Kylearan sends an async team to death or guardianship

[Kylearan]

Normal Act 4

After three acts, enough items have accumulated for me to solve a couple of problems some of my characters had. First up was the amazon, which had low damage output at a way too high mana cost. Someone had found her a rare crossbow with significant higher damage stats than her current bow:

   

The problem of course was that Strafe with a slow crowssbow is inefficient and not much fun, so I gave her a couple of runes in preparation of an amazon bow with open socket. And indeed a stag bow with +1 to bow skills dropped, which I turned into an Edge bow (first time for me!). Its nominal damage values are much lower (9-19 compared to the crossbow's 21-39!), but thanks to all the other bonuses like +35% IAS, huge bonuses against undead and demons etc., it turned out to be a much better weapon in practice. Also, this runeword is so cheap that I can make it again later when a better base drops. I also gave her one of my two Biggin's Bonnets for the +30% enhanced damage and combined that with several pieces of mana leech gear, which works really well with Strafe. The end result was this:

   

Suddenly she had a very solid clear speed and was entirely self-sustained, rarely needing to drink any potion at all, and a ton of fun to play! Once she's grown out of the bow, it will be a nice hand-me-down for one of the rogue mercs, preferably with a tank around for the thorns aura, although I'm not yet sure how good a level 15 thorns aura really is with the new patch and its new mechanics.

During act 4, the necromancer also found a Hellcast for the amazon which she will put on switch later to test against physical resistant monsters:

   

Although if I understand "fires explosive arrows" correctly, the main damage of the weapon is still physical which means that upgrading it later, when physical resistant or immune monsters become a problem, won't really help.

Also, the sorceress got this javelin from Diablo:

   

Damn, that's a nice early javelin for a javazon, which now gold sold instead.

Back to improving characters: I was sorely tempted to mod the game (would have been a first for me) to allow for the new patch 2.4 runewords in non-ladder, single-player games. I had the runes and bases for Pattern claws for my assassin, and I guess once they are allowed in single-player after season one has ended, they will no longer be useful to her. I don't think I'll ever have have the chance to try this runeword out again, but ultimately decided against it in part because the assassin doesn't really need more power.  She still dominated the game, walking over the monsters in Chaos Sanctuary with impunity. Only Diablo himself was surprisingly hard despite a level 8 Fade and max fire/lightning resists, and I had to restock in town several times - in hindsight, I should have put some gear with reduce magic damage on her. The other melee char, the barbarian, simply kept on jumping on Diablo like Super Mario on turtles, thus avoiding Diablo's lightning attack easily.

The Paladin's problems got mitigated by Sander's gloves and boots, a Bloodrise, Darkglow and a Sigon's Visor for the extra mana, plus a nice scepter with +vengeance and a rare aegis shield with %damage goes to mana for when he had to go in melee. All this made his path to Diablo much smoother.

The sorceress was fine already without any major item upgrades, and I really like the laid-back approach of Hydras combined with some extra spells when needed/bored. The Druid also received some +mana gear and now that he finally has Hurricane, had nice clearspeed and was fun to play as well. Only the necro felt like beyond saving... He is so STUPIDLY WEAK! Compared to the others, he needs more castings of his main damage spell to kill monsters at a much higher mana cost each, which is really ridiculous. The Stealth armor also didn't help, considering he needs about 10 mana to cast a single Bone spear and only has ~90 mana. After Act 4, I crafted caster gloves for him with the one perfect amethyst I had to help out with mana, and got sub-par caster stats combined with +6 maximum stamina and poison length reduced by 25%... bah. He will stil wear them for the +12 mana, 6% mana regen and +2 mana after each kill.

I'd love to hire an Act 5 barbarian instead of the necro's rogue merc to have a tank for his Amp Damage/Corpse Explosion routine and to help out with dealing melee damage, but then I won't be able to have an Insight bow around later to alleviate his mana problems. I could of course hire an Act 2 merc instead, but I already have two of those in the team and explicitly wanted to use the other merc types more. At least someone found a Sol rune in the Chaos Sanctuary which allowed me to create a Lore helm for him for Act 5, maybe that helps a bit with his damage output. (Most other interesing runewords that Sol rune opened up for the other characters like Insight, Honor or King's Grace were in practice not possible or sensible yet because of a lack of good bases or bases with enough possible open sockets.)

