OK, I was about to go eat dinner, but if we’re rushing now, I can come back. I don’t have a 20, but I do have an 18. He should probably be able to make up the last two by tagging along the first acts.
BTW, sorry about last night. The janitor said the floor would be ready “tuesday night”. I interpreted that as “around 6 or 7”, but he meant “late in the night shift”.
Also, even with regular damage on your amazon, high-level enchant can make it literally impossible to kill fire immune monsters, if their fire resist is high. So you’d want someone else there to take care of Colenzo and Lister.
I think y’all are losing something in the translation here. Lemme see if I can help.
Bone is offering a way to get a char to lvl 40 right quick if y’all have party members online. theckhd is saying that if there are two people online, he’d rather take one through the game as far to A4 Hell as possible than make a lvl 40 char, which he can just do in his spare time.
Now here’s a question: from what vendor am I most likely to find an item with charges of lifetap?
Sort of punha; i’m saying that there are easy ways to get the baal quests quickly, with a few people or many people, so leveling a mule to 40 during the rush is actually a slower way to go. I don’t think that rushing chars the way Bone suggested will be anywhere near as fast as the current method, even if we have to resort to public games to get the baal quest. If someone were to do it ahead of time as preparation for our current method though, it would certainly save time, since the least predictable part of the process is getting the baal quest in a public game. But that would be pretty much the same as what we do now, using characters who are conveniently arranged to be pre-prepared.
That being said, the method Bone suggested is completely viable. I just don’t think it’s nearly as fast. Perhaps we can try it sometime and compare, after all most of us are scientific-minded, and are all about experiments…
…BUT we rushed 7 mules to hellforge today in an hour and a half, i’d challenge anyone to try and beat that cold, german efficiency. Go us.
By the way, to whichever one of you gave me the +1 combat skills / +35 life gc, i checked the forums and a +1/+28 life charm was going for soj+, so that one is probably at least worth an soj and a half. If you’d like to reconsider just giving it to me, that’s fine. Or, if you’d like, i can trade it off on the forums for you and see what i can get for it.
I believe it was Eonwe that gave you the charm. Also, to be honest, we only rushed 6 characters to the hellforge. I just provided the Baal quest characters in norm and NM. I had planned to have a mule running on my second comp, but since so many people showed up there wasn’t room and I was not going to try to take one of your spots (you do almost all the work). Unless you’re planning on doing another mule rush within the next couple of days, I should have a normal and NM Baal quest character again. I’m going to level the barb and start the Bonemancer before finishing up the bowazon.
Also, does anyone have Naj’s Light Plate set armor anywhere? I’ve been looking in the trading forum but haven’t seen anyone trading it. I have to get the javazon into some armor that I won’t be trying to upgrade. The defense isn’t that high, 7xx or so, but the +1 to skills and 25% resist all is suited to my playing style. I will pay in runes whatever you feel it’s worth. I’ll also pay for a T-God’s, but that I can get off the forums.
I have both the Naj’s Light Plate and the T-gods. I might get on at some point tonight, so i can drop off the plate and t-gods. I’ll be on hiatus for about a week starting friday though.
If i end up doing another mule rush tonight, i’ll make sure you get a character or two in (since i still have 2 characters ready for the norm and nm quests).
Yeah, it was me with the charm, but go ahead, keep it. I’m just kind of in the game for the heck of it; I have neither the patience nor the knowledge/savvy to trade that for anything worthwhile.
By the way, Eonwe and whoever that was in the rush and did not get their hellforge quest run… If you see me on-line and need/want it, just whisper me on *numbnut1 or *numbnut2 and we’ll get those forge quests done. As a matter of fact we can do the NM and norm forge quests too if you’d like. Even if you don’t usually use runes in equipment, they’re the easiest things to trade to get better equipment.
Thanks, theckhd, that’ll be a big help. How much do you want for them?
Hey y’all who were in the rush last night - sorry about disappearing like I did. I screwed up in A3 Hell on the Council & Meph, and couldn’t get to A4. Didn’t want to make you all wait while I redid Meph. So I didn’t get as far as Hellforge, but at least now I have a mule I can bring to Hell. Thanks for the rush. theckhd!
What I’d really like to do some time is get a bunch of my mules leveled. I’d like to level my mules enough so that they can actually wear some of the stuff they’re holding. More room that way. This is handy with sets - in SP, when I was able to mule (with a friend via ethernet) I liked to use a trainer to bump my mules to whatever clvl and stats necessary for them to equip full sets. It was handy to be able to see all the set bonuses while equipped. I had mules with names like “Sigon”, “Tancred”, etc.
