There’s a list of the monsters that inhabit each act at darkness.diabloii.net. I don’t know where to find stats on how often monsters spawn in a particular area, btu I’d guess it’s pretty damn likely you’ll see skellys and serpents in Duriel’s tomb each blessed time.
Nothing huge to report today. Managed a Dangoon’s teaching, so if MDSL wants to equip half of that set he now can, though the set mods are atrocious and occupy some key item slots: weapon, shield, armor and helm. I’d rather have one Aldur’s mace than five Dangoon’s reinforced maces even with the scaling damage.
You know, a lot of people knock those (i.e. me) who put any points into find pot or find item.
In 1.09, I horked (Find Item and Find Pot are both referred to as horking) a 246% Doombringer (max 250).
Tonight, horking the Council, who usually only give me gold from their bodies, I got the unique wrist sword. 49% res, lowest possible +skills, 200% ED. Not perfect, but horked.
MDSL, I’ve got a Corpsemourn armor if you want it. I haven’t had the time to really get down and dirty with magic finding, and even if I did a magic finding necro ain’t going to be able to do quick runs…
I’m taking my best friend back to South Carolina Friday night and coming back Saturday. After that I’ll be able to spend more time on-line (as if I don’t spend enough time there now…).
No, not a girlfriend… just a real life…
I don’t think the loading time has anything to do with how long the thread is. Every thread loads slowly during business hours…
I can’t imagine anyone dissing find item. A free second drop from any non-act-boss monster you want? Sign me up! I wish every class had a horking skill.
I’ve been monkeying around with a shockadin. Just for kicks, I’ve been having him use a Gull. Yeah, it’s weak, but the 100% mf rocks and most of his damage is from the elemental anyway. Hell, when it breaks (as it inevitably does), he’s been known to rampage through the dungeon with only his bare fists…and done surprisingly well.
Kinda scratching my head about what eq I’m going to give him for later on. I’d like to get him an Ali Baba’s or something along that lines–with so much damage coming from shock, my theory is that you might as well stock up on useful secondary mods, like mf, as long as the weapon has decent speed.
I’m probably going to have to dump a few pts in vengeance or he’s going to get gang raped in Hell. sigh Of course, this is assuming I play him that long. Short attention span and all of that. Most of my experimental characters tend to stall out in the mid 40’s due to lack of attention span.
Level 75 before going to hell, eh, punha? That explains a lot, then – I thought I was just particularly inept at playing my 73 assassin, given the amount of grief I was getting. I’ve been completing quests in Act 1 mostly by running past any boss creature I can, which doesn’t do a whole lot for the old magic find.
And now I have a difficult choice. I’ve got Tal Rasha’s belt and helmet, Immortal King’s boots and glove, and Natalya’s helmet and boots. Immortal King makes my assassin attack (and move) insanely fast; Natalya’s gives me much better AC and a huge dex boost; and Tal Rasha’s improves my resists, which I desperately need.
Maybe I’ll find a third (useable) member of one of these sets, making the choice easier.
LHoD, as you’ve no doubt discovered, Blizzard made 1.10 harder to solo than previous versions. There aren’t many characters that can solo in hell without very good equipment. My lvl 83 necro is slow, but can go anywhere fairly well due to his minions but still hits gloams or multiple bosses and dies. My javazon is very strong, she has 85% lightning and poison resistance and using a spare helm instead of the Andy’s Visage can have fire and lightning at 85%, poison at 75%, and cold resistance at 60%… she dies easily if I’m not careful.
Hell is designed to be played in parties. The various immune monsters make it tough to have one character who can inflict enough damage in enough areas not to be vulnerable to a double immune monster that takes out your two biggest attacks. A one dimensional character (read that as my fire sorceress) is totally useless solo. You need to have at least two attack that do different types of damage… (ex. fire, cold, lightning, physical, poison)… and you have to be able to maximize that damage in order to kill anything in hell. Doing 500 damage is not going to cut it, your damage must be counted in the thousands. If you only have two types of damage attacks, then you must find a way to get a third… just for the monsters that you run into that are immune to the two main attacks. This does not have to be as high since you are only going to be using it if you run into a double immune monster that you can’t run away from.
Use the synergies as much as you can. Using them my javazon can do 7000 damage with the plague jav, and 1-2500 damage with lightning strike with 27 bolts for a total possible damage of over 50,000 when fighting big parties, and can do 2000 points of damage in physical damage. Both elemental damage totals are that high due to the high level of the skill, AND due to a lot of points used in lower skills to raise the synergy totals.
Damage in the thousands? Yikes! I figured my two claws doing about 350 each were good.
Damagewise, maybe I’ll start pumping more points into Phoenix strike; it’s a pretty flexible skill.
Back to nightmare for me, back to running Baal endlessly! I’m playing this character SP, and my local friends don’t have any characters above 40th level; I might try reaching level 80 or so before working seriously on Hell again.
I am using kicks and I can do 4k damage with my asn. Your claws should have damage in the 100-200 range. I can survive in Hell if I hit and run, but traight on combat I just don’t have the hp. At least not until I get the rest of the Natalya set…I can’t wait to have 30% damage redux!
LHoD, is that 350 listed on the claws or is that 350 from the character stat page telling you the total damage the character is doing?
My bowazon can solo NM easily. She can kill with reckless abandon. Act5? Pfft! No problem…
She gets to hell and can’t kill a damn gollem in Act1 without taking 20 shots. She has maxed freeze arrow and uses synergies. She can’t begin to solo hell. She’s level 80. She is useful in parties with the freezing arrow, but she’s not going to carry a party. She’s backup, plain and simple. Now that she has a buriza and Lycander’s Aim she’s better than when she first went to hell, but I’m not about to take her soloing in hell.
