Terror zones and the Quest for 99

[LouB]

Since I decided to take my Wolfbarb to 99, I've been interested in how the terror zones would work in SP and how they would effect the time it takes to get to 99. Now Argh is currently level 95 and it takes me about 14 runs of the Council, LK, Pindle, Nilhalthak and Baal to add 10% to experience or about 22.5 million. He also does not have Enigma so when I say run I mean RUN.

When I opened the game tonight it told me that Travincal was being terrorized. I thought it would be a one and done sort of thing, but the terror zone stays active for a period of time during which you can run the terror zone as many times as you can. When the tremors died in Travincal they opened in Black Marsh and the Hole and when that timer ended the terror zone opened in the Forgotten Tower (Countess). Based on the limited time I've played so far it looks like there will always be an open terror zone. I didn't think to check on how long it stays in one area, but I think at least 20 minutes.

So what about experience gain?

The council on p/8 normally give me around 14,000 experience. Two runs of terrorized Council members gave me a little over 500,000 each time and an almost full clear of Travincal netted not quite 1.3 million.
Clearing Black Marsh and the hole combined resulted in almost 3m experience and just clearing the hole got about 1.9m.

I did one countess run while it was being terrorized, meaning taking the shortest path through the 4 levels and then clearing level 5 got me 1.7m experience.

Terror zones are definitely going to have an impact on how many people try and reach 99 as well as opening up the possible areas and probably shortening the time it takes.

 

[NorthDakota]

The other thing is that terror zones don't necessarily get that much harder (if at all?) with their new higher monster level.

Obviously this makes getting 99 easier and by a large margin. But here's my take - getting 99 as it was before TZ's isn't so much a difficulty thing, it's a measure of how much you can endure soul-crushing boredom. I just feel there's something off about spending my time doing it. At least with magic finding I can swap characters, go play another zone for a while.

TZ's fix two problems imo - they remove the boredom aspect (i.e., you can grind in more than 3 spots). And the second is that it makes it more reasonable for more builds to get 99 without taking an even more insane amount of time. Take bowazon. I can grind out /p8 chaos sanc seal runs and get to 98 and then just blast nihlathak at 98, but doing it will be the ultimate slog. So once you reach a certain point, there's no reason to continue on that character.

Now there is! How neat is that?

I like that the path to 99 is more accessible and reasonable for a casual player in single player.

 

[LouB]

Killing the council was definitely just as easy and I was actually surprised that it was. What really shocked me was that an Act 1 area like the Black Marsh produced so much experience and everything was just dying like normal.

I agree with the boredom issue, I have trouble just running mindless Pindle, Pits or LK runs and at least then I might get something besides experience.

I do think that we should add an * for those that reached 99 before TZs. Or maybe draw a line in the list.

 

[snickersnack]

I do think that we should add an * for those that reached 99 before TZs. Or maybe draw a line in the list.

Terror Zones are optional; there's a check box. What about those that choose to run without it? Or those that run in LoD?

 

[coju]

It definitely shows a switch/line has happened. Whenever 1.09 99ers are mentioned then being able to /p99 comes up. They don’t have a * by their names.

We already typically mention what patch the toon played in. It’s still a feat nonetheless. I would vote against any type of line or extra delegation for D2R 99ers.

It is quite a big swing in exp. But either way…

 

[BBS_Agonistes]

I wasn't that jazzed about terror zones, but I played tonight for a while and it was really fun having an excuse to run different areas I'd never done before, and certainly made it less boring and more fun. And it didn't hurt seeing the XP bar actually move on my lvl 95 paladin where it wouldn't usually. No crazy loot dropped, and no Sunder Charms, but I did notice some of the grand charms that dropped had pretty impressive suffixes (e.g., +41, +45 life), though I didn't get lucky enough to get any skillers.

I do like the variation it adds to the game. As far as the difficulty, I think everyone here has enough knowledge to know the difference between 99 in different patches.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

Pavke made a mathematical analysis on Sunder Charms drop rates for Single Player. As per usual with charms, run at /p7 to get more chance to get Sunders.

 

[ffs]

Literally 2nd boss pack I killed in a TZ dropped a sunder charm. The cold/fire ones will pile up in no time, and those are the most impactful ones... seems about right.

