The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

I did not misunderstand.  No extra 'trick' is required.

Ah, then I will have to clarify my objection to your technique, when I was trying to be oblique (since you were somewhat oblique in your original posts), in case I'm misunderstanding your technique.

I used no "safe spots" as part of the method as they are unneccessary and in this case somewhat counter productive to getting the job done.

I do not have that bad of "switch user process" if I do it right (~0.5sec on bad switch of users with ~25-30 feet of distance between the computers).

Just out of curiousity, are you using keyboard/mouse/display switch, or can you actually cross 25 feet of space in half a second (must be a NASA G-force test chair)? My switch times were much better for v1.09, as I tweaked the dll and ran two windows on one desktop (I also tweaked the minimize, so I could keep both windows up and displaying--or not, as I wished). My XP times, while not requiring any program tweak, are rather slow (over 5 seconds I think).

Why not just have the sorceress just kill all the monsters in the area and let the lowbies use her portal to come and fetch the malus from its stand?

Ah, that's an easy one, as per Ferengi's earlier snipet:

Your clvl 30+ sorc with teleport and FO didn't imbue because she didn't turn in the Malus. She gives it to the Imbuee, who needs to get the elite item anyway. The sorc FOs the Smith et al and picks up the Malus and can do that forever, and really is an "Imbue Mule" similar to the Act2 staff game creator.

To wit either the Sorc or the imbuee can start the game in which the elite item *and* the Malus are handed over, and there isn't ever any coordination issue. The Sorc is probably going to save *her* imbue until she is really high level anyway, so why not have her just never give Charsi a Malus in the first place, to get this (admittedly) small convenience?

Okay, back to the point of whether dying is a "convenience" or not. In my case, because my switching is awkward, I wouldn't risk the set up effort (game creation overhead etc.) by potential failure in timing of an operation such as the following, using normal as an example: 1) static/injure act boss to virtual death; 2) poison or OW act boss and/or 3) bring in rushee via TP (clvl 20+ in the Baal case) to be present (or to cause) for act boss death. I'm not discussing carry-alongs in town, of course. I understand that the rushee in this circumstance can have enough HPs to survive any pre-death throe AoE the boss might tag them with and as such need have no safe spot. My rushees, since I'm NOT exploiting the carry-along sleaze, are typically only level 1, have no skills, no HPs, and can't throw a poison potion to save their life (clvl req 6). Obviously this is by choice, as I could level up the rushee np.

Since I don't, however, with awkward switching, I then neither like the case where the rushee doesn't get there in time, nor do I like the coup de grace case (where rushee delivers the final blow via poison potion or other autohit) even if the rusher is still there, distracting the boss. Certainly the rushee, if the boss is on the edge of death, could show up, toss a poison potion, or Holy Shock pulse, or Thunderstorm (or whatever, if they are high enough clvl), and immediately step back through the portal. This is pretty good, as long as the rushee has enough resist/HPs to withstand one poorly timed AoE catching him.

But, for me, when *not* in hardcore, I completely remove any issue of timing, need for skills, need for HPs or need for thought by simply walking the rushee to where I know I'm going to drop the boss (switch; walk; switch back; kill; switch back; escape; complete quest dialogs; go to next step/act; switch; rusher proceeds) I do a lot of switching per quest, and my overhead is high, so I naturally prefer mindlessness for speed and accuracy. If you realize how huge my overheads are, I think you'll appreciate that 26 minutes to act 5 is a product of mindless speed.

Still, if I were set up to switch trivially, as I was in v1.09 and before, I'd have no reason to need to die or for a safe spot. This would avoid a HC tax as well. Although I think it is worth considering the possibility that the +6/7 player carry-along sleaze makes sacrificing potentially even five characters per difficulty (Andy, Meph, Diablo, Ancients(20), Baal)--like a multi-stage rocket--not an insurmountable cost (for example, imagine the anti-rush code tightened up in somehow, to make this way the only trick available).

If we think about this for "friends" who can work together (for just the one rushee case) then I think my way involves less uncertainty or coordination (non-Hardcore that is). Admittedly nearly but not quite killing an act boss doesn't seem like that hard of a skill to master and, of course, some of the coup de grace methods are pretty auto-magic, if which class you rush can be selected at will (which, of course, is definitely true for the carry-alongs sleaze).

I certainly don't think anything Walkiry is doing deserves to be nerfed, and I don't want to see the Hellforge rewards nerfed (since I'd like to see players at least have the possibility of seeing decent runewords without endless play). But I really want to see Baal have a 20*diff clvl req, and possibly a (reasonable) clvl req that is higher than that for Hellforges, to reduce the carry-along sleaze to a minor efficiency instead of an economy breaker.

Edit: Another possibility would be to have them change the code so that carry-alongs don't work. This isn't fair to players in a legit attempt party who die (the main rationale for carry-along in the first place I believe) so you could add to the stay-around-without-escape-at-death technique a new bit of code granting credit if they have a corpse in situ (thus you wouldn't have to document any of the changes in order to get players to not hork themselves by pressing escape). With these code changes, since a sub clvl 20 char can't get to Baal, they can't get credit either by escape screen or by corpse, but a 20+ char that made the (shared) attempt but died, will get credit if any party member succeeds (unless they come back, loot their corpse, and return to town, while the party then kills Baal--I don't see this as a problem case, as the game already has this problem, potentially, if no quest-enabled party member is in situ).

There. Now that I'm less obscure, and finally understood that you were using some better than safespot technique (safespots are hassles--I like my suicide method better, unless the safe spots are no-brainers, like Andarial's area), am I on the same wavelength? Or did you discover some awful D1esque player attribution "slot" oddity, like have the rusher cause open wounds and then leave the game, which then decides to award the kill to a remaining (in game) party member? I was assuming that if you had found something abnormal like that, you'd just report the particulars as a bug, and not worry about it, so I guessed that you were using safe spots or timing (or, as I now believe, timing insensitive automagic kills, like Holy Shock).