the True Story ™

There's no much fairy-tales about Hoard of Bugtraction. Two people meet, both aged in years and cynism, and debate about rhymes and reasons of their affliction to that fairly old game. And why they don't play online anymore. And if there'd be no way to counteract this.

Goals

We don't want to turn the game we love upside down with HoB. We like the actual feeling of Diablo II, and we even like some parts of the Lord of Destruction expansion. Hey, even 1.1x patches had some nice additions, if a bit overaggregated. But 1.10 invented a technical system which made it quite simple to modify the game, so we won't complain. We didn't change much about quests, monster appearances, skills and synergies, we just, well, modified it a bit. We want to achieve

1. more dangers, thus more needs of tactics
2. more focus to character development than to character equipment
3. easily achievable useful items
4. no invulnerability or invincibility of any character due to easily achievable items
5. elimination of some bugs (we simply can't avoid all of them)

To match our requirements we realized some steps.

1. Monsters deal more damage but have less life.
   No-one should be bored by stupidly hacking several minutes away at a single monster. But no-one should stand invulnerable amongst a herd of monsters and slaughter them away with no harm.
   Happy Feet is no cowardish behaviour in HoB. And sometimes you may need a brain cell or two to find a way for killing a kind of monster.
2. All skills are re-checked and double-checked for usage. Status Points, especially Mana, are more important than in unmodified Diablo II.
   Some well-known concepts from unmodified game like 'strength to equip items, dexterity nothing, energy nothing and vitality all the rest' won't work anymore.
3. The Horadric Cube is an important instrument.
   As a rule of thumb, you have found the base item, you may cube it to a better quality. Actually the currently active recipes are quite simple, but don't rely on this in later revisions. But we don't want to force anyone to boring shopping/gambling/boss-running routines just to get a desired item.
4. We've invented negative attributes especially on Uniques and Runewords, but also on Sets.
   There is a price you have to pay for easy achievement of items. Some of the most popular items are flawed to some extend, and you'll have to counteract those flaws with other gear.
5. With more or less lack of elegance we could avoid some of the nasty bugs and glitches the original Diablo II offers. However, our capabilities are limited, so we couldn't do anything about, say, some character animation weirdos.

Hoard of Bugtraction background story

We haven't messed around with the story, as said before. However, Diablo II and the expansion Lord of Destruction are very old by now in terms of a computer game. Years and years characters have fought Evil in Sanctuario with more or less success and more or less fair means. You should guess Evil's Spawn has learned something in between. Also some items got some flaws due to incompetent usage by former owners.

Hoard of Bugtraction should be seen as a more difficult Diablo II version, where a player needs some virtue and patience to fight Evil despite of all this disadvantages. Enjoy it!

ReaperMan & librarian
22II07

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