The Return Of The Kicker [single Pass P8 Hc] - Topic

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Sep 27 2020 09:49am

Single Pass Rules:
• Always players 8 (bosses and countess included).
• Hardcore
• Absolutely no rerunning maps or bosses.
• All items are solo self found; However, I will "retire" items to shared stash. These stashed items will not be used once stashed.
• Plugy is only to be used for the extended stash; no restatting, reskilling, or ubers.

The intention is to theory craft a single build, avoiding respec, that can handle all aspects of the game but still presents some challenge. My goal is to full clear every map and defeat Hell Baal. I will be streaming this run everyday on twitch.

This melee build is extremely gear independent and/or easy to plug in necessary equipment. Smoke helps resistances plenty although duress is preferential for hell. Having a shield "rhyme" for CBF, All res, mf, and blocking is quite useful. Boots are going to be resigned to the strongest kick damage available within reason. By this I mean I will not be increasing strength for some absurdly high req like myrms. Scarabshell/boneweave boots are likely "good enough". Crafting and Imbuing will be used for boots once I reach elite tier. Belt and jewelry should be flexible. "Lore" can go far but another tal's mask or all res +skill circlet is desirable. Weapon, it is my opinion that for full clearing the entirety of the game safely means using a "Lawbringer". Anything else is simply more expensive and often times less useful. The RIP affix does shut down use of DSentry, but in turn the kicker gains: Decrepify (useful cc and pdr reduction), -50% target defense (although I won't be struggling for AR with max block and dtalon's %AR), 180 fire and 155 cold damage (per kick - this is godly), Life stolen (frees up the need on other gear), RIP is actually quite useful for the times you'd use DSentry for corpse clearing anyways (unravelers, shamans, nihlathak), +10 dexterity (this can be viewed as free block and free life), and the biggest feature of the weapon (imo) Sanctuary Aura - this sets all undead to 0 pdr (meaning almost all physical immunes in the game take full physical damage) and it provides some additional safety. A big part of why sanctuary aura becomes even more valuable is due to the 422 halt line error that occurs when using CoS on stationary targets like the Ancients and.... Mummy Sarcophogi.

My Goals for this run:

Guardian and only guardian. I'm convinced this is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, build I've tried to single pass. Cloak of Shadows and Mind Blast can carry a long ways due to their imba-ness. I just need 1 Lem rune.

Martial Arts 21-23:
18 Dragon Talon for 4 kicks. Hopefully 24 with +skills for 5 kicks
1 Dragon Flight
2 prereqs

Shadow Discipline 48+:
5 Burst of Speed
1 Cloak of Shadows
10-20 Venom - with our fast attacking speed this doesn't get much mileage per point (~30% value)
Mind Blast 10-20
Shadow Warrior/Master 10-20 - again as much as master may be better in some circumstances I think it may be too risky to take in a single pass as it can easily crash the game in A2 and fights like Ancients. I haven't decided yet.
Fade 8+ (+skills take this to 14/15) mainly going to be used as a PDR or resistance tool depending on necessity (conviction aura).
3-4 prereqs

Traps 11+:
1 Blade Fury - useful tool to deal with dual enchants in nightmare or otherwise unsafe packs while letting the shadow tank. Good for applying venom and open wounds as well. Lack of AR matters less than you may think in these instances.
Death Sentry 5+ mainly for radius, and annoying pack or corpse clear like flayers, fallen, unravelers, cows.
6 prereq

Point distribution is quite flexible due to the shadow tree. Traps and Martial arts are fairly fixed.

Helm: Most likely stuck using "Lore" for the PDR, LRes and +1 Skills

Armor: Duress/Smoke

Amulet: Crafted prismatic with +skills/life is ideal

Rings: Quite flexible +stats/res (even ravenfrost) are helpful.

Gloves: Looking for some +Martial Arts preferable +2 crafted blood gloves for more CB and LL

Boots: All my imbues. If I take strength to 118 for boneweaves then maybe some hit crafts.

Belt: A blood craft is desirable to pick up OW if no Duress.