A point, about Bone’s and theckhd’s respective methods for mule rushes: I note that Bone mentioned he’s playing Hardcore, which would make a huge difference. In our (softcore) method, a mule typically gets credit for quests by portalling down to the boss, dying, and waiting for the boss to die before respawning. Obviously, this is not viable (or rather, re-viable) in Hardcore, so you’d always need at least one character on the scene who both needs the quest and is high enough level to survive. So you need to get high enough level to handle Andariel, while still in act 1, and then get high enough to handle Duriel, while still in act 2, and so on. Which means, in turn, that you either prepare by spending an insane amount of time in Act 1 normal to get to level 40 before the rush starts, or that you intersperse rushing and levelling.
Incidentally, for the levelling part, we can take Bone’s method a few steps further. At the same time that you cast Enchant, you could also have a barbarian yell at the new character, to increase survivability, and you could have a (non-partied) paladin run alongside the new character with Conviction, to both make the monsters easier to hit and increase damage. And a necromancer, too, for that matter, for curses (probably mostly Decrepefy and Lower Resists) and possibly Bone Prison. As an added benefit, the Conviction and/or Lower Resists would probably be enough between them to remove any fire immunity, so the new character can even handle Colenzo et al (of course, the paladin could help, if it’s not enough). I’d love to have the paladin partied, so he can use Holy Bolt, but that would dilute the experience far too much. Of course, whenever you’ve leveled enough for the next quest, these support characters can step out of the game to make room for the other mules to come back in (of course, the BO would stay on while they were gone).
Well guys and (maybe) gals, I have gotten my wolf up to about level 80 now, which makes him one of my highest level characters ever. I usually have a hard time staying with one character long enough to get that high
What should I make next? Is there anything that we are missing on West that I can fill?
Note: I never use maphack. The methods I describe work legit on bnet.
I know you’re not being hostile, no worries. There are several ways to play the game, I’m just trying to share an alternative. That being said, I do think you are incorrect that your way is fastest, and here is why:
From reading, it seems as though to get the Baal quest (to be in the throneroom when he dies), at least one char needs to be > lvl 20/40. It sounds like you have typically had a character already at that level. You are not including the time it took to level that character to clvl 20/40 when you say:
My method will yield similar results, perhaps 2 hours, but starting from scratch without the lvl 20/40 ready to go.
The bigger games is not for the sorc, but for the zon to level faster. Her kill speed will be the same, but the monster density and exp will go up.
The twinking isn’t the key, the Enchant is the key. Everything will die in 1 hit. Everything. You will hit everything you shoot at. Multi goes off screen. You will kill as fast as you can run. Lvl 20 in 20 minutes is easy in a full game at this speed.
Actually, the char that is actually “down there” doesn’t need to be viable, except vs the Hell council, and for Normal and NM Baal.
Consider, in Act 1, the mule can sit in the outer room on lvl 4, in the upper most corner. He will get the quest when Andy dies, as long as Andy is reasonably close. In Act 2, the mule can wait in the staff room when duriel dies. It will say, “cannot complete”, but after walking down into duriel’s room after he’s dead, you can simply talk to tyreal and get quest credit. In act 3, the mule can park in a corner in one of the side chambers, and lure meph close, but on the other side of the wall. In act 4, there is a corner spot above the dias that will be invulnerable as long as someone tanks D. and act 5 ancients, hiding behind the stairway is generally safe, as long as a buff char can kill them quickly. The only trouble is Hell Council, because they tend to cast hydras and such.
This is what is meant by “prepping”. The staff should be found, all right tombs found, the right summoner leg found, lvl 4 cats found, lvl 3 durance found. All these areas where the mule that is “down there” (all the others stay in town right?) need to be cleared so they don’t die.
All of the additions, the paladin/necro/BO, is really not necessary, since the totally twinked/enchanted amazon will mow through everything, at least until lvl 40.
The key to this is having a lvl 20/40. If you have one ready, there is no need to power a zon though as I described. But if you do not have a 20/40 ready, my method is just as fast.
Spearazon might be the way to go. I don’t have any idea how to play/make a singer . A bolt sorc is too limited, in the same way that my trapasn could take out anything but lit immunes. Those I just had to run away from.
What is a pacifist? That doesn’t seem to be anyway to survive in D2…
Go us.