Guide:Magic Find Amazon v1.10, by Nightfish: Difference between revisions

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Welcome to another fishy guide, short though it may be. In the following I’ll briefly outline the amazon build I use to run the worldstone keep and baal. I believe this to be one of the best places to shop for items, yet it seems to scare people and even the people that do MF there sometimes just skip through the keep right to the throne of destruction. It is my hope that this guide can clarify some things and perhaps provide a new MFing build for some of you. I’ve been really impressed with performance of my latest guardian on this run, not just because she’s very lucky but also because the run is fun and fast with her.

So, as I said this is about MF. When I MF, my goal is to maximise Sets & Uniques found over time. I do not care about anything else. Just the sets and the uniques. Anything else that drops is icing on the cake. This build focuses on area runs, the worldstone keep in particular. So the items we are after will be TC78 and up.  

As far as the build is concerned, the plan is to be able to kill everything at good speed. Any possible combination of monsters the keep can spawn. No matter if it’s gloams, stygian dolls and oblivion knights, this lady is taking them down. We do not want to lose any time by aborting runs if bad things spawn. A secondary objective (primary for me as I’m HC) is to not die.  

First of all, this is why I run this place. This may or may not apply to you and I don’t want to prove that this is better than running, say, pindleskin. If you want to run him with this build it’s very well capable of doing so but I’m focusing on the WS K because:

* Anything can drop here

Now, let me say once more that the best way to run this place is *not* to teleport right to Baal’s minions. Most of the TC87 items will come from regular boss packs in the keep itself and neither from the minions nor from Baal. They’re just something to kill because you’re already there and Baal is an act boss after all and his drops will be worthwhile for what they can be just as will Mephs. Just think of him as a Mephisto who drops up to TC84 with a reasonable chance just as meph himself goes up to TC72/75 with reasonable odds. The times you see TC78 from meph are the times you see TC87 from baal. It’s rare but the chance is there.  

I’ve tried a lot of different things here. Pretty much every melee and ranged skill amazons have to offer and this is what I believe works best. Skills mentioned by name are relevant for the build, anything else is summed up as “prerequisites”.  

==The Spare Points==

Well, what to do with the skill points we get after the core build is finished? Basically you could take them to the dark wood in act 1 and plant a skill tree as you don’t really need them. I advise against getting a valkyrie as dodge / avoid / evade will cause your attacks to miss occasionally and they are not needed to be safe. Imo the best option is to dump the remaining points into decoy. It isn’t the world hottest tank but it’ll be keep lister occupied for the 2 seconds it takes to fry him. Anyway, do with them as you see fit. Keep in mind that I warned you if you cannot hit the little flayers on lvl 3 because 100 blowdarts interrupt your every attack due to evade.  

There are a million things that will work here. I’ll try to highlight a few items I consider relatively easy to come by and useful for this build and you can take it from there.  

If you have are using the RWM definetly make insight for your merc. This build really likes the meditation. It is not mandatory but it helps. Other than that make sure he has some leech to help him tank. Crushing blow isn’t really necessary.

Well, actually this is pretty straight forward. First of all, make sure you have a good map. Good does *not* mean that the stairs down is next to the waypoint. No! Bad MFer! Down boy! Anyways… Good in this context means that going from the WP to the stairs down lets you pass everything once, and ideally only once. In other words, an “O” shaped map is pretty good while a “T” shape is horrible as you need to pass 2 arms of the map twice. The idea is to do as little useless running around – useless meaning running through areas where you already killed everything –as possible.  

For Sets and Uniques, stay on players 1. Over 80% of these will come from bosses and champions and their drops are the same on P1 as they are on P7. Increasing the rest of the drops by upping the players is not going to help you get more sets and uniques as you will never be able to run fast enough to actually get more items over time. To break even you can afford to spend 120% of your P1 runtime doing runs on P7. So, if it takes 10 minutes on p1 it’s okay if it takes 12 minutes on P7. This is really, really hard to do and then you just broke even. It’s different if you’re hunting specifically for runes but due to the low odds runes have I find it unrewarding to specifically hunt for them anyway. If I want runes that badly, I’ll play 3 hours sorcs to the hellforge.  

Just a few words on this as this is mainly supposed to be on MF and it’s too long already. Anyway, I recommend starting with the lightning skills in normal. They become powerful faster than FA. I think I took both of them to 12-15 and then started pushing FA and it’s synergy. It doesn’t matter too much how you do it, just try to have 20 FA / 10 synergy ready by the time you enter hell. Personally I was impatient to see how the melody bow would do and thus pushed FA earlier.  

You shouldn’t really have any problems anywhere. Lightning Fury kils mobs real fast, charged strikes kills all big single enemies and the ancients. Beware FE things in nightmare and stygian dolls in general. Lightning fury when surrounded with those is a death sentence. Iron Maiden would kill my zon in 3 hits so this is a lot less dangerous than it would be for other builds. (I use CS a lot vs oblivion knights)  

Generally when MFing, try to be patient. There are dry spells and sometimes you will go for hours without a good item. That is normal when running for things mephisto can’t drop but might be annoying if you just did 1k meph runs. Don’t run for a single item. Try to appreciate your finds. Even if you really want a stormlash or windforce, try to enjoy the skill charms, flawless gems, runes and other things that you find. If you get pissed at every drop that isn’t *your* item you’re in for a frustrating time.  

Well, that’s pretty much it for the first version of this thing. Not sure if it’s long enough in the right places, I’ve played so much that I’m losing track of what I need to put in guides and what’s clear for everybody. Anyways, enjoy, maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t but at least it gibs me +1 post count. If need be I will probably update it once to elaborate where necessary so comments are welcome, but this isn't going to turn into another fishymancer guide.

Now run along and hunt some gloams. With a bit of luck you’ll see things like these soon:

Image: nightfish-amazon1.jpg