Weapon: "Steel" early if I need OW, "Strength" Can carry nearly the entire game (it's very slow) but makes for a good boss killer too (I may replace this with black for bosses). You don't use "Black" for CB otherwise as the Knockback does apply for each kick. The ultimate weapon for this run's build is "Lawbringer"

Prebuff: 2x +3 Shadow Claws preferably with some useful automods.

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One of my moderators had a very suitable name for this run. And so, Klogs, has become PumpedUpKlogs.

An early gull dagger means running 150+ mf for most of Act 1 normal. I'd say this a new achievement unlocked. Gull will be run for all of normal.

It's not the best and not the worst countess drop. It is our first rune of the run.

Another low roll nagel. 16% mf. As if I should be complaining about wanting more MF. It's been 3 or 4 consecutively bad nagels lately.

Andariel was a joke. Kicker just destroys normal if you keep up with the boot upgrades. We finished A1 with some light plated boots iirc.

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More runes.. in fact I was able to make an early Flail "Steel" that I have yet to use (outside of boss fights). Still rockin' that gull dagger and about 164-196 MF.

A quick dragon flight to the ammulet and then spanking Fangskin.. the last assassin started the Fangskin curse. Its personal this time.

Tombs had a really good early drop. I think I can sport these until we're ready to craft for hell or find some martial art/resist rares.

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The assassin just flies through normal. Despite my dicking around I'm still on record pace for full clearing each act. Act 3 coughed up some wonderful GCs too. I'm sorely lacking on the lightning charms however.

Conviction Bremm had me switch to fade for the first time yet. Mephisto, much like his childrien, Duriel and Andariel, just melted.

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Post 1/3

LogicalLynx

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Sep 27 2020 09:55am

I really love finding early Sol runes.. they don't come much earlier than outter steppes. Funnily enough, I didn't even have an ort rune yet!

Amn rune hellforge too? Is this the good luck run? Runes seem timely. Anyways this made for an early "Strength" which made the diablo fight an even bigger joke... the "kick"line being that I forgot to swap back to my gull dagger for the final blow but still remembered to don the MF helm I had made and replaced with my chaos sanctuary found ort rune "Lore".

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Act 5 had me thinking it may be time to switch from gull to "strength" full time but it quickly coughed up some exceptional boots. A quick el+chippy fixed the durability

I'll take all the GCs like this the game wants to throw my way. Fingers are still crossed for a suitable LRes GC.

Boss fights with teleports are no match for DFlight. Sorry Nihlathak.

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An early shael rune too? Why not.. "Rhyme" this early is amazing and just in time for our baal fight.. oh yeah as if I needed another 25 MF...

Even with 234 MF Baal said "no loot for you"

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Post 2/3

LogicalLynx

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Sep 27 2020 10:00am

Gear and stats going into Nightmare:

Gull dagger will be moving to secondary swap. So, I'll be running ~73 MF most of NM
I'm looking to replace my demonhide boots with battle boots at the a2 vendors or simply some better exceptional boots (magic/rare)
As you can see most of my gear isn't great although both of my rings are somewhat decent.
Chance to block is roughly ~62% right now. I'll be working on getting this closer to 75 by hell. I will not be putting much if any points into strength anymore. The rest needs to come from gear or charms. I'll be focused on maintaining high block % and increasing my life pool. I want 1k+ for hell.

This is an extremely budget friendly build and it can certainly be built with more emphasis on traps (it's probably even better that way) but we'll be doing this run as close to a pure kicker as we can.

I'm sorry it took so long to get this WT up. I've had some really stressful and busy weeks lately and haven't had as much time to stream but I'm finally moving on to Nightmare now. I will start working on the youtube playlist for this run soon too.

Thanks for reading!

Post 3/3

This post was edited by LogicalLynx on Sep 27 2020 10:02am

Camowlin

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Sep 27 2020 11:29am

not a fan of Plugy-WTs, but I have to say: that s/s arrangement is pretty damn cool.
GJ and GL

Vorp

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Sep 27 2020 12:33pm

A lot of work out into this. Gl. Also pm me that link to the diablo run thing. Looks interesting.

LogicalLynx

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Sep 27 2020 05:54pm

Quote (PikaBhew @ Sep 27 2020 11:33am)

A lot of work out into this. Gl. Also pm me that link to the diablo run thing. Looks interesting.

it's just diablo.run You'll need diablo interface as well I believe.

