The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

At level 11, poison jav does close to 1,000 poison damage. Even with the trips to town, the fact that you can fire a good trail, lead many enemies to it and just go away knowing full they'll be dead shortly is a big advantage.

I think going to town can be a good thing, when you know the monsters can't get to you and are all dying while you chat up the townsfolk. :D

Generally I'm all in favor of not investing (skill or) stat points until the clear need presents itself. But for this build (poison javalin centric power-leveler) I'm somewhat puzzled over what approach even makes sense...

STR: why bother? this isn't an equipment (str req) intensive build
VIT: "always good" but why bother? With stamina potions and town portals it's not like we ever give the monsters a chance to whack on us (yes, I know, "can't hurt" and sometimes helps)
NRG: why bother? mana potions can be bought at shop and you'd have to have a ton of mana before your regen would be high enough to pay for your mana expenses; as you pointed out, a single Triumphant (+1 mana/kill) rulez

bringing us to:
DEX: why bother (?!!) as poison javalin works just as well without it, and *better* when we deliberately miss any target. Any "tough" target we'd prefer to just ignore anyway (build is about power leveling, not proving we can kill anything). Also there is the shield blocking angle (but see VIT comment above).

So my answer, thus far (small little tests in the last week but nothing like your five hour ancients run), has been to either not distribute, or put points into VIT. What's your take on it, in practice?

On a related note, aside from PJ, I've put skill into Dodge and Critical Strike (just for fun--I like to see the star animation--I don't think the poison is ever getting any benefit) but decided that the new improved Inner Sight didn't matter, as poison clouds are auto-hit. But going to 20 opens skill choices up all the way to 18, so, again, what's your take on it?

On a tech note, I think I should mention that my current thinking, for assisted power leveling, is that Sorc/PJavazon is an ideal combo. Since pumped PJ has such long duration, a simplified procedure would be:

1) Sorc teleports to new area; lures mass of monsters together; does: teleport/cast Town Portal/teleport dance to open a TP for PJavazon near but not in monster cloud

2) Sorc begins staticing mob

3) PJavazon comes through portal, tosses a couple of PJs aimed to miss and leaves through Portal

4) Sorc is still staticing mob, weaving about a little if needed to trick mob into crossing the poison cloud lines from step 3 above; at some point static will get the mobs so low on HPs that the poison will finish them off (this shouldn't take very long at all, as far as I can see--naturally I'm assuming normal diff, but as that allows this technique to be useful up to at least clvl 40 as thus hell Hellforge clvl req, I think I can rest my case)

5) rinse and repeat

Now this procedure hinges on a technical point I pondered long ago and didn't answer: who gets kill credit for a poison death?... the last character to damage the monster?, or does the last poison successfully applied to the monster have its own memory of who the poison belongs to? (this question was originally thought up long long ago, when poison overwriting laws were quite different, and potentially an odd implementation here could have been exploitable).

If the answer is favorable (i.e. poison remembers its source) then the above procedure should work. If the answer is unfavorable (i.e. there is only a bucket to remember a single player who last touched a monster) then the above procedure needs reordering, so that the Sorc has to take everything down in HPs via Static before the PJ does the final coup de grace. This is much less efficient (no PMH and sensitivity to monster HP levels to decide what/when to perform actions).

tech note: also, if you're using two humans in the above scenario, instead of one human doing game switching, I'm wondering if the numpad "help" etc. voice keys work for player communication even when you aren't in the same zone? (rather hard for me to test, as I'm not set up with two PCs atm) The purpose, of course, would be to have a single key press for the Sorc to summon the PJavazon for her step 3 (this is the only real-time signaling/coordination issue in the whole procedure, making the assistive twink relatively mindless and therefore highly effective). In case it isn't obvious, the Sorc and PJavazon are not partied (if that matters to the communication method detail).

edit tech note: if this is hardcore, or danger is posed to the PJavazon in her brief appearances, the Sorc could use an item with charges of dim vision or cloak of shadows just before the PJavazon comes through. I think DV might be better, because of its *short* duration, to free the monsters up again asap to walk into the poison clouds. Naturally the Sorc isn't going to stop her teleport search and do a cycle in an unfavorable mix of monsters--such as bunch of horror archers (e.g. act 5 guests) who can be deadly at range, who won't move into clouds and don't suffer much by poison anyway. Also, while there isn't anything wrong with the PJavazon having a merc (and it might even be helpful, as, iirc, HF mercs can now hold their auras up on themselves while in town?) it would be a poor idea for the Sorc to have one :blink: