09-05-2003, 03:57 AM
Quote:A) Are you going to make a site for these like Sirian did?
I've been thinking about that. I need to find the time and motivation to actually do the HTML coding.
Quote:What's your next planned character?
It's a secret! Oh, man, it's going to be so hilarious and some places are going to be *so* hard, but God it'll be so much fun. I've finished most of my testing on the character build (using Nobbie over at diabloii.net's package of untrained 99th level characters just to experiment) and I have the actual character up to the middle of normal Act II right now. As I was commuting to school today, though, I thought about a possible improvement to the character that I'll have to test out and if it works out, I might have to start over in order to change where I put some skill points.
Quote:C) Are you, or would you in the future be interested in taking votes as to the next character story played and presented?
Absolutely! In fact, before I played Gunter, I put up a poll over at diabloii.net asking people if they'd be more interested in reading the adventures of the Return of Ember (untwinked sorceress who only focuses on Firebolt in honor of the original Ember) or Gunter, the barbarian mage. I described both characters in detail in an accompanying post and Gunter won by a landslide -- like 40 to 5. Ultimately, the choice to play a character is up to me, because these kinds of characters take a long time to play and write up, so the character would have to be something that I personally would enjoy playing and writing about. But the poll was very helpful in seeing what people were interested in. I was worried that people might balk at Gunter, because I was twinking him three Trang-Oul's items, which are fairly rare items, and because while the characters are rare on the realms, there have been guides describing singer barbarians before. However, the poll showed that people were really interested in the idea of Gunter and many people didn't think it would be possible for him to survive. Most singer guides that covered 1.09 that I read basically said, "It's a fun build, but you can't get past nightmare." So it was fun to show that it was actually possible to take one through hell in 1.10. Plus, adding in the "no weapons" policy and having him cast Firewall using new 1.10 items intrigued people.
And I always encourage suggestions for future characters. The idea for Gunter basically came from a suggestion from a poster at diabloii.net who said, "Now that you've made a melee sorceress, you should make a barbarian who casts spells! lol." That started me down the path and after a fair amount of research and testing, I realized, "Hey, this might actually work!"
I started Grizabella simply because I'd always wanted to make a melee sorceress. I wrote her up, because I thought it might be interesting to a handful of people. I had no idea how big of a deal she'd become. She ended up having a big fan club by the end of her adventures and I have to admit it was a big kick for me to see people responding like that to something I wrote. When I thought about what kind of character to do after Grizabella and now after Gunter, I started thinking about what properties would make a character interesting to both play and read about and I came up with this probably not exhaustive list:
1. The character build should be unusual enough that most people wouldn't have played or seen it before.
2. The character should use underutilized skills and make the most of them. (E.g. Enchant and Confuse for Grizabella, Taunt and War Cry for Gunter).
3. The less the twinking of items, in both quantity and quality, the better. A completely untwinked character is a huge bonus.
4. The right balance has to be struck in terms of the power of the character. The character should be strong enough that it could be imaginable that the character could survive, but the character should be weak enough that in some situations, special strategies and skills have to be employed to get through some areas of the game.
5. The rules of the character should be easy to follow and not change. e.g. Gunter must only attack with spells, must get every waypoint and quest, and will be twinked only these three Trang-Oul items. Other than that, anything goes.
6. The character should have an interesting character background story that motivates the build.
7. Right now there's a big interest in changes in 1.10, so characters that use skills and/or items that have changed between 1.09 and 1.10 are interesting. For example, seeing how War Cry got a boost with all of its synergies was interesting for people to see. Also, while I know that there's a contingent of LL'ers who don't like the cross-character skill items, it was interesting to experiment with some cross-character skill items and see how they might affect strategy and play in 1.10 games.
8. The more humorous and ridiculous the build, the better. ("A sorceress who fights melee? You're insane!" "A barbarian who only casts spells? You're insane!")
Of course, probably no character build will have all of these properties perfectly and there's a sliding scale to all of them. For example, the weaker the skills you choose to use, then perhaps the better the items you'd be allowed to twink yourself. But those are the things I think about when people make suggestions for character builds.