The Many Lives of Amaresu - HC Holy Grail Sorc

[Luhkoh]

Hardcore Holy Grail Sorceress

Introduction
Hello everyone. I (somewhat) recently started up my first ever hc character, a sorceress named Amaresu. I created her to participate in the Orange You Glad That Rune Dropped tournament HERE. This took quite a while, but was loads of fun, and I managed to get her to guardian! The guardian thread is HERE, with links to my tournament updates inside. I also had in the back of my mind that I really wanted to start a hardcore holy grail sorceress, and if Amaresu made it through, that would be her next step. So with that in mind, all socket quests were saved .

The thread name is a result of me assuming I will deeds at some point, after which Amaresu would be reincarnated (though not necessarily under the same name) and continue the grailing effort. Hopefully she'll never die and the thread title will end up being a bit confusing, but obviously I don't consider that to be super likely . Also, the name Amaresu is from the Wheel of Time series, in which Amaresu is a "hero of the horn" who get reincarnated each age, so very appropriate .

Anyways, I will update progress and ideas here periodically, Should be fun!

The Plan
So here's the plan post-guardian. Well actually I've already done some playing past this point and should have the first update up soon. I have 2 respec's left (used one while questing and kinda wish I hadn't, but ah well).

So first, I will respec to max vita and pure blizzard and get to moat tricking mephisto. The only must-haves before moving on are wizardspike, vipermagi, stormshield, and shako. I personally think anyone playing hc sorc without stormshield is crazy, so I want it for sure. Other things that would be super nice to find include maras or tals amu, arachs, soj or bk, war travs, and tals belt, but I would move on without any of those.

Then second, I plan to respec to some sort of max block, 1pt ES, max tk, max shiver armor spec for running LK. Will want wizzy and viper for this part for sure. I will probably use a shield like whistan's at this point, since without cta, the str and dex for stormshield are a bit high. Then the only must-have from lk is cta. Though I would probably stick around for a hoto as well. I plan to main wizzy, but it would be good to have hoto as an option for testing. Hoping for nice charm finds during this stage as well. 7mf scs, mf scs with resists, and life/resist scs are the most sought-after. And any high runes are welcome ofc too. Fort for merc is an eventual goal, as well as infinity for myself, as I think experimenting with fizz sorc build in AT or even switching it up to pits someday would be fun, but definitely not a must-have.

At that point I would be out of respecs and need to farm a token to get back to a reasonable spec. And since that's not the best spec to farm one, I may need to farm a token before LK, so without cta. Furthermore the meph build will be max vita, and I would want block for sure to farm a token. So the options I see are to respec to blizzball after farming meph and farm 2 tokens, or to just wait till cta is farmed and then slowly farm a token with the weak ES/blizz build I'll be using for LK. Let me know if anyone sees a better option there. Hopefully I don't die trying that .

After that it's pretty much just time to head to AT and stay there. Just run on p1 and slowly upgrade as I find stuff. First big thing to find would be tals armor since I think I'd just be running viper till I find it. Eventually in the back of my mind I would want enigma, but since the runes would have to drop on p1, I'm not holding my breath there.

Socket quests are the most precious resource, and I plan to use them on stormshield, shako, and wizzy. Right now I'm thinking um in storm, shael in shako, and ist in wizzy. This means no socket in merc helm, so I'll probably target kiras (for cbf), fort, and insight for him. Will use defiance merc when I get to AT for a small amount of added safety, without making it tough to see boss packs (the problem with holy freeze). But I'll use holy freeze merc during LK farming.

Anyways that's it for the plan! I've already done some mephisto runs and had a couple of VERY lucky finds, so will post them soon!

 

[art_vandelay]

Why don't you have a seat over there?

Spoiler

Despite that I hope we will be seeing more of Amaresu, or you know: Amaresu_XIV trough Amaresu_XVII

 

[Luhkoh]

@art_vandelay hahaha too racy? Coolest sorc pic I could find but I have a couple of other more conservative ones I could use instead.

