The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

3 hours is 180 minutes.  A tuned Orb sorc kills NM Countess in 2-3 casts as I recall (Nova is the same), most of the run time is lost in teleporting.  The mazes fell into general shapes, a few exploritory teleports reveal maze shape and probable exit.  1 minute runs were possible in 1.09 for NM, so Enigma Leap Attack barbs can be 1 hit kills in Hell at similar runtimes.  Thus this runner is getting about 150 chances for every 1 at the Hellforge and this runner is willing to invest (i.e. pay big) for Enigma.

Perhaps I wasn't fair by merely pointing out that things get bad fast for Countess runs and putting a peg for you for comparision with Um. Even though nm and hell Tower are now much larger mazes in v1.10, I'll concede a one minute run time (seems optimistic to me, as it should be measured "round-trip" including game set-up/exit overhead and in some games just *finding* the tower and exiting could take a minute roundtrip).

Remember that that 3 hours was a "possible" peg for *hell* hellforge (and my drop comparision was only for nm Hellforge, which is certainly doable in less than that). So let's look at the 1/11th chance for Gul...

Hell Countess can't even drop Gul as part of her normal rune pick (has to hit for her from another TC, thus it is "off the end of the world" at less than 1/10000 of 1%) so we have to assume we are trying to get 2 Ists to cube up (ala Gunter and Maldar luckily getting back to back Guls on their hell Hellforge rewards) at ~ 1/70th of 1% per pick. This will take many thousands of runs to make our Gul. Let's be optimistic and say 100 hours of tip-top play.

As things stand now, it is likely that hell Hellforge rushing--without carry-along--beats this (100/11 hours peg per rush).

And that is without considering Hardcore, where the notion of doing thousands of hell runs per desired reward strikes me as tiring and therefore risky (some boss combinations are scary and you will, in so many runs, "run" into them).

So, to recap, the reason I picked Um is to try to give the hell Countess runs a chance of being a reasonable alternative to nm Hellforge runs... my inclination is to give that contest to "efficiency". Which is to say, (ignoring the huge benefit of carry-along) I think that one comes down to how efficient the respective races can be performed.

Since, at present, "theory" (as partially tested by those participating in this thread) suggests these two competitors are somewhere in the same ballpark, I'd tend to favor "slow and sure wins the race" myself. That is, I personally prefer the nm Hellforge method, because the distribution of results is more uniform than the hell Countess method (i.e. 22 1/11ths runs, with cube up, is much "flater" in expected results than--e.g. only--2000 1/1000th).

Indeed there is a cap on how much longer a hell Hellforge run can be than a nm Hellforge run before doing the nm runs and cubing up makes sense instead. This cap is probably not even close to being relevant however, as getting from clvl 20 to clvl 40 isn't that big a deal.

edit...

For time comparisons, if would be better to start at the higher clvls. I think you have said that characters can be generated at clvl 33 with -act5. Does that work for other acts choices? (still no game here, maybe this weekend).

Yes. -act 2, e.g., is clvl 16. I don't recall the spread for a3 and a4, but iirc it is pretty uniform between 16 and 33.