Hellfire Patch v1.02.A5: Classic HF with less bugs and more polish!

[Belix]

[...] in my opinion at least - it aged better than Diablo 2 did

I have similar feelings. Diablo II is a decent game in its own right, but it wasn't what I wanted in a sequel to Diablo. I still replay it about once a year, hoping it'll finally charm me like its predecessor, but after finishing the game with on Normal (and some higher) with 30+ characters since I first got it and its expansion, it still hasn't happened.

Glad to hear you're keeping feature customization

The value of this became apparent to me as each update I have to decide what things should be on by default or should be specifically enabled, because there's so many things that feel like they're somewhere in the middle. In a future update I'd like to make it stupidly easy to turn features on/off, when time allows. That could be awhile though.

And also good to hear you're doing what you can on that front. Blocking [...] I was surprised to learn it actually came from vanilla D1

I have approximately half of all the changes Marsh made nailed down now, so if there is anything else you'd like to turn off, let me know and I'll see if I have the info yet.

Haha, yeah, if the shield block change wasn't basically gospel, I definitely would of included a reversion for that. Were it a user decision instead of Blizzard's, it would be a pretty radical alteration to the gameplay mechanics.

[...] it seems like the Search spell fix might either not work as intended

You're right, I've noticed this as well. When I tested this modification (from Hellfire: Fixed), it was with a character that had Search maxed out. The time it ran in the game was, as best I could tell, exactly what it should be for Level 15 according to Jarulf's formula. But playing with other characters since I notice the duration of it at low levels - even Level 1 (which scrolls normally cast) - is far too long. So it seems Lemming's formula only appeared to match Jarulf's coincidentally at Level 15, or perhaps he simply set it to always be the maximum duration.

I'll have to take a closer look at the assembly code and maybe rewrite it. Meanwhile, I prefer this to having to recast it every 15 seconds, and I suspect some people wouldn't mind if it lasted 15 minutes or could be activated by pressing ALT.

[...] did Hellfire have unique mobs and they were commented out? Or did Marsh do some custom-content job here?

That's an interesting question! I'd have to say a bit of both. As you may know, there were a lot of things that were intended to be implemented in Diablo that never made it to release. Pieces of some of these things exist in various stages of completion inside the game. One such case are monsters that were never implemented, for which information is defined internally, such as their 4 varieties, names, stats, and uniques.

For adding unique monsters to Hellfire, Lemming and Marsh changed these unused unique foes to be derived from monsters that actually do exist (from Hellfire), and set them to what seemed to be appropriate levels.

So you could say they already existed and were just enabled... or you could say it is a bit of mod flavor. Marsh's implementation seems largely based on Lemming's, so many consequently share the same looks and placement. Names are another matter; in some cases the original name from the unused unique monster was kept, in others Lemming took some creative license (anyone remember uniques with names like "Smellsbad Tastesworse"?) and in these cases Marsh either kept them or gave them, erm, more serious names.