 

[Pb_pal]

Fun project, I look forward to the updates! Definitely get CtA ASAP, an invaluable resource in HC.

 

[Russell.s]

I hadn't thought the drop chances on essences were so low that you really needed to worry about re-speccing for it to farm them? Certainly it'll be slow going with that spec, but not impossible. And you only need one of each to start with

 

[SirName]

@Russell.s I think it is good to plan for spending a good while getting the essences. I restarted well over a year ago. Still have no essence from Baal! Casually “run” Baal for those from time to time without a dedicated runner. Ok my playing hours are 0-5h /week. But still.

 

[Luhkoh]

@Russell.s Haha yeah i might be overthinking it. I'm a big scaredy cat in hc and doing 15 or so CS runs and 15 or so baal runs with a weak single element and a weak merc sounds rough. But it might be the way to go since I'd at least have cta at that point. I have found reapers from meph though. The merc can probably solo most content with that if need be, so maybe thats the way to go.

 

[Luhkoh]

Mephisto Update #1
Am right about 700 mephisto runs in and have several updates. I went to Akara straight away and respec'd to pure blizz, max vita. Then started trying to roll a nice meph map. Note that I realllly should've done that in reverse, as I sorta felt like I was gonna die teleporting around durance while map rolling. But that's just my current hc ultraconservativism talking, it wasn't terrible. Pretty quickly landed on this beauty.

Niice. Thats the first time I've ever gotten the perfect wraparound meph map. Two teles to durance 3 entrance. I went ahead and started meph farming with ~150mf. I was still wearing smoke since I didn't have an mf armor available (and wanted to keep decent resists for hc), and was wearing a 3os mask with a perfect topaz and two flawlesses (lol), then some rare boots, gloves, and rings with a bit of mf on each. Running ancient's pledge for the extra res on the primary damage swap, but have rhyme on swap for an extra 25mf on kill. Well about 16 runs in, meph drops a unique ring...

Spoiler: unique ring

What. The. Heck. I did find a 16mf nagel while questing through the game, but this is the first unique ring otherwise. Of course I equipped it. Also found hotspur slightly after.

Now at just a few dozen meph runs in I decided I should get a few easy levels to power up my blizzard, so I farmed pindle for about 300 runs. Mostly on p3. I kept that max vita setup. A bit risky for sure, but it's not too many runs so I figured it would be ok. Also I've heard stuff in the past about you can't block the charges from these guys? Which would make max vita better. But I have a hard time believing that. Would make charge so OP in pvp. My small amount of research on the basin makes me think maybe it always connects and stuns you, but that you CAN block the dmg from it. Anyone know the details of that?

Anyways, Had a couple of nice finds from him as well. First off he dropped me my first pair of titans.

Spoiler: titans

Lol this sorc is blessed. Too bad that even if I make other hc chars, zon is at the verrrry bottom of the list. Then pindle dropped me a Ko rune. This is important because it means I could make wealth armor, boosting my mf up for meph farming by 75mf (replaced 25mf rare gloves with tri-res crafted gloves to keep res decent after losing smoke). Pindle also dropped me a mal rune, which was a nice surprise. Lastly, he dropped me lidless wall, which, while not super interesting in general, is my first "endgame" item found, since I'll be using it on my cta swap eventually (because of strength bugging stormshield).

So after those pindle runs I got to lvl 86 and headed back to meph. At about this time I recorded a video of what the moat tricking looked like.

And as you can see, in that video, meph dropped me ali baba. Had to put a hel rune in it, and then an mf jewel, but that brought my swap mf up to mid 300s! Healthy. I also dropped telling of beads. What the heck. Before tancreds or cathans. Why not tals instead?! A couple of hundred more runs in (somewhere around 300ish total, forgot to write it down), the first item off the must-have list drops.

