2.5(+) stuff

[Boro]

After reading Sullla's writeup of his Hydra Sorceress (with Nova as the backup), I've got the urge to give it a shot myself.

First thing I did though, was to wipe my save files, save for the trapper assassin who I actually wanted to continue now. This included the shared stash, so my 2.5 start was a "semi-clean" slate. Semi-clean because the blue items in my sassy's private stash were still there, not that they'd matter much aside from tedium reduction.

At any rate, as my BlueTurrets (supposed to be part of a "blue items only" team where I lost interest after the 7th run through act 2) blazed through act 3, 4 and 5, heckled Baal a few times for experience, and then did the same in Nightmare, taking care to visit the Countess at every opportunity for her generous rune donations to The Cause.

BlueTurrets' biggest experience was the low point with death sentry failing to do much besides being a burden, forcing a respec (from the experiment) back to and committing to a lightning sentry based build: Fully powered Lightning and Charged bolt sentries, with Fireblast and maxed Shadow Warrior to take advantage of the quick-cast added in D2R, improving my fireblast power without taking up my valuable trap limit. I'm not sure how high I want Shadow Warrior to be, and how much I want in Shock Web (my original idea was that Shadow Warrior would throw shock webs and fireblasts like me, but I got to like her throwing mind blasts and help out with crowd control this way.

After that, every run I made to Baal or Mephisto made me feel the desire to have teleport on me, so that's how Lerny (named after Sullla's Lernie) became the star of the show.

For the first four acts of normal difficulty, Lerny did the same thing as Cinderella: Some points in energy, the rest in vitality, and ignored strength altogether on principle. The skill of choice was Firebolt, and as expected it was a lot less powerful without taking the time to full clear everything. On the other hand, I still got through the acts a lot quicker than with the full clear pace, and had plenty of time to soak up experience in Act 5, clearing up to Anya with just her trusty starter skill.

At that point however, I was curious to try out the 1 pointer pre-reqs to improve her clearing speed, and a +1 blizzard +1 cold skills staff made her an impromptu blizzard sorc. With that she managed to finish getting to level 30 in a flash, and got her Frozen Orb and Hydra.

What followed was what T-Hawk referred to as the backup overshadowing the main skill, because I just couldn't help myself, it's been so long since I played Frozen Orb to it's "full" potential. I respecced Lerny to focus more on Hydra and Frozen Orb, gave her the Spirit sword BlueTurrets spent a socket quest to make, alongside an Ancient's Pledge large shield (base from Fara) and Lore helm (random 2slot circlet for good looks), and spent all my points onwards on Frozen Orb, never looking back at Fire Bolt.

Nightmare went by in a flash. Lerny had comparatively little health, lacking a whale belt for one, and was on middling resists too, but it was practically impossible to hit her when she was teleporting through acts like a maniac. In Act III, she spent about five minutes teleporting through the jungle and grabbing waypoints up to travincal. Then of course she cleared a few areas when I forgot which layout to look at. Same way through act 4, although she was enjoying clearing much of it with Frozen Orb. Hellforge rune was a fal, which, combined with a Lum cubed up from three Io-s, made a Lionheart in a Cuirass. However, when teleporting, faster cast is a form of defense in itself, as I learned to experience by being daring in countess runs. This made me reluctant to give up Stealth's faster cast. What I wanted was in fact Skin of the Vipermagi.

Which dropped right around the time I was thinking about it!

And it was ethereal, damnit. 13 durability doesn't even last that long, unless I play something like a summoner.

That is of course just one thing, and I still had 11 durability to burn. If only I had someone who used an act III mercenary...

