Difficulty Exploit + Dark Golem Fight Exploit (SPOILERS)[G5]

[Nioca]

First off, it's possible to exploit the difficulty level to reduce a monster's health while still playing on a high difficulty. If it's turned down during play, the monster's health will go down to a level reflecting the new difficulty. However, if it's turned back up, while the max health will return to its appropriate value, the monster's current health will remain at the turned-down setting and only slowly regenerate to its new max, as if they had taken that much damage. This means that a player on Torment can turn it down to casual and knock of 66% of a creature's HP without firing a shot.

 

This, used deliberately, is obviously a cheat. However, it can also have some unusual side-effects. In Kratoa Stoneworks, I decided to turn the difficulty down from Hard for the Rune-Etched Golem fight. However, at the last moment, I turned it back up to Hard, wanting to fight it legitimately. The fight went as normal, though their HP was reduced (I would have won anyway; the only difference is that my Corrupted Thahds survived, which really means I got an XP penalty for the easier time I had with it ).

 

However, I then went to confront the Dark Golem.

Click to reveal..

As you know, Makar is the one controlling it. Makar had regenerated a good deal of health... but the Golem didn't seem to be recovering. As I started to approach, I was told the golem was waiting, blah blah... and then I got told that Makar was taking a hand personally for all the damage I did to the golem. He didn't engage me in the conversation that's supposed to happen, which means that the golem never turned hostile. In other words, I fought Makar one-on-one without the golem intervening at any point.

 

Just thought this should be out there. Jeff might want to look into it, but it isn't a big deal.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I noticed this bug too, just the difficulty one, I didn't try it when I was doing stoneworks an hour or two ago.

[TheTerminator]

It's not an exploit, it's a bug/inherent problem with the HP system. Perhaps changing the difficult should only apply after reloading the zone?

[*i]

Originally Posted By: TheTerminator

It's not an exploit, it's a bug/inherent problem with the HP system. Perhaps changing the difficult should only apply after reloading the zone?

That would probably be the easiest fix. But seriously, this doesn't seem like that big of an issue so long as it doesn't make the game unwinnable. I mean, if you really want to cheat, there are far more efficient ways.

[Øther]

Ya. For one, you could start with iamweak and all that. For two, you could use the awsome power of scripting.

[Student of Trinity]

It's a problem that Jeff would surely like to fix. You should probably e-mail him. The difficulty levels are meant to be used freely, because customers happy with the difficulty of the game are happy customers. And changing the difficulty level up and down in a fight shouldn't do unexpected things like this.

 

Jeff has been concerned in the past that people weren't adjusting the difficulty level enough — that he was losing customers who found his games too hard, when all they had to do was drop the difficulty. He renamed the 'easy' setting to 'casual' so that people wouldn't feel bad about using it, and would use it instead of deciding not to buy a game that was too hard on 'normal'.

 

That having been said, this is a rare problem, and it might not be easy to fix, so Jeff may not actually do anything about it. But I think he'd appreciate having it drawn to his attention.

[Spidweb]

Here is a quote from the original post:

 

"This means that a player on Torment can turn it down to casual and knock of 66% of a creature's HP without firing a shot."

 

So, if I am understanding the situation correctly, the problem is that turning the difficulty down to Casual is making the game easier. But I think I intended that turning the difficulty down to Casual would make the game easier.

 

Because of the way hit points work, odd things can happen when you change difficulty in the middle of a fight. Only taking difficulty changes into account when changing zones satisfies some arbitrary concept of purity, I suppose, but I would far, far rather have things be a tiny bit wonky and have changing the difficulty actually change the difficulty. Change it now, not later.

 

But don't kid yourself. If you turned the difficulty down to Casual during a fight, even for one round, you won the fight on Casual. Not Torment.

 

- Jeff Vogel

[Alorael at Large]

I think the spoiler in the first post is the bigger problem. Turning the difficulty down to Casual and then back up to Hard makes the golem never fight at all, apparently.

 

—Alorael, who could see this breaking the game if it scripts allowed it, which he doesn't think they do. A fair warning when you change difficulty might be in order, though.

[AaronC]

How is this a cheat? Changing difficulty is changing difficulty...it affects nothing except you knowing that you had to help yourself through a difficult area of the game that you may of otherwise not of finished.

[Nioca]

Originally Posted By: Spidweb

So, if I am understanding the situation correctly, the problem is that turning the difficulty down to Casual is making the game easier.

Almost. It's that turning it down, letting enemy HP adjust, then turning it back up leaves the creature's current HP at its lower setting.

So if a creature had 100 health on Normal and I kicked the difficulty down to Casual, it would adjust its health to 50 HP (assuming I have my percentages right for difficulty levels). If I turned it back up to normal, its max HP would return to 100, but its current HP would remain at 50, and only slowly heal back to 100.

That said, I fully understand that such an exploit isn't really a big deal (since it's rather difficult to do this accidentally), but I still thought you should know, especially considering it's can cause at least one fight to break (and possibly others that rely on HP for an event to occur).