Only rolled 28@/10mdr, but I will take it. Right after that, found an excellent pair of rare boots for meph farming, and honestly decent for AT too.

Spoiler: booties

A bit later, dropped a 46mf tarnhelm, so equipped that ofc. And meph dropped me a couple of decently rare items too, the redeemer and ondals. Also a reapers! Didn't think the reapers would see any use on this sorc, but as I said in my comment to russel above, it may see some use after all. Meph also dropped a SECOND telling of beads. Haha what the heck. And then the next significant drop was quite nice.

Spoiler

Nice! Then meph dropped us an item we were definitely looking for: tals belt, and that first one was 15mf! Score.

Next up, our second pair of titans... and... also eth 0_0. Lol just ridiculous. But not as ridiculous as what happened next. Drops me another set amulet, and you guessed it...

Spoiler: tals!

Wowowow. I did NOT expect this from the meph farm. Especially so early on. This is huge since it's an extremely rare item I wanted for farming AT. And this was before cathans amulet and I still hadn't found a single unique amulet. Lol. Ridiculous. Blessed sorc for sure. Hope I don't deeds her too early . I had found tals mask at some point as well, so I switched to running 3 piece tals with mask, amulet, and belt. Quite a nice setup. Sometime around here I also found upgrades with a 28mf nagel and 37mf chancies. I think I'm around 400mf now on kill swap. I have 75 light res on the setup, but only 41 cold res. Ah well, I take a cold ball from meph occasionally when I mis-tele and they only do ~150-200 dmg (I have 1250ish hp), so seems good to me.

And last item for this update, a second arachs. But this time... 120ed! Haha the boons keep coming.

So that wraps up first meph update. Perfect map, soj, 2x eth titans, tals amu, 120ed arachs, 2x telling of beads. Crazy stuff. No shako, wiz, or stormshield, but I sure aint complaining. Soj and tals amulet are each ridiculous individually, but both together is incredible, let alone the others. Definitely starting out well, and hope to have a shako or storm found on next update!

 

[Pb_pal]

Great work! What a haul too, she's off to a fantastic start. Keep it up!

 

[Luhkoh]

Mephisto Update #2
We are done! Didn't take too long at all. Picked back up farming meph Thursday evening, and was immediately greeted by wizspike. Nice 2 of 4 down off the list. The got my first gheeds, and it was 35mf. I'll take it! Then at run 769:

Ahhhh. That life. That mana. That DR. Was 117 defense. I debated just not socketing one till a 130+ defense one drops, just because why not wait for it if I'm going to be doing loads of runs with her. But since I'm planning to put in a shael, I kinda want the socket sooner rather than later. Decided to just wait till the end of the meph farm to make sure a higher def one didnt drop.

I was super pumped by this and then played a load yesterday and today. Next drops of note were alma negra, a mal rune, and heavens light! The latter was nice because that means both mighty scepters are now off the list. Later some fun drops came along in the form of greyform, arcanna's sign, and gnasher. Always fun to find the tc3's. Next up, meph graced me with a spirit keeper. Super rare item thats very rare for him to drop. And next, these were a welcome sight.

45 mf on first pair! I'm not sure how much use they will or won't see since I may want to run rare boots with res and mf, but we will see. Then dropped a second shako, but was only 100 defense.

And then at run 1176:

Ahhh it is done! Unfortunately it rolled the lowest possible base defense, but I'm not sticking around for another. Was kinda funny that the shako and the stormshield showed up extremely close to their "average number of runs" from meph. Glad it went so fast. Could have taken much much longer. I went ahead and socketed the shako, stormshield, and wiz. And was ready to start looking for an LK map. The first LK update should be forthcoming, as I've already started it and am really pleased how my spec and gear are performing. So will be up in a few days.

Mephisto Summary

Went from lvl 86 to 88 on p1 meph.

