Kylearan sends an async team to death or guardianship

[T-hawk]

Ah, I was wondering if you were going to full-clear all the way through hell difficulty. Yeah, I found the same thing, act 2 goes slow but then it speeds up a lot through act 3 and later. I also found the same as you regarding treasure - act 1 doesn't quite give enough and you still feel a bit underpowered, then act 2 fills in all the gaps and you feel like you're set for the end game. Act 1 mostly still isn't high enough level for most elite uniques (like that Jade Talon), but act 2 is.

Yeah, for the Sur rune, Wind is the only thing to do with it that doesn't require some other higher rune. Wind works in claws, so I'm guessing that will be the assassin's other weapon. Note that Dragon Claw uses IAS only on the primary weapon and ignores it on the secondary (I tested this personally), so Wind with the 50% may be actually pretty good as a primary claw. Or else what you are doing with the Sur might be to just socket it into the Buriza for the hit-blinds-target property.

You can't die anywhere from poison - the life loss stops at 1 life. (But don't do this in a dungeon, it's easy to trigger some trap that will do the last 1 damage.) Mercs can die from poison in the field, but aren't supposed to in town, although sometimes they do anyway (but not always, so probably some bug.)

The Vampire Gaze can be socket-quested for a rune to help with resists. I use Rals and Orts like this all the time.

And yup, I had acts where I didn't remember anything a particular character did by the time it came to write the report. Most often this was druids for me; they're easy to play with a big life multiplier and have fairly monotonous attack skills.

And Stone is great. Use the Clay Golem charges too - the golem benefits from Battle Orders. 2k gold per charge sounds expensive, but more than pays for itself in saved merc resurrections, particularly for a character that leaves the merc in danger while he's leaping.

For difficulty - yeah, this game isn't exactly Nethack. Particularly with the worst bugs fixed in Resurrected. There are many routine situations where you know you won't possibly die, including the act bosses which are never dangerous enough to deal a thousand damage quickly enough. But there's just enough that *can* be dangerous - particularly undead dolls coming up in act 3.

I never had that effect of "this is the last time I'll fight Duriel", since by the time I got that far I already had each next team planned out in my head.

+x-y damage on the weapon works with Vengeance, as far as I know. It's only straight +x damage that doesn't, as on Grief; this is a separate modifier than minimum or maximum damage (weapons like Aldur's have both min and max, which the UI consolidates into +x-y.)

For the Oculus, I did use that on one of my teams, though only for the last act. I actually kinda liked the teleporting - there is always a lot of empty space on the screen, it seemed a lot more likely to blink the sorceress *out* of danger rather than into it. The player can actually react to the random teleport faster than the monsters can - you can re-teleport yourself somewhere safe faster than the monsters can converge and swing (the 15 frame AI delay is critical here.) That sorc did die for me - to the whirlwinding Ancient, where Oculus didn't make a difference - actually it would have saved me if the teleport had triggered.

[Kylearan]

Had to travel for work and couldn't reply earlier...

Yeah, for the Sur rune, Wind is the only thing to do with it that doesn't require some other higher rune.  Wind works in claws, so I'm guessing that will be the assassin's other weapon.

Yup, that's the plan, probably wasn't too hard to guess. I have found a 2os Suwayyah with +2 to Claws of Thunder, and while Wind doesn't have the best range for enhanced damage (between 114 and 135 max damage in the end) it will be better than my current claw even if it rolls bad, and the other modifiers and are solid as well. Still nothing any sane player would normally waste a Sur rune on, but in this format it's better than finishing the game with the Sur still in the stash, so thanks again to your variant for making me do unusual stuff.

Note that Dragon Claw uses IAS only on the primary weapon and ignores it on the secondary (I tested this personally), so Wind with the 50% may be actually pretty good as a primary claw.

Wind only has +40% IAS, but anyway, they changed the behavior of IAS for dual wielders in D2R at least twice - and I failed to find out in what state it is now.  The IAS calculator at https://d2.lc/IAS/ is supposed to be up to date however, and if it is indeed, the IAS on the secondary weapon does matter. I don't quite understand how exactly, but it looks like my best option is to Jade Talon as primary and Wind as secondary weapon and then an additional 20% IAS would get me to the 7 frames breakpoint.

