Major pedant: the Pit is chock-full of lit-immunes, mostly Dark Archers who can be utterly lethal to a Trapassin in boss packs.
'Doh! Of course it is. That’s what I get for talking about games at work. :smack:
I was for some reason picturing the Tamoe Highlands when I said “Pit.” I haven’t used her in a couple of months at least, but I remember running through that area wasting Dark Lancers and skeletons. Just proves I’m a :wally
I also have a lightning trapper on West. I outfitted her with only found stuff, no trading or anything, and got her through Hell Baal entirely solo. I agree that you live and die by +skill items. 2 +traps claws for your main weapons and 2 +shadowmastery claws on weapon switch (for fade, mind blast, and shadow warrior/shadow master) together with a decent +asn/traps amulet and a Lore helmet can get you pretty far on the cheap.
I put more than a few points into shadowmaster for dealing with large mobs of lightning-immunes. I use mind blast on the mobs while that she and my merc (act II defiance) can kill one or two, with a couple of fire bombs from me to help out. After that, death sentries will often take out the remainder. You really don’t want a holy freeze merc or even outfitting cold-damage gear on your merc because of the chance of shattering corpses.
One small trick: since merchants reset their inventories every time you enter town. So, after you rescue Anya, you can pop in and out of the portal near her to look for nice claws. I think that you need to be at least level 38 (something like that), though, to get a decent shot at +skill claws, so don’t do it right after you complete the quest in normal.
Oh, I run the Pit with my clvl82 Trapassin and almost never die - my backup weapon is Chaos GTs and a good shield. I just didn’t want anyone thinking it was a cakewalk.
I just did a couple of pit runs with my clvl 80 trapasin “NoPrenup.”
Wow was that easy. I may have to make another. Inside the pit I really only saw some cold and fire immunes. The few lit immunes I saw were taken down easily by my barb and his flamebellow. Not pretty for them.
Here’s what she wears:
Nat’s Boots
Que-Hegan’s Wisdom
Harlequin Crest
+2 traps ammy
2x +2 skills claws.
She has +9 to traps and +7 to the rest of the skills. Thus her single points in claw block and shadow master and speed burst and such are at level 8 without wasting ant points. They lit traps are all at lvl 29.
I also just noticed that I have over 1000 hp and 80 stat points unassigned. I don’t know how that happened exactly, but it seems to work. I’d probably dump them all into vit if I were going to play her much more.
One more thing.
“Faster cast” has nothing to do with assassin traps. She tosses traps based on the “Faster attack” modifier.
Ladder season is almost over. This means a few things:
- We may not get a chance to practice.
- We really need to figure out who’s doing what soon
- If there’s anything you wanted to try on ladder with your current ladder characters, do it now. Item prices are probably going to fluctuate wildly for the next few days.
As for the new group, please post what type of character you’d like to play. Don’t be shy, because we don’t have much time. My choice will probably be a holy freeze paladin, unless someone else really wants to do this build. I will choose last though, just to give everyone else a chance to play what they want. Remember that we can have more than one of each class, we’ll just have to share items. It would probably not be wise to have more than one of each subclass though, i.e. 2 holy freeze paladins, or 2 fire sorceresses, etc.
oh, as punha pointed out on irc, we may as well give up on the classic character for the time being. We’ll have to remake a new one anyway, and we won’t need her for at least a few weeks as we’ll have an over-abundance of low level characters to satisfy the quest requirements
If Ladder season is ending soon, then I’m definitely going to need some help. My Wind Druid and my TeslaFroster are in Act V. I’ve gotten the paladin, Nzappa, as far as the Ancients, but can’t get past them - they were one-hit killing me. Wind druid, Padruig, is almost to the Ancients.
I’d really like to earn “Patriarch” for both of these guys before Ladder ends. Guess I’ll have to check back into the SDMB game…
As discussed in chat, this would also be a good time to trade any upgraded exceptional items (or otherwise valued items) for sojs for trying for a Dclone - you probably won’t need that upgraded buriza for your new ladder character, so might as well put it to good use.
