Hell Mephisto: Question about his drops

[Myge]

This has been bugging me for some time, as I've been doing numerous runs on him (Keshdono Barbarian on UsWest HC Ladder in case you're wondering who) and I'm really wondering what his potential drops are now. I noticed a Horadric Mummy drop a Colossus Blade in the sewers of Kurast and that logically leads me to believe that Hell Mephisto should be able to drop up to TC 87 at least. Is this true? Or are there monster types that can drop a higher Treasure Class than the boss himself in the same act?

Just another note to anyone interested in doing the run, I've figured out a better method than the ol' clockwise rule, something that is true 100% if you'd like me to post it I'll go ahead since it helps better than just hugging the left wall all day in these bigger Durance Halls. It's kinda lengthy but I'm sure the experienced players already know this, just a bit hard to explain since it concerns the design of the map spawned with specific set pairs of waypoint room vs Durance of Hate stairs room. Same thing goes with Worldstone Stone Level 2.


As for his drops, within 50 runs, I've scored a Doombringer, and a Demon's Arch and some minor uniques of 1.09. I'd say the returns are fairly good, either that or I was just very very lucky. The run though is very dangerous, nearly carked it at least 4 times, using my teleport ammy to take quick shortcuts and avoiding dangerous boss packs. Stygians it seems have been beefed up from before and do about 400 damage to me per explosion (this is with maxed resists and 10% damage reduction). Mephisto's physical attack has been downgraded I'd say, he was mighted and only doing about the damage he used to do in 1.09 (without any physical augmentation aura). And without the help of Might aura he was quite weak. His Charged Bolt attack it seems is the most deadly taking off 10% of my life (I have 2.7k life) around (this is just a guess the percentage that is).

[Caaroid]

Hello,

I've been doing Meph runs since the patch came out (SC non-ladder, but the drops should be the same).
I use a max-block-max-resist orb sorc (ok, a PVP sorc if you prefer to hear it this way). She has ~ 1k life and 1k mana, was especially built for 1.10 (meaning max TK, ~ 55% ES, 121% vulpine, max Orb and I messed up here and used Thunderstorm, but anyway).

What I mean to say is: she never ever got even close to dying. I mean, sometimes she looses 4-500 mana, but with fast hit recovery (ok, this is item dependant; I used SHAELs in my armor and helm) nothing can harm her on the way down.

In the past, say, 40 runs I got 5 elite uniques (the spiderweb sash, the pdr life belt, the useless mana leech armet, a hellslayer and a wizspike), some mid-level uniques, some nice new class-specific set pieces (aldurs helm, boots, IK boots, belt, hammer, nat helm).

So I'd say it's pretty profitable. AND I have not even found your faster method, I just keep teleporting like mad and try to recognise familiar chamber patterns.

If you have the gear to do so, I'd advise making an Orb sorc for Meph. He dies in 6-9 orbs, and really nothing can touch me on the way down with 70% fast cast.

(this is also some encouragement to make you type in the "better method", since latelly I was doing Andy-Meph runs since Andy is so much easier to find :)

thanks

c.

[airblade2000]

Hey guys,

I'm interested to know how much mf equipment the Barbarian in the original post is using. Also, what kind of equipment are you using?

Also, I'm kinda of new to MF, you do your runs in a passworded game, correct?

[Myge]

I'm using 194 Magic Find at the moment. But I'm not sure whether to believe this has any effect or not, because I do remember reading that Magic Find does NOT work on act bosses. But this is contrary to belief in the Diabloii.net forums where people speculate Magic Find DOES work.


As for the trick to finding the stairs. I pretty much explained it above, but I think the only way I can make it any clearer for anyone is basically linking to some pictures. I've taken screenshots and in fact was ready to post the idea back in 1.09 since the trick/method whatever worked so well. In 1.10 it's not as effective and all it does is just raise your understanding of how the map spawns and allow you to make good educational guesses as to where the staircase should be located. I'm sure you're very familiar with what rooms typically hold the stairs to the next level.

Anyway I'll attempt to explain.

EXPLANATION STARTS HERE (Warning: long and wordy!)

I hope you can pick up on what I'm saying. You start out on the waypoint, and the room faces NorthEast. You will find that you will ALWAYS enter into a room NorthWest to get to the stairs which are located at the far end of the room.

For a Waypoint Room that faces NorthWest the exit room will face SouthWest and will always be one of those rooms that appear to look like a box with two interior walls and the exit will be on the left I hope you know what I'm talking about hehe.

Waypoint Room that faces SouthWest will correspond to an exit that faces SouthEast and the room will always be one of those with a slightly higher middle ground with small stairs protruding in 4 different directions and the stairs should always be visible on the right hand side of it.

