Frequently Asked QuestionsThe following questions appear repeatedly on our forums, so here is the answer to them: Technical questions:
Quick Questions & Answers
How do I get to the Cow level?You need to find 4 items and fuse them together in your cube in Act 1. This will open a portal to the Cow Level. The items can be found in the locations listed below:
These bosses won't *always* drop the cow parts though, so you may have to visit them a few times before you get what you want. What the heck do I do with a cursed item?You may notice that a monster drops a cursed ring, amulet or sword and wonder what hte heck this is used for. Obviously you need to uncurse it! That can be done by finding 5 purification glphys and fusing them with the item in your cube. The glpyhs can be found in the locations listed below:
Normal Glyphs : Cursed Ring ---> Horadric Ring What is the Land of Shadows and how do I get there?The Land of Shadows (or LOS) is an end game area with powerful monsters and fat loot. Each of the final bosses drops a "heart" that gives a large bonus to a particular character class. The bosses don't die easily though, so you generally need to bring your A game to get the job done.To get to the Land of Shadows you need to fuse together the 5 Keys found throughout the realm. The keys will only drop in Hell Difficulty. In addition to fusing together the keys you need to have the following quests completed: Hell baal, Countess Quest, Viper Amulet Quest, Council Quest, Hellforge Quest and Nihlathak Quest or you won't be able to enter the portal.
Once you have fused the keys in to a single Key of Evil, just use it outside town in A5 in Hell Difficulty. One final note - at the end of each area, the boss will open a portal to the next area. Make sure you don't use thorns damage (from an Iron Golem or Spirit of Barbs for example) to make the final kill or the portal won't spawn and you will be very unhappy. The Deal with HealHealing isn't quite as simple as it may appear at first glance, there are a few entanglements to be aware of with all that praying.1. Its all about the +life number.The most important component of Prayer and the number that I will refer to repeatedly in discussions is the amount of +life it returns. The key reasons for this is that it doesn't suffer the frame rate penalty that normal life regen items get. The frame rate penalty is the real kicker for any item that has the Replenish life mod:
In contrast, the +life from prayer kicks in every time the aura pulses - which is about every 2 seconds. So over 10 seconds a +20 life regen item would heal you 20 life, but a +20 life from prayer would heal you 100 life a 500% increase over +life regeneration items. Life Regeneration isn't all bad though as it comes in at a constant frame rate rather than the pulse effect of the prayer healing, sort of a steady constant healing effect that can be rather handy to have around. 2. Prayer's bonus conveys to Meditation and CleansingDespite dumping a lot of points in to Prayer, you probably won't be using the aura all that often because its key benefit conveys to Cleansing and Meditation so you might as well use those rather than your prayer. Only the +life value conveys though, the additional +life regeneration value does not and thus you will see a slight decline in your healing power since you will lose the +life regeneration boost for you and your party. As mentioned above the life regeneration aspect is a really small component of the big boost, so losing it in favor of an increase in mana regeneration or curse/psn durataion reduced is a pretty good deal.3. Prayer Auras will stackThis is an important thing that isn't widely known. Normally when 2 paladin auras collide, the higher one wins and the smaller one just sits there doing nothing. So if you are running lvl5 fanatacism and someone else in your party is running lvl15 fanat, his fanat aura overrides yours.This is not the case with prayer - *both* your prayer and anyone else's will be active simultaneously giving the healing goodness all around. So lets say you have a +30 life prayer, another person has a +10 prayer and a merc has a +25 prayer. These will combine to give people in your party as nice +65 life prayer. That's a LOT better than just your +30 prayer. Understanding this stacking is important when choosing your gear and what to run in parties since both Cleansing and Meditation do not stack. So in the above example, lets say you are running a +30 life Meditation and the other healer is running a +10 life Meditation - rather than +40, you will only get the benefit of the highest cleansing aura: +30 life. Additionally since Meditation doesn't stack, there is no point in running multiple copies of them - you will only get the % mana regeneration from the highest level aura, all the others will be ignored. 4. Items with Healing auras on Equip.Things can get really fun when you have an item like Insight that gives you meditation on equip because the +life benefit from prayer gets applied twice - once by prayer and once by meditation. So if you have a merc with say +15 life prayer and you put an Insight weapon on him, suddenly you will recieve a +30 life pulse every 2 seconds. Pretty neat!Keep in mind though that Merc's and other minions do not have a mana pool and as such don't gain any benefit from the meditation aura. For them, it will still just be +15 life from the prayer aura. Also remember that the only way meditation benefits is when the holder has points in prayer. That means that if you put an insight weapon on an A5 merc you won't get anything except mana regeneration out of him even if you are a Medic with lvl40 prayer. Likewise, if someone else in your party is running meditation that meditation won't magically get a boost from your prayer level. This means that healers are probably best off being the one who wields the Insight item and not having other people run one. If you happen to be in a party of multiple healers, only one of them should be bothering with an Insight weapon, the other characters should choose some other item that will benefit the party (they should be running prayer though!). Its all about the choicesThe big benefit that having an Insight weapon as a healer is that it gives you options as a healer rather than being stuck running the same aura all the time (zzzz...). As long as your Prayer is sufficiently high, simply relying on the Meditation aura from the Insight for healing will probably do the trick. You can then choose some other neat options like:
There are tons of other options, the important thing is that you don't have to be a 100% healer all the time - you can run at 50% healing capacity and still be plenty useful to a party. Especially if you take in to account your other healing skills, which leads me to..... Holy Bolts Batman!So far I have only been talking about Prayer, but to be honest Prayer is really no where near as powerful as Holy Bolt when the heat is really on. A well played tank/healer combo can take out bosses without using a single potion (I've done this and confirmed it) due to the mighty healing power of holy bolt. The problem of course is that Holy Bolts will drain your mana quite quickly so you will probably want to click on that little Energy button a few times [*loud moans and groans from the audience*].In addition to just healing a lot more at relative skill levels, Holy Bolts really shine because they give your party member (or merc) that boost of life right now which is pretty nice since you can pray all day over a dead body and it won't heal anytime soon ;) One thing to keep in mind about Holy Bolts though is that while the animation pierces through monsters, the skill really doesn't. That means that if a monster comes between you and your tank, he won't be getting his healing happiness from you, so it becomes a bit of a dance for tank/healers. I have found that for some reason Barbarians perform this dance a bit better when they are wearing a Tiara ~ not really sure why... Either way, make sure that if your tank isn't aware of this little nuance he is educated about it very quickly. In Softcore, letting him die a few times generally helps to drive the message home, but of course that isn't really a recomended tactic for Hardcore. Fast cast gear is nice for Holy Bolts but not really essential since you really jsut cast the Holy Bolt on an as needed basis. If you are constantly pumping Holy Bolts at your tank, either the tank sucks or you are in over your head and maybe should level a bit before tackling this particular boss/area. What it does allow is for you to stand back a little further since your reaction time can be slowed down a bit and that can be really helpful when you are facing a boss with wide ranged counters. The biggest nuissance to using Holy Bolt is that you really can't do much else except stand there and heal the person when they need it. If you try to do other things, quite often you just aren't able to get that Bolt over to your party member when he/she really needds it. While I have found that I can use Sacrifice or Vengenance, I have had a bit of trouble using Zeal since my paladin keeps wanting to finish off his Zeal cycle before casting the Bolt. You also need to be a bit careful if you do want to be a melee/healer combo with getting set in to hit recovery. High levels of Faster Hit Recovery are going to be very important to you as well Holy Shield - since if you do block you will want it to be the blazing 2 frame block speed of Holy Shield. |