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#11
Oct 6 2020 08:28am
Sorry I'm a bit late to updating this thread.

Nightmare has been mostly uneventful. Still no desired Lem rune, heck I've not seen a single Io rune either yet.

I did find my first Lum rune though! More P.Rubies for blood crafts too.

LK coughed up this lovely ethereal shaftstop.. I've had some tough decisions between using this, hawkmail, or boneflesh for the merc. Ultimately I've stuck with the DR%



I've seen quite a few FELE, but you never want to start off a temple with next to no space to contend with it. Fortunately for assassin, MB and CoS make this a non-issue.

Council is usually never an issue. But we definitely use blade fury to finish off affixes like this FECE.

I am rolling in the uniques... I just wish snakecord wasn't one of those T_T I think this is the 3rd one this run.

Meph actually gave me some trouble. He would occassionally burst me to < 300 hp.

---

More P.Rubies!

Unfortunately no Lem or even an Um from the forge. Fal is... close? Maybe I can get another Fal to drop and cube from a couple Ko/Lum runes to make a Lem.



There really wasn't much to showcase in A4. We were in and out without much to write about. I felt pretty rune starved this act. Here's an Amn rune at least?

Diablo has been the easiest boss since Andariel.

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Bloody Foothills was going quite well. Coughed up some mediocre runes, rubies, even a couple of uniques. However by the time I full cleared the map I noticed I had thrown an unhandled exception error. My guess is this was from CoS'ing catapults. I'm not 100% sure, but it's likely. The game crashed, I lost some items, exp and the waypoint. It required me to run all the way back up the map ignoring the now, annoyingly-spawned, skele archers. The rest of my overworld maps were done CoS-less due to the catapults, rubble, doors, and demon huts.

Only my infernal pit had frenzy taurs. The portals as well as Drifter's cavern were surprisingly safe.



It was nice to finally drop a perfect MF roll on IK Will. I think this is my 5th or 6th drop. I was overcapped on gold so I decided to spend some gambling and also lucked out with some early elites.

Another Lum rune! Only 8 more for a Fal rune.

We saved this bad boy for last. Venom and the knockbacks got the job done.

---

Gear and stats in next post.
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#12
Oct 6 2020 08:28am

Gear and Stats:

Thanks for Reading!
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#13
Oct 6 2020 07:03pm
Sick eth shaft!
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#14
Oct 7 2020 08:41am


Act 5 was unkind to me in many ways. The highest rune I saw was a Lum rune. The game crashed in bloody foothills (catapult) and nihlathak's temple, floor 2 (probably maggot egg). I was definitely not expecting either of these to crash the game in the fashion that they did. Fortunately for the second crash we only lost a little bit of the map on the first floor and didn't have to completely forfeit the second floor. Although running back there past frenzy taurs was a bit scary. It also reset my Ancient's way which was a really long run to Ancient's past, you guessed it, frenzy taurs. Otherwise, finishing up Nightmare was quite easy. I did get 2 evil urns in Icy Cellar, and an exp shrine on halls of pain that surprisingly still got me to lv 75 (hit this on cows) due to better map ordering (doing nihlathak last before ancients/wsk).

Heater is the best I'm going to do for shields. It was nice to find this early 2os Heater to replace my bone shield "rhyme". It's only +2% block but that's free life essentially.



Sadly this was the best rune I was going to do for today... I'm not sure I've ever completed nightmare without a single Io rune. But despite 2 Lum, Ko, Fal. I essentially feel "starved" and that's partly because the rune quantity doesn't feel there for the mid runes, nor the runes I really need (Lem, maybe Um). I'm pretty far away from cubing into Lem as well.

---

Demon Limb is a nice drop. Unfortunately I won't be getting anywhere near 133 str this run. I thought about socketing a hel rune into it, but decided to just retire this. I think if we resign to no "Lawbringer" I'll be dropping a ton of orts (maybe some rals) into a 6os PB. In the meantime I guess now I'm holding out for a 3os PB until I find/get Lem. A1 should be pretty hard/tedious, but I think due to the amount of CC assassin has I'll persevere.

Many Tal runes.. I found like 6 yesterday, I have a total of 25. I won't be able to craft this many blood belts, but given the amount of rubies I have I may find a decent OW belt in 16-18 rolls :)



Of course this ring wouldn't be an RF or SoJ. Anything would've been better than manald/nagel. But such is the sad case lately with our ring finds.

---

Gear and stats before shopping/gambling/crafting and getting hell ready.



