The Great Race; a proposal for "Khalim" awards

[Crystalion]

Well, the first goal was to go through the game up to the ancients as fast as possible (leveling to 20 in the meantime), but then I hit a wall and decided to just do leveling to 20 ASAP in the untwinked, one player from start to end, way.
[...]In the meantime though, I took the assassin out for a walk. Claw mastery to 6, Burst of Speed up 3 levels then pots and at 12, Wake of Fire. As usual, untwinked and unassisted players 1, 2:23:20 (I might be getting better :lol:). Wake of Fire, being "Fire&Forget", is absolutely amazing for speed leveling.

I'm not nearly so good a player as a theoretician, so my times are always going to be embarrassing compared to Walkiry and Ferengi (and others). OTOH perhaps I'm a better measure of what your "average joe" can do?

Following in Walkiry's not-location-rushed footsteps, but twinked heavily (making this a very easy build to play) my first sub-times were: (I'm not including game setup or twink item xfer time fyi)
1:41:30 made act 2 (paused at Andariel to waypoint to level up to 12 before doing her)
2:00:30 acquired staff of kings from maggots
2:15:30 acquired claw viper amulet
2:30:00 killed summoner and took Canyon of Magi waypoint
2:37:00 placed Staff to open way to Duriel
2:38:00 made act 3
3:05:14 made level 20 (had picked up Spider and Marsh waypoints, was exploring Flayer Jungle)

I took 15 minutes, roughly, worth of breaks (off the clock--my play time overlapped dinner time).

I started by doing the Den of Evil, but I skipped doing Radament.

I wasted time to town and couldn't help myself picking up and identifying some stuff... my four best drops (that I noticed) were...
jewel of: 1-5 cold; lightning resist 14%
jewel of: 20 poison over 2 secs; 11% vulpine
jewel of: +3 mana/kill; 16% extra gold
ring of: rare: 10% faster cast; +3 min dam; 3% life steal; +5 max stam; lightning resist 24%; fire resist 15%
(fyi: at present I'm wearing partial Sigon's set and full Angelic + extra Angelic ring, which comes to a *lot* of +MF)

Starting at level 12 this build rocks (especially the twinked version) so a location rush would have been very nice for leveling speed (note: in a previous post my time for a location rush to act 5 was under half an hour).

Now that I'm 20 I'm taking a break, but I will time taking the character to 25 sans location rush. Then I will location rush to nm Hellforge, timing that. Then I will time, solo once again, leveling to 40. Then I will time the location rush to hell Hellforge.

I had enough fun doing this that I'll probably try it again sometime, hoping to turn in a faster performance (also, of course, this was done all in Players 1--Players 8 and location rushing post clvl 12 are probably rather efficient).

As Ferengi points out, these times are probably more significant than the early level up times, but I'll share my build plan thus far, on the assumption that my current happiness with the character means I'll continue to get interesting baseline results...

This is a v1.10s Assassin. At clvl 1 I handed off a ton of stuff, more than filling her stash with future goodies. The key concept for the character is to move fast (Burst of Speed, faster run/walk) to get to monsters and then spam Wake of Fire to doom them (while trying to remember to continue onward instead of wasting time watching them die oh so prettily).

WoF is a clvl 12 skill, but in v1.10s it get 8% damage synergy per level of its prereq, Fire Blast, which is a weenie damage area effect spell, very good for early level mass killing. Thus my plan was to pump that to slvl 3 (every 3 points there also is a bump for number of shots for Death Sentry, which is not relevant to this build as a rushee, but is relevant if you want points to not be "wasted" for a playable post-rush character) which would help with early leveling speed and give +24% damage to WoF later.

Burst of Speed, a clvl 6 skill, has a ("wasted") prereq of Claw Mastery (I didn't intend to ever use claws).

Finally, although I've not used them in getting to clvl 20, I planned a point in Cloak of Shadows (clvl 12) and its prereq, Psychic Hammer (clvl 1) so that "messy" situations could be blinded and WoF spammed (I'm expecting this will be a standard practice in leveling from 20 to 40).