Notable drops in Act 4 were a Mahim-Oak Curio amulet which is nice for its +10 to all attributes and resistances, a Duskdeep helm with +8 max damage and all resistances +15 which replaced a +3 Leap helm of the barbarian, and a second Nagelring. I would have loved to have the barbarian with his Find Item to wear both Nagelrings, but he needed a mana leech ring to sustain his constant leaping and jumping, so it went to the Paladin instead. Finally, I found a General's Tan Do Li Ga, which despite some fun low-level mods combined with slows target by 50%, I couldn't really find a use for. I might have tried to use it with my paladin against a boss or so if his Holy Bolt wouln't have been much better.

Now, onwards to Act 5! The act I like the least, mainly because I find its overland maps too big - might take me a while to finish.

[KingOfPain]

Although if I understand "fires explosive arrows" correctly, the main damage of the weapon is still physical which means that upgrading it later, when physical resistant or immune monsters become a problem, won't really help.

  You are worry about PI monsters, already, in Norm Diff with a Hell cast, as if this is end game?
For what its worth, it actually does more damage than it seems. You have the listed damage, then add 15-35 Fire damage. And again, add another 22-26 fire damage from lvl 5 (slvl native to Hellcast) Exploding Arrows.

The bow does physical damage as it would any bow, and adds the fire damage on top. It of course will add on all other fire damages via charms, jewel, skills, etc., etc.  I am talking about fire damage adders (including the one on the bow itself), these damages will be applied to the explosions as well.

[Kylearan]

You are worry about PI monsters, already, in Norm Diff with a Hell cast, as if this is end game?

More about physical resistant than immune monsters I guess, but yeah, my amazon is the least equipped to deal with those. For me the main appeal of this variant (self-found with an unusual amount of time spent in Normal and Nightmare) is to attempt to spot and try out things I haven't done before and enjoy some unusual low-/mid-level stuff. I never really looked at the low-level bows and crossbows before other than as a stop-gap on my quickest way to Windforce, Faith etc., so now thinking about how I might be able to utilize Normal drops a bit longer for a change is part of the fun for me.

I know I can easily survive on Magic Arrow if need be (and will have much better drops later), but maybe finding an alternative (even if somewhat silly) intermediate solution would give me a sense of achievement.

[T-hawk]

Upgrade that Hellcast to exceptional (Ral + Sol + emerald) and it will do enough physical damage for the first half of nightmare. A Ballista base item deals tons of physical damage compared to anything else you can get around this time. Slow, but it will be like 5x the damage per hit as Edge. (Just note the 110 strength requirement.)

Most bowazons max Immolation or Freezing arrows for a backup plan against physical immunes in hell. Fires Explosive Arrows isn't enough, it's a very low level. Physical resistant monsters aren't a problem through nightmare; even ghosts at 75% resist or itchies at 90% still have fairly low health and aren't hard to kill. Fires Explosive Arrows applies only when you use Normal Attack, it changes the missile into the Exploding Arrow missile instead. Any other skill (including Multi/Strafe) fires its own missile and doesn't get the exploding arrow. Other sources of fire damage do transfer to the blast radius as KOP said, either with the bow's property or by natively using the Exploding Arrow skill. A bow with Fires Explosive Arrows is a fun toy for an Enchant sorceress, since you can get 1000+ Enchant damage transferring into the blast radius.

Have patience with the necromancer. Bone Spear does ramp up to 2000+ damage, it just takes a lot of synergy. A White wand helps a great deal, or at least shopping a +3 from Drognan in the meantime. Also a +3 bone skills circlet and amulet when you can gamble them (around character level 60.) For mana for now, put whatever sapphires you've got into a socketed helm.

General Tan is pretty decent (particularly if upgraded to exceptional), but you don't have anyone built for one-handed melee on this team. This will happen a lot - you feel like you should have a use for everything with a team of so many characters, but there are still a lot of types and categories of stuff that don't help anywhere.

Yeah, Act 5 is big. You really don't need to full clear everything just yet (I start at Arcane Sanctuary in nightmare), but up to you. Also don't forget to have some fun in the cow level afterwards.

[KingOfPain]

I know I can easily survive on Magic Arrow if need be (and will have much better drops later), but maybe finding an alternative (even if somewhat silly) intermediate solution would give me a sense of achievement

I get that

Also, don't forget that since you are Zon you probably have points in Pierce. So every time it pierces the exploding damage applies again to the neighbours so if you pierced 4 times in a tightly packed group of monsters that is a whole lot of multiplicity... so you really need to use the bow instead of reading the numbers, to judge its worth. These bows beg for tactical manoeuvring; I think you enjoy.

