Originally posted by Gripphon
Since sorcs were so popular this round, I think it is worth it to share some more info about her how to achieve fast running, aka 18s and below per run, but I'll also share "newly" developed technique how to farm super fast even outside tournament environment.
Obligatory runcounter pic:
Video:
Biggest issue other players had with their sorcs from what I've seen from the video are their maps. Difference between nearly perfect and perfect map easily means ~2s of runtimes for sorc, believe it or not. My map is pretty much perfect, it doesn't go better than that and that is first important prerequisite to do 18s running. Without perfect map I don't think that is possible. Even if minions are just slightly scattered, it could very well mean 22s running instead of 18s.
Second important thing are save/load times. I achieved mine by playing window mode and turning off glide wrapper. Yes, you could get annoyed by clicking outside window, but that is the recipe to get such fast s/e times which will lead to faster running. With glide wrapper working I could hardly maintain 18.5s running, which is whole second slower.
Technique - very simple. Blizzard + 2-3 static + few blasts + blizzard + blasts. I saw some players not using static. That is actually less efficient because static influences ALL minions and drops 50% of HP to half of the minions there which makes them much faster killed in case they didn't get hit by blizzard yet. Also drops other minions to 90% of their life which is not a bad help, also something no other skill can achieve even if you spam 2-3 blasts instead of static. Difference is not big, but it could mean 0.3 or more seconds slower running.
Picking stuff - don't get paranoid about leaving stuff on the ground is the main rule to achieve such running. Things that ged flooded in drops, either use 5 seconds of your time to dig them up every 4-5 runs, or leave them be and go on. Your choice, but I find it better to simply go on.
Stragglers - in general it is mathematically more efficient to NOT chase every single straggler out there. Every 10 or so runs happens that one straggler that is ugly to kill and would take 3 or more seconds off your runtime. It is more efficient to leave him alive and use those 3 seconds to start a new run. Especially true with leaving cold immune boss alive, don't waste your time really. More importantly, chasing stragglers will drain your energy, and if you keep as comfortable running as possible can mean you will easily maintain peak efficiency farming for a longer time.
My data in other sense
Even though my runtime avg. is 17.307s according to runcounter, I didn't kill everything all the time. In fact I was really glad to leave some stragglers alive. By my test, I leave minion alive roughly once in 12 runs. Or, once in 15 runs if we exclude cold immune bosses everyone leaves alive. Let's assume average running time for situation. Values are calculated with math.
If I killed everything but cold immune boss
Avg runtime: 17.413s
If I killed everything all the time, even cold immune boss
Avg runtime: 17.439s
In reality, if I really did kill everything, my runtime would certainly not be 17.439s, but rather in 17.6 or even 17.7 region. So, by skipping some stragglers I actually gained efficiency on a long run. A little bit, but still counts, right.
I also did 1000 runs test to see what would my average time be if I counted gomule time into running time.
If gomule time was also part of playing time
Avg runtime by the 1000 runs test: 17.78s
I could achieve that because I didn't pick up grand charms. They would hurt my average time as well by some ~0.2s, but then I would have to visit gomule even more and I assume avg time with gomule would rise to 18.x seconds easily.
Technique is simple. Open gomule and go running. When you are done, pick stuff from the sorc in gomule and DON'T bother dropping them in stash, just leave them picked up. Close char, continue running, then repeat the process. After you do like 6-7 visits to the gomule like that, then fast open stash, drop everything picked, and continue. This way I didn't spend more than ~10-15 seconds in gomule, and had to visit it roughly once in 35 runs. Similar farming could happen outside tourney as well, it is more efficient than using in game stash and go identify stuff etc. Why to bother with identify if you can simply see everything you picked up in gomule later? It is much faster process anyway. With such way, even if you pick grand charms and most other things, you could aim to have sub 19s RL farming on a long run. But, that is assuming you roll perfect map first.
Q: you didn't pick up grand charms, that is really bad way to play in my book.
A: you are correct, however I don't find them valuable enough to waste my time on them in a tourney. For casual playing, sure, for tourney, not anymore. I'm rich guy and on 500 picked grand charms I perhaps find 1 I might use at average. But, I'll leave YOU to pick them up for me and then I'll trade for them if you find something I could use, deal?
Barb vs sorc, who is better Travincal farmer?
For a long time it was considered barb has no equal. But recent discovery of sorc changed that, barb is no longer king of Travincal alone. But, who is really better? Now that is question we should answer and many details are required to do so.
1. First of all, barb usually kills everything all the time, so for this comparison I'll take my sorc which also "kills" everything which is by calculation average time of 17.439s in tournament environment. This time I'll use for comparison.
2. Secondly, by my tests, 1s cold duration Reaper's makes 1 minion shatter every 4 runs at average which means barb has 10.75 minions to hork per run.
3. Hork is always p7, and p7 is 10/9 more efficient than p3.
4. Properly balanced barbs use 56% item find, so I'll use such barb for this comparison.
By math, this barb should achieve ~28.043 s average running time on a long run, like RFO environment. Can he do it?
Video
Barb on a sorc map, tested with both G+G and G+B to conclude they are pretty much the same, but G+B offered me more comfort so I use that. With some previous tests I concluded G+G is slightly faster, now G+B ended up slightly faster. I guess you have to do tests for yourself.
To make barb faster, I used additional warcry skilled in inventory to skip battle command and still have 56% item find.
Result? I could do sub 28s running in short periods, but sorc could do sub 17s running the same way. Maintaining 28s running on RFO tier effort seems to me like hell of a job to do with a barb. 28.5s running was somewhat at the edge while 29s running seemed more comfortable and maintainable.
Difference? Since I assume barb could maintain 29s running through whole RFO, then sorc is ~3.5-4% faster. Another significant difference is, barb needs to do walking to check all the drops and is still not completely sure did he leave something behind or not, while sorc always sees everything that drops and chance to leave something behind is extremely low, especially if holding alt key all the time. Barb tends to have too many item flooding and must waste his time to make sure nothing is under all that garbage.
My overall conclusion is that in most optimal playing environment sorc wins by a hair and is most efficient Travincal farmer, and not barb like people thought ever since diablo came out. But, those are my tests and my conclusions. They are still queen and king of Travincal, only thing that changed is I don't consider barb to be the best anymore, but rather sorc is the best by the test proved on the same map with same playing conditions.