LogicalLynx

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Sep 28 2020 08:30am

Nightmare started off easy enough. Resistances were fine despite my gear not being the best.

An early 4os Partizan is great, but I didn't have a second Sol rune to make the merc an "insight". At least the Nagelring is a slightly better roll than what I've been getting lately.

My first FELE pack. Shadow + Blade Fury to make sure I don't get a quick rip.

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More FELE and not the last FELE. In addition to all these FELE's I managed to find a couple CELE and some CEFE as well! My hole ended up being trapped with 2 brute packs and no space to move. It wasn't too bad thanks to MB and CoS although one of these packs were on of my CELEs.

The charms dropping are fantastic too! I just desperately need one decent (20+) LRes GC to feel like res is in the bag for hell if I forgo a "smoke" for "duress"

Countess rune drop being the exact same as my normal countess is disappointing but expected.

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1% off from giving me 75% cold res but I'll gladly take this. FWIW the lightning damage although small does get applied to kicks

More MF? At the cost of 40 life and 30FHR? But its MF.... Give it to me!!!!! (so greedy) Its not like I have already have over 120 mf without the gull dagger or anything

This "Insight" Is easily the best roll I've ever made. 17 medi, 259% ED, 245% AR, and 5 CS! WHERE WAS THIS LAST RUN

I spanked andy and headed to a2 to shop some battle boots to replace my weary white sharksin boots.

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So far nightmare has been quite easy. I'll feel very confident about this run if a Lem rune drops in this difficulty and that becomes a possibility in A2.

Gear and stats on next page

This post was edited by LogicalLynx on Sep 28 2020 08:53am

LogicalLynx

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Sep 28 2020 08:32am

I bring gull dagger with me to the boss fights. I can also swap in another 38% with rings, 17% on neck and 32% on helm but I don't think it's worth the effort as I'd already have about 285% MF with just the gull and only 372% with the other 4 annoying swaps. FWIW I did run 341 MF for andy and that didn't really pay off

Thanks for Reading!

itam

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Sep 28 2020 11:42am

GL with your lem drop. Maybe NM forge ooOoOo

LogicalLynx

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#10

Oct 1 2020 08:35am

There were a couple of goals with Act 2. One of those is pretty much the run goal "Find a Lem rune" and A2 is the earliest I've ever seen a Lem rune. The other goal was to not crash the game with CoS - this meant relying on mind blast a lot more in areas like Halls of the Dead, Viper Temple and Tombs due to mummy sarcophogi.

As far as runes went, here are the majority of my drops. The take away here is that I found a Ko rune which is huge! I still have not found Io or Lum rune yet. I did drop a bunch of hel runes though.

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Poison is a bit annoying with my resistance and life pool being quite low. There were a couple of fights, like Radament where I had to tp+clear poison and chug some antidotes for safety.

I had a really nasty claw viper temple floor 2. It was good practice - there were 6 unravelers and a very very close fangskin. Again I practiced most of my tomb/temple running without CoS and this room wasn't really much different. I Dflighted to the center and used a lot of MB while my merc made his way outside the center to kill stuff. I was totally tunneled on dealing with unraveler's (their unholy bolts hurt) that I didn't even see Fazel wreck Fangskin!

Charms were also quite benevolent. I've been more than fine on cold charms however a free 12% FHR is very welcome. This LRes Large charm afforded me some more inventory space as well - which means using more life charms.

I also found this decent, earlyish Dex @Res Ammy. I'd still like to try and craft a better safety amulet for hell, but if I fail this might suffice assuming we don't get an amazing unique like saracen's or mara's.

Despite swapping to Gull dagger at the end of this fight for 285 MF the drops came up short (IMO). I did hold on to the Whistan's. It could be a decent enough shield were we to not need rhyme resistances/CBF.

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I've decided I'm not going to try and keep block capped. I'll probably maintain high 50% to low 60% throughout most of NM to allow my life total to get a bit higher. I'm not so worried about total incoming damage as I seem to mitigate that well but don't handle large hits that make it through (this made the Duriel fight a bit nerve wracking even though it was relatively easy).

Gear and stats post a2:

Thanks for reading!

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