Thanks for Reading!

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#15
Oct 7 2020 03:35pm
I think today went well tbqh. 1 roll for my blood belt and it seemed "good enough". I decided to save p.rubies for other crafts.

In total I crafted:
1 blood belt
4 blood rings
5 safety rings
8 safety amulets
1 caster boot

I have a lot of resources left over but I had to cube many tal, ral and orts to get the amount of thuls for these crafts. I only had 3 thul runes and had to cube into an additional 6 while ensuring left over orts/rals for an ele weapon. I did manage to add a ton of block just through new gear (~54% to 72%). I also made a Smoke. I increased my life pool to exactly 1,000. I can still switch to duress and be able to close the resistance gap with charms. For now I have a ton of life charms and some elemental damage added. I'll either socketquest or hope to naturally drop a 6os PB (although I may just settle for a dim/crystal) and do 4x ort 2x ral for ele dmg.



I gambled over 3 million gold worth of (mostly) amulets and rings.

---

Shopping wasn't too bad, but success came in all once. I really didn't have the patience to shop better prebuffs than the +2 shadow and +2 assassin. It only really helps my venom and warrior (and not by much)



Getting to 5 kicks was awesome! 4fpa average now :)

---

Here is, what's probably, my final gear setup (save for a lawbringer/ele weapon)



Thanks for reading!


This post was edited by LogicalLynx on Oct 7 2020 03:37pm
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#16
Oct 13 2020 12:19pm
Blood moor always starts off a little shaky until I get my bearings. This was no exception. I had multiple zombie packs at the start including a physical immune zombie. 3-4 of these packs surrounding an annoying LE quill rat pack. I was pretty fortunate that I didn't spawn any A1 maps with Crows. I was able to safely Cloak of Shadows for most of A1 (was careful around gargoyle traps).

I did DOE to pick up my +1 skill quest and proceeded to do my overworld maps, cold plains and stony field, underground passage, burial grounds, and dark wood before starting the high Alvl dungeons. Blood raven was np thanks to Dragon Flight.

Underground Passage was pretty rewarding. I hated giving up the blind on my coif of glory but the fire resistance, hp and lifesteal was too much to pass up. Treehead gave me a spook since I wasn't expecting him to be so close to the shaman ruins here.



The themes for act 1 was "dodge the curse" and "convert minions for free amp". Griswold was giving me some flashbacks to last run. I was not going to risk taking an Extra Strong hit here. I killed everything except gris and then used blade fury and kiting to finish him off.

Cold Crow also proved a bit annoying and dangerous with that holy freeze + strong combo.

---

I actually came across several physical immunes in A1 before having a "fast" way of dealing with them. They really weren't that bad. Poison helped some, my lightning charm helped others. Speaking of I picked up this juicy 1-71 +22L Large charm. In addition to this I snagged a 27-40 fire LC later on! Sadly this Io rune was the highest rune I have found in hell (even up to maggot lair). It's also the only Io rune I've dropped for the entire run. I am totally rune starved!!!!! I feel so far away from my Lem :(



Tower was okay. Ghosts slowed me down a bit, but things were going much quicker than last time.

Countess: "you're run starved?" *Laughs in Rick Astley* "Neffer gonna give you up Neffer gonna Lem you down"

Finally an answer to annoying PDR/phys immunes. Its not 6 sockets, but with 5 p.rubies I gained 75-100 fire damage. This actually helps a fair bit against wraiths. I have the resources to spend and wanted to conserve ral Runes for weapon rolling, boneweave boot crafting. The other option was Ort runes but I was already doing quite well on lightning charms.

---

This floor was somewhat lucky given that it spawned a cursed multishot (maybe strong too, I forget) archer pack. Fortunately the demon archers were the first thing to pull and I was able to cloak, isolate and telestomp burst down the pack leader.

Also... Tri enchant Pitspawn??? Yikes.



Pretty much the strategy with cursed packs is to curse everything :)

Andy actually giving me some love. Gull Dagger + Chancies + MF helm swap for decent MF, For those that don't know, I'm obsessed with Woestave. It's easily my favorite merc weapon for these runs. This will come in handy sans "lawbringer" for annoying stuff like unravelers (and already has - a2 update soon).

---

I left Act 1 slightly underleveled. I tried to do map ordering well but still was about half a level shy of 82 due to poor mob spawns :(


edit: Also just wanted to apologize that the updates have been a bit slower. I've not had as much stream time (still streaming daily, just shorter) due to life craziness. As always, thanks for reading!

