The Normal Set Project

Mimmi has started exploring hell and suffers from her low cold resistance, level, boot damage, general defense and the absence of a curse for bosses and a tanking mercenary. Not loking too good, but she hits hard against living enemies and should be able to find somewhere with no lightning immune ones to level up quickly. Luckily she found a nice amber small charm of sustenance and her life is almost at 1100. Now at level 71.
 
Mimmi now stands in the outer Cloister at level 73 and has acquired Blade Fury. Since she wears Goblin Toe I Think it will be effective combined with venom and the 9% open wounds from her crafted belt. It's great to have a ranged option against strong Lightning immune enemies.

Mizan dies a lot with his bad equipment and my lack of attention. I need some characters to play casual with... He did however receive an etheral 3-socket stygian pike and now spreads his bleeding malice to the enemy. This has been a substantil improvement and if Mimmi can make Mizan retreat properly he may be able to hit and run aginst tougher foes. Perhaps even Worth getting him a stealth armour instead of the Rockfleece, just to get the speed? The hit recovery isn't too bad to have either, and poison resistance is good with Andariel approaching, although her poison is physical as well.
 
DiabloTwoinDC
Nice. I've played most of the normal sets through Hell HF. And I can tell you the killing gets pretty slow later into Hell difficulty. Playing self-found is going to make it very rough going. I shared runes/runewords between all of them. Making 'insight' and 'harmony' should be a priority, allowing mercs to do a lot of killing. Just make sure you plan your builds carefully. You're not gonna be able to play a melee barb with the berserker's set..
dterry is undertaking a similar project. Here's my notes if you're looking for any tips. <link>
because finding the individual pieces with each character seems like a big beat down.
I agree. Twinked the sets onto each of my characters. Don't punish yourself! lol
 
Regarding insight, harmony and relying on mercenary killing;
I'll use this thread to write updates here and there about my project to complete a guardian using each of the normal sets and tailoring each character to the set in some way when it comes to skills and other equipment. All self-found of course, and in patch 1.13 with no mods.

Regarding Berserkers Arsenal: I was not planing to don two set axes, only one to complete the set. If I use two I can also not name all pieces "Clueless Berserkers ...". With one other weapon available I can't see why it would not be possible.

Even with only the set weapon (which will be no fun because there will be almost no damage from the berserk skill but just for the fun of speculation), suppose he charges up venom with treachery, then dons a Duress armour, has blood gloves for CB, goblin toe for more CB, a blood belt for more OW, or even Guillaumes Face. That is more damage than some of my previous Guardians so I would hardly think it impossible. Finding that Um and Lem rune takes luck but it is not unthinkable.

About twinking; I could say the same to you, don't punish yourself by ruining your game.;) For me, there has been no surer way to absolutely destroy my feeling for a character than to twink. I did try it out just to test the feeling but it's really not my thing. But magic finding will need to be carefully planned, as mentioned previously, and hopefully result in some other nice stuff than just the set pieces.

And Clueles will be a meleer, have no doubt, some kind of frenzy and berserk combination (frenzy to take advantage of two weapons and berserk for, well, it is a berserkers set).
 
Clueles the clueles has advanced to the mighty level of 17 instead of the n00bish 9. No berserking gear has crossed his path bu Blood Raven dropped Hsarus shield which could have been quite good this early on for a charcter so inclined. Having outgrown his double swinged scepters he wields a cleaving claymore and shouts at everyone. If he can build up some MDR to block scarab lightning, the big defense boost should make acts 2 and 3 quite enjoyable.

It also suddenly occured to me that he will not have the skillpoints to spare to build up battle orders. Oh, well, he is clueless after all so all people claiming the skill to be nearly mandatory for all barbarians must have escaped his mind.
 
Cathan has advanced to level 40, but more importantly I have come up with the idea that she should of course use a town guard with thorns and returned damage gear because it makes the mercenary into a walking living trap on his own, so any trapper must like that.

EDIT: Make that level 44. Levelling goes fast with an early skill focus.

On second thought, maybe she should contend with just having the thorns aura. Town guards are so fragile they will not live long enough to damage anyone without the best gear they can come across. The set also gives a Little faster cast rate so she should have some sort of spell that benefits from that too. So it seems she will use cloaking and mind blasting after all. Perhaps only mind blasting since it seems more mage-like. If she can convert enemies from afar and the mercenary has his thorn aura, the converted enemies are turned into traps! That might be promising. And Mimmi is using cloaking so mind blast it should be here for the sake of variety. Hopefully she can find gloves with weaken charges for bosses.
 
Restles has stumbled on no less than three Shael runes in the frozen tundra, found Sigons gloves (he has the belt too), which proved inferior to Bloodfists faster hit recovery, and lastly also slain Baal at level 45. He found a head with +3 to attract which was funny and might be handy for nightmare. Baal is slow grinding but Listers minions are doable so it might be worth it to stick in normal and gain some experience. Restles is actually notably helping with the OW from the steel flail which is nice to see. Annor the rogue has survived as well!
 
RadTang
I have few completed normal sets in my stash but never used them. If only set items could be upped like uniques...

My complete sets are:
* Arctic Gear (belt is on my necro + a better variant of armor, I have second armor in ATMA)
* Berserker Arsenal (3 Hatchets, 2 Hauberks and just 1 Headgear :D nb: +1 to Barb skill level viable from lvl 3 - so cool for twinking in A1)
* Civerb's Vestments
* Cleglaw's Brace (complete x2 + few lone set parts)
* Hsarus' Defense (lack only a second belt for a 2nd completement ! :D)

Quite much I think :)

GL on your quest ! :) Hope that Blizz would add Maltatai's Diabolical Stubborness set in 1.15 as a tribute :D ;)
With obvious great bonus to MF - for more set items found in your journeys ;) And gold find 'cause this thread is golden.
 