But who knows what my other chars manage to find before the assassin gets to play; maybe I keep my current claw if a better option drops.

You can't die anywhere from poison - the life loss stops at 1 life.

Oh, I didn't know that and could have sworn I died to poison before - but maybe that was indeed from some other damage source.

The Vampire Gaze can be socket-quested for a rune to help with resists.  I use Rals and Orts like this all the time.

I do so, too, but the +40 all res from Jade Talon gives me the option to socket IAS instead. 

I never had that effect of "this is the last time I'll fight Duriel", since by the time I got that far I already had each next team planned out in my head.

Hehe, and I'm glad for that as your reports made for great reads! But I now realized that 90% of the play time it's turned into a casual game for me and "only" the long-term aspects of character progression and item configurations are still fun. And that means it simply takes too much spare time to play any longer. There are a lot of other games and hobbies on my list where the ratio of fun to invested time will be much better, which is a shame as Diablo is still one of the games I've played and love the most (besides Civ). I still hope D4 will become more than a casual game.

+x-y damage on the weapon works with Vengeance, as far as I know.  It's only straight +x damage that doesn't, as on Grief; this is a separate modifier than minimum or maximum damage (weapons like Aldur's have both min and max, which the UI consolidates into +x-y.)

Damn, this game is needlessly complex (or bugged) at times... I didn't realize there's a difference between +x and +x-y. 

[T-hawk]

Wind only has +40% IAS, but anyway, they changed the behavior of IAS for dual wielders in D2R at least twice - and I failed to find out in what state it is now.  The IAS calculator at https://d2.lc/IAS/ is supposed to be up to date however, and if it is indeed, the IAS on the secondary weapon does matter. I don't quite understand how exactly, but it looks like my best option is to Jade Talon as primary and Wind as secondary weapon and then an additional 20% IAS would get me to the 7 frames breakpoint.

I don't think that calculator has been updated for Resurrected at all. I don't think the host of that site even knows the javascript code. It was originally copied from the original host at indiablo.de . The javascript hosted at d2.lc is still the original source code, with all the variable names in German.

But for speed testing - you can test it yourself. I do it by way of analyzing the audio. Use an audio recording program (probably Audacity), and record the audio as you make some attacks. You can zoom in and look at the recorded audio waveform and see exactly how far apart in time the peaks are. Works particularly well for the double-claw skills where the assassin yells every time she attacks. This method works for online or offline play, doesn't require any mods, and doesn't involve video recording which can affect the speed of a computer enough to throw off the results.

Damn, this game is needlessly complex (or bugged) at times... I didn't realize there's a difference between +x and +x-y. 

Grief and that +x damage modifier are particularly messy; it was poorly hacked in by a later developer in patch 1.10. It wasn't designed to be complex, more like agglomerated by happenstance and laziness.

[KingOfPain]

The calculator is not updated for sure, and (me think) gimped for some reason. For example, it is showing Barbarian Throwing max out 9F/2.77APS when my Throwology table showing Max 6.2APS. (but potential of 7.1APS)

Either that or it's missing the option for 2xThrow if it had one

[T-hawk]

That calc does have an option for Double Throw. You have to pick both weapons as throwing weapons first, then it appears in the Skill dropdown. It does show up to 6.25 and 7.14 attacks per second in the table, although those require some really high IAS numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

[KingOfPain]

That calc does have an option for Double Throw.  You have to pick both weapons as throwing weapons first, then it appears in the Skill dropdown.  It does show up to 6.25 and 7.14 attacks per second in the table, although those require some really high IAS numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

Ah I see my mistake now. I was about to replace TooThrow's ArreatFace with some Barbarian hat with 3 IAS+ jewels. I was watching some guy on 2xThrower and followed some link then links and links reading all kind if confusion on the net - some with screenshots of the calculator - until I got confused by it too. Then I checked my own numbers on Throwology and asked if I was wrong or the "whole web" is wrong. There are a lot of confused pubbies out there. And, not realizing speed is king in 2xThrow; that they can reach such high speed.