[Kylearan]

During Act 4 I had only gained two levels (from 31 to 33). Act 5 however, with its higher monster levels, bigger and more maps, dungeons I normally skip, evil urns, and the Ancients... provided a liiittle bit more xp than that. 

   

I think I've never finished Normal at such a high level, ever.    And that was even with rushing through the last couple of maps, to leave room for more tedious characters to skip content. But the killing speed felt fine at players 7. Maybe I should have started wiith the necro instead...

[Kylearan]

Normal Act 5

Act 5 is long, but while I'm still not a fan of the slightly too sprawling overland maps, a lot happened and so I also had a lot of fun. Going in at level 33 meant I started the act at an ideal level with regard to gaining xp, and ended up at level 46(!) in the end (almost all done at players 7). I didn't do a complete full clear, to leave some room for characters to skip at least some parts, but I visited all side-dungeons I usually skip.

By the way, I know I haven't really said that much about the skill progression or exact item loadouts of my characters so far, but I figured that's not that interesting considering this is only Normal and I'm over-leveled anyway. I will do a break-down of all classes at the end of Normal and then do more detailed reporting per character starting Nightmare.

I don't have a fixed order for playing the characters like I had in the beginning; by now, I simply start with the class I'm most curious to see their new gear or skills in action, and then try to alternate between different playstyles. For Act 5, I began with the amazon which had started to become more and more fun and, because she's a ranged attacker with auto-aiming, I expected to have the least annoying time with those jumpy imps on the overland maps. Turns out I was right, but overall not a lot happened during her run.

Next up was the druid. Now that I could invest in Hurricane, playing with him was a lot smoother than with Tornado alone. His main problem was mana for spamming Tornado, but he got lucky and a 2os serpentskin armor dropped relatively early, out of which he made a Stealth armor. That mitigated, but not yet solved, his drinking addiction; little did he know that the assassin would completely solve this problem, but more on that later.

The Ancients were all fought on players 1. The usual connotations I have when thinking about the Ancients are "adrenaline", "danger", "respect" and "sense of achievement". Fighting Normal ancients with a level 44 character was the exact opposite. I activated them, spammed a couple of Tornados in their general direction and then, while trying to find where they were, realized they were all dead already. Ooops. The only other notable drop was a second Sander's Taboo, which I kept in hope of a second Riprap to combo with.

When it was the barbarian's turn, I took up T-hawk's tip and upgraded the mallet he already used. Upgrading is really somethinhg I always forget and have to do more, it's cheap and powerful!

   

Now I did roughly 900-1400 direct damage and 300-600 area damage with Leap Attack, which dealt easily with everything that came along. The mana leech from his Manald Heal ring meant that a direct hit would refill roughly half his mana bulb, so he rarely needed to drink a blue potion. Surviving monsters from a pack he jumped into would immediately attack him however, so health potions were in constant demand, although not more than he was able to find on the floor. So that went alright, although I sense a future problem here. (I mean I could equip Cathan's Sigil for some life leech I guess, but I don't want to give up his Nagelring.) Apart from finding a second Twitchthroe, he also found some solid set of gloves:

   

Nothing groundbreaking, but 20% IAS combined with mana leech and at least one resist is better than what most of my characters had, so I kept them. He also found this set of armor, which he kept for himself:

   

I'm sure some runeword armor will replace this in the not so distant future, but until then this is a nice improvement.

After the barbarian I decided to play the bonemancer next. By now I had decided to switch out his rogue mercenary for a tanky barbarian, which made playing him a lot more fun! When monsters gather around my tank, I can reposition easier, Bone Spear can hit more targets per casting and Corpse Explosion works better. My initial idea was to use Bone Prison/Wall more, but in practice I never really do this and will have to see later if I need and/or want that.

I really love the new patch 2.4 barbarian merc! Both my necromancer and my sorceress took a dual-wielding Frenzy/Iron Skin/Taunt barb instead of the Bash based one, and for fun the Bonemancer made him a Strength war sword for his main hand and gave him a nice rare war sword for the off-hand. He just never dies except against the strongest of opponents (Lister, Baal), and once he has his Frenzy going, he zips around on the battlefield from monster to monster much faster than the sedate desert merc. The obvious downside is you cannot use an Insight polearm to boost mana regen for your main character, but I'm sure other fun possibilities for his equipment will present themselves.

