The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

This is probably a Divide and Conquer problem.  There are two pieces, getting to clvl 8 and getting the Malus.

I agree entirely.

Based on what I've read, I'd say the Poison Creeper Druid would be fastest.

I thought so too, until I did a bunch of testing and listened to Walkiry. Then I realized its another divide and conquer: leveling to 6; leveling to 8. Any class levels to 2 very rapidly. Any class with a tiny bit of thorns levels to 3 rapidly. So a Druid really only has a sure edge getting from 3 to 6, as far as I can see. Once you hit 6 though, Strangling Gas Potions and Poison Javalin are faster than Poison Creeper (because he goes underground for seconds at a time--you can short circuit this by recasting him, but he'll only put a mat down where he attacks, whereas you can specify where you want poison clouds with PJ and SGP, to more quickly maximize your kills). Of course, clvl 5 req thorns shield is huge, as is the Hellforge Hammer, if you twink.

"The player with the Malus has left the game"

Yes. Quite funny. Except that, in practice, you can level in the Players X game, but you have to make a Charsi quest still-open game yourself to collect the Malus. Of course, since the whole point is to do the imbue for a higher level character, you could just wait until they want the imbue and they can have the half minute burden of waypointing to Inner Cloister, running/teleporting to the Malus and then town portaling you in.

I suppose, therefore, that an interesting Great Race alternate-Category would merely be: attain level 8. While I think it is very entertaining and instuctive to consider this, in perspective--rushing the imbue because you found an elite with high qlvl--one has to wonder what is the likely frequency of needing to do it? If you need to do it all the time, then being very very efficient is worthwhile. If you only need to do it a couple times a week, then shaving ten minutes off the time isn't a big deal.

The other big "level up" race is to level 20 (the Ancient's qualification). As a divide and conquer problem you have:

1) getting a char to level 20
2) rushing the char to the ancients
3) rushing the char to nm hellforge reward

And if your total time is good enough, then this is a better deal than even Hell Countess Runs, for the majority of plausible runewords. (actually, at present, as Ruvanal has noted, this can be sleazed to get another 6 or 7 rewards with little additional effort, but lots of accounts--I'm hoping they fix this pre-release).

The best rushing techniques I know for #2 and #3 don't have much room for improvement. But #1 is highly variable, and like the Malus race, probably quite interesting to consider.