The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

As a sample, I did a baseline test for this:

1) Malus... for qualifying for an Imbue (Charsi quest/reward; fyi norm clvl 8 restriction)

Pure (no aid/twink); Solo (no help); Count: always (players) 1, SP v1.10s normal difficulty, no exploits or oddities used. Time was roughly an hour and a half (I could be more precise, but this "record" won't hold).

My thinking, ahead of time, was that any reasonable character will make level 8 pretty fast, so my concern was being able to safely get in (aka sneak) to the Malus. I imagined a Barb with Howl and Leap might do this well. So I created Imba the Barbarian and set out.

Turns out stamina potions and town portal (because of waypoints) are so effective at low levels that my Howl/Leap concept was pretty much pointless. I also forget to distribute any stat (i.e. Vit => life) until I made level 6 (which didn't matter except during one LEB skel archer pack in the underground passage that I didn't choose to just run past). I further discovered that Howl didn't work against the minions I tried it against (didn't extensively subsequently test what determined this).

My feeling, both before and after this test, is that twinking probably wouldn't have sped up the xp leveling much, which was pretty easy. Players 8 would both be much faster leveling and also suitable for a little twinking. Players 8 with an Inner Cloister waypoint teleport search to Town Portal the level 8 player directly to the Malus rack would be a big speed up. If that char was Sorc and the twinkee used ranged attack, I think a mild level of Enchant would be more than enough twink all by itself to optimize leveling to 8.

As a tech note, if you really want to see insane early leveling speed, you can, SP, use -seed 666 (any seed actually) and the game just tiles Blood Moor solid with monsters (which, for example, level 1 poison creeper (Druid) will just obliterate). Major lag but quite entertaining.

For non-exploit max leveling speed there is a powerful team technique (which I will detail at some later date), but I hardly think the coordination effort is worth it unless you're taking 6 or 7 characters to imbue completion simultaneously.

As a further tech note, the reason this rush is important, is that some elite base items have a high enough qlvl that imbuing them is potentially really very good even with level 8 characters (and, at present, v1.10s is reported to allow all affixes on rares without the pre-v1.10 restriction for affixes of magic-only). So if you can readily find elites worth imbuing (not too hard) then the payoff for getting a lot of shots at rares is pretty good if you can generate imbue rights fast enough. An hour and a half doesn't seem worth it, but I bet that time can be seriously beaten, eh?