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I'm going to breakdown the various changes of the upcoming CM 1.60 into manageable topics, because the full change log is HUGE! This post: Creature Fixes These are fixes to bugs with creatures' stats and spells. The Swirling Mist of Miasma now uses its special "Weakness" buffs that were designed for it (causes ice damage, lowers player stats and speed). The Swirling Mist of Miasma no longer regenerates health faster than it summons undead (reduced cooldown on summoning spell). Kufferath Castle is now defended by knights of its own realm (wearing Urtamark green) instead of DeMordrey soldiers. Guide Jaftar (human enemy, Light path main quest) is now a boss-level opponent who uses a weapon and a Hard Hit attack. Some elite Thraconians on Christmas Island who weren't properly flagged as elites now have the proper rank. Some normal ranged Slave Outcasts who were wrongly flagged as elites now have the proper rank. Reduced Poison DOT of Spiders' Venom Spit. Reduced the damage and healing of the Spider Queen Asmarael's life leech aura. Elite Yeti and Gahanka (Troll boss) now use the "Stomp" CA. All Trolls and Yeti who use the "Stomp" CA now use the correct animation. The Toughness skill now works properly for elite Blade Spiders. Elven Apparitions now have ice resistance like other ghosts. Ghost Wolves now inflict some physical damage like other ghost animals. Elite Ancestral Spirits now have their missing armor and damage mitigation values, as well as physical-to-ice damage conversion. Elite Scarabs are no longer missing damage and armor values. Bears, Boars, Spiders, Snow Leopards, and Yeti now have fur. Yellow shimmer on elite enemies removed - no longer overrides special texture effects like fur. Enemies will no longer spawn inside the town limits of Tharum, Na Fian, Dar Al Badja, the village by Eloeth-Sun, Badawi and the Badawi portal, or the exterior Scorpion Temple soulstone. All human-race NPC's in the game were scaled up in size so they're not so short and dwarfish compared to the player and other races. Female Orc Merchants now use the proper "Greetings" and "Farewell" voice files. Removed Knockback effect from enemy attacks because of a serious bug where the player could become perma-stunned until reload. Only Crystal Traps and a few bosses caused this effect. Most of these changes were introduced in Diablo 2 Fallen, so if you're familiar with that mod, you've already seen the breakdown of most of these fixes in the D2F Creatures Thread. Here's a couple changes that are new: Stomping Trolls. Trolls have a Stomp CA but had the wrong animation assigned. Now they do a big jump, sending out shockwave when they land. I also gave Stomp to Gahanka and elite Yeti. The Swirling Mist of Miasma was taking too long to summon fresh undead, meaning it would regenerate its health too much in-between summonings. Now it summons undead more frequently. This is a semi-reversal of a previous CM Patch change where the cooldown was made really long (too long). Yellow shimmer on elite enemies removed - no longer overrides special texture effects like fur. The thing is, there already 4 major indicators that an enemy is elite: different circle at the feet, different icon on the minimap, different health bar with gold nameplate, and different skin (sometimes). The yellow shimmer on the enemy model was overriding shaders and special fx, like fur. Now for the first time, all the fur on elite enemies will be seen. Humans too short. This isn't new, but worth talking about again. For some reason, Humans in Artamark and Bengaresh are astonishingly short, like little dwarf people compared to the playable characters. Strangely, children are of "normal" height compared to the player, which means the kids are almost the same height as the adults, which makes them look really creepy and disproportionate by comparison. This is fixed now. Before anyone complains about "a major gameplay element being removed" with the removal of knockback, let me clarify: in the vanilla game, only Gar'Colossus, Octagolamus, and Carnach could use knockback. Each of them were notorious for causing the "perma-stun" glitch. It's awful to experience. CM Patch then gave knockback to Asmarael and all the Crystal Traps in the Crystal Plane (huge mistake). Perma-stun bug reports skyrocketed after that. Knockback is now removed from those enemies. The player can still cause knockback, so the effect isn't removed from the game, just from a couple enemies, because the bug was just that problematic.

I think toning down spider DOT is a good idea.

