Mmmm. I’m thinking more of using it on my Strafeazon, who’s currently fairly lethal with a combo of Steelrend and Delirium - Delirium is great with Strafe because Confuse triggers nearly every shot, plus I can zap the now-stationary monsters with level 24 Immolation Arrows. The big question is, would Dracul’s Grasp and Harlequin Crest be better for that strategy?
I’ll make the effort to get on tonight…but I probably can’t get on as early (5pm or 6pm PDT), but I’ll help out if I don’t have a mule that can catch up. Heh, we’ll see…
Found the IK StoneCrusher last night, which completes the set…wooooot.
Any more SDMBers out there?
Paladud found his way in the West last night, but maybe he can post his account names on the link above…
I just use Meditation (supported by maxed Prayer) for that purpose, and it seems to work well enough. Soloing the Clone, I typically use about a half-dozen red potions, and maybe a purple if he hits me several times in a row. If my merc manages to stay alive long enough, the Clone gets a dose of Decrepify, but I don’t rely on that.
For a 'zon, though, I would probably recommend the Delerium over Lifetap. Leech only matters if you’re getting hit, and if that build works the way it did in 1.09, you won’t be. You might also want to see about crafting some Hit Power gloves, for the knockback. Enemies far away is a good thing.
Snake Legs, I think I have the highest level sorc on West, but I’d just as soon stick with my Eschuta’s Temper. As mentioned last page, I’m not a big fan of the Tal Rasha’s set. The orb by itself would only give +2 to my mastery, while my Eschuta’s gives 2 to all skills, plus the bonus to fire damage. It’s not until at least three set items that I’d see any advantage (the reduced enemy fire resistance), and I’d have to sacrifice a lot of other gear for that. theckhd already has the full set on his sorc, so I’m not sure who the next sorceress would be. Who_me?'s, maybe?
The summoning charm, though, is quite worthwhile. We seem to have a lot of summoning necros on West, so you may see some competition for that one.
Actually I can’t really use the summoning charm because I don’t have the room for it. I use my necro as a magic finder and try to haul around all the magic find charms I come up with. As for the Tal’s Lidless Eye… that’s the orb, am I correct? If so, I had one a while back but gave it away. Without the rest of the set to give you the plus to skills, I think the orb is useless. I also don’t really enjoy playing sorceresses that much.
My two newest characters, an axe barb that I’ve been playing with Eonwe and my bowazon are doing okay. The bowazon soloed NM Diablo last night at level 54. I’m going mostly multi-shot and freeze arrow with her and will put a few more points into guided just for cold immune bosses. I’m going to trade for a WF eventually or just up her Goldstrike Arch. I’ll have to get her a buriza I guess too. I haven’t started the bonemancer yet since I started playing the barb again.
Might I recommend that you hold off on Baal until we have a few mules in tow? Finding a character to get the NM Baal quest is the toughest part of mule rushes, it seems.
And while we’re on the topic of magic find, I’m thinking of loading my barb up with MF gear, too, for horking. So if anyone has a decent Gheed’s or other MF gear lying around to spare, I can use them. If the Ali Baba’s we have lying around on the communal mules is still unclaimed, I might take that, too, and stick a couple of Ist in it. Also, does anyone have a Heart Carver?
I don’t have enough (any) experience with Confuse, but my frenzybarb used a pair of Dracul’s and when D’’ was tapped, he (barb) didn’t have to use any pots. Mostly the barb was useful for getting D’’ to stay in one place so voltaire’s sorc could meteorb the everloving bejeezus out of him, though the barb did do competent damage (esp. with open wounds and poison). Do remember the Open Wounds on Dracul’s, since they can more than compensate for the regen on D’’. I’d actually recommend Dracul’s for anyone making a melee MFer (and especially if you’re running an act boss beyond Norm), since being in close proximity to Meph or Baal doesn’t do wonders for the ol’ life pool. With life tap on, I didn’t have to worry about chugging pots. Without it, 4500 life and a psn res over 50 (ltg and cold res above it, too, and CBF from DShell) still meant chugging at least one pot.
Lastly, I would suggest for the benefit of you Westers that you have one, max two chars for MFing (a barb can get 750+ on LH, and a sorc or zon can regularly load up 400+ and kill faster’n a barb) and one or two designed purely to tank. Back in the day of voltaire and me doing runs, that’s what we did … at least, in ladder play. Before ladder play, we had my barb running 750 mf on switch and his sorc regularly running 500-700, depending on wep switch. He got LH on Baal’s minions when we did Baal runs, he tried to get me LH on Baal hisself, but ultimately it didn’t matter. If y’all are up for some backseat driving I’d be delighted to detail the build for the type of barb we used, since I think it was rather effective for LH boss killing.
Chronos, the Ali Baba blade is on the commie account barb.
As the resident charm hound, I’m interested in the summoning charm. My necro has +10 to the summoning tree and I want to see how much higher I can push it.