Enter Winny, a pure summoner druid I made not long before Lerny. Winny was Winnie's successor, my first to experience a variety of wolves and the grizzly fight together, who just changed mercs at the end of normal difficulty, from Fire Rogue to Fire Iron Wolf. As of 2.4 and onwards, Fire act 3 mercs have Enchant, which helps all my wolves and bear against dual immunes. On top of that, the firebolt/fireball damage is decent enough with modest gear (Spirit, Skin, Lore, Sigon's shield)

A bit more about Winny: I built him to be as offensive as possible, minimizing Dire Wolf points, and going into Poison Creeper and Rabies (for synergy only!) as a third damage type, making him the only character with four damage types going in tandem. I wonder how it'll turn out, but for now, in early nightmare the going is quite fast. Dire Wolves eat up corpses, Poison Creeper does AoE, and Spirit wolves also help with the occasional shatter. I wonder how it'll look like when going to hell, since Spirit Wolves are lacking in the damage department right now, and Poison Creeper likes to die all the time.

Anyways, Winny is waiting for his turn right now, because I enjoy Teleport + Frozen Orb a bit too much. Lerny is beating up Baal with the "moat trick" of teleporting across the gap to the corner of the T-shaped platform at the worldstone, and popping down a full set of 6 hydras, and then popping back, being safe from all sorts of nastiness Baal throws and tends to kill the merc with.



So yep, as T-Hawk predicted, the addition of Bnet runewords made the early-midgame into a one-size-fits-all of Spirit and Insight. Similarly, with shared stash and a couple mules, it was all too easy for me to fall into a hoarder mindset, starting to lose track of what I got so far. (It took a big mental effort to get rid of a bonesnap for example, as I'm not playing mainly-melee characters at all)

I don't mind it though, much of it is still novel for me.

Another "for-fun" toon is SirGuy, a holy fire paladin: Holy Fire was buffed significantly, to the point where I heard stories of people clearing whole screens of enemies in hell while walking by. I have much more modest goals for him, to grab chipped gems and fuel my rune cubing. I also intended him to be a hammerdin before that "need" presented itself, so maybe he'll be a holy fire + blessed hammer hybrid, after I run the numbers of course. I'm also open to other ideas, except for holy shock because that means that some of my hardest enemies would be lightning enchanted bosses, which I don't want on a pally.

He's my first (modestly) twinked character, with 16000 gold granted to him from a shared stash wallet to buy himself a +3 Holy Fire scepter, Arctic belt and gloves, and a Steelclash. He played through Act I in /players 5 as a result, destroying most normal mobs in 1-2 pulses.

[KingOfPain]

I never learned to type, still a hunt and peck guy after all these years on a computer. I especially admire the new generation of thumbers on mobile devices. I thank god for speech to text..

Looking at your hotkeys I am guessing you have very nimble fingers, they are all over the keyboard. I have mine set up at the I-Don't-Know-How-To-Type-Kinda-Guy, a.k.a. the Lazy Man positions. Nowadays, I rarely use the F1-8 keys. F5-8 is used for pre-buffs like a start up sequence as old habit goes - for example, Sorceress: Energy Shield, Cold Armor, Enchant/Thunder Storm, and F8 (RMB Skill) Teleport.

The Lazy Man cluster of keys are ASDZX. Best of all it doesn't alter the default key functions.


Asher Odin-
F5-7=pre-buff, F8=RMB, D=TP
A and S = Secondary Skills ( Stun and Weaken if the monsters get that close)
Z and X = Primary Skills (The frequently used "Get over here!", and "Stay away from me")
All these skills without moving my left hand from its comfortable resting position
Of course, it is always a panic if I have to drink. LoL


.

[T-hawk]

Heh, I'll join the key bindings hijack. Your Z does have a default function, toggle the portrait images of your minions, but that's rarely used.

Q-W-E-R attack skills, T for Town Portal, Y for identifY (Y did I pick this up?)
A-S-D-F buff skills, G for most summons (Grizzly, Golem, "Girl" for Valkyrie or Shadow), H for Hork on a barb and psychic Hammer on an asn
F1-F4 left click skills for characters who need to change those (mostly only paladins with the aura occupying right-click)

These displace some defaults so then there's these:
X = weapon swap
U = qUest log
K = sKill tree
N = toggle ruN

Also I map Ctrl to show items instead of Alt, so doing that plus Tab to show the map doesn't alt-tab out of the game

And I use an ancient vintage IBM keyboard with no Windows key, so that never gets in the way either

[Boro]

Hahaha, I only use E-R-D for the most part, G for main summons most of the time (Grizzly, Shadow, Valk), same as you T-Hawk. Ctrl to run, (I know, maybe after another break to clear my muscle memory I'll do the change to Alt)

The identify bind is purely to see if I need more ID scrolls.

