my personal all-time favourite is the blizzard sorc. i play only hardcore, but it can be be done without gear and it works just fine even in full games
skills:
just put 1 in all prereqs till lvl 6
pump ice blast till 8-10 hard points, you should be 18 by then
it has insane damage, just chug those mana potions
at lvl 18, you have teleport and glacial spike, put the points in glacial till lvl 24 - glacial has the best crowd control in the game imo
after 24, you will be almost unstoppable, just make sure you have some skillpoints left to put points in cold mastery + blizz at the same time for a while

as for the gear, spirit sword, 3 pruby/psapphire helm, viper, soe, bloodfist/magefist, fcr rings, 3 pdia shield for me

Depending on urself for damage and without drinking 1000 mana pots. Do sigons with holy fire paladin.
Sigons give nice AR and ias.
Holy fire is great for normal.
I normally used Civerb's Cudgel for wep (8-38 @ level 9) increases max damage per level.


I used to do bumpers a lot.
I done barbs and paladins with Sigons, civerb wep, angelics. I could solo to 24 without dying at least.

Even got to the point to socketing the gear to help.
Flawed gems in everything I think it was, lol.

This post was edited by 15bucks on Aug 30 2018 04:49am

It also depends if you're able to run 2 or more instances of Dia at the same time, if the char is rushed and how many populated norm games are open. If you got acces to an encher that is definitely the fastest to get to lvl 25 (on hcl I saw a ench bot running)

For me solo self rushing (usually self found because I like a bit more challenge) is sorc the fastest and only in cs I really need to pay attention. I don't spec fire I spec light (4 in cb 1 fn tk and Tele, 7 nova and rest static) till 20 and then build towards blizz assuming den and iza this gives you a decent range on static and strong enough nova to clear. 70-80% of inventory is filled with mana pots.

I prefer tower over trist since there are almost none trist runs atm in hcl. You can also check some speedruns to get a general idea (cows where popular some time to get from 21-24 but unless you got an opener you need to kill baal what defeats the purpose and if I'm not mistaken they lvl now in flayer just adjust to tombs in more populated games).

Gear wise if you want to deck her out Jancsipapa has some nice suggestions although if twinking I would add an insight and forgo on the fcr rings (you won't hit 105 fcr and spirit+viper can give you the 63 fcr BP) and use sojs. Use stealth till you can use viper (I even used stealth in hell just for the fcr at start ladder). With Insight you don't need the sapphire helm and if you are comfortable with a bit less life then peasant crown or lore gives a bit more damage.