Except it did make a balance difference OBVIOUSLY which is why people did it. lol
Lol decreased the value of your average Elite Eth Armour, but increased the value of Superior Elite Eth Armours…
Glad they got rid of it.
Now you actually get excited finding a 10ED Eth Archon Plate, or 8ED Eth Sacred Armour.
Instead of being like… Oh its Eth but has ED, so I can’t bug it…
I have no idea what in the lord’s name your even talking about. Hmmm where to start with whatever your saying this thread was all about how Blizz removed something that would make defense on a piece of armor higher If it was ethereal, once placed in a cube recipe with tal, thul, perfect topaz, transmute and the armor would come out with a random# of sockets… therefore making a very good base armor to make a runeword of whichever armor runeword you are wanting to make… now that they have removed that, we can no longer have extremely good eth bugged fortitude runewords that have close to 4k to 4.9k defense or Stone with 5k and not have to put runeword on a piece of armor that requires so much strength therefore allowing us to make our mercs alot stronger and able to survive at lower levels. Now in order to have a extremely high defense you have to roll your eth runewords on a sacred armor or shadow plate which takes way to much strength so in order to use that you are gonna need to be over lvl 89. With a lvl 89 Merc now yes you dont have to have these 4k and 5k Defense Runewords but they do very much help ur Merc survivability wise. Now I just use a eth Skullders ire Balrog Skin which is just an upgraded skullders from russet to Balrog which is 2k defense with an auto-repair mod eth armor and is actually what I used on my hdin until I got my enigma and then I used it on my barbarian until I made my Fortitude then switched it to my hdins Merc. But when I used the eth skullders Balrog Skin socketed with UM rune btw which also gave it +15 to all resists when using it on my pally it was gg I could literally tank mobs like they weren’t there in chaos even In the throne of destruction. Sooo that just goes without saying one of the best armor I think in the game without considering the runewords is definitely Ethereal Skullder’s Ire Balrog Skin
20 days and 20 characters of necrooooo
Writing your own eulogy?
I would suggest you to organize your text. But based on what you said or at least what was readable:
They didn’t removed the recipe to do that, they just fixed an armor irregular increase by exploiting an unexpected behavior in the game. That’s what devs call bugs. The armor will be still good and have the same perks, just the correct armor not a irregular one.
You still have extreme good defense items, just not bugged ones your sentence already reinforced was bugged. You used in the past the merc with defiance aura instead using him as holy freeze or might? That should be the only situation that you would have a huge impact on his survival, otherwise defiance would provide enough defense or more for him to have similar amount of survivability.
Instead of exploiting a mechannic that was cleary unintended, if was wouldn’t be called eth bug in the first place.
What’s the issue about that? For real, unless you’re using your merc as stat stick he will survive just fine if you put gear on him towards the content he will be dealing.
Reaper’s toll(shael/amn) + guardian angel(UM) + kira’s/tal rasha he would survive against all contents that would have huge elemental dmg. Swap the kira’s/tal rasha for vampire’s gaze and he will also be fine for the rest using defiance aura.
If you wanted a merc with bugged gear just to use the aura you wanted paired with runewords you wanted, maybe you should use on your character instead of use it on hireling or just compromise on something like using potions or have a secondary build for him in certain maps.
The melee bug and eth bug, are examples of things that weren’t supposed to happen and still folks exploited to forget that they were hirelings not stat sticks. You still can make several runewords for him, just would need to manage his survival a bit more using potions, sustain and in some cases defiance aura.
If still, you failed to realize that bugs are unintended behavior in the game. Maybe you should play where they didn’t fixed because a single human being wouldn’t have time to manage to fix every single bad code line in the game without receive too much backlash and either revert or keep putting his hands on fire for changing something.
Bugs aren’t core gameplay and neither intended to be on the game. If the team can solve it without taking too much time and resources for it they should fix it, otherwise they would make the function be more predictable and simulate as intended. Just because they had 18-19 years of a single guy working in the game doesn’t mean that d2r only have a single guy.
Yeah, the game had a single guy working on it after 1-1.5 years after the release of the expansion, just shows how well maintained the game was and how backed up he was when he released a patch who made several folks angry to the point of him reverting those changes from the backlash from it.
Right now they have support and a team providing enough time and resources for address those unintended behaviors.
Just because a thing was broken for 20 years doesn’t mean isn’t right to fix it. Bugs can have several root causes, some of them are directly linked with other systems the Eth bug by example could be related to a system they planned to work properly or fixed and the bug vanished as bonus. Either if was correction directly on the bug itself or as result of fixing something else, just proves that the bug itself wasn’t intended to begin with.