We can add the ability to stack runes. Doing so will save inventory space. EDIT: Read the whole thread to see how all my original arguments for voting NO were set aside due to coding developments. In the end, I too voted YES. As such, I left my original arguments for the sake of clarity, but crossed it out to indicate that the downsides to rune stacking were overcome in the end. But, it will also make the bonuses on all runes in the stack identical. So, if you have a low level Darting Assault Rune with +1 Darting Assault and 2.0% Chance to Poison, then every Darting Assault rune you pick up afterwards will be added to that stack and the bonuses conformed to match it. This means you would have to check each rune that drops before you pick it up, and make sure that you don't already have a lower-level stack of that rune in your inventory already, or you will lose the higher level bonuses. In essence, you're trading one kind of micromanaging for another. You won't have to constantly look through an inventory filled with dozens of individual runes, but it will now be up to you to always check and make sure you're not adding high level runes to low level stacks in your inventory. One method to do this is always keep runes in your player stash, where stacks don't upgrade. You could also spend 125000 gold to upgrade a single rune, then reverse upgrade the stack. This is basically a cheat feature, since you can add low level runes to high-level stacks, if this change is made. Sacred 2 players, is this trade-off worth it?

Another chunk of the CM 1.60 Changelog. Text and UI Fixes The GUI background is now less transparent so that text is easier to read. Grunwald, Swamp, Desert, and Girvym Dragons now display correct names in the "Last Opponent" window. Destructible "enemies" like Crystal Traps and Cursed Banners now have names in the "Last Opponent" window. Scaron boss now has a portrait in the "Last Opponent" window. Enemy names now fit better in the "Last Opponent" window without being cut off. Improved and clarified tooltip text for attributes. Damage modifier now appears in the Willpower tooltip if applicable (for lightsabers). Percents, not flat numbers, are now correctly shown in tooltips for Combat Discipline and Speed Lore. Corrected all instances where "Urtamark" is mispelled as "Urthamark." Corrected all instances where "Lakeview Tavern" is called "Ocean View Tavern." Corrected loading screen tips where "Cooldown" is used instead of "Regeneration Time" Corrected loading screen tips where "Frost" is used instead of "Ice." Corrected loading screen tip where CTRL+Click is said to be the command for directing minions, when in fact it is SHIFT+Click. Tornado and Gust of Wind are no longer called "Whirlwind" and "Flurry" in the rune exchange window. Master of the Hunt quest: Corrected mention of the city "Grurag-Orc" to the actual name of the city, Entruag. Sar'Thaz and Bengaresh Threshold now display their proper names onscreen when the player arrives, instead of "Arena of the Winged Ones" and "Red River," respectively. Corrected several lines in the various localizations that had incorrect or awkward translations (thanks to all the translators and bug reporters!). Using SHIFT+Click for minions was a big revelation for me. I thought directing minions was broken, when it turns out simply the game tip was wrong. See this post for more pics of the new, easy-to-read User Interface. Most of the missing enemy names were previously added in Diablo 2 Fallen. However, the names for the traps in the Crystal Plane and Cursed Forest are brand new. Poor Scaron never even had a portrait assigned to him. I had to make one from scratch. Big thanks to dimitrius154 for doing the necessary coding to get tooltips corrected for Willpower, Speed Lore, and Combat Discipline. He also figured the scripting necessary to get Bengaresh Threshold and Sar'Thaz names displaying properly. We erroneously thought it was a hard-coded issue for years. Read about the long and winding road leading to solving that bug here. MUCH appreciation to all translators who pitched in to get the CM Patch ready for all 10 localizatons. Caledor, Czevak, desm, thareross, dimitrius154, thank you! ==================================================== Quest Fixes Arena fighting rescripted (LUA code review: onRespawn). Quest targets in the Thylysium quest "The Usurer" will now appear and be attackable. There are no longer duplicate "Sister of the Archaeologist" NPC's standing in the same spot in Orcish Byway. Dragon Mage now makes comments when approaching quest bosses, like the other characters. All characters now have voiced comments when accepting new quests. The first three changes listed above are the work of quest script guru Marcuswob before he retired from the CM Patch. I carried them over from the previous test release. I believe the "Arena Fighting" refers to those quests with waves of enemies in arena locations. If you die during the quests, they should now resolve properly instead of glitching. I had Dmitriy pursue the issue of the missing "Quest Acceptance" voices mainly due to the persistence of one user, TonyG, who has been checking his topic for years, and also PM'd me about it. Tony, if you're out there, quest accept voices are finally restored! In the process, we also noticed the Dragon Mage was not making comments about the main quest bosses when he approached them. That's been fixed as well.

while that is true Dimitrius, it isn't exactly useful for roughly 85-95% of all other players and merely clogs up the possible stats on Items. the majority of Sacred 2 players I know, play the Singleplayer, where Pacifism, due to its function, is absolutely useless. Edit: Flix, please correct me if I am wrong but that CA is defined as a "DoT" right? sooo "D"amage "o"ver "T"ime would mean the implementation of a duration parameter. It would not surprise me, if that was actually INTENDED to be done, but ultimately forgotten about before release.