Also, I have all 7 character classes in my yeticusrex2 account, so I don’t mind taking stuff off people’s hands…that goes for low level runes too (but I certainly won’t refuse higher level runes!).
Current Roster:
Amazon…89
Paladin…79
Necro…57
Barb…31
Barb(rune)…20
Druid…18
Sorc…17
Assn…14
i lvled one of my mules that was in his 30’s up to 40 so we can get the nm baal quest taken care of. I also have a character for the normal quest this time around, so those are the two characters i’ll be rushing. If dopers have two characters who can fill the norm/nm baal quest completion roles, we can always do another one. Only problem is that this coming weekend is bad for me, and the next weekend may not be much better (maybe sunday of next weekend would work). Of course, if you want to do it on a weeknight this week, that’ll work just fine.
Not a problem about waiting with the zon since I want to level her until she can use a WF before going to hell full time anyway. I may wait with the barb as he is lvl 24 in norm, but if it take a while before we need him I’ll take him to NM after he gets lvl 40 or 45. I gave my only spare Gheed’s away as I did with my only Heart Carver, but if I get another one of either I’ll save it for you unless you get yours first. If you need Ists, I have a couple that I was saving to trade.
I understand what you’re saying about magic find, punha, but I’m mostly just interested in it for horking. I end up doing a lot of that, anyway, just to keep my mana up (Find Potion won’t give Super potions from NM cows, so I have to use Find Item and hope for the best). And, of course, while any character can get last hit, only a barb can hork.
Also, a note about Open Wounds and poison damage: Poison damage does not actually stop a monster from regenerating, it just damages it, which is usually enough to offset the healing. Open Wounds, however, does stop a monster from regenerating while it’s in effect, and then does its damage on top of that. So as long as you can hit often enough to keep D’’ (or any other monster) bleeding (not very hard), you completely deal with the regeneration problem, and then some.
Also, incidentally, if you’re going to use a sorc against D’’ without support from a paladin or a necromancer, Frozen Orb will work much better than Meteor, because Cold Mastery lowers resists. And when your opponent has 95% resists, lowering resists is a godsend. Even a first level cold mastery, enemy resists -20, will increase your damage by a factor of 5. 10th level Mastery will increase damage by a factor of 14, and 20th level will increase it by a factor of 24.
Doesn’t “Prevent Monster Heal” do the same thing then? Or does something else factor into this attribute?
PMH doesn’t also cause damage, like Open Wounds does.
I am a bit late coming to this thread (about 40 pages) but I did a search and didn’t seem to find anything on it mentioned yet. I notice that several of you are doing “mule rushes” for the Hellforge quest. And while you need to be level 20 and 40 for the ancients in Normal and NM, there are faster ways of getting there besides playing a whole character through.
Ideally, you don’t need a character that is viable, or is playable. You just need a lvl 40 character. The fastest way I can think of to getting a lvl 40 character, takes a little less than an hour. With teamwork, it would take probably less than 45 minutes.
Here is what you need. A high level Enchantress. Level 70 should be fine. She needs max enchant and synergies. All mules should be Amazons. The Enchantress enchants the Mule rusher. After this, everything will die in 1 hit in Normal and NM (due to enchant) and AR will also be boosted to absurd levels. The Amazon should have a Rogue’s Bow (Unique Composite Bow, base speed –10 and 50ias) in her inventory, ready to go at lvl 20. Prior to lvl 20, any fast bow will work. All items should be socketed with Tir runes for + mana after kill (3 socket mask w/ 3 Tir runes, armor with Tir runes, bow with Tir runes). Multishot should be about lvl 8-10ish. This way, mana steal isn’t necessary as you will fire many arrows per kill, and re-coup all mana spent via the Tir runes. Other items should be for run speed/life/resists as needed. There is no particular equipment that is best, but iratha’s set is nice.
After being given all the wp’s, she should be able to level to lvl 20 in about…20 minutes. Lvl 1-13 Act 1. Lvl 14-20 Act 2. Lvl 21-24 Act 4. At lvl 24, do ancients to get lvl 25 and pass the mlvl/clvl penalty. Then go as far as possible. Multi should go well off screen, and everything should still die in 1 hit. A good place to level after 25, is NM Arcane. Good packs of tight monsters. She shouldn’t kill any of the act bosses, although that would be easy. Just have her there while a high level sorc does the act boss killings.
While this char is leveling rapidly, a high level sorc should be “prepping” the other parts of the game for quick progression through the acts. Setting up staff in Act 2, clearing durance, clearing CS.
I’ve done this repeatedly in Hardcore, and it works fine. If the “leveler” can find full games, it should go even faster. It is ridiculous how fast the Amazon on enchant will go. Enchant will need to be recast periodically, every 10 minutes or so. At the end of the day, you’ll have a char to lvl 40 very quickly, and as a bonus, she qualifies for all the rune quests along the way. So each run, in full games, will yield 7 NM and Hell Hellforge quests. Start to finish, about 1.5 hours in a full game.
