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Spirit Tournament
One second I was in a frenzied attack with a really huge Urdar in hell, the next second I was feeling absolutely no pain and all I could see was stars (stunned). Then, I found myself in this strange place standing before an Angel who is taller than even that Urdar. This could not be good?
“Mortal, I had such high hopes for you. But, you failed.”
“Forgive my obvious mortality, but this was not easy you know. I did last until Hell difficulty and with just a little luck I may have gotten to act 5!”
“No, I am not criticizing you for dying, that is expected. I am criticizing you for making a botch of dying. You are only about 99% dead and you cannot enter the Ethereal Plain unless you are completely dead.” This has never happened before. You seem to be fully Spirit, but there is something wrong. If you were fully spirit, you could not lift anything, but you do still have some mortal strength. Oh, not much, but enough to keep you out of here.”
“What does this mean? If I cannot enter the Ethereal Plain and yet I am dead, what is there left for me?”
“Ah, a good question. Let me seek the advice of the council and I shall return.”
It has been hours since the Angel left, and all I see is absolute blackness. This would not be a good place to spend eternity. I can feel some strength in my body, but I am so much weaker. I can only barely raise my arms. I suppose that is no problem here. After all, there are no Urdars to attack and there are no chests to open. If there were, I would be in big trouble. Speaking of trouble, here comes that Angel again. I hope he has some ideas on how I can get out of here.
“Spirit, you look a bit worried. If you are not extremely worried, you should be. I have talked to the council and they will not accept your entrance to the Ethereal Plain. However, they did have a solution. You will simply return to your world as you are and surely it will not be long before you will finish your botched attempt at death. Realize that when you get there, you will have minimum strength and may find survival a bit difficult; but that’s good. If that were not enough, your skills are completely gone and you will not easily be able to relearn them. Do you have any questions?”
“Just how weak am I, can I lift an axe? Can I wear armor? Can I run? Oh, I hope I can run.”
“As for your strength, I have two bits of good news for you.
First, your weakness will stop you from using many of the implements that you used in your previous life, but it will not stop you from:
Wearing ethereal armor and wielding ethereal weapons.
Wearing rings and amulets.
Picking up gems, runes, jewels, charms, potions, arrows, bolts, keys, scrolls, and quest items.
However, most non-ethereal armor and weapons will forever be beyond your abilities.”
“Well, that is not so bad, at least it gives me some hope of survival….. Ah, what do you mean most will be beyond my abilities?”
“There are four exceptions. You will be able to wear items and wield weapons that have either the word Angel, wraith, ghost or Spirit in their name. Other forms of the word like angelic and spiritual will also work. As long as a word starting with the five letters ANGEL or GHOST or the six letters SPIRIT or WRAITH is in the name of the item, you will be able to use it. However, you must realize that such items are rare indeed and many of them are so heavy that you will still find them difficult to use. To help you in this last regard, Tyreal has promised to provide you with some small amount of added strength if you can reach him in the Pandamonium Fortress.
Any other questions Spirit?”
“Yes, one more. What did you mean when you said that my skills were going to be hard to relearn?”
“In the beginning, you will only be able to develop skills if you focus on a single area (skill tree) of expertise. If you survive long enough, you may be able to move on to a second, or even a third group of skills, but survival for that long is not likely.
Any other questions Spirit?”
“Yes, one more. When do I go back…”
And, the answer was obvious as I found myself here in the Rogue Camp. They expect me to die quickly and I suppose I will die up to their expectations. But hey, everyone likes a challenge, even a Spirit.
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Equipment
You may wear or wield only ethereal items, rings, amulets and those special items that contain the letters SPIRIT, WRAITH, GHOST or ANGEL at the beginning of a word in their name. This means that you must discard or sell your starting equipment. This is no big loss in the long term, but it can make the first hour of play a bit dangerous if you try it on P8.
NOTE: You may pick up anything and bring it back to sell or to deposit in your own private collections. The equipment limitations are only meant to limit what you can wear or wield.
A few comments on this.