Got 28@ viper, wizzy, reapers, spirit keeper, both mighty scepters, ondals, alma negra, 2 arach (one perf def), 2 total shakos, soj, tals amu, 15mf tals belt, gnasher, greyform, hotspur, arcannas amu, and mal rune.

Ended at grail -159.

Edit: Also went ahead and changed the first image in the parent post to one I liked better.

 

[Luhkoh]

LK Update #1
Alright! I'm 1000 runs in, all on p7 ofc, and its going... ok.

The Build
First up the build. I wanted to just go full tanky defensive, with 105 fcr of course. I think the only requirements in my mind are max block, 900+ hp, max c/l res, lvl 87+, and 105 fcr. I never used to be a big believer in levels for survivability, but in sc when I ran a lvl ~78 sorc in lk, I found she died loads compared to what I was used to. After I leveled her up to 87, she rarely died. So now I'm a big believer. I used whistans shield just since I thought the stat requirements for stormshield were a bit too high pre-cta. And then wizzy and viper are obvious choices. Then shako is a no brainer imo for the life and mana and dr. For the rest of the fcr, trangs, and an fcr ring (with 20 fres) do the job. I kept wearing tals amulet because the skills, life and light res are super nice, and lastly, I wore string of ears (12dr), so I have 22dr total and soj for the mana and skill. Shael in shako and two fhr scs to hit the 30 bp, then 10 inventory slots for life charms. Really nice setup imo. Got over 1k life at start. And am lvl 88 myself.

However I went even further with the defensive measure from my build. In particular, 1 point energy shield (I cast it from my swap orb), max tk, with a decent mana pool and an insight merc is an amazing defensive measure in my opinion. Shaves off HALF of all physical dmg, and the mana bulb never even seems to move unless I get mana burned. And in that case, I still have my block% and hp etc. I maxed frozen orb and put 10 hard points in cold mastery so I had a little firepower at least. I'll be trying to farm a token with that after lk lol. But otherwise, I couldn't decide the most tanky way to distribute my remaining points. Shiver armor for higher defense, warmth for more robust energy shield, or teleport for getting away after youve been mana burned. So I split them between the three with 14 hard points in each.

I love this build, but I do think it's a bit over the top. If I have to do it again someday, I'll take those extra points in those 3 skills and invest in a fireball backup instead to make killing stuff easier. Not that you need to do that in lk, but that would make countess farming a possibility and make farming a token after LK much easier. But for now I'll just enjoy my tankiness. I don't think I've been put under 800 hp once, despite sometimes standing in packs sorting through chest loot. Heres a videos showing the build and I hop into a little champ pack at the end to show how slowly she takes damage.

The Progress
Like I said am already 1000 runs in. Ran a lot over the holiday weekend. Started rolling maps right after respec. I've never had a problem getting good LK maps, and this one showed up in about 30 minutes.

I've never ran one with the two campfire tiles separated by the waypoint, but I think its as fast as most of the wp, campfire, campfire layouts that I've ran.

18 runs in, was greeted with this welcome sight.

With cta as my primary target, that was good news indeed. I prematurely started considering whether I would stay in LK longer than the time it takes to make cta, in order to get better charms. And indeed I think charms are one of the biggest issues with this path for starting a sorc since she often only needs to do ~1000 LK runs runes-wise, but that wont lead to a reasonable set of charms. I figured I'd stay till I had at least 200 scs, and I would pick up all flawless gems to reroll them at the end of the running. Ideally id want like at least like eight 17+ lifers, eight 5+ mf'ers, and four each of 9+ cold and light res scs, just for a basic starting set. Have definitely been making some progress toward that and have ~130 scs farmed so far. Here are a couple of screens of the best charms so far.

Spoiler: charm highlights

Also threw in a screen of some halfway decent rare boots I found. The elemental druid lifer is super cool but obviously doesnt help me haha. No sorc skillers yet. That 14 life/10 lres sc is the best one so far for sure. And the hp has crept up to 1098 now from improving the life scs.

