Fire Claws is now over 2k fire damage. At this point I'm going to max Heart of Wolverine in preparation for Hell. I will need higher AR and a nice physical damage portion to my Fire Claws in order to make it through Hell. So I want to get a Ribcracker, maxed HoW, Lawbringer barb merc before going to Hell. After I max HoW, I'll finish maxing Molten Boulder as a FC synergy, and then finish it out by maxing Werebear to improve phys damage.


Extra Strong, Amp, and had Might from a nearby bosspack


No match for Hobbes though

Yeah okay


Here's where I am now. Just hit level 59 and found HoZ off a random pack. Geez, I hope Jalal's Mane will drop this easily for me! Onward to Meph!

Brain


Wrong skill tree At least it was a druid one...


Can wear Riphook now. Only 350 physical damage after HoW and Might, but you have to start somewhere right?

Stat book guardians




Apparently cursor goes invisible when you screenshot in d2r? Just noticed. There's probably an optional setting for that.

There were 2 healers right inside the Council area


I pulled them out a bit, away from the healers.




https://i.imgur.com/ynqQMmh.png

You hear so many horror stories about NM Geleb's fire explosion... Thought I'd better let merc finish him off.




Hobbes running-punched the compelling orb.

Let's gooo


Well that took forever!


Drops

As sad as it is, the amulet he dropped is my best non-MF amulet now...


Welp, here is there gear I will start NM Meph runs with. Random helm I know, but I needed some lr/cr Hope I can improve this setup quickly!


I was mistaken when I said that NM Meph's chance to drop Ribby is basically the same as Andy. I was looking at the "Quest drop" for Meph, when I should have been looking at the regular drop. No matter, there are some other things I need from Meph that Andy can't drop, so I would have been doing a bunch of Meph runs anyways. May as well see if Ribby will drop here while I look for my other stuff! If it doesn't, I can always go back to Andy later on. All I need to do now is roll a good map and the runs are on! I should also mention that the runs are incredibly slow and fairly dangerous - I had to return to town 5x for potions during my first kill. Hopefully I can improve my gear quickly to get some faster runs going.


This post was edited by Belarathon on Oct 6 2021 11:02pm

Re-rolled this map on my third try!!! I have never been so lucky with a map roll in my life.


Ah, but the Council spawn is right in front of the bridge, directly in my path. Adds time and danger but hey, you can't have it all! There is no way I'm giving up that Durance 2 map.


So after just 2 runs I realized that I was wasting a ton of time going to town for extra potions, needing both life and mana. So for now I think I'm better off to just slap on the upgraded Nightsmoke. It takes care of all mana issues, don't even need to keep mana pots in belt, plus it has 4 extra potion slots for hp pots. The extra lr/cr doesn't hurt either! I lose 30% mf, but the runs become more bearable and quicker too.


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If you don't like watching long MF grinds, I'm giving you the chance to look away/untrack now! I figure I'll be here for a couple weeks. I'm not entirely sure everything I want off of NM Meph, but here are some things he can drop that I'm quite interested in:
Ribcracker
Raven Frost
Dwarf Star
Guillaume's Face
Gore Riders (super rare off nm meph though)
Vampire Gaze
String of Ears
Thundergod's Vigor
Pul rune (although hella rare from nm meph, around 1:6500)
Lem rune

Not really sure which armor or helm to go for when entering Hell... I figured gface or vamp gaze for helm though. Armor, I have no idea. May need the res from vmagi in the end. Guess I'll have to see what drops! Let me know if you can think of anything else I should be looking for. I will probably run NM Baal a bit to look for Laying of Hands before entering hell also.