(1) Repairing ethereal items is impossible, but some are magically equipped to renew themselves. Those items will be heavily sought after.
(2) Charsi embues of ethereal items are often (if not always) ethereal.
(3) Anya personalization rewards may contain the right word in them if you think ahead.
(4) Your mercenary is exempt from all equipment restrictions.
(5) You may acquire items in the field, in stores, or by gambling. No tweaking your character from your item collections.
(6) Since you can carry as many socket fillers as you like, socketed ethereal items will be valuable. However, when the item wears out, those gems and runes are gone too.
(7) Quest items may be used until they are given up. Examples include Wirt’s leg, the horadric staff, the flail in act 3 (Khalim’s Will), the hell forge hammer.
Skills
When you start out, you will be limited to putting skill points into only a single skill tree. This restriction will continue throughout normal difficulty. When you reach nightmare, you can begin to use skills in a second skill tree. When you reach hell difficulty, you will have all skills available to you. Note that skill points can be saved for latter difficulty levels rather than be used immediately.
Items that give skill mods can be used even when the skill is in another skill tree that you cannot assign skills to at the moment.
Attributes
You are very weak, and you cannot easily get stronger. No attribute points may be put into Strength with two exceptions. The Alcor quest attribute points may be placed in strength if you like. In Act 4 of each difficulty level, you may put five points into strength when you level up in act 4. Other than that, all attribute points must be put in Dexterity, Vitality or Energy.
Magic items such as rings/amulets/charms will be sources of strength that allow you to wear heavy ethereal items and wield heavy ethereal weapons.
Mercenaries
Any mercenary may be used. However, you are not allowed to temporarily move to another town just to switch mercenaries.
ATMA Stash
The ATMA stash cannot be used until you gain the ATMA reward for killing Radament. After that, it is usable for the rest of the game. Anything can be put there.
Scoring {Scoring is rather complex}
To calculate your score, it will be necessary to have all equipment and charms in place when you go to the “in game” character screen to look at strength and life.
[*] Plus two points for every waypoint activated.[*] Plus one point for every health point.[*] Minus one point for every strength point.[*] Minus five points for every level.
Other basic rules
1. HC only. When Spirit dies again, it will be done right!
2. Only Version 1.13 is permitted. The Rune Word Module may be used.
3. No Multi-Player permitted. No trading permitted.
4. You may play on any players setting you wish, and change that setting as you see fit.
5. You may not use the escape key to bail out of a rough battle. If you cannot run away or portal out, RIP.
6. ATMA is permitted to extend your stash once you have met ATMA and killed Radament for her.
7. You must solve all quests (grayed out by the end of the act). Waypoints can be skipped if you like.
8. This is a single pass tournament except for the countess. You may run the countess in normal difficulty until you have received 5 RALs. In Nightmare until you receive 5 ORT or higher and in Hell until you receive 5 FAL or higher. Once she dishes out the fifth RAL, you must move on. NOTE: When you save and then reenter, you may rerun a small area due to the need to enter at the last waypoint. This should be kept to the barest minimum.
9. You are not allowed to go back to previous acts or previous difficulty levels for any reason except to visit stores. After killing Baal, you may elect to do the Cow Level. (You do not have to do the Cow Level!)The Cow Level is considered part of Act 5 and you may go back to Harrogath after killing the cows to use your socket quest or Anya personalization quest.
Replays
Replays are allowed, but you must select a new character type each time. That means that you are limited to 7 attempts.
Signing Up
The plan is to start on March first. That will depend upon interest, so let me know if you intend to give this a try. If several of you decide to enter, I will post a final set of rules to include any additions and clarifications that are made as a result of your questions and suggestions.|||Great writeup! Reminds me of your Afterlife tournament back in 2007 which I enjoyed very much
With the current rule-set I expect the tournament to be dominated by Sorceresses and Necromancers, and maybe Druids and Hammerdins, though. What about bows? Banned, I suppose?