But on the runes front, I dropped zero pul+ runes from run 18 to run 749. That is quite a dry spell, especially considering I was hitting 4 additional poppables for about half the runs. Note that I don't really think it's worth hitting those poppables, but was just doing it for fun. Anyways rough stuff on that front, but then on run 749, found this.

Nice I will take it! So ohm is in the bag, and I have a mal I found from pindle and a mal I found from meph, so I'm just a mal or ist from cta. Though I think I'd wait to cube the vex's till I decide I'm done running LK since I'd like to make a hoto as well. But no more pul+ runes between runs 749 and 1k either. Man, those are ~140 runs between on average without hitting any additional poppables. They gotta pick up the pace soon. I also want an ist for my wizspike before moving on. Note that I can't really farm countess even if I wanted to. Since frozen orb is my only dmg spell and she and her minions are cold immune. But I means shes also more dangerous than lk and I need charms and gems anyways so I'll just keep hoping for runes here.

Last thing I'll discuss is my cta base. Since I rushed through hell on p1, and didnt save any white bases from late nm to cube socket, I had zero cta bases. I tested the weapon racks on my lk map (the two in the huts and the two elsewhere on the map), and none regularly dropped eligible bases. But I spent like two hours popping them on my runs anyways, and I think I must've gotten pretty lucky. Through variation of monsters being around I managed to get a 5os knout, divine scepter, and naga. Any of these can work for me, since I'll have 126 str and 200+ dex for my stormshield setup. Only one problem, I wanted to use the cta while farming a token after lk, and I currently have 58 strength haha. So we'll see. After I'm done in lk, may reroll maps and see if I can rack a double axe or military pick base or something.

So thats the update! Hope the ists start dropping soon! Would like to be out of here before I get to 2k runs. And wouldn't mind seeing a couple of surs or ber either ofc . Hope everyone's doing well. Cheers .

 

[Nona]

Great write up and the videos have been super helpful! I am essentially planning on the same thing though using the sorc to build wealth for my other planned HC builds. Planned to do mephy and LK and then AT. Can you remind me what the Holy grail is?

also it looked like you were running Mephy on p1? I thought p3 was best?

 

[Luhkoh]

@Nona great! Glad to hear they're helpful. The holy grail is trying to find all 504 unique and set items in the game. With regard to mephisto, p1 is best for most everyone. When you're strong enough for p3 to be best, you usually dont need mephisto anymore.

Here is the link where I calc'd that. Note that the two main drop calculators give very different, and both incorrect answers for this specific question (comparing psettings for act bosses). In summary p3 meph is 9.5% better than p1 meph, so your p3 runtimes would have to be 1.095x or less the runtimes of p1 to be worth it, and mine definitely aren't.

Since idk if those drop rates have been reposted on the new forum, I'll copy that info here.

So conventional wisdom is to farm mephy on p3 right? I was arguing with a guy on reddit who was saying p1 is almost always better. I said its trivial to look up the difference in the drop odds and compare to your runtimes. However, then I did so and saw that silospen and german drop calc differ by quite a bit (20% vs 2% difference in p1 and p3). So not trivial at all apparently.

So I calc'd them myself. @drmalawi 's video HERE is how I did the math, and he says he'll make another, better video on it later. I knew both drop calculators did not take the optional 7th pick into account correctly, but I did not expect such a big discrepancy.

Anyways p3 mephisto is only 9.5% better than p1, and so I think the guy on reddit was right, and I probably should have been farming mephy on p1 all along. I ran the numbers for Andy too and she, as expected, is still likely best on p3 or p5. Of course it all depends on your runtimes, but for moat tricking blizzard sorcs (or at least for mine) p1 looks like the better way to go. Here are the ratios I calc'd.