ISTM from a fair amount of experience (heh) that at level 25, you can get to level 40 fairly easily and quickly doing Baal runs, which have the added bonus of nice MF and, if she hasn’t yet killed Baal, first-kill MF bonus every time.
And since I can tell that y’all are keenly interested even despite the astounding pile of 1 post (by MDSL), I thought you’d be interested to know that I’m now in Act 5 of NM with a char who has yet to drink a potion. I’m going to have to probably get Jamella and give myself a pair of Dracul’s because leeching off act bosses beyond Norm and a few in NM isn’t possible without lifetap (and I can’t figure out a way to safely get it from anything else).
iampunha, my mistake. I forgot, Baal runs after lvl 25 is far superior, at least until lvl 40. Even the minions should die in less than 5 hits while enchanted. Although I think some of them may end up fire immune. Either way, the Enchantress is the key to leveling mule rushes.
Well, that’s a great idea Bone but we really don’t feel like wasting 45 minutes leveling a mule. Usually between the lot of us somebody has a character they’re playing that’s about the right level, so it’s just faster to use them. On the other hand, a lot of times we don’t, so we just don’t bother. It is possible to rush mules without having any characters of our own above lvl 1 (other than the rushing sorceress, of course). If i don’t have a character conveniently near the lvl 40 requirement for nm ancients, i just use the old-fashioned method, which only takes 15-20 minutes on a bad day.
However, it’s inconvenient to use that method with a large group (more than 3 mules, for example), which is why generally for a doper rush we arrange for someone to take care of those two quests.
Speaking of which, since Chronos never showed up last night, we held off on the mule rush. I was thinking that we could do it tonight around 9pm EDT if anyone’s on battle.net and wants in. We can’t start much later because i really do need to sleep tonight, seeing as i’ve kept myself up much later than i should have for this game the last 3 nights, and have been dogging it at work.
theckhd, I was in the same boat you were actually. I didn’t want to waste an hour leveling a mule that I had no intention of playing after the rush. I did however, want the runes.
Even if you have a character at levels 20 and 40 ready to go, how much time does it take start to finish to get the rush done? I bet it takes at least 30 minutes or so, longer if a bigger game, and longer still if the rusher isn’t a very high level. I figured that doing it on my own, spending the 45 minutes, wasn’t that much of a tradeoff. Spending the time at lvl 1 waiting for the game to be prepped, or spending the same time just turboing through the game while enchanted. Just depends on what you like.
It’s viable. And if you have multiple computers, it’s even easier. Just an alternate idea.
Colenzo (1st set of minions) and Lister strike me as two, though Ventar might be. I’ll have to take more careful note next time I do minions. With the 15 Dex and +5 min boni from Iratha’s set, though, it strikes me that the damage from that set might be enough for a level 26 amazon who hasn’t completely botched the build.
I think Vidala’s set might also be viable for this type of character.
Partial Set Bonuses:
Wearing 2 Items: +75 to Attack Rating
Wearing 3 Items: +15 Dexterity
+50% Better chance of getting magical item
+24% Fire Resistance
+2.5 Defense per clvl *
+8% Resistance To All
+2 to Attack Rating per clvl
Full Set Bonus:
+15-20 Cold Damage
32% Chance to Freeze Target for 1 Second
+50% Chance to Pierce Target
+10 Strength
The cold damage would probably be enough to beat up Lister and Colenzo. The bow could easily be socketed with a Tal.
But if you have multiple computers, why waste one of them leveling when you could get another hellforge out of it…
If we have chars prepped for the baal quests, a full rush to hell act 3 takes about an hour and a half. that’s pretty good, i’ve never heard of a full hell rush taking less than that. I doubt 30 minutes is possible; maybe with several rushers and maphack, but that’s all wasted space that more mules could fill.
Bigger games don’t really make it harder, a lvl 80 sorceress can motor through norm and nm without much trouble, and the only thing in hell difficulty that takes any time is act 2.
I don’t know what you mean by “prepping” games, we’ve found it fastest to plow through each act sequentially. I’m also not sure how you’re figuring on leveling to 20 in 20 minutes, nor 40 in 45 minutes. In my experience, that’s virtually impossible, even with the twinking you’re suggesting. Soloing in the game will definitely not get you there, and i sincerely doubt that even a full 8 player cooperative game would net you that amount of experience that fast.
I have no doubts that it’s viable, i’m just saying there are faster ways to do it. Why bother going through the work of leveling the mule when you could be done with normal and halfway through nightmare in the same amount of time? I have the rushing process down to a science by now, from trial and error. I would challenge anybody to “run through” the game faster than we can teleport and complete quests. Especially a zon, who can’t teleport. The underground areas (maggot lair, viper temple, tal’s tomb, durance 2, worldstone…) alone would take forever to navigate. Remember that none of us use maphack, to my knowledge.
Sorry if this sounds a bit hostile, it’s certainly not meant to be, just overly practical.
by the way i’m sitting in a clone game at the moment, as soon as we finish walking this server we can start the mule rush, if people are on.