There is just one little, er, huge, I mean HUGE problem with this build... it eats mana like crazy (for spammed WoF traps, and also CoS). Sure you can buy mana at the shop, so you don't really *need* to twink this build to make it work, but I wanted to twink it, if I could solve the mana problem in a way that pleased me.

This means I added a skill--one point in clvl 1 Dragon Talon--and two mandatory items: Sigon's Greaves and the Serpent Lord unique staff. The boots are both faster run/walk and, being greaves, give good kick damage (see Assassin kick posts if you don't already know about this stuff). The Serpent Lord goes on the weapon switch, so you can switch, kick a monster for 100% physical kick damage mana leeching, then switch back. I'm happy to report this works well in practice, as long as you have the rest of the situation under control.

All of the other twinks are optional, but those above are, in my build conception at least, "required". For the other stuff:
Cleglaw's gloves
Hsarus belt and boots
A Horadric cube
gold, books of TP & ID
a circlet of +1 trap skills (Tarnhelm would be good also of course).
complete Angelic set (plus a second angelic ring)
complete Sigon's set
a mask with 3 flawed gems for +12 str.
A large charm of +3 str

The Sigon's shield and 3 Angelic items grant +2 all net, so traps are getting +3 once you can wear the +1 headgear. Because I knew I was twinking this extremely I kept 3 skill points "saved" in the build (to clvl 12). They might be best in the FB synergy, or they might be useful for BoS breakpoint, or some other use (e.g. Blade Sentry or saved for some later skill level). The down side of the Sigon's twink is that you need +str twinks and lots of stat points put into str. The upside of lots of str is that it makes the DT kick hit harder and thus get more mana. This means I am ignoring Energy entirely. After I made my str requirements I put points into Vit. I have 15 unspent points at clvl 20 and I'm not absolutely sure whether I want to ignore Dex (Sigon's shield has good blocking, if you have the dex, of course).

The skill point distribution looks something like (at clvls):
1: Fire Blast
2: FB
3: FB
4: save/FB?
5: Claw Mastery (prereq for)
6: Burst of Speed
7: save/FB?
8: save/FB?
9: Dragon Talon (here because Serpent Lord is clvl 9 req)
10: save for clvl 12
11: save for clvl 12
12: Wake of Fire; Psychic Hammer (prereq for); Cloak of Shadows
13 onward: pump Wake of Fire

As I noted above, for all those "save/FB?" I choose to save them.

You should see the beauty of killing Flayers with WoF. Rapid mass slaughter without targeting. Sweet. And those pesky shaman?... after they die and release their flayer he gets toasted automatically before he can be a pain. Very sweet. Since I know I'll never have a mana problem, I can pretty much just cast WoF traps ahead of my travel path, speculatively. This means I'm often "in the middle" of three of them (WoF traps) when the little buggers rush out of nowhere in a vain attempt to swam me.

A weakness in WoF traps is that they are less effective by far in tight quarters. So they lost some power in the Arcane Sanctuary and the Maggot Lair. However they benefited in AS by being able to toast enemies that couldn't get to me, and in ML by being "round the corner; through the doorway" skills, so I could avoid beetle lightning and maggot spit. Tal Rasha's tomb, OTOH, has enough space even in corridors, for WoF to be effective, as well as the beautiful "cast through the doorway" tactic. It was really nice being able to take out Unravelers without needing to see them or even have line of sight on them.

The downside to this build, if you're going to play it past clvl 40 (hell Hellforge), is that as of v1.10s beta, Wake of Inferno, the logical "next step"--synergistically speaking--for the build, is seriously horked, by all reports. Perhaps it will get fixed, or the reports exaggerate. Otherwise, it's a "blast". :) Of course you'll need to explore non-fire damage skills as well (don't overlook Blade Fury, Death Sentry and Mind Blast, as they are "one point wonders"... I'm very very fond of Dragon Talon, pumped, but there are a number of reasonable options).