Don't know yet if I will enter, because I still have my randomly challenged Assassin and 5 obsission character
|||This sounds very interesting and tough! I agree that it will likely be mostly caster types that will enter, as the STR requirement alone makes it tough for others, let alone the fact that you would go through weapons like water!I will likely enter, although I do have a myriad of other tourney's I am in already.
You may want to clarify the ATMA rule to include Gomule.
I also don't quite understand the rule on not changing mercs.|||Quote:
This sounds very interesting and tough! I agree that it will likely be mostly caster types that will enter, as the STR requirement alone makes it tough for others, let alone the fact that you would go through weapons like water!
I will likely enter, although I do have a myriad of other tourney's I am in already.
You may want to clarify the ATMA rule to include Gomule.
I also don't quite understand the rule on not changing mercs.
Example: if you are in act 4 using an act 2 merc and you decide you would like an act 1 bowyer merc. You cannot go back to act 1 to change your merc. You would have to wait until act 1 nightmare to change to the bowyer merc.
What is Gomule? I have been away from Diablo for a while so I suppose it is something new that works like ATMA.|||Quote:
Great writeup! Reminds me of your Afterlife tournament back in 2007 which I enjoyed very much
With the current rule-set I expect the tournament to be dominated by Sorceresses and Necromancers, and maybe Druids and Hammerdins, though. What about bows? Banned, I suppose?
Don't know yet if I will enter, because I still have my randomly challenged Assassin and 5 obsission character
I wondered if anyone would remember "afterlife". This is a bit less complex, but every bit as challenging (I suspect).
As for the bow, I intend to depend upon Anya's personalization quest. I just have to get my Amazon to survive until then. Maybe I will luck out and find an Angelic Sickle to keep her going until act 5.|||Quote:
Example: if you are in act 4 using an act 2 merc and you decide you would like an act 1 bowyer merc. You cannot go back to act 1 to change your merc. You would have to wait until act 1 nightmare to change to the bowyer merc.
What is Gomule? I have been away from Diablo for a while so I suppose it is something new that works like ATMA.
Thanks, makes sense now.
And Gomule is basically just ATMA 100 times better. Better interface, search, prettier, etc... Don't get it unless you want to hate ATMA
|||Wolron, neat idea as usual. A couple observations:1. There are other words you might consider permitting for equipment, in addition to Angel and Spirit: Ghost and Specter come to mind, and there are probably others. Perhaps scour the item and item mod lists for a couple more ideas, to keep it interesting?
2. For your Countess rule: that's fine for Normal, but do you intend for NM and Hell also to be limited to finding 5 Rals? If so, that's OK, but it seemed worth clarifying.
3. I would consider allowing *slightly* more investment in strength, at some crucial points in the tournament, to make wearing equipment a little more possible. Like, maybe every 15th level you could put your stat points into Strength... something like that. The way the rules are now make melee characters pretty much impossible, and it'd be nice to see melee at least be an option (even if it's wildly challenging).|||and ban people from naming their characters spirit or angel.
"why can't i use my death cleaver? it's angel's death cleaver afterall. buahahaha"|||Ahh, but then you just have to use a bit more creativity: Angela or Angelica would still work, for example...
You might want to make the strength penalty for points over base...as it is, it adds an extra penalty to those classes that are already at a huge disadvantage.
Edit: Hmm...those classes will get more bonus for hp's though, so I guess it evens out a bit...
WoRG|||Bows, crossbows, are out as are most throwng items.
The only items that start with Spirit are 2 exceptional armors and 1elite shield. Good luck getting the STR for those.
Angels prefixes will be allowed on magic items(staves, orbs, and ammys) , but not Arch-Angel prefixes?
No set items other than Angelics? Not even Heaven's Brethern? ( a pretty useless set anyway)
Magic prefixes not allowed: Divine, celestial, hallowed, sacred, elysian, pure, astral, unearthly, godly?
Magic suffixes not allowed: "of Life Everlasting" and "of Revivication"?
yet my spirit character can be a necro and raise the dead?
The combination of the strength rule and equipment rules seems a bit extreme, and yet there are many items that could be allowed that are well within your theme.
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