Mephisto drop ratios

• p1 to p3 - 1.095
• p3 to p5 - 1.003
• p5 to p7 - 1.000

Quest bugged Andariel drop ratios

• p1 to p3 - 1.440
• p3 to p5 - 1.070
• p5 to p7 - 1.014

And an example calc from drmalawi:

Spoiler

Mephisto Hell

px = players number x

No Drop = 15 (p1), 2 (p3), 0 (p5+)

Prob sum (items) = 66 (gold = 5, Act 4 (H) Equip = 52, Act 4 (H) Junk = 5, Act 4 (H) Good = 3, ceh = 1)

Chance of no drop per pick is calculated as P_0 = No Drop /(No Drop + Prob sum) = 18.5% (p1), 2.94% (p3), 0% (p5+)

Chance of 7th pick is calculated as "chance getting at least one no drop in 6 picks" : P_7 = 1-(1-P_0)^6 = 70.7% (p1), 16.4% (p3), 0% (p5+)

Effective number of picks is 6 + P_7 = 6.707 (p1), 6.164 (p3), 6 (p5+)

In order to figure out the relative gain in drop chance of an item of consideration, which we will assume have a very small drop chance (less than 1/100 say), we have two things to consider
i) The decrease in no drop means that each pick has a higher chance of picking the item of interest.
ii) The decrease in no drop can provide a 7th pick.

Players 3 vs players 1:

i)
Let the item of consideration have drop chance per pick equal to P on p1.
On p3, we need to take into account that the new denominator in the first TC-selection on Mephisto no is 2 + 66 = 68 instead of 15 + 66 = 81 as it was on p1.
81/66 = 1.191
This means that the drop chance per pick for our item of interest on p3 is 1.191 * P


ii)
On players 1, the chance of getting at least one item of interest can be approximated by "exactly one" since the drop chance is so small. Or we can do it the more sophisticated way using Taylor expansion.
The result is that the chance per kill is 6.707 * P on p1.
On p3, we have instead 6.164 * 1.191 * P

The relative gain p3 vs p1 is 6.164 * 1.191 / 6.707 = 1.095 i.e. 9.5% higher.



Players 5 vs players 3:
i) 68/66 = 1.0303
ii) 6*1.0303 / 6.164 = 1.003 i.e 0.3% gain


Players 5 vs players 1
i) 81/66 = 1.227
ii) 6*1.227/6.707 = 1.098 i.e 9.8% gain

 

[Nona]

I thought finding a "grail" was all the sets and uniques, I didn't realize it was also called the holy grail. Thanks for all the info, especially the Meph calcs.

 

[b1ur]

Dang!

I wish I saw that thread earlier to tell you that ES is not at all that useful in LK, especially on a good map. The equipment alone coupled with any build should do perfectly fine. Especially with Stormshield. If you're worried about being a bit low in the life department you can always include Bloodfist or high life belt and some Vita SC's.

You can actually use any build with no block/no vita/no defenses at all but rolling a map where no boss packs ever spawn inside or on the way to the huts is a bit more effort. But even when well geared and with LK build you should probably still do that as it will otherwise slow your runs down which is never a good thing.

 

[Luhkoh]

@b1ur haha no worries. I am loving this build for lk. She feels so tanky. The 1 pt ES feels great. A separate layer of 50DR when there's no mana burn? Yes please. I thought the extra points in shiver armor, teleport, and warmth were much more suspect, but we'll see how much I regret my low firepower when I farm a token soon!

I do have a couple of other questions for you since I've got you here. First, do you try to get a decent amount of fhr on your sorcs? I'm currently using and plan to keep using shael'd shako and 2 fhr scs to hit the 30bp. But I've seen many sorcs with zero fhr, and am not sure it's actually important at all when you're max block.

Second, do you overstack cold and light res significantly for AT? I was planning to overstack to ~50 while convicted, but that pretty much relegates me to never using anything except wizzy. The other couple of guys I know who've stacked that high played non fam, so had an easier time reaching that with torch/anni.