With runewords such as Treachery, and the latest post-1.10 items such as the unique throws, it is not that expensive/hard to reach (near) top speed of 6.2APS anymore - A total of ~109-120IAS. Then one can reach the max 7.1APS after a low level Frenzy from yourself, or Fanaticism aura.

.

[Kylearan]

Hell Act 3

There's not that much interesting to tell about act 3. Most characters except for the two melee fighters should have all they need to finish the game alive, barring mistakes on my part or bad luck. Of course their gear can (and will) be improved, but chances for such drops get lower the longer I play, so I semi-rushed through act 3, more or less clearing the open jungle areas at players 3 except for when I had to backtrack too much, and also full-clearing the Kurast areas. I decided to risk and do the Ruined Temple (at players 1), but skipped the other temples and rushed through the Flayer Dungeon, the Sewers and the Durance of Hate as quickly as possible. It's time for the team to finish this.


Amazon

The amazon again was perfectly safe behind the Valkyrie, but she misses too many times and also lacks a bit of raw damage (which isn't a real problem beyond my lack of patience), so I invested my attribute points into dex and my skill points into Penetrate. Later I read that patch 2.6 fixed the AR bug with Strafe; let's see how this changes things (at the time I had already finished act 4 with her...).

The only noteworthy drop for her was this:

   

I guess I could make a Mosaic for the assassin now , but while I use Insight, Spirit and other unbalanced runewords, (double) Mosaic is too much even for me and I think I'll ignore it. (Although I commend Blizzard on attempting to introduce some new claw runewords, even with a new mechanic to boot!, I wish it would have been obviously broken.) Still, a Gul rune can be used for other useful runewords, so we'll see what the forge will add.

The council managed to actually kill my valkyrie and my merc several times, as three of them spawned with Conviction. Ugh. Didn't mean I was in any danger, though. But in the Durance of Hate I actually had two near death experiences involving dolls: Once because I instinctively triggered Strafe when I saw something move, and once because the lights in the room where I play were too bright and thus the contrast on my monitor too low and I didn't notice two dolls standing right next to the amazon. She survived, however.


Barbarian

So with the Pul rune found by the paladin last act, I could now craft a new weapon for the barbarian and hopefully have him covered for the end game as well:

   

Ugh, that's not a very good Oath. Still better than the Unbending Will he's used until now, but not dramatically so. Depending on what the hellforge drops, I might try to reroll this... (Over my disappointment about the bad outcome, I completely forgot to use Heart of the Wolverine and only remembered it after killing Mephisto. Well, obviously I didn't seem to need it, but hopefully I'll remember to use it in Act 4!)

Even with the sub-par Oath, the barb had no real trouble except for the ruined temple which had a nasty stair trap I couldn't manage. After my merc had died three times and I had used way too many rejuv potions without making much headway (the room is just too small and the monsters too fast to use Leap for separating enemies), I decided to leave the monsters be and just leapt to the Tome.

The Durance of Hate gave me another small challenge. The barbarian is the only character in my team without a tank - all others either have a melee merc, a summon, or both, while my leap attack barbarian himself is the tank for his Iron Wolf. But I remembered in time that my armor provided me with Clay Golem charges, and so death by dolls could successfully be avoided. (Were undead stygian dolls fire immune, I would have needed more creativity - or courage. )


Sorceress

Early on in the jungle, the sorceress made the best find for all of act 3:

   

Laying of Hands will be great on the assassin, fixing some IAS problems and more importantly, increase her damage considerably! Unfortunately I feel like Claws of Thunder, my originally intended main source of damage, will probably pale in comparison to Dragon Claw which is already at least as efficient or even better against certain monsters. Now against demons, I wonder if I will use CoT much at all.

