's a shell that's either bash or bash compatible. Getting used to zsh-specific functions wouldn't do me much good.
an age divisible by ten calls for huge parties. Not as huge as a power of two, but huge nonetheless. Hope you complied :)
although I'm a tad late now: Happy Birthday!
feel free to not read this addendum, it was only clever once.
oops, sorry about that. I obviously didn't test the script :)
I've played Cannon Fodder on the Amiga a lot, but I don't know if the Genesis version is any good. Lacking a mouse it probably isn't. Not sure if it'd be interesting to watch either.
So you might as well use adelikat's suggestion ;)
if you're lucky enough the text is contained in the ROM uncompressed and unaltered and can be extracted via simple tools (linux offers the aptly named 'strings') or edited with any hex editor you like. Note however, that you can't just change the length of text - padding a shorter text with spaces is easy, making something longer requires more complicated, game-specifig tools.
if you're comfortable using a linux live-CD, it's quite trivial to do, you can just create a raw copy of the whole hard drive with basic tools and you're set.
The drawback is that a raw dump will also save the contents of unused parts of the hard drive, resulting in a bigger image than needed. I could tell you how to do better when saving/restoring a linux system, but found windows to be too touchy for such things. Windows really likes to have a fit when things changed during a reboot. If you really need small images, you might want to use a solution that's specialized for windows and cares to deal with it's quirks.
anyway, here's how I'd do it.
a) install the system as you'd like it, defrag the hard drive.
b) boot from a linux cd
c) optional, for better compression: mount the hard drive, create a file and fill with zeros until the drive is full. (cat /dev/zero > /mnt/hd/zero.tmp ; rm /mnt/hd/zero.tmp). Unmount again.
c) plug in external USB hard drive and mount it. Alternately, mount a network share of the second computer and burn the image later, (although I doubt it'll fit on a DVD)
d) dd if=/dev/sda bs=4096 | gzip > /media/usb-drive/hd_image.gz
done. replace blue stuff with whatever's appropriate for your computer.
Repeat for the second computer, unless they're completely identical (but again, windows can be touchy when it notices it's been booted from a different drive than it's been installed on.)
to restore a computer:
a) boot from a linux cd
b) plug in external USB hard drive (or insert dvd, if you burned it), mount it.
c) zcat /media/usb-drive/hd_image.gz >/dev/sda
reboot, done.
keep in mind that doing it this way will save and restore the whole drive, not just the system partition, thus you'll lose ALL data kept on this drive. Also keep in mind, that you'll be restoring outdated software and need to update drivers and other apps anyway.
I prefer places where the prices and the products are clearly listed (before making the purchase decision), so as to minimize the need to ask questions
Ah, a perfect Finn. :)
meh, I'd do the same, and I'm not finnish.
Might be out of habit, because over here shops are required by law to list prices. A shop trying to hide their prices would seem suspicious to me.
meh.. they told us they're working on it (but anyone who has been reading their job offerings knew that already), they've shown us a couple of fresh ideas and cute graphics..
But it's still to early to conclude anything. It'll take another couple of years, we'll see how it turns out when it's done.
"The rest of it is not difficult." -> "The rest of it's not difficult."
Usually, contradicting "is not" to "isn't" takes priority -> "The rest of it isn't difficult.".
Exceptions apply, e.g. when you wish to emphasise the negation. "No, it's NOT!"
In this case, "is" refers to "the rest", not to "it". As the two words don't belong to each other semantically, you shouldn't contradict them.
Do I get a cookie?
That was at least 5 times awesomeness in one video. I laughed pretty hard at this moment:
interesting to note that even though it's optimized for realtime, hero's run takes less ingame-time to reach tourian, but wastes all that advantage on a slower MB fight.
comparisons for each room wouldn't be too valid since you can enter with different positions/speeds, but re-syncing at the landing site, elevators and when entering boss rooms would have been cool. Just way too much work. :)
interesting to note that even though it's optimized for realtime, hero's run takes less ingame-time to reach tourian, but wastes all that advantage on a slower MB fight.
comparisons for each room wouldn't be too valid since you can enter with different positions/speeds, but re-syncing at the landing site, elevators and when entering boss rooms would have been cool. Just way too much work. :)