It would also be a good idea to burn in a new account for the new ladder season and to further post the name of that account in Yeti’s thread so folks can find you for runs.
And, as always when going through the game, leave someone with good killing power for LH on Baal runs.
I’m not sure what anyone else feels like doing so I’ll outline my plan.
I have an issue with creating characters, I like it… a lot. I’ll probably start with a javazon and make a sorc and a necro also. Whatever the group needs the most is what I’ll concentrate on. If a barb is needed I’ll make one of those also. Of course this is why I don’t get my name on the ladder, but maybe this time I’ll stick to one of them enough.
I’m thinking that they might reset the ladder in time for the holiday weekend. If so, I won’t be on Friday. I should be getting home Saturday evening sometime, but I’m on call at work this month so I don’t know how often I’ll get called away.
The classic sorc is ending at lvl 47 and in Act2 of hell… just to let ya’ll know…
I would suggest the following:
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Whoever plays the most should have two characters (this works out conveniently, since ckhd has already said to more than one person that he’s planning a HFdin and a rushsorc). These should be on different accounts, if possible, so that they can be played at the same time.
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The next char should be a barb, as cookie-cutter as reasonably possible. While I’m sure a dual Carver barb would be a fun toy, my thought is that a conc or frenzybarb would be a good thing (WW would be good but only once we have guaranteed leech).
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Either an amazon or a necro, depending on gear.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Again, just a suggestion.
Wow, it feels kind of pointless playing the old characters now… Does anyone have more information on how soon is “soon”? Incidentally, another thing to do right now is to use any ladder-only cube recipes while you still can. I imagine that elite-upgraded items and high runes are going to be in high demand on non-ladder.
As for new characters, I could do another fire sorc, or I could do a paladin. For sub-build of the paladin, I’m thinking of either medic/saviour (very party-friendly) or tesla. Both of these are fairly equipment-independant, so they’d be good for starting a new ladder season. I will also have a lot of time the second half of the summer, now that I’ve finished my class.
As for recommendations for others, we should have at least one barbarian, but not too many, since warcries can’t stack. The first barbarian should probably be a conker, for the Battle Orders. Any number of paladins can work well together, so long as they all use different auras. A necromancer is also useful for curses, but as with the barbarian, we only need one. And sorceresses and amazons are good against large groups.
On another point, once we get into doing Hell-level runs, I’d like to throw together a little script to automatically monitor what server we’re playing on. That way, if we stumble onto a server that’s due for the Diablo clone, we can know to leave a placeholder character there when we move on to the next one. I’m certain that I can cobble this together to run on a Mac or other Unix system, but not so sure about PCs, so I may just have to run it myself and pass the message on to someone with computers to spare (theckhd or Who_me?).
And on yet another point: This probably won’t be happening with the current classic sorc, given the timing, but it occurs to me that the next incarnation would be exceedingly well-suited to SoJ running. She’s fire (which kills Andariel quickly), she’s built for teleporting, and I’m under the impression that Stones of Jordan are more likely to drop in Classic (less competition from other unique rings). Find a few, transfer them to mules whenever we run mules, and convert the mules (and the rings on them) to ladder.
I don’t know what kind of char to make for the new ladder. I like the trapasin and the paladin or Fury Druid the most. Either are character friendly and both are pretty reliable without any really special equipment. The assassin is a little more dependant on equipment later on in her life, but friggin claws drop all the time.
I don’t think any of us are Blizz insiders, so my guess is that we will find out when we find out. I would also strongly encourage anyone with gear to burn (i.e. a buriza and a Lem or whatever it is … it’s been so long that I have forgotten) to do so in the hope of getting a decent trade.
I would strongly suggest using only one fire sorc (two sorcs, maybe, but only one focusing on fire) for our purposes. Given that ckhd has plans to make a rushsorc (who, I am guessing, will have more firepower than coldpower, but enough coldpower to not be useless against FIs), my suggestion would be to make either a paladin to run with his HFdin (such as a Convicter or hammerdin, the latter of which I am guessing we will be seeing in droves and hoardes) or a Conc barb. The reason for this is that adding points to your BO will also increase your Conc damage, so you do not have the problem most barbs do re: adding to attack vs. adding to BO.