My Paladin had it worst in this Act, which is full of non-undead, non-demons. It was slow going, especially considering that Vengeance is such a mana hungry skill. I skipped tedious parts where I could. I also had completely forgotten that the Ancients are animals of all things, and have to think about how I will deal with them once (if) I arrive at them in Hell. Anyway, all this prompted me to do something about my weapon. I upgraded a Bloodrise morning star which I had found in Act 3 and kept in my stash, and in its exceptional version and with the open wounds, life leech and +AR it was okay, albeit still not great. I also made a note to self for later: Since +%ED from other items won't work with Vengeance, I will try to collect all +min/max damage charms for the paladin alone.

The best improvement was delivered later by the assassin however, waiting for him at the end of the act for the next part of the journey.

*Sigh* Yeah, the the assassin. Again, not only is she still the strongest character on the team (with the notable exception being the fight against Baal), she also seems to find a lot of good stuff all the time, both for herself and for others. The gift for the paladin came first:

   

A morning star with +IAS, +200% ED, +max damage, +AR and a bit of life? YES PLEASE, it's upgrade time again! Let's see how long this will carry the paladin. It lacks Bloodrise's life leech and open wounds, but all I really care about at the moment is the physical damage as the basis for Vengeance.

Then, for the first time in a very long time, the class-specific reward from Anja wasn't crap:

   

+20% IAS, +%ED dual leech claws? The only downside is the rather slow base which, annoyingly enough, becomes even slower when upgraded . Oh, and that they don't come with +skills at this level, but still, I have a feeling it might take a while before I can find two sets of claws better than the immediately upgraded version.

   

Finally, I had mentioned she had a surprise for the druid as well. I had seen a couple of white crystal swords before, but always from areas which too low a level. Now, one dropped in the Glacial Trail:

   

Coming from a monster in the Glacial Trail meant it can have up to four sockets, so I Larzuk'ed it and used it to made a Spirit for the Druid. Now that should make him considerably more powerful, and especially will increase his mana pool dramatically. Let's see if I can find one or two more Spirit bases in the cow level later!

Finally, the assassin enjoyed something she knew only in Normal really works: Running head-first and Burst-of-Speed-empowered towards large mobs, straight into the middle of them, instead of having Fade going and moving away from the mob, trying to separate some individual monsters to carefully take them out safely one by one, like I know she will have to do in Hell...

   

(I actually ran into much larger mobs but forgot to take a picture, and this worked only because after at most two Claws of Thunder/Dragon Claw routines, everything around her was dead and she was at full health and mana again. And yes, especially in this instance, I should have simply used Dragon Flight directly on Nilathak instead, seeing that I already carried three charges with me...)

The sorceress' run was uneventful, except that Baal dropped yet another good claw for the assassin, to replace her off-hand claw. Yeesh, she doesn't need even more power, at least not yet! The sorceress itself, as expected, is now easy to play and, after the assassin, the second strongest character, plus very laid-back and chill with her high-level Hydra and some Frozen Orb here and there if she gets too bored watching her Enchant-powered Frenzy merc picking off stragglers.


So, that wraps up Normal! I'm actually glad that I didn't embarrass myself too much and didn't lose one of the team already. I mean, things like that happen, same as I lost my first ever HC amazon and one of the first high-level HC javazons on the Europe server at Level 87 to an unfortunate doughnut incident which I still have to laugh/cry about after all these years. (Fond memories... every time I threw a jav against large mobs, my graphics card couldn't handle the resulting load and the game would slow down to ~2 FPS for 3 or 4 seconds, but that I always survived. Of course it also annoyed and scared other players on the screen who also didn't have top-noth GFX cards themselves, most of the time followed up by the question "What skill did you just use?!?" ).


Anyway, here's the roster of my team, presented by the undisputed star of Normal, my assassin:

   

Unfortunately she's also the ugliest; that Biggin's Bonnet just doesn't suit her.

What's up with those hardcore titles by the way? I never really thought about them. What exactly is it that gets first destroyed in Normal, and then conquered in Nightmare and guarded in Hell?

Next up: A steak break in the cow level looking for some bases, and a more detailed break-down of all the characters before I enter the more interesting Nightmare difficulty! I'm recovering from a Covid19 infection at the moment and have a bit of time on my hands, so... 

[T-hawk]

I don't have a fixed order for playing the characters like I had in the beginning; by now, I simply start with the class I'm most curious to see their new gear or skills in action, and then try to alternate between different playstyles.

I never had a fixed order either. Mostly I would play according to how I felt at the time: when I was awake and fresh, I would play one of the characters with a more complicated play style or more vulnerable on defense. Later at night when I was more tired, I would play the simple bashy melee characters. Also I most often played the sorceress last, just so I wouldn't become used to having Teleport when switching to another class and become impatient with them.