@RadTang
Hehe, if I got to choose I would like one Amazon set with a blue, red, green, yellow and purple item to commemorate the misadventurous amazons.

Restles now just shy of level 48, raiding Baals minions at /players8 and Baal himself at 1, which has been working out well At Nihlatahks halls he found a dual leech ring, with attack rating, light resistance and a huge mana boost! If´only one of the meleers could have come across that one... Possibly end game material. Having found Bladebuckle Restles actually sports a stable 101 % faster hit recovery now. Probably a record for any of my characters, soon to become almost nothing when he finds the set pieces to wear instead...at least I hope it will be soon.

The attract curse is great when assembling an army as it gives Annor some breathing room to shoot. Also good to take the edge off council members and Achmels unravelers.
 
Restles is now at level 49, having found a socketed Razor bow to make a new Zephyr for Annor which is a considerable improvement. The game taunts me with green items of the wrong sets, of course.
 
Restles has advanced to level 50, and having found an unravelers head with sockets and +1 to decrepify he can now shut down Baal at /players8 as well. That head will surely come in handy in the future as well. The three Shael runes from the frozen tundra have proved quite useful.

Isenhart has advanced to level 60 and rushed through the remainder of Act II and Act IV. He was lucky enough to find two grand charms with 29 Cold resistance each (and looking identical too!) which was the resistance where he had been lacking. With holy freeze, a fast attack and goblin toe which he could now safely equip instead of a pair of rare resistance boots, he is quite effective. The council dropped the Tannr Gorerod which made the Town guard Mizan twice as resistant to hydras and very happy.

Mephisto dropped Crainte Vomir, a favourite item of mine. If I can upgrade it this will make a barbarian hieling superb I think, and stacked slowing is always fun. The only drawback is the lower damage if I wouldn't find a Pul rune. The hellforge yielded a mere io:mad:. It remains to be seen if a Kelpie snare or Woestve can turn the tables in favor of a Town guard instead. The prayer aura has surely been convenient to have. Diablo fell very quickly, as I took advantage of a combat shrine Close to the city of the damneds waypoint. He did not drop anything good, however.
 
RadTang
GL for Cathan though I personally hate him :p Too much of his rings dropped for me. I got once 2 in one game ! :D Wow, these charms are really cool.

Meanwhile, I often get League of Angels ads here. It looks like a WoW-ripoff. Now I got a clone of Tyrael.
 
Cathan's by the way at level 47, forgot to edit that earlier. The monsters are brutal to her underequipped town guard so she will have to turn it down to 1 player in nightmare I think despite her fire blasts working fine. Hopefully 47 is high enough for you to buy armours of amicae at the NM rogue camp, and then some Sol runes in a hat will complement that. Andariel is tempting to run for a fire based character but she might be a bit underleveled to do that effectively.
 
Restles advances to nightmare at level 52, still without set items but with a tough pack of fashion models and the well protected Annor. I plan to run through most of Act I and only do the quests, since the experience is rather low. It shall be interesting to see if Andariel is possible to run effectively at this level...the poison is hard on minions...
 
Restles has rushed through Act I to Andariel and since he both found an excellent map of the second and third (and a fairly decent fourth ;)) and his skeletons can stand up good enough against the poison there will be raiding and looting. There are so many useful items to get ones hand on att his stage of the game. Might be worth looking for am Io rune and a socketed flail for some black crushing blow. Would be typical of me to find a rune and then go back to normal to buy a flail and thus lose the map...
 
Restles has advanced to 53 after a few runs. He found no deathly hallows but the bloodletter gladius which is a nice and good looking improvement. With the gold from sold loot he has gambled amulets hoping to find some skill levels. He did not find much of those but the very last thing I did today when playing was gambling a ruby (32) amulet of life everlasting (23) :D. This will be hard to beat! With the resistances from death's disguise he can probably invest heavily in PDR gear without suffering too much from the elements. It might even be worth it to keep a skill level amulet in the cube to summon the skeletons with.

EDIT: Now found String of Ears...which will of course need to be discarded later... :confused::mad::rolleyes:
 
Mezion
Just wondering about socketing your set items. Are you going the socket de best possible jewel/rune/gem for each item or go with something of a similar level requirement? I'm asking this because, Sigon for example, is pretty much the perfect leveling set for a new character (a couple of str charms can easily unlock it for anyone) and so, having a full Sigon set with every socketable piece socketed sounds awesome.

Maybe it could add some "replay" value to your set items to socket them with something usable early on. What do you think?
 
The plan is to use the best I can get my paws on, the whole project is intended to be kind of a tribute to each set where I try to make them as strong as they can be (within each of the characters budget). Besides, I never twink my characters so that replay value would be lost for me.

It is an intriguing thought to make a sept for a large and characteristic set like Sigons for example but I don't have the time for that, nor really the inclination.
 
Restles is resting his way through the nightmare deserts to level 54 while the novice yet effective Vidala and her colleague Visala are shooting their way through the Tower to level 17. I will probably level to 18 there at least to gather some runes.

EDIT: And what does Vidala manage to gamble, if not Death's Hand!!! :mad: Aaargh! Why not Restles!?
 
Nokoz and Vidala are advancing through the early careers. Nokoz the impatient imbecile is running through the desrts with a newly acquired blood golem and town guard while the thorough and careful Vidala is raiding the Tower for Ral runes and to reach level 19 so she can craft a leaf staff. Teleport and archery is going to be ridiculously fun I think. It's nice to see enchant make a difference early thanks to the bonus from invested points in warmth.

EDIT: Now at level 19 with Ral runes in her bow and a leaf staff and stealth armours for both her and Visala. Tremble, Andariel!
 
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