1. As a new player with 500 fg or less of gear should I be mapping, catacombs, whistling, using the /low difficult command? I basically just kill 2-3 screens and regen. Curious if I could be minmaxing different at my gear progression/experience level.

2. Some mobs have a red circle with weapons, I understand this to be melee reduction. What about the "bloodrat" that has a red drip animation? What is this ability?

3. How do weapon mastery points work, is it just a random chance to gain 1 prof point per attack, and it appears mobs cap out after giving X? Unfortunate for me as I need a lot of attacks to kill mobs

4. Are there any communities or groups that do climbs with new players? I can attest that solo game play is less than thrilling at this pace


I'm sure I'll have more later.

- definitely /set easy 1
- Some good details here: https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=82660445&f=272 - including "dangerous" mobs
- as far as I knew, weapon proficiencies just slowly build per hit > 0 damage
- the community has thinned quite a bit since I came back as well. It looks like you're on SC and I exclusively play on HC, so I'm not going to be a huge help to you on that one

Definitely recommend when you solo explore to do the /set easy 1.

Check the marketplace frequently as you can find Enhanced Effect on armors for a cheap price and that will give you a lot of survivability.

I would recommend on Samurai to use Powerstrike and TwoHitBack as abilities for quicker killing. Also if you stick to whistling you can avoid the evil presences (powerful monsters). Exploring can be more fun and find more items, but if you want to increase climb speed, whistling is better.

I was with you when we were doing the 3-4 person exploration and you were clicking well. I know Tilt pays well for GPs so mq'ing is a nice benefit. I know our guild would be happy to include you in climbs and I have some usable gear I can getcha for 1fg each on the market.

So a few things on prof:
There's the cap, each wave is a maximum of 10 proficiency, there is sometimes a cap increasing event which increases this number.
0 hits do not give prof, some examples include attacking the spiders images and when goocidic has his physical barrier up
Rough chances of prof increase:
Attacking with weapon ~20%
Attacking with charm ~25%
Healing ~66%
You will also not gain prof for levels below or equal to your prof amount, so if you have 10 sword prof, you will not gain any from all attacks until level 11.
If you want to give yourself brain aids you can see this topic: https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=84248031&f=74


This image gives some idea on what mob abilities do, let me know if any of it is unclear:



I would not worry about mastery though, as to get even 10 in a single area takes a long time, focus on mq'ing/killing mobs as fast as possible and take the prof as it happens. Focusing on prof is not a style of play i'd recommend.

The main bonus to solo play is you get all the drops and drops for solo generally seem to be slightly better than group climb drops.
Getting a group willing to explore is rare.
Getting a whistle climb is much easier but if you're after item drops to make fg, these are absurdly rare. I've seen about 3 decent items in about 1000 climbs, and it's still a 1 in 5 chance to get it. I see something of that quality in solo more like 1 in every 50 climbs