Not any real new advice here, but it's a great guide.

The formating and writing is top notch, should be stickied.

10/10

Wish I could edit some of it. Probably overdue for a 2.0 partial rewrite.

You might want to test some new merc setups, etc, but 95% of the guide holds up. It does it's purpose quite well, mate.

But then again if you are using gavel just for the amplify damage then what is your thoughts on using Reapers toll with decrepify 33% and atmas scarab amu ?

Reaper's shatter corpses. Atma's doesn't work on mercs.

The gavel idea was mine for many years ago, but i got harassed and berated for suggesting it.

This thread should be closed 100 pages ago.

Reapers is fine if you're doing the self-dps WW route and don't want to deal with gavel repair every run. In this scenario it shatters maybe 1.5 corpses on average, so this setup is effectively losing out on like 7.5% of gold/loot. It also doesn't boost dmg as much as Amp, which is particularly noticable when piercing physical immunes.

If you use it cleverly, you can use 1-2 amp casts every run. I'm pretty sure I've written this about 20 times before.

I'd like to rewrite it for the new patch, including stuff like Flickering Flame as options, etc. But if you'd rather do it, go ahead.

I wish you'd written the guide properly a long time ago, because I can tell you for sure that in the hundreds of hours I spent in D2 Legacy testing stuff waiting for Realm Down, I never came across anyone suggesting it.
The issue, too, was that Gavel wasn't even that great in D2 Legacy specifically BECAUSE of Realm Down. You had so much downtime there was almost no reason to bother trying to clear in 30-40s, unless you were playing SP.

What do you estimate your repair:run ratio to be? Because no amount of clever use can prevent a split council spawn, and if you've used 2 charges on run 1, then there's high likelihood you'll run out on run 2. Unless you're simply willing to accept running out of charges.