Lastly any ideas for an armor to wear starting AT till I find tals? I'm planning to just run viper, tals amu, tals belt, as to be ready to change it out to tals with no respec as soon as it shows up (and then get an instant 150mf upgrade), but that 250ish mf i'll have with viper feels a bit lame. Guess there's nothing else to really consider other than skullders or farming lk for a high end armor rw.

Thanks in advance!

 

[b1ur]

@b1ur haha no worries. I am loving this build for lk. She feels so tanky. The 1 pt ES feels great. A separate layer of 50DR when there's no mana burn? Yes please. I thought the extra points in shiver armor, teleport, and warmth were much more suspect, but we'll see how much I regret my low firepower when I farm a token soon!

Yep, the build is godly for LK, but you'll have a hard time farming the token with so little damage. A mercenary with CtA and Teleport support should be able to handle immunes just fine, abeit slowly.

I do have a couple of other questions for you since I've got you here. First, do you try to get a decent amount of fhr on your sorcs? I'm currently using and plan to keep using shael'd shako and 2 fhr scs to hit the 30bp. But I've seen many sorcs with zero fhr, and am not sure it's actually important at all when you're max block.

I don't bother. You have plenty of life with CtA and plenty of %DR with SS and Harly and you block 75% of attacks. You'll almost never be put in Hit Recovery. Only worth it on no block builds which already have loads considering they're probably using Spirit Shield.

Second, do you overstack cold and light res significantly for AT? I was planning to overstack to ~50 while convicted, but that pretty much relegates me to never using anything except wizzy. The other couple of guys I know who've stacked that high played non fam, so had an easier time reaching that with torch/anni.

I do. However I overstack it with %MF/res charms. Which means when I don't have them stacked I play carefully around Conviction Packs. Much easier to stack resistances via charms rather than sacrificing equipment slots.

Lastly any ideas for an armor to wear starting AT till I find tals? I'm planning to just run viper, tals amu, tals belt, as to be ready to change it out to tals with no respec as soon as it shows up (and then get an instant 150mf upgrade), but that 250ish mf i'll have with viper feels a bit lame. Guess there's nothing else to really consider other than skullders or farming lk for a high end armor rw.

Skullder's will be a huge resistance loss and definitely not worth it if you can't compensate. Viper is good enough, CoH/Enigma are nice as well if you stumble across some HR's in LK

 

[Luhkoh]

LK Update #2
The second LK update is pretty short. Even though I hadnt done many runs overall, I was getting frustrated with the lack of mid runes dropping for me. This one showed up around run 1200.

Spoiler: um

And I had dropped a pul sometime before that. I looked at my stash and realized I could JUST cube up to cta, from fal up haha, with no leftovers. And I was so eager to get going to AT that I went ahead and pulled the trigger and left LK for good.

Missing a mal in that cubing action shot, but I had just left it in the stash by mistake. So anyways with all my meager resources burned through (so no hoto anytime soon, and no sur/ber), I made my first hc cta in a knout (lowest str req base I had available), and prayed for 3+ BO.

Spoiler

Success!

Oh man that is a huge success! And a weight off my mind.

Next, I had been saving all flawless gems from LK in order to reroll small charms before moving on. I used all except amethysts for this rerolling. Later while running AT, I think I'm going to use emeralds and rubies for crafting safety amulets and blood rings, but for now I decided they were better used in this sc reroll. I had 183 scs from lk and a barely acceptable charm set of mf, res, or life scs, but they really are a weak point in this gearing up path. So was happy to see I had the materials for 70 rerolls. Here are the highlights of those 70 rerolls.

