Hidden shrines and Thinking Cap?

[winmar]

I recently found the unique helmet called "Thinking Cap". It's a great helm for a sorcerer, but unfortunelty it only got 1 durability! And since items with 0 dur will vanish in D1, im afraid to use it.

But then i thought about Hidden shrines, they give -9 Durability to a single item and +9 to all the other items! Will this work on uniques with the Altered Durability mod? I will certainly try it once i run into a hidden shrine if noone knows the answer! :thumbup:

[Lanthanide]

Actually it's -10 to one item and +10 to the others. Make sure you a using a sword/shield so that you have 4 items to choose from instead of just 3.

Yes, this works for getting the thinking cap up, I found something like 8 or 9 TCs (that I kept, anyway) and I got most of them up to 21, with a couple up to 41 or 61 which I used on my main chars.

I'm not sure if hidden shrines are completely random in which item they pick to take 10 dur off, or if they are proportional, ie something that has 200 dur is more likely to be picked for -10 than something that has 50 dur. Jarulf's guide doesn't have any details on it. It seems to me that it might work in that sort of fasion, because I would almost always get the first few shrines I used to bump up the durability on the TC, whereas later on once it got to a higher durability it was possible for it to lose durability from using a shrine.

[moo-cow]

some low scale testing in SP years ago made me believe that the game pre-determines which piece loses durability. Then again I suppose that if it chooses the shield and you don't have one equipped it will either cycle around again to the helm or pick at random.

[Flux]

i mentioned the thinking cap on the recently-created d1 shrines page (http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/D1_Shrines). I didn't note it there, but most often the shield is the item that loses durability. It's noted in Jarulf's v1.62, at the very end of the shrines section, along with Enchanted usually -Chain Lightning, and Mysterious usually +dexterity. Also note that hidden shrine won't break an item, so if you get unlucky, your hat will still be at 1; not vanished.

More durability is always nice, but 11 is plenty for a TC to be quite usable. You're back in town and can repair fairly often, and you shouldn't be getting hit that often playing a sorcerer anyway; that you can teleport and kill from a distance is the whole point in wearing a hat that gives virtually no AC bonus, eh?

And if you're playing Hellfire, there are various oils that boost max durability too. Which is nice, since they added more shrines so it'll take you that much longer to find a Hidden.