As for 99ing: Having made three UT99ers, I must say the sense of achievement of finally getting there used to be unparalleled. With TZs, it's a joke. Personally I will farm TZs with my D2R charsacters, including for XP. But getting to 99 via TZs is about as impressive as getting some character to 95 beforehand, i.e. "business as usual" rather than a meaningful feat. At least that's how I feel about it.

That being said, hoping this gets 99er threads more active again. After all, it's still a fun journey. Although IMO it should always be denoted in the tables/character info that TZs were farmed to get there. It's massively less effort in comparison to previous 99ers.

 

[krischan]

When I opened the game tonight it told me that Travincal was being terrorized. I thought it would be a one and done sort of thing, but the terror zone stays active for a period of time during which you can run the terror zone as many times as you can. When the tremors died in Travincal they opened in Black Marsh and the Hole and when that timer ended the terror zone opened in the Forgotten Tower (Countess). Based on the limited time I've played so far it looks like there will always be an open terror zone. I didn't think to check on how long it stays in one area, but I think at least 20 minutes.

A few observations by me:

I had Travincal, then Black Marsh/Hole and then Forgotten Tower as well last evening, so it seems that they appear in a fixed pattern for everybody. I'm not sure if that's a good idea, as it might allow people to manipulate their systen clock in order to produce terror zones in particular areas. I wouldn't do that, however. It might cause problems with your system and it seems silly as well.

Terror zones change once an hour. 5-10 minutes before, a message appears that terror fades in the current area and increases in another. When the hour is full, unspawned monsters in the current terror zone won't be terror zone monsters anymore.

It might have been incndence fo far, but I think that charms (or at least grand charms) drop more often in terror zones then they normally do, probably because the monsters have an additional or different treasure class invloving charms which allows GCs to become sunder charms, but could also be regular GCs. In one run I've found four GCs, one of them my second (lightning) sunder charm (and another a 41 life pcombat skiller! *passes out*).

Killing the council was definitely just as easy and I was actually surprised that it was. What really shocked me was that an Act 1 area like the Black Marsh produced so much experience and everything was just dying like normal.

When I did Travincal, I noticed that the zealots that come with the hierophants aren't running away from you anymore (like they do after you finish the "kill Council in Travincal" quest). That doesn't really make things more difficult, but it might need additional time, in particular if you don't have fancy runewords like Enigma (like me). It makes a difference for fohdinss, however, who cannot zealots/hierophants with holy bolts, as they are animal class.

A few questions:

1. Do super-uniques get the upgrade as well if their monster level isn't tied to the area level, like e.g. Nihlathak?
2. Act bosses get a higher monster level, but I heard that Mephisto and quest-bugged Andariel won't get their drop tables upgraded due to a bug. Has this been fixed?
3. Are chests affected? For example, the highest runes possible for chests is based on the act, so act 1-4 chests cannot drop Zod, for example. This is probably still case, correct? I assume that the maximum ilvl/base qlvl of chest drops (which is area level-1) goes up as well, right? Also, superchests can still drop only magical or rare items (if they can be like that at all), correct?

Edit:
Regarding 2: Seems to be fixed. Andariel just dropped a Grandfather for me.
Regarding 3: When googling about it, I've read of people who found 41+ life charms, so it seems that chest ilvls go up as well.

 

[Excalibur]

I can understand it seems quite unfair for those who spent hours and hours getting to 99 but there wasn't really any reward other than personal goal to motivate players go for it. It really requires so much time and if we include deaths it could push you back weeks and maybe months of progress.

My highest char before D2R was an Amazon at 97 and that's only because she was a Magic Find build which we tend to use a lot. Most of the rest characters that we spend so much time to dress with the best possible gear usually remain inactive because they really serve no purpose.

Terror Zones seem like a good solution to use those powerful characters, put their strength to the test and eventually making the journey to 99 doable. My only concern from what I can read is that Terror Zones are not that intimidating? I wish they would at least make them severely more dangerous to balance the greater experience gained and put a challenge to highly optimized builds.

 

[krischan]

My primary concern with terror zones is that a lot of extremely rare items become much lass rare now. Terror zones certainly add variety to the game, by creating incentives to visit places that aren't visited often or at all, but the incentive to keep on playing until you have a satisfying amount of everything will cease more quickly.

 

[NorthDakota]

My primary concern with terror zones is that a lot of extremely rare items become much lass rare now.

Are they though? Sure maybe across the population it speeds up the rate at which people get tc87 items, but won't pits/pitzerker still be the gold standard in terms of time to get any particular item? I'm not completely sure how TZ loot mechanics work but I don't believe they offer that much of an advantage over alvl 85 zones.