That’s damage on the character stat page – I was thrilled when I found a claw that does base damage of something like 28-54 :). I’ve got a Strength runeword claw on the other fist, and it does slightly less damage (but makes up for it with crushing blow, I hope).
I’ve got claw mastery maxed, so kicks don’t do me much good (though I wasted too many points in them before realizing that I should go one way or the other). My equipment is really not very impressive at this point, a side-effect of playing my first SP character; I’ve got tons of great loot for other classes stashed away for subsequent characters, but other than two IK items (boots and gloves), I’m not so great.
Of course, I attack really, really fast now, so the 350 avg. damage per claw adds up quickly; that’s worth something, right?
I’m trying to decide whether I should max the double-claw finishing move, phoenix strike, or tiger strike, or whether I should divvy points amongst them. Phoenix strike is great against groups and gives versatile energy damage; tiger strike is great against bosses; and double-claw is pretty good all the time. Any advice?
I’m not an assassin expert. Weapon/attack speed do make a lot of difference, but whether it’ll be enough…
Keep looking, you should be able to find (eventually) claws that do much more damage than the ones you’re using. If you were playing the character on ladder I could give you claws doing twice the damage that your claws are.
I like claws of thunder for the massive damage and the double claw for a finisher. Phoenix strike is actually pretty weak. It’s a charge up, not a finisher. The other claw skills give bonuses to phoenix, so it’ll be ok eventually…but still not as strong as thunder or ice.
Hmm…I’ve not spent much on any of the charge-ups (although I’ve spent two or three points on a lot of them, early on). Thunder claws, eh?
Might work. I have a cold-using rogue as my backup; maybe I could let her handle the guys immune to lightning and physical, and focus on doing these two things myself.
I came across a pair of ethereal magic Wyrmhide boots the other day, and decided, hey-what-the-hell, I’ll craft a pair of Caster Boots. Besides the nifty orange label, though, they kind of sucked eggs. The only upside to it all was that the boots–which had been ethereal–were going to sell for 3k or so. I put another 10k or so into the Cube with them (between the gem, the rune, and the jewel) and they were suddenly worth 35k (by virtue of no longer being ethereal, mostly). So, other than the profit in gold, which I could rack up on one good run, is there any good reason to try crafting items? Has anyone managed to craft a really great piece of equipment this way?
Aye, that you can. So you have just been putting points in Claw Mastery? There seemed to be severly diminishing returns on that skill after about 4 ponts.
I generally pump the claw block up to about 50% and then start poutting points into thunder claws and blades of ice. Both are two handed attacks, so they use both claws every time. I also love burst of speed. If you want to use the claws for a finisher, use that. If you want to kick, sue the one that applies fire damage. It has knowckback too so it’s good in crowds and can do some serious damage.
Jurph, crafting is excellent. In fact, they offer the highest ED% for weapons possible*. Crafts can get all the same mods that rares can, plus the additional crafting mods. One of the recipes (hitpower?) adds more Enhanced Damage, so you can get something like 475% ED.
*Excepting ethereal items that spawn with the repairing suffix.
Claw Mastery grants me essentially double damage with each claw hit, and a (probably insignificant) bonus to attack rating – or does attack rating bonus get multiplied by something else? I thought that was my best skill-point allocation :(.
And I’ve not tried crafting at all; maybe I’ll mess around with that tonight. Deplete my treasury buying good claws and random rings and amulets and see what happens.
Crafting, in my experience, is very useful. I have crafted several extremely viable items, including a pair of gloves I used until vol gave me my Dracul’s, a belt I used until I found TGod’s, boots I used until I got my Travs, etc. Some of the crafts you will make will be utter crap. And some of them will be 20% IAS dual leech +res and dex, with 5% crushing blow thrown in for good measure. It is mostly random, as far as I can tell (I have had slightly better results using rare jewels than magic alone, so this may or may not be related).
Who_me?, a thought occurs to me regarding your burizon. I know that cows have all been nerfed to the point where I am confident that someone will soon report getting negative experience from them, but if you went and got all MFed out, with the exception of your bow (a mfing amazon is wise to use the strongest possible bow), you might turn up a few goodies doing NM cows. Specifically, vol has been jonesing for Cow King boots, and the entire set would be rather useful. And of course, the set pieces can be found nowhere but the cow level.
Lemme know. I’d do it myself, but my barb is horrible at killing groups. He is beter for individual things, but then that was my intent in building him (as a partner for vol’s sorc in doing meph runs).
If I want to do NM cows, I could do that with the necro with no problem, although it would be fairly slow. The fastest way to do cows would be with my javazon. I’d need mana potions, but I imagine she could take out NM cows rather quickly.
The necro would be able to have better magic find because I wouldn’t need any leech. I’d have to drop a ring or two for leech if I use either zon.
Actually, I had a thought. The Cow King set isn’t very valuable to start with, wouldn’t it be easier and quicker just to trade for the boots? If I’d have known at the time that he’d want the boots I wouldn’t have given them away the one time I did have a pair.
What I’ll do is when I’m back on (I won’t be on again until Saturday night), I’ll split time doing Pit runs with NM cow runs. I’ll also post in the diabloii forums looking for the boots. I should be able to pick them up for a couple or 3 perfect gems. Maybe I’ll offer 4 so I know I’ll have room on the mule for the boots.