It's a balance decision. The Poison DOT is very high on this particular spell, nearly boss-level damage values, which are about twice the damage of other enemy spells with Poison DOT. This is in addition to a moderate flat physical damage burst with each spit (unchanged). Yet, these are just trash mobs. Unlike boss battles, you are typically fighting huge swarms of Spitting Spiders, so the health bar gets eaten through in seconds. As most players could tell, they're inexplicably some of the most dangerous encounters in the entire game. It wasn't always this way. Ice and Blood is when players saw this bizarre deadliness applied to these spiders. I'm trying to restore that pre-expansion balance, but I don't have the Fallen Angel scripts to work from. An alternative might be to apply a "duration" parameter. DOT spells are supposed to have a duration assigned, which dictates the period of time over which the damage is applied. Poison Spit has no duration parameter. The spell still functions, but its damage payload is applied immediately, resulting in huge chunks of health eaten away at once. If people don't like the idea of damage reduction, I could try to make the spell be like other DOT spells that spread out the damage over a duration.

the high droprates ARE the reason stacking would be a nice feature. I mean really... the runes simply clutter up the inventory after a while. Stacking would definitely reduce that issue

Not sure why anyone would want a stack of runes in the first place. Are there people out there hoarding runes? They drop frequently and you can craft whichever rune you need on demand at the rune guy... seems kind of pointless. Fixing something that isn't broken.

The rune stacking issue is literally the last thing we have to get sorted out. Until we can agree on that, I'll be posting these change log chunks. This is just the tip of the iceberg folks! TBA. Block Chance: Knockback is replaced in CM 1.60. Removing Pacifism will be something for the "Enhanced Edition" mod I've yet to officially announce.

"Block chance knock back" could be replaced by "block chance CA", while pacifism... yeah, no clue! Hooyaah's right though, those kind of modifiers could be worked around somehow.

Wow Flix, just... Wow! The waiting is the hardest part. You did not mention the new locations where the balloon captains can transport ones player around Ancaria. That's yet another thing to love about the upcoming CM Patch 160. I was wondering if some superfluous items modifiers in items could be omitted. Such as block chance knock back and pacifism. Right offhand I cannot conjure anything else in my mind that fills armor, etc. that could be replaced with a different and potentially useful item modifier.

Oh come on, now I'm even more excited about the patch!

Would it be possible to stack runes the same way as potions? Potions stack according to their size, runes could stack according to their level. That would basically remove the further micromanagement because only runes with equal bonuses would stack together. Otherwise, meh, I don't really know if I like the idea or not. Call me Switzerland on this.

Good, Gar'Colossus was always such a dirty cheater! I'd be whipping him in a fair fight and he'd go and pull that sneaky trick.

given what Dimitrius clarified, I would say "Yes to stacking Runes" Keeps the Inventory nice and uncluttered and if we switch Difficulties, all we have to do is put the runes into the Chest before going off slaying monsters

ahh crap, forgot the dependencies. Thanks for clarifying Flix as for the BGs... well if it can't be done for technical reasons like you mentioned, then it can't be done. Still, what your pics show is a LOT better than the original. Easier on the eyes as well

Dang - if thats the reason 3,500 is a heck of a lot of related words (~140 pages of posts)! Maybe schot isn't the only person gogo has chained up slaving away over this forum...

I would vote for yes. I can't honestly think of a scenario where socketing runes is useful except for at low levels and if as Dimitrius says the only thing impacting the bonus is the difficulty it drops in, then you are probably not going to be changing difficulty any time soon to progress past silver which I doubt would significantly impact the bonus level. Otherwise, could you make all runes drops with the same bonus level regardless of difficulty?

I'm with you on the UI, I recall modifying the font the game used in order to make things legible enough to read easily, this is much better.

>"check each rune that drops before you pick it up" Not quite correct. Runes stack by CA's they represent. All runes spawn with the same level throughout the current difficulty level, their boni values determined by their static level and the difficulty. If you change the difficulty level, gather new runes and decide to merge stacks, then rune level and rune difficulty value are conformed to the first rune in stack. That's where the micromanagement part kicks in.

Ok here's the CM interface with opaque black background. I think it's much easier to read the text now. Things look really crisp. Is it too black? Should I try another color? Did anyone actually like that hideous blue background from Fallen Angel? EDIT: Ok I'm sorry, but really? Someone's complaining about wanting the old interface back? It looks even worse! It's just as transparent, plus it's blue. It's nigh-impossible to read jack. I can't appease everyone, so I won't try. Play the patch or don't.