Someone correct me on the exact mechanics, but like isn't it just that in TZ's all monsters have their TC upgraded to 87 once you're level 85, and then all monsters can drop TC87 items? There's no other inherent bonuses besides the increased exp due to having more monsters above your character level, right?

The thing I notice more than anything with farming TZs is that it's difficult to get a good feel for where boss packs are going to spawn in an hour, so you're not exactly farming efficiently by comparison to a super strict AT or Pits run, so are you really acquiring loot at a faster rate? Maybe after going through several cycles and getting accustomed to your maps you can create efficient routes for all the zones.

 

[BBS_Agonistes]

One thing a few have mentioned is that the Terror Zones don't seem to be more difficult, which surprised me. I kind of went into it purposefully not reading too much because I just wanted to experience without being all primed for anything in particular, so I assumed level 96 monsters would be pretty scary. I was running with my Hammerdin (400% MF) and slowly cranked players setting up to 8 with no problem. That said, Hammerdins are one of the more broken/tanky builds in the game so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that p8 wasn't a problem.

I do assume it would be more of a pain for melee characters? Wouldn't you need a heck of an AR to hit 96 monsters consistently?

 

[krischan]

The distribution of weapon/armor TCs is a bell curve, being stretched out the more towards the higher TCs, the higher the monster level which means that stuff that's to the right of the maximum of the curve has higher chance to drop while lower TC items have a lower chance then. A pit zerker will probably find more high TC items from L99 uniques than from the usual L88 ones. There might be a cap which makes the distribution of base items the same for monster levels of 88 or higher, but I doubt it.

I do assume it would be more of a pain for melee characters? Wouldn't you need a heck of an AR to hit 96 monsters consistently?

Not if your weapon has ITD, like Grief or Faith. My zealot and my physical bowazon do well in the areas they usually visit. It's a bit tougher, but not by that much. Bosses are immune to ITD, of course but once they are alone, they aren't a problem.

 

[little birdy]

I spent a couple hours running around in TZs last night and it was a blast. Didn’t find any Sunder GCs or other GG items yet, but the EXP was tasty. I also came across a handful of nice elite items that could have been good RW bases. I dusted off a few different characters that I haven’t touched for weeks. It was fun taking turns with several different builds over the hour that each TZ lasted: I circled through Elemental Bowazon, Bladesin, Bone Necro, Multishot Bowa, WW Barb, Lightning and Fire Ball Sorcs, Pally, etc. (Guess I forgot to take the Wind Druid for a spin ) One hour feels just right for this approach of mixing up runs with different characters. I could also see myself taking a run at 99 with my Fire Ball Sorc running TZs. That will get more serious once I land a Fire Sunder GC.

 

[Avengor]

Might be a dumb question, but how do you guys efficiently counter the resistance penalty? playing ssf sp i find i have a hard time managing resists anyway, these on top is awfully brutal. About the only class i see not having problems is paladin, and thats because of the glory of pally shields.

I'm guessing resist charms and items like Mara's? i would say rares, but finding good ones is a bit difficult until you've grinded for a fair few hours. Just curious if there's any tricks.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

Yes, I counter the resistance penalty if I'm playing javazon in a dangerous TZ like WSK. But I'm mostly playing Hammerdin, who doesn't care about equipping a Sundering Charm, anyway.

 

[Avengor]

Yes, I counter the resistance penalty if I'm playing javazon in a dangerous TZ like WSK. But I'm mostly playing Hammerdin, who doesn't care about equipping a Sundering Charm, anyway.

Ahh so I actually left an important word out of my post "HOW do you counter...". Drastically changes the theme of my post. Sorry for the confusion!

 

[bill_n_opus]

I found lots of good info from bowa's tier list of sunder charms. Some things have changed a bit since 2.6, notably that traps are not considered "minions" anymore iirc and so they are affected by sunder charms.

He talks to some degree about how to counter the negative effects of sunders, potential items to use, plus the situational characteristics of having sunders in your inventory and when it makes sense to park them in your cube while battling particular monsters or bosses. Overall a worthwhile listen.

 

[Arparrabiosa]

Ahh so I actually left an important word out of my post "HOW do you counter...". Drastically changes the theme of my post. Sorry for the confusion!

Mostly via 11% LR SC and all resist GC & SC.