Re: Tournament: The Randomly Challenged II
Well, it´s been slow, but now my Barbarian Brad has made some decent progress. He´s just teamed up with Flux the lightning mage in Kurast.
Progress was slow already in Black Marsh, especially those Brute types took a long time to kill. It was often quite dangerous, too. Ridiculous in the first act! But missing the initial merc is a major thing if you do not have access to quickly rising skill-based damage, and you are (like me) stubborn about going with /players 8.
Brad had two things going for him, tough:
* Big life pool. Even with a moderate VIT investment, he passed 200 life near the end of the act.
* Barbs are very good at drinking healing potions. The Minor Healers do not do much for a caster-type character, but they bring many life points for Brad.
I met a pretty tough archer boss pack in Forgotten Tower. Used Taunt for the first time against them. Worked out well.
Find Potion was a good skill to have in this act, because it can destroy all those Fallen corpses so they won´t be resurrected. Gave me a little bit more wealth as well.

It does not work on skeletons or ghosts, though. It
does work on maggot babies and Dried Corpses produced by a Mummy Sarcophagus. You can´t get anything with Find Item from these, so Find Potion is the better choice on them. The only "endless" enemy type that Find Item works on is the flesh beasts in act IV.
Considering how tough packs of regular rogue meleers or goats were for Brad, I was pretty scared of The Smith. But he is apparently not immune to Knockback, so I switched to Bash and beat him easily.
Bottlenecks are nice.
The first really good drop for Brad happened in the Cathedral. A Champion Tainted gave him Dimoak´s Hew, the unique Bardiche. Its 2-54 damage was quite a step up from the 6-11 physical and 6-8 fire damage on his Gemmed Scepter.
Dimoak´s was used for the rest of the act, plus in the first areas in Act II I played, Halls of the Dead. I actually found
two more Dimoak´s along the way - one from Andariel and one in the Halls.
As soon as I had found the appropriate runes, Brad switched to a "Steel" Flail. Much easier progress with that, due to its speed, the OW and the ability to use a shield. I started with a Bone Shield of Deflection, but found one with even better blocking about halfway through the act (see below).
After gambling a couple of circlets, I decided to skip that project and instead put two mid-sized Topazes in a Mech´s/Balance helmet. 32% MF is hard to beat for a gambled circlet, so I switched to other gambling targets. At level 26, it was a little too soon for Boots of Luck gambling, so I went for amulets instead. On my 3rd-4th try, I got the one I still use.
Some time later, I started Boots of Luck gambling. Burning 200k or so, I bagged
this beauty. That´s endgame material, methinks...
Current skills:
Howl 4
Find Potion 3
Taunt 1
Shout 3
Battle Orders 1 (I had saved many skill points for level 24. I distributed them until I had scored BO - that left me with only 4 spare points, and I haven´t gotten any more in BO since then.)
Sword Mastery 3
Axe Mastery 2
Mace Mastery 1
Pole Arm Mastery 2
Throwing Mastery 1
Spear Mastery 1
Increased Stamina 1
Iron Skin 1
Increased Speed 2 (kind of nice - my Medium Weight shield does not bother me beacuse of this)
Bash 1
Leap 1
Stun 1
Primary Gear:
* Mechanic´s Full Helm of Balance with 2x topaz
* Rare amulet with 20% Cold Resist, 3% Mana Steal, 48% Gold Find and 23% Magic Find
* 'Steel' Flail
* Superior 3s Breast Plate with 3x flawed topaz
* Stormguild unique Large Shield
* Tangerine (8) Heavy Gloves of Fortune (25)
* 19% Nagelring
* Ocher (20) Belt of Equilibrium
* Fortuitous (13) Ring of Warding
* Boots of Luck (31)
Switch
* Rare Pilum with 8-28 physical and 1-8 lightning damage, some poison and AR
* 2s Bone Shield
Flux the Lightning Iron Wolf:
* Captain´s Circlet of the Magus
* Azure (8) Broad Sword of Slaying
* 'Stealth' Breast Plate
* 3s Kite Shield with flawed sapphire and ruby
Some notes for merc gear:
- Those gems in the shield is all I can think of affording at the moment. No way I am putting topazes there, and I do not want to put chipped or regular gems there either. I want them for weapon rerolling if I make it far. Flawed diamonds would be nice, but I use them for making Savage polearms. The next flawed ruby I find goes in the third socket, to protect Flux from council´s Hydras, vampire Meteors, shaman Infernos, etc.
- Flux' weapon is extremely lame, I know, but there are very few options at this stage. If only Act III mercs could use wands or orbs...
I suppose a Crescent Moon sword would be good down the road, but there are probably 20 better uses for Um runes.
I am actually thinking about installing the RWM, just to Flux can have some better gear. These guys will never be overpowered in the current version anyway.
[Highlight]Brad the Barbarian and Flux the Lightning mage, level 28/27, Spider Forest next.[/Highlight]