A Wailing Beast and Rogue boss pack right at the stairs of the Ruined Temple made life a bit hectic, but in contrast to her merc, the sorceress survived without much problems. Sarina was sniped using hydras from far away, again thanks to my wide-screen monitor. What did almost kill the sorceress though was Icehawk Riftwing. I had forgotten to switch to players 1 for the sewers, but the sorceress dealt with everything in there easily - until she encountered the extra fast Icehawk with Conviction. I didn't realize the danger at first, until my mercenary almost instantly died and I tried to teleport away - and Icehawk was immediately at my new location and almost killed me! A couple of full rejuv potions later, I realized casting teleport wouldn't be fast enough, I wouldn't have the time to open a town portal and thus in panic hit escape and exited the game.

The second time in the sewers went much more smoothly, as went the rest of the act. Toorc Icefist was fire and cold immune and had to be isolated first and then killed by the barbarian mercenary. Afterwards, they got yet another present for the assassin from Mephisto: War Traveler. Nice!


Paladin

Fist of the Heavens and Conviction work well enough against animals most of the time, but against some lightning immunes, it's simply not good enough. Jungle hunters and bats were examples of this in this act, and the paladin using Vengeance (now maxed) struggled a bit against them. I had made Honor in a scourge which was a slight improvement, but the problem is that he gets hit too often. His Smoke wyrmhide is fine, but I'm still looking for a elite shield base with higher defense to put runes into, maybe for a Sanctuary. I realized I will also have to be careful and re-roll the ancients until at least Korlic and Talic can savely be dealt with using FotH from afar.

The paladin also had the hardest time of the team in the Ruined Temple. A fanatic Sarina, a ghoul lord boss and wailing beasts right at the entrance cost me a lot of potions and trips to town to revive my merc and I almost gave up - but in the end persevered, and won, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. Take this, weak barbarian team mate! Lam Esen's Time isn't really worth the risk of dying, but since the game is so easy in most places, I stubbornly wanted to try and get it nonetheless.

All my team members crafted blood or hitpower gloves when a suitable magic gloves dropped and I had all the needed resources, but most of the time nothing came out of it. The paladin finally had more luck:

   

Nothing spectacular but still a slight improvement for the amazon.


Druid

He found a Mal rune. That's about it for him for this act, I'm afraid.


Necromancer

The necromancer made himself a Spirit monarch once he had the strength (yeah I know), and... that's all there is for him as well.


Assassin

So now to the team member I was looking forward to the most, the assassin, whom I had wanted to play last to see if others would find some good claws for her. Since that didn't happen, I went forward with my plan to "waste" a Sur rune and make something I've never made before (with heartfelt thanks to this team variant ruleset):

   

I was a bit miffed the damage roll turned out to be not very good - I mean, come on game, be glad somebody actually makes a Wind! Also note that I've chosen the base for its +2 to Claws of Thunder but will not use Death Sentry, as I'd like for once to play an Assassin without that skill. Anyway, together with Jade Talon this is still a massive improvement over her old setup. I socketed the Jade Talon with a Shael and the Vampire Gaze helm with a 15% IAS/27% cold res jewel. The Vampire Gaze in turn allowed me to replace Rockfleece with an upgraded Spirit Shroud socketed with a ruby. Finally, the huge resists on Jade Talon allowed me to put more charms with +life, +fhr and other goodies into her inventory. All this was by far the biggest gear change of all my team members, and next act there's also Laying of Hands and War Traveler waiting for her!

All these upgrades noticably paid off. She still has max physical resistance and solid values for fire and cold absorb, magic resistance and damage reduction. That, and good values for life and mana leech combined with much improved damage output, meant she was no longer afraid of crowds. Here's the Ruined Temple's stair trap (after I've already killed some of the monsters):

   

It was like back in Nightmare: She almost never needed to drink any potions and just calmly and methodically killed everything on screen with great combat flow, a pure joy to play. Stormtree was killed with ease, much easier than with the other melee characters. A safe melee char, who would have thought... and who needs Moasic?

She also found something for the druid.