Sometimes I played in an order for strategic reasons. If I had an important decision to make on some character's equipment (spending a high rune on a runeword or an elite upgrade, sometimes spending a socket quest), I would play that character last, to see if the others found anything better for them first.

Yeah, the Ancients are cake on normal difficulty, and pretty easy on nightmare too (easy to reroll into harmless modifiers), it's only on hell difficulty where they get nasty. And of course do them on players-1.

When it was the barbarian's turn, I took up T-hawk's tip and upgraded the mallet he already used. Upgrading is really somethinhg I always forget and have to do more, it's cheap and powerful!

It's powerful for certain items, because high-end exceptional base items like the war club do lots of damage, almost as much as many elites. It's not so great for lower bases, like that morning star will barely make 100 damage even with 200% ED.

I'm sure some runeword armor will replace this in the not so distant future, but until then this is a nice improvement.

Maybe, but there aren't any super great easy runewords for the armor slot, nothing like Spirit or Insight or even Lore or Ancients Pledge. Smoke is decent, but it's still only +75% defense. Lionheart is great for stats but doesn't have defense. The first great armor runeword is Duress, but Um runes aren't common. (Or Treachery, which has specialized applications, if you need big IAS.)

I really love the new patch 2.4 barbarian merc! ... I'm sure other fun possibilities for his equipment will present themselves.

The most fun barb merc weapon is a Vile Husk sword, with CTC Amplify. It always shows up sometime in nightmare. Although a necromancer (who can cast Amp himself) or sorceress (doesn't do physical damage) wouldn't care so much. It can be great for a physical bowazon though.

Since +%ED from other items won't work with Vengeance, I will try to collect all +min/max damage charms for the paladin alone.

+%ED from other items works with Vengeance. It doesn't multiply the elemental damage. But that's the same as any other skill, off-weapon +%ED never multiplies with skill %ED, it's just additive. For Vengeance, the off-weapon item %ED part is physical and adds with the skill %ED part which is elemental.

I think Larzuking the crystal sword was a waste. It's pretty easy to get 4-socket swords; all items in nightmare drop with a max of 4 sockets, and Broad Sword and Long Sword easily get 4 sockets from the cube recipe. People want crystal swords for Spirit because they think they look cool, not for any mechanics reason.

And yeah, I remember the old pre-expansion Lightning Fury graphics too. I wish they would have brought that back like five years later when everyone had graphics cards that would be way more than enough for it.

And yeah, the titles for hardcore are weird. They decided the expansion had to have different titles for beating Baal than the simple Sir/Lord/Duke/King/etc for beating Diablo in Classic, but there just weren't many words left to use.

[KingOfPain]

I think Larzuking the crystal sword was a waste. It's pretty easy to get 4-socket swords; all items in nightmare drop with a max of 4 sockets, and Broad Sword and Long Sword easily get 4 sockets from the cube recipe. People want crystal swords for Spirit because they think they look cool, not for any mechanics reason.

Sheesh, I dunno, I just took your advice and made a BotD with what I had on hand ;p Waiting for a Long/Board sword with 4 sockets to drop!? I do realize a team has only a limited amount of Larzuk rewards, just not sure how tight that would be relative to the amount of runewords (with max sockets) the team can reasonably expect to make.

Crystal Sword has the lowest req (not that it I ever limit my own toons base on that), but style points has to matter.

Anyways, AFAIK, Larzuk always give max sockets no matter where the items are from.

Finally, the assassin enjoyed something she knew only in Normal really works

Yup. Got to get while the getting is good. And LoL with the Ancients. I think they have been nerf'd, Izzy for sure...

[Kylearan]

Thanks T-hawk and KoP for your input, I appreciate that!

I think Larzuking the crystal sword was a waste. [...] People want crystal swords for Spirit because they think they look cool, not for any mechanics reason.

Nah, it wasn't a waste. I mean, yes, technically it might have been, considering the reward from Larzuk generates an effect you cannot get from anywhere else in the game, while a 4os sword will drop eventually. But I wanted that Spirit for its huge plus to mana ASAP, as I got so annoyed by having to return to town constantly - it was such a huge boost to convenience which I didn't want to wait for for another one or two acts.

I also cannot imagine running low on Larzuk rewards. I will have 21 of them eventually but only so many unique items to spend them on, and while there will be times I'm glad to be able to socket a white elite weapon or armor for a runword, it's hard to imagine this will become a real problem - or am I mistaken here? What has been your experience with this?