For those, who would like to play Diablo a little more and know all it's ins and outs, I can recommend Jarulf's Guide to Diablo and Hellfire: http://www.lurkerlounge.com/diablo/jarulf/jarulf162.pdf

It's a very comprehensive guide with descriptions and stats of all skills, items, drop rates, monsters. It contains descriptions of all the quests. It even analyzes AI patterns of all monsters.

It looks like a very detailed guide, thank you very much!

I didn't know this was a thing. I jumped straight to the Mana Shield section and saw that there's some pseudocode explaining exactly how it's calculated and how it's applied. Such detail. Jarulf's Guide is a keeper.

I remember Mana Shield being OP a.f., and according to this guide, it actually got nerfed in Hellfire in a weird way, where increasing the spell level also increases the damage taken.

Back in the day this guide was the best resource I was able to find, I have great memories of reading it with my brother while we were playing :D

Yeah Jarulf's Guide is fantastic. Lots and lots of great stuff therein. Really shows how deep of a game Diablo is.

I especially like knowing the quests details, such as how you'll randomly get assigned 2 out of 3 of these quests, 1 out of 2 of those quests, etc. Great guide!

This actually isn't true. I was playing on Hell difficulty with a sorcerer this morning and monsters were stun locking me, even with mana shield active.

Wow i didn't know about this :o
It effectively makes you nearly invulnerable.

While it makes you take damage to mana, they can still stun lock and kill you.

I don't think it does, at least not from what i've seen. But i haven't been to the last few levels of hell/hell as my sorcerer is only lvl 34 so far (i used to have a lv40+ one but that was lost ages ago).
edit; not talking about mana shield but the 30hp thing

Not exactly. According to the Diablo patch notes, prior to v1.07, Mana Shield in Diablo also had this problem.[1] Hellfire has it because it is a fork of Diablo v1.04, and the fix was not applied to Hellfire. This is due to a design bug, and does not work exactly as you describe. Mana Shield does not redirect damage from life to mana. Combat still causes health loss as normal. Then, at the end of the turn, before the screen updates, the game notices that your character is protected by Mana Shield and refunds the lost health, charging you an appropriate amount of mana in return. That is a bit weird, but it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The alternative would have been to modify every site that deals health damage to use a helper function to deal health/mana loss directly. The big problem is that the health-then-refund model breaks down when dealing with other special status effects. If your character takes damage greater or equal to character level, then you are stunned. However, if you take damage greater or equal to your current health, you are killed. Due to the implementation of Mana Shield, if you take fatal health loss, but have sufficient mana to cover the damage, then you should not actually die. Mana Shield satisfies this requirement by canceling your death state and putting you back in Stand state (instead of whatever state you would have had if the game had not declared you dead). If you were supposed to be in Stand state, you won't really notice a difference. If you were supposed to be in any other state, such as stunned, then you are in the wrong state after Mana Shield prevents your death. This leads to several exploits, all from the same bug:
- A character with health less than level can never be stunned. Damage less than level would not stun due to the normal rules. Damage greater or equal to level would kill the character instead of stunning him, then Mana Shield would cancel his death.
-- More generally, a character with current health less than the minimum damage of the attacking monster cannot be stunned, even if current health exceeds character level.
- A character cannot be knocked backward by an attack that deals fatal health damage.
- A character hit by simultaneous attacks may die from an early attack and ignore later ones. Are you sure it was a stunlock and not a standlock? How much current health did you have?

[1] https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_1.07_(Diablo_I) section "Medium bugs (affecting gameplay)" states:
- Fixed the bug that caused Mana Shield to become less effective with increasing spell level.

I have always wondered how 200% damage was applied to a weapon like on a Windforce bow because I always thought that it was double the amount of damage but according to this guy's guide it is triple the amount. He gave an example of a weapon that gave 200% damage to demon based enemies.

In all cases, percentage based modifiers are about adding or subtracting the percentage, not setting. When a weapon says +50% damage, that means take the damage you would use, multiply by 0.5, and add the result back. That is why a +200% damage weapon does triple damage, not double damage.

Most, but not all, weapons that give +% damage modify the damage from the weapon's base type, so a dagger (damage 1-4) with +100% damage does twice as much damage (damage 2-8) as a normal dagger, but it's still just a dagger, so a non-magical Blade (damage 3-8) is better than a +100% damage dagger (more minimum damage, same maximum damage). Weapons better than a Blade are even better than the +100% damage dagger.

Some effects break this rule and apply their multiplier after adding in character damage. Civerb's Cudgel (+200% damage vs demons) is the most famous of these. When wielding it, do the entire damage calculation as normal (ignoring the Cudgel's special), then at the end, triple the damage if the target is a demon (section 6.2.1, page 139). This allows characters with high base damage to do tremendous damage to demons, since the +200% is not tripling the Mace (damage 1-8), but the total, which is (str * clvl) / 100 (for Warriors and Sorcerers) or ((strength + dexterity) * clvl) / 200 (for Rogues) (section 2.2.2, page 9). For an advanced warrior (say, level 40 with strength 300 (after items)), his bare handed damage will be (40 * 300) / 100 = 120, so he hits for 120 damage plus whatever his weapon adds. When the target is a demon, the cudgel will let him deal at least 360 damage on every hit.

It's worth noting that although the Deadly Hunter also claims to deal +200% damage versus demons, the code for ranged weapons does not check this property, so it does not provide the claimed damage bonus.

I don't know how much health I had. Also, what is a standlock? I have never heard of such a thing.