   

Funny that the magic +2 to druid skills, +2 to Tornado, +2 to Summon Dire Wolf magic antlers the druid currently wears are not that much worse than this. In the end I think the resists on Spirit Keeper allow me to make room for an additional +1 elemental skills GC and other helpful charms in his inventory, and the high defense and fhr are nice too, but it's close.


Items

Some other items found in this act:

* Giant Skull: High defense, 10% CB, +35 STR, 2os, knockback - hm...this looks like it should be useful for someone, but at first glance I have a hard time to find a good use for it.

* Zakarum's Hand: With nice %ED, ignore target defense, 30% IAS and mana leech, it might be useful for vengeance when upgraded... but maybe not worth the cost in runes. I'll have to think about that.

* Windhammer: I'm still disappointed that no merc can use maces in this game. Not that Windhammer is particularly good, but my bash barb would have used it and it would have been nice for variety.


The sorceress, paladin and amazon reached level 85, the rest only level 84. Off to Act 4!

[T-hawk]

That Oath isn't ethereal, is it? You want that to take advantage of the indestructible, although who knows when you might ever find an ethereal base to do it. And an ethereal Oath can't have the Heart of Wolverine charges recharged. That might actually be pretty good with Battle Orders to help keep it alive.

Yeah, it feels like the Tome quest isn't worth the risk in act 3 of hell, but I always do it anyway. If someone did die later without the extra stat (life) points when they could have had it, I'll always kick myself and wonder.

For the paladin's shield - you don't need an elite, the defense values on exceptional paladin shields are almost as good, if you happen to have any decent ones saved.

Spirit for the bonemancer - Does he need high strength for anything else? If not then I'm not entirely sure it's worth the strength over a good necro head (something like a Rhyme or Splendor in a base with +3 Bone Spear.)

For the assassin - I've found that low level Death Sentry really isn't good for anything. Monsters are rarely dense enough for many to be in a small blast radius, and it doesn't try to pick a corpse that's within the range of a lot. The only times I ever found low level DS to do anything were in the cow level, and against ghosts that can all stack up. Besides those situations, it never did noticeable damage. Even if it works, it's lower base damage than necromancer Corpse Explosion, and the assassin doesn't have Amplify to help it.

15% IAS/27% cold res jewel

Wow, I never found anything that good across all my teams, don't think I ever had any useful prefix at all on a Fervor jewel, maybe at most 8% resist or so.

Spirit Keeper can also be socketed for a resist rune, when you reach the quest in act 5 if you don't have any quests remaining available now.

[Kylearan]

That Oath isn't ethereal, is it?  You want that to take advantage of the indestructible, although who knows when you might ever find an ethereal base to do it.  And an ethereal Oath can't have the Heart of Wolverine charges recharged.

No, haven't found a suitable ethereal base yet but I'm still looking for one, although if I start to remember to actually cast HoW, that would no longer be so important.

Spirit for the bonemancer - Does he need high strength for anything else?  If not then I'm not entirely sure it's worth the strength over a good necro head (something like a Rhyme or Splendor in a base with +3 Bone Spear.)

He used a Rhyme necro head with +2 to Bone Spear until now, but I actually value and enjoy the increased levels for my other spells like Corpse Explosion, Clay Golem etc. more. I know you think differently, but I actually feel like he has enough life and could risk putting the necessary points into strength. (Have to look up his life total; I'm away from my gaming PC for a couple of days.) 

Spirit Keeper can also be socketed for a resist rune, when you reach the quest in act 5 if you don't have any quests remaining available now.

Yeah, I still have two socket quests left for any "emergencies" (things I've forgotten about or surprising rune drops which open up new options). I should use them before starting Act 5, I guess.

[Kylearan]

Hell Act 4

This variant run really needs to get finished rather sooner than later. I've looked it up: I had started it over a year ago, and since then it's clogging up my games pipeline! At first, I had played a second game in parallel (Horizon Zero Dawn) but quickly noticed how one game detracted me from the other, and stopped playing other games until this variant would be done. Now, 13 months later, SO MANY GAMES I'd love to play have been added to my wishlist (among them Citizen Sleeper, The Last Spell, Outer Wilds, Wartales, Hi-fi Rush, the latest Battle Brothers DLC, ...) and Diablo 4 is already around the corner, too. Time to end this!