Spoiler: sc reroll highlights

Small Charm of Vita
Small Charm
Required Level: 39
Fingerprint: 0xefd7b7a3
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+20 to Life

Garnet Small Charm
Small Charm
Required Level: 20
Fingerprint: 0x1755ba90
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
Fire Resist +9%

Small Charm of Vita
Small Charm
Required Level: 39
Fingerprint: 0xc6e7e46f
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+20 to Life

Ruby Small Charm of Strength
Small Charm
Required Level: 32
Fingerprint: 0x9c5ccf03
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+1 to Strength
Fire Resist +11%

Garnet Small Charm of Strength
Small Charm
Required Level: 20
Fingerprint: 0xdee07bd
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+2 to Strength
Fire Resist +9%

Amber Small Charm of Inertia
Small Charm
Required Level: 32
Fingerprint: 0xd01a3b52
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+3% Faster Run/Walk
Lightning Resist +11%

Serpent's Small Charm of Balance
Small Charm
Required Level: 40
Fingerprint: 0x7bc3f179
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+5% Faster Hit Recovery
+13 to Mana

Small Charm of Vita
Small Charm
Required Level: 39
Fingerprint: 0x256b80de
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+16 to Life

Small Charm of Vita
Small Charm
Required Level: 39
Fingerprint: 0x568635e2
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
+20 to Life

Small Charm of Good Luck
Small Charm
Required Level: 33
Fingerprint: 0xdf935be7
Item Level: 80
Version: Expansion 1.10+
6% Better Chance of Getting Magic Items

Sweet. That helps out a lot!

Token Farm
Now it was time for the dreaded token farm that I was a bit nervous about, and that @b1ur was warning me about (btw sorry forgot to respond, thanks so much for the input!). I had two 19-20 strength rare rings saved for strength bugging stormshield later, so right now I equipped them in order to wear my knout cta. Then I loaded up on lifer scs, and had a pleasant result. 1918 life with max cold and light res, and a little less on fire and poison. Also put reapers on the merc. Ofc I wont have this much life when running AT due to more str and dex needed for stormshield, as well as higher prioritizing resists and mf.

First I headed to duriel to get an essence and he gave me one in a few runs. Then it was time for the harder ones. Doing p1/p3 chaos runs didnt feel too unsafe, but took probably 7-8 minutes per run once I got a bit more comfortable with them. The es/forb build still felt pretty safe, but I ended up not casting es much, since projectiles from OK's really eat it up quickly. Anyways took like 15-20 runs and diablo dropped the essence. Onto the worst one. Baal took 10-11 minutes, not counting the extra time it takes to reroll the map when the throne room had more than 5 or so cold immunes. Wave 2 skeles took a while, but once I remembered to put cbf on the merc, it was manageable. So this took much longer than I would've liked, but once again, 15-20 runs later, we had our essence, and finally, our token. Took just over 3 hours total to farm it.

So I plopped placeholder socketables in the stormshield and wizzy (pdiamond and 10mf jewel, respectively), to be replaced with um/ist and ist respectively when they drop in AT. And respec'd to pure blizz and started doing some AT runs while looking for a good map. Here's what the starting AT setup looked like. Check out the overstacked cold and light res when I unequip wizzy. The res under conviction will be 5 lower than whats shown there.

Since then I have gotten in a fair number of runs and rerolled the map many times looking for a good one, and I'll post an update on that in the next day or two! I was so pumped to be in AT, and rushing to it with the minimum gear I think I needed has been super fun so far.

 

[HanShotFirst]

Congrats on the +4 BO CTA! And good luck in AT!

P.S. Your AT runs look much more exciting than when I run there ... I don't have the discipline to stick to killing the champion/uniques and therefore end up doing full clears. Your runs are much more interesting to watch. I hope they bear fruit!

 

[Luhkoh]

@HanShotFirst thank you! Haha they feel so slow to me comparing it to softcore where my sorc has >1.5x the dmg. But I'm loving it! And sometime youll have to give unique/champ only p1 mfing a proper go. I wasn't sure I'd be able to get into it myself a year or two ago, after having done a lot of p7/p8 running, and then turned out to be my favorite way to play the game!