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Since 2.0, I made sure all uniques were unique, because in vanilla there were plenty of uniques and legendaries that were clones of each other. That project didn't (fully) account for the uniques that were clones of rare items though. So to make uniques really, truly unique, I would need to either reduce the pool of rare designs, OR... add new models for uniques. Luckily dimitrius154 has done some work towards this so I can pursue the second option. These are the new designs will be in EE. I'm starting with shields. In vanilla almost all the unique shields also appear as magic or rare randoms. No more. * If there's any special objections to these being the designs I could always keep the original models and make the new models random rares instead. I think all of these fit better though. Most of have FX that makes them feel really special & "superior." Eternal Block - this thing has fine elements when you look close: skeletons dance around the centerpiece. Really has a feeling of "antiquity." Wall of Flames - Pics don't do this one justice. WIth the FX it really looks to be made of living flame. Glacial Defender - like the above, the new model seems to be made of shifting ice. Unyielding Wall Grunwald's Protection - the T-Energy effect flows in a circle, making the world serpent look like it's chasing its tail perpetually. The following join the lineup of rare shields. This is a very "High Elf" looking shield. This forcefield shield was made Silver Fox years ago for the CM Items Mod, I just never remembered to include it until now.

Unfortunately I can't install the mod right now as I'm building the next release of Enhanced Edition on top of my install currently. As soon I can get that packaged I will resume on D2F development.

Well actually quest rewards just pop out of thin air whenever the quest is marked complete. So neither enemies nor chests actually drop the reward. They basically appear at the player's feet after the final quest stage, whether it's killing an enemy, talking to an NPC, or even just walking into a certain area. I'm not really sold on handing out a Legendary without defeating a serious boss or completing some really long chain. The Pirate Treasure is just walking through two short dungeon levels and opening a chest. I think I'll add some random rare drops of various kinds.

It's supposed to be the treasure itself that's Legendary. If it's going to be an item, it's gotta be a specific one. What should it be?

Good to know. I should be shocked this made it into the game, but you know... I notice the Shadow Warrior has {"et_debuff_armor_phy", 500, 10, 3, 9 }, on Demonic Blow. Is that '9' doing any harm? What does @BRSamael mean when he says "increased bosses"?

Yeah it's the Dungeon Map that's broken: http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Dungeon_Map_of_Ancaria It just says "www.darkmatters.org refused to connect."

Well it's been nearly 7 years since my last update in this thread, where I talked about my wish to add one more Dragon Mage set to the lineup, one titled "Mark of the Dragon" and themed after the Dragon Mage's class chain quest. I had the idea back then for the set item names, but no clear idea on what the modifiers should be, and more importantly, no good visual design. Yet another recolor of an existing set? Then, during D2F development, Pesmonits helped me import the Dragonscale armor from Skyrim. I created the scripts and prepared all the files right away. But the proportions were never quite right, and In the world of Ancaria, the textures seemed very drab and washed out. For years this armor languished simply as random rare armor parts that could be shopped or found as drops, in D2F only. Recently Dimitrius has generously adjusted the model and textures as well as cooking up some modifiers themed around melee combat. So now I can finally present to you the full armor set, "Mark of the Dragon" (upcoming in the next releases of Enhanced Edition and Diablo 2 Fallen). The modifiers are focused on Dual Wielding combat with melee weapons. Since EE 2.0, the final boss of the Dragon Mage's class quest, Varmin, has been sporting a blackened version of this armor. Varmin will also be benefiting from updated models and textures in the next release of Enhanced Edition:

YES. Oh definitely a great memory of that last visit to the UK in 2007 was the Guinness that flowed like water. And it somehow tasted so much better than what we get imported here in the States.

Well, the bosses get the "persistent" flag set in their taskcreature entries. The flag is agnostic to game modes. The exception would be if you've already killed the boss in campaign mode and saved the game, before applying the mod. He ain't coming back in that case. Nice. It almost seems to promise too much, I feel like I should be throwing in more features. I suppose some notable elite-rank quest opponents could be made to respawn as well. I wonder if might be interesting to have the class quests available to all characters too? There's no technical reason preventing it, other than the text would not be well-suited to other characters. But it would be a chance for the Shadow Warrior to fight the Black Seraphim, or for the High Elf to go up against bosses like the ghost Dragon or Varmin, etc.

So I've developed a new optional module for EE. It has the following features: 1) All bosses respawn each game session (with a few exceptions for bosses that appear in towns). 2) All quests are available in all game modes, regardless of single/multiplayer, campaign/freeplay, softcore/hardcore. Shadow/Light quests still have to be separate because it would be buggy chaos to mix them. What I should call this new module?

Found the problem. My itemtype entries weren't pointing to the right directories for the standard armor models. In vanilla they sit directly in the dragonmage folder; in Addendum they are moved inside the "sets" subfolder. Sorry for the wild goose chase. I believe the texture difference was just due to me not yet adopting the FX on the base model.

180,060 bytes July 22, 2020

Ah yes, I see. I missed the textures. The helm and torso models of all the cloth variants still seem to clip into the DM's body without equipcut though. All models and animations from Addendum are present. This is what I see for the Magic torso and arms: This is what I see with the Leather pelvis. Defense, run, fight idle. Generic Arms:

Notes on the Dragon Mage models: There is severe clipping with the Cloth torso, the Magic torso, and the Magic arms. The EQUIPCUT flag resolves this - however for the torsos it does add visible seams in the bicep area. Chaoskampf textures were not edited so the torso has non-changing skin and the helm has severe clipping. I would personally recommend leaving the helm texture alone and adding EQUIPCUT back to the itemtype, as I intended for it to be like pale face paint as the base. Both the Iron and Leather torsos have visible seams in the bicep area. The Leather pelvis seems to introduce some clipping of the upper thigh through the leg fabric (more noticeable when moving/blocking). The generic arms (t_dmage-generic-arms.GR2) clip through the back of the DM's arms.

Some more updates on what I've been doing with spell FX. Vanilla mounted casting FX is, for the most part, very lackluster. There are only 3 mounted FX per character, with generic sounds and colors that are often not appropriate for the CA's. Let's take the High Elf as an example. The above FX is used for casting: Ancestral Fireball, Blazing Tempest, Frost Flare, Glacial Thorns, & Cobalt Strike. The same generic blue, and the same faint 'swish' sound in place of the usual unmounted FX. Now, in EE 3.0, mounted casting FX will better resemble the unmounted FX: I repeated this process for all 7 characters. About 90% of player CA's were affected. A handful were better suited to the original mounted FX and so remain unchanged, notably the Dryad with her "leafy" mounted casting FX that was actually unique and interesting.