If we do have someone who is good at building capable hammerdins, I would strongly recommend coupling that hammerdin with a summonmancer; I imagine the Undead Crown will probably be selling for not a lot, and a summonmancer properly built provides much in the way of damage absorption, especially with concentration (adds to damage), and a medic who also has FotH would make for a particularly lethal combination.
I’d submit these pairings and threesomes as being particularly effective:
CC (cookie-cutter) sorc with convadin/frenzybarb
hammerdin with summonmancer
Summon/WW druid with HFdin and BS necro (with decrep, I think)
WW barb, hammerdin and CCsorc
I don’t have enough experience with javzons or assassins to know where they’d effectively pair up.
I am most certainly going to have two characters, a paladin of some sort (probably holy freeze, since i like that build, though maybe tweaked a bit for cloning) and a fire/cold sorc much like my current one. These will be primarily for accumulating wealth so that i can start a few more interesting characters.
You can play two characters on the same account at the same time, you just can’t have both in chat at the same time. That being said, i don’t know whether i’ll put them on separate accounts or not yet. I have already registered *theckhd and am burning in a temp-mule right now. I also deleted two old nonladder characters from *gand, so i have two slots open on that. **30-foot-smurf ** will probably be losing a few mules to make space as well, so those will probably be my three play accounts. Depending on how fast i sell/trade off annis, most of my mules on gand2-*gand4 ** will be deleted and replaced on ladder.
However, the paladin will probably be on my personal accounts, and will not be open to the public. I’m doing this because i will need a dedicated clone killer, so the paladin is going on one of my accounts. Period.
The rushing sorceress could possibly be on a sdmb account. I haven’t decided yet whether it will definitely be on one of my personal accounts, and i’m not sure if there’s an absolute need for it to be there. The only reason i can think of right now is mostly for convenience. It may be the case that i make a sorceress on the sdmb account and build it up as a rush/mf sorc for everyone, and later start my own sorceress.
I may also just make a different character for sdmb-ing, since it’s very possible that someone else wants to make a holy freeze pally or fire/cold sorceress. Until such time as someone speaks up though, those are the two characters i’m planning. If we feel that the group has too many paladins or sorceresses, or is weak in one area that a different character would remedy, i’ll make whatever’s necessary and play it as my third character. I think i play enough that i’ll be able to keep 2 characters moving right along through to hell difficulty.
Now that i’ve laid out my plans, it’s someone else’s turn to post what they’re going to play. I’ll start a list:
**1) theckhd **Holy Freeze Pally
**2) **
**3) **
**4) **
**5) **
**6) **
**7) **
**8) **
**9) **
**10) **
**11 **
In chat just now, I got a thought. If anyone has an idea for a character, but isn’t sure about a build/stat-skill allocation, feel free to post here. Obviously given the number of people in here experienced with char builds, one of us should be able to help. I’m quite happy to post (or email, whatever) a guide as detailed as anyone likes of how to build any number of barbs, paladins or many other characters.
I’m not sure why a hammerdin would go well with a summon necro. The summons would tend to spread out the enemies and make it harder to get them in the hammer field.
Javazons tend to work well with any sort of tank. Javazons benefit from having something out front to lure enemies into a small pack. For example, a Javazon and a holy freeze paladin go well together, because the paladin can stand out front and tank while the monsters congeal around him in a pack, at which point the javazon can use 2-3 javelins and take out the lot of them. Valkyrie is pretty good at this with a few points in it. In fact, if someone else is seriously into a holy freeze paladin, i’d be willing to play the javazon.
As for the party, it’s not worth over-thinking this. We don’t need to design the “perfect” party because there are many different parties that will work perfectly well. The limiting factor for this group will be how often we can all be on at around the same time. I suggest that people choose to play character builds they’re interested in trying. We can fill in the cracks later. Just mention what you would like to play, and we’ll go from there. Remember that, as punha said, if you don’t know at all how to build the character you want to try, many of us are experienced at building and can give you more information than you could possibly care to hear.
You freeze 'em and I’ll zap the bejezzus out of them.