This post was edited by LogicalLynx on Oct 13 2020 12:22pm
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#17
Oct 21 2020 09:06am
Really late to finishing this thread, sorry! My life has been a bit crazy and as a result of this run ending I'll be taking a break from D2 from a while. My GF is starting chemotherapy this week and I've just not had a lot of time or energy to tryhard the single passes.

Here's the exciting conclusion to the kicker run!

---

Things generally start off easy enough in A2 compared to A1 hell. I was dropping boneweave boots but my rolls and finds were just not great.



Radament was terribly easy. I also eventually found a sol rune to upgrade my merc's Andariel-dropped-Woe Stave: This weapon is amazing and helped carry me through horrible places. Just under 2.5 hours in halls of the dead could have been a lot more tilting without it!

Maggot lair was pretty easy though. I was in and out of here in under an hour.

---

Runes continued to be starved. I had only dropped 1 Io rune and a couple Lum. Other than my nm hellforge coughing up the Fal rune, all I had found for my "Lawbringer" was a Ko. :(

It's pretty funny how I always find decent druid stuff on no druid runes T_T

Fire eye came with a love fanata enchant, yikes!



Arcane actually ended up being more tilting/exhausting than HoD. First time I've ever said that. I was here for almost 3 hours. You knockback one wraith only to get mana burnt by another, rinse repeat. Lawbringer would've sped it up by a lot. I used to my 5x p.ruby pb for this map. I also found another pretty decent lightning charm here.

So I finally made it to canyon of the magi without having crashed the game from a CoS bug... but who freaking knew that there was another bug.. and it was with my back up CC. Apparently if you Mindblast + convert enough beetles you end up in an infinite loop of charged bolts which take the usual 25 frames per second down to about 1 framed per 100 seconds or worse. I ended up doing this on my canyon of magi and losing the half the map I had cleared and forfeiting the rest of the map... BEGIN THE TILT.

There were definitely some tricky packs in tombs, but we were going carefully and slowly. Duriel was hiding out in Circle, so I started with Crescent. However, in my second tomb (square). I came across a dozen or so beetles, half of whom belonged to a cursed pack. My natural instinct is to always convert via MB on curse to get free amp.. it didn't cross my mind at that time that the MB conversion+charged bolts are what caused the initial frame lock and alt+f4. But here we went again. I tried desperately to unfuck the situation. I think I spent about 10 mins going only several frames and nearly getting a tp up. In the end I finally gave up and had to forfeit all of my 2nd tomb (square).

Sidenote: I've been told by a friend after he experience a similar instance on his Sin that CoS may actually break the infinite loop. It's at least worth a try if you can find the frames to get a cast off!

---

Onto Sun, hello Ancient Kaa. Pretty large tomb filled with unravelers - which practically every tomb at this point had a pack of (I think we had one non unraveler tomb, oof)

This beetle had a lot of friends and was actually a really hard start. IIRC he was in the room with another CE+cursed beetle and 2 unraveler uniques.. like how do I even spawn these rooms is beyond me. That's the beauty and terror of D2 though.



Apparently I can find everything but a Lem rune eh? This is easily my best single pass rune find and probably will be for all of eternity. This was in my 4th fake tomb (arrow).

However moving on to the final fake tomb (before doing duriel's tomb).. I had cleared out nearly all of the tomb and was just in general tired and distracted. I made a couple of mistakes.

1) forgot to summon shadow
2) figured I could telestomp this unraveler, so as to not deal with the constant rezzing of the vampire pack in the earlier room... but might, cursed, and strong is just too disgusting.. I asked to be one shot essentially. Here's the cringey clip: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/772436999
3) didn't consider the possibility of there being monsters that'd pull down from the upper room as I'd pulled out many things from here already.
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#18
Oct 21 2020 09:08am
I can't say I'm too too sad. I really did give this run my best shot and was just terribly tilted and tired from how slow it was going due to rune starvation.

Here's what my final gear looked like (I also used a flail "strength" depending on the area or if a boss)



I really appreciate everyone hanging out during these runs and following these threads. But I'll be off jsp for a bit while life settles. I hope to pick up with more fun single passing soon. Until then, I hope you all have successful adventures in Sanctuary!

Thanks, as always!
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#19
Oct 21 2020 10:27am
RIP Thanks for the great WT though! GL on the next one!
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#20
Oct 21 2020 10:46am
Dang rip. Hope to see you back soon
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