Lindon - Twinked SC Hammerdin on a Mission

[HanShotFirst]

Congrats on level 98 and making your goal!

Looks like your Hammerdin hit 98 on the same day that my Hammerdin hit 98 . But you started three weeks after me ... and I don't even want to know how much time I've spent playing ... (I'm sure it's way more than 90 hours) ... but again, I really don't want to know ...

Best wishes for finding your Stormlash and a death free level 98!

P.S. Glad to hear you're giving Lindon a break for a month ... my Helm-Hammerhand needs a good long head start . See you at the finish line!

 

[Luhkoh]

@HanShotFirst haha thanks so much. Same day?! Pretty insane. Good luck to you too! Do you know what your runs will look like for 98-99?

 

[HanShotFirst]

Well I wasn't going to do the math (because I was pretty sure I would get cold feet if I knew exactly what I was getting into) but after doing two and half hours of Baal runs and not getting a speck of white on the xp bar I decided I'd better take a look at the numbers.

At clvl 98 I'm getting an average of 83,392xp per P8 Baal run. 32,306xp from clearing throne and waves, and 51,086xp from Baal (with +5% xp boost from Ondal's Wisdom). So just looking at these numbers it became really clear that I needed faster access to where the bulk of the xp is located (at the boss). Also, it wouldn't hurt to have a better than +5% xp boost when defeating said boss. And, since xp shrines aren't found on the way to Baal and wouldn't do you any good at Baal anyways as you get cursed as soon as you enter the Worldstone Chamber ... all signs pointed to it was time head to the Chaos Sanctuary.

Switching players settings mid run has always seemed pretty cheesy to me but at clvl 98 the advantages seem too great to ignore. With Diablo himself being such a huge percentage of all xp in a clvl 98 Chaos run I'm going to go with your approach: Set players 1 for Infector of Souls and Lord de Seis and then set players 8 for the Grand Vizier and Diablo. With this approach I'm averaging 52,508xp per run. My map has three shrines (one at the RoF waypoint, and two in the Chaos Sanctuary), if one of them is an xp shrine my average goes up to 76,500xp per run.

Considering I can do 2-3 Chaos Sanctuary runs in the time it takes to do a Baal run the choice is easy from an xp per hour point of view. But how will drops compare? ... to soon to tell. Lots, probably most, of my goodies from Baal running came from the P8 Throne Room. On the other hand, I'll get a lot more boss drops at Diablo ... so I'm predicting it'll be about an even trade.

I briefly considered running Nihlathak but then thought better of it ... In my experience it's best not to even go in there without over-capped resistances, huge amounts of all forms of damage reduction, and most importantly a sustainable means of replenishing life (like leech and or tap) ... I imagine a caster like a hammerdin would either go in there and burn through full rejuvenation potions (and then either have to waste a lot of time looking for more), or would be really timid to use full rejuvenation potions (not wanting to waste a lot of time looking for more) and end up dead ... but again, that's just my sense of things. Besides, I'm equally interested in finding grailers and with the damage reduction gear I'd need at Nihlathak the odds would probably go way down ...

Cheers! -HSF

 

[Luhkoh]

@HanShotFirst For sure! Baal gets pretty bad at 98 compared to diablo or nihl. He's not so terrible that you cant mix in some runs of him every now and then, but yeah a good bit slower.

As far as switching psettings midway through, I definitely do that, as I have described, but just leaving the psetting on p7 isn't very much difference, if you are interested in testing that out yourself and comparing the numbers. Also compare the xp gain of p7 diablo to p8 diablo. At least in modern patches, p8 is no different exp-wise to p7, due to a maximum exp that can be gained from a monster (and baal caps out on p3 for exp). I'm not at all positive this is the same for your version, but I think it is, so give it a test!

Also if doing CS runs, see if you have any shrines close to waypoints in act 1 anywhere before black marsh. These have an 18% chance of being an exp shrine as oppose to 8.2% in most of the later game. Actually again I'm not sure if this is true for old versions either lol. I don't know much about them.

On nihlathak, I sorta want to test him out too, but dont want to give up the rune drops and stormlash chances from CS. If doing nihla, I would try a mercless hdin and slap on a natures peace. That should make the snakes not terrible (due to avoiding nextdelay from not having a merc), and I THINK the runs would be very doable. But again I'm talking 1.14 and haven't tested.

As far as the drops go, for me I feel like its something like:
Baal - poor for runes, poor for tc87s (but better than nihla)
CS - good for runes, almost zero tc87s (but best for stormlash)
Nihla - medium for runes, poor for tc87s

Hahaha. Good luck!

 

[HanShotFirst]

@Luhkoh - Thanks for the tips!

Your advice appears to hold true for 1.11b. P7 and P8 Diablo results in the same experience ... so I guess I might as well go with P7. Also, I have a shrine one teleport off the Stony Field waypoint and (without doing extensive tracking) it does appear to be an xp shrine at a better than average rate. The xp bar is moving slowly ... but it is moving .