Static I barely used, Telekinesis I use to break barrels, urns, and open doors remotely for hydra scouting.

[Boro]

I did it, deathless matriarch. I thought I'd slip up at some point, get eaten by a cold death explosion, get bonked by a frenzytaur, get taken by Talic for a waltz, or accidentally teleport into a pack like an idiot and die, and it didn't happen. Funny, as I went through act 4 and 5, I started to get stressed – super stressed – by the realization that Lerny, my hydra/orb girl, had a shot at doing it.

Sure I rerolled the Bloody Foothills until I no longer got thrower cats, and also Frigid Highlands, where I settled for two archer types and lancers, but after that every draw was friendly, maybe except for Frozen River, with a few gloam packs here and there, and Worldstone Keep 1 with it's flesh spawners.

Other highlights

After bullying hell andy a little, getting annoyed at the fire immunes, I speedy-ported through act 2, only slowing down to clear the claw viper temple. For fangy, I wanted to claim the central altar, but the greater mummy and his posse had other plans, so I worked my way counterclockwise, using hydra placement to clear out the cold immunes and frozen orb for the guardians.

Act 3 I mostly teleported through the normal jungle (stopping by for Buy-a-Vowel), which was a very good choice given a gloam-filled great marsh, grabbed the waypoint, did the Flayer Dungeon for Khalim's Spleen (yes, I wrote a loot "filter" that renamed it from brain to spleen), and rolled the map until I got a nice one with 2 close-by superchest tiles. Then I did Lower Kurast runs.

The runs didnt help at all, except for racking up runes I didn't use and close calls. They were fun though. Once I started feelong under the weather yesterday, I continued down to the sewers, making good use of the riverways and teleport to keep the exploding dolls out of range. Other than that, hydra scouting won the day, the TWO skeleton/horadrim ancient packs down in the usually empty level 2 were dealt with quickly, and Lerny got Khalim's Bladder.

Travincal was fairly uneventful, other than the council managing to kill Amplisa once, and in the durance I was once again relying on level features to keep the dolls out of range. Down in durance 3 I found that casting hydra in a specific spot allowed them to be cast on the other side of the wall, so Bremm could be handled remotely, only worrying about the occasional hydras he sent as a form of retaliation. My hydras were stronger though.

Finally, Act 4 was all about the hellforge, doing the usual of giving a better rune (Lem) right before the forge was popped than the forge itself (Lum). Other than that, Amplisa did stellar against the infector's pack (who was afaik double immune), and even stayed alive through the diablo fight (to be fair, it happened offscreen with the hydras working on that big healthpool while we waited)

Anyways, as I'm writing this down, I'm starting to recover from the exertion and stress I put on myself. I don't know what comes next, maybe a javazon, now that lightning fury / charged strike is nerfed unless you go all-in single element with lightning to make a specialized farmer. Baal did give up the Ghost (Glaive, even ethereal!) after all.

[T-hawk]

Hey, congrats on that, Matriarch with no deaths. I did almost that too when I first started playing seriously, had a softcore character with no deaths in hell (one to a fire enchanted boom in nightmare), which inspired me to start playing hardcore for real. Although that character was the javazon build that no longer works in Resurrected.

Lol at Khalim's Spleen, I called it that too back on my first team here.

get eaten by a cold death explosion, get bonked by a frenzytaur, get taken by Talic for a waltz, or accidentally teleport into a pack like an idiot and die

And ha, I've died in hardcore in all of exactly those ways too (the frenzytaur was years ago before my teams here, and in nightmare difficulty, to a hammerdin character.)