So I lowered the difficulty to players 1 and ditched all nonessential magc find gear, instead equipping my end-game items. For example, now that the assassin has Laying of Hands, she gave Ghoulhide to the barbarian to replace his Chance Guards.

Overall, my characters seem to have everything they need, everything else they will find from now on will only be a bonus, so I might as well speed up the game. I did do a full clear for the last time however, since it's so easily and quickly done in act 4. All characters except the assassin finished at level 85; not sure what happened here (she doesn't use traps, and her shadow master only rarely).

Not much report-worthy happened. The amazon almost died to Lord De Seis, who somehow spawned almost on top of her and with his fanaticism aura is no joke. It was the first time in this act that my slvl 22 Valkyrie died, which caught me off-guard - her sturdiness had made me a bit careless, it seems. I got away alive however, and the valk didn't die again. Oh, and a couple of days after I had played her (as the first of the team, as usual), patch 2.6 landed and finally fixed the Strafe bug! Looking forward to see how this will improve her in Act 5 (not that she really needs it).

The paladin had it the easiest. Familiars and those leapers were slightly annoying due to their lightning immunity but still manageable,  and the rest stood no chance against Holy Bolt and Fist of the Heavens.

The druid had swapped out his Rhyme shield for a Moser's with three perfect diamonds. He lost Cannot be Frozen that way, which he doesn't really need, but gained enough resistances that I could remove some resistance charms and instead use all of my four +1 to elemental skills GCs I had found.

Usually I find large packs of Damned annoying or even dangerous for some characters, but what surprised me a bit was how easy a time the barbarian had. A character who is almost always airborne only laughts at them.

And that's about it when it comes to noteworthy events. I even didn't find anything remotely interesting in this act, until the Infector of Souls dropped this for my last character, the assassin:

   
Another Jade Talon! This is slightly better than the Wind claw she's used, although I will be sad to see the attack speed, faster run walk and interesting mods like Hit Blinds Target go. I will miss even more the overall uniqueness of using a rare runeword like Wind, but the extra damage and extra skills from Jade Talon are just too good to pass up.

So let's compare the new Jade Talon to my other one. New one:
   
Old one:


Haha, rolled almost minimum combined resistances and mana leech , but at east above average damage on both. Even their minimum resistance boni are still overkill and will allow me to swap out some resistance charms for +life and other useful charms.

The hellforge was a mixed bag: 2 Gul runes, 1 Pul, 1 Ko, 1 Io and 1 Hel rune (and one rune that my spreadsheet somehow converted into a "30"?!?; wasn't something worth remembering). I now have 3 Gul runes, 1 Ist, 1 Mal, 1 Pul, 3 Lem, 3 Fal and 3 Ko runes left (plus several lower ones of course). Even with cubing up, I don't see a lot of options that really excite me, especially if I want to re-roll the barbarian's Oath. I have to think a bit more on that, but I might finish the game with an Ist and some Gul runes unused.

I have to say I'm really excited that all of my characters have made it this far! A year ago, I wouldn't have believed the team would really make it to the last act in full force. The fact that I now have a real chance of getting a match against the Ancients with every character makes me really happy.

I expect the biggest challenge might be the paladin against the Ancients, although I hope if I respawn them until only Madawc remains immune to lightning, I should be able to deal with the other two with FotH by kiting, patience and a lot of potions (I don't think I'll be able to keep my mercenary alive). The barbarian might also run into trouble against them, or not - monsters maneuvering around while he is in mid-air and unable to do anything can sometimes result in really dangerous situations. But if I remember to use Leap a lot to separate them, I should be fine.

As for the Sorceress, after reading T-hawk's reports I'll refrain from trying to use Static Field against the Ancients and instead keep my distance.    The rest should be fine, although against other monsters, bad luck or mistakes might still kill me of course.

Time for one last item shuffle (not that much to do this time) and then I think I'll report on each character individually, starting with the Amazon. Fingers crossed...