Hi folks,
I'm playing through the game, at the beginning of Act 2, on Hardcore, and I'm finding that the game is far too easy if you take your time to clean out the Battlegrounds like a good, thorough gamer should... When you can enter the battlegrounds, check the vendors, leave, and repeat until you find great gear, it gets too easy. My characters at level 17, and I am finding that I am really outpacing the level of mobs in the game. My main character is an archer, and if the explosive arrows don't take out a mob immediately, my Death Knight, a sword-and-shield warrior, will take it out with one hit. This goes for mobs around the same level as I am at, too. Boss monsters in BG dungeons are extraordinarily easy, for they just can't hit me.
The game is also too easy if you find a lot of Holy Water in the BG merchants' inventory. Why bother using the highest level charms, worth 50k gold, for a 5 point gain in stats which is tied to a weapon or piece of armor when, for 33k, you can buy holy water and make a permanent potion to give you 10 permanent points with no strings attached. Maybe a good way of balancing this out is to either increase the price of holy water, or to decrease the amount of stat gain to 5 or maybe 4?
I also have several levels of the Extra Skill Points for Summoning Dolls skill, and have my Act 1 skellie as a dedicated alchemist. Can't wait to get more summoning dolls, I can give the extra skill slots on each of them to non-combat skills I would never have spent points on. What a skill! An investment of 4 points give all your dolls that 4 points, talk about return on investment! THis is a very powerful skill which, along with the Summoning Doll Level Increase skill, could easily unbalance a game. I very rarely use my summoning doll for combat, I just don't need to. It's much more convenient as a mule, or a dedicated alchemist. When I get other dolls, I plan on using them for other rarely-used skills, such as pickpocketing or lockpick.
Anyway, my main question is this?
Does anyone know of a way involving hex editing that increases the base level of all monsters? If I can increase mob levels by 5 or so, I can bring the difficulty level back into line. Since most mobs are 5 or so levels behind, Hardcore mode would be much more challenging. I've already gone through most of the Act 2 BG Level 1 dungeon without getting any experience for killing most of the mobs, as they were more than 8 levels behind me. I am reluctant to cut back on vendors and permanent potions. I'm one of those gamers who won't cheat outright, but will take full advantage of all the resources available to me...
So, if anyone knows of a way to do this, please share... thanks in advance.