Lastly if the Waypoint Room faces SouthEast the exit will always be facing NorthEast and the stairs will always be located at the far end of the room.

So in conclusion how does this help? Basically if you're hugging the left wall as you usually do you're going to avoid going silly directions and taking left turns when you don't need to as you know the waypoint room MUST face a certain direction. So if you're hugging the left wall and find yourself curling around turn back and try to climb the other direction and look for a hard swing in the right direction.

An example when it can be useful is, say you start in a NorthEast Waypoint room. You turn left as you normally would since that's where the exit room should be facing and you find yourself turning and going SouthEast more than anything as the map curls around. You can probably conclude that the exit is in fact BEHIND the waypoint room as sometimes the map will spawn it there since there doesn't appear to be any room for the exit room to spawn a NorthWest exit in front of the waypoint. And I can safely say this is true for 90% of the time for me when it happens. Sometimes you just need to persist in the hugging of the left wall and eventually you uncover the NorthWest exit but if you find yourself doing a complete U-Turn you know you should cast a TP and start from there.

EXPLANATION ENDS --

I hope this isn't all gibberish and hadn't wasted your time as you might have already known this information or this isn't helpful at all to you hehe but this is what 10k+ runs of Hell Mephisto did to me in 1.09 :P and yes the above information is 100% true hehe, just the use of it isn't 100% useful, but it helps you guess better. Also note: after running Hell Mephisto long enough, I'm concluding that he can't drop higher than TC 78 like in 1.09. I haven't found a single item higher than that.

Oh and yes I run in private games. I don't like the idea of taking more than a minute to kill Mephisto and people trying to player kill me.

[Caaroid]

Hello

Well, when I've written "teleport around and try to recognise patterns" I meant something akin to what you've written. It is somewhat of help, though, since I never really realized the connection between the start and exit rooms' facing; only remembered the 4 different types of exits and kept looking for them. In 1.10 it still involves a LOT of teleporting around, considering the map size.

About your MF question: No, I can confirm it does NOT help at all. I have 50% (harlequin, hello), but the rest is just cookie-cutter PVP equipment (remember, this is a PVP sorc I am using for meph runs). And thusly I find that act boss MFing has actually been improved in the 110 patch, since in 1.09 I had to use my sorry little MeteorSorc with "tactics" like not-hitting-bremm-and-mob, teleport-around-and-position-meph, switch-to-mf-gear-for-the-kill, etc. And she had like 850/600 life/mana, and terrible resists, so was totally not HC viable. Whereas now you can get any immortal down there and just TANK Mephisto, with no need for MF whatsoever. BTW, it is true to Andy as well (she just dropped a Guardian Angel and Ialal's Mane in one game, aling with 3 crappy rares).

Thanks for the info, I hope I can hardwire it to my brain to help my pattern recognition :)

Happy hunting

[Ferengi]

About your MF question: No, I can confirm it does NOT help at all. I have 50% (harlequin, hello),

50% is >> 0

in fact there was a theory amongst the bot crowd that both 50 and 500 had some sort of sweet value effect. Given the routine bugs people report about calculations it might be true, since bot runners had steady streams of data to base it upon.

In any case, it does seem that boss drops have been improved, no more cracked sashs from Diablo. That will deflate the trading economy better than any other of Blizzards attempted nerfs.

[Caaroid]

What I meant to say with that sentence was this:

"Considering the drops in 1.09 with a 382% MF sorceress and the drops in 1.10 with a 50% MF sorceress, I am willing to say that Magic Find has been changed in a way that against act bosses marginal amounts should be sufficient and the results surpass that of 1.09"

Also, taking into account the number of runs and quality of drops Myge experienced with his ~ 200% MF barbs, I am also willing to state that it "seems" that 200% MF and 50% MF have roughly the same returns, making the "50 and 500" hotspots somewhat dubious. Then again, the samples we use are small, abour 50 both for fim and me, and I admit I only used one setup throughout the whole time.

I hope this post is more precise in stating my observations. Again, I would like to stress that 50 is indeed not 0.

[Myge]

Yeah the quality of drops have been alot higher than the norm of 1.09. It seems that you don't need much magic find to achieve the same results from act bosses. The reason why I'm toting 200 mf is mainly because I can without sacrificing alot of life/killing speed and opening chests on the way or killing unique guys with damage auras is a bit of a habit of mine. I'm guessing you haven't had much trouble on the way to Mephisto because of the amount of DR you're using. I tried it with my 99 Barbarian, setup with SS, GF, etc and the run wasn't hard at all. So yeah... all I got to do now is to run Mephisto until he drops me that Gold Monarch :D and then it's happy safe times for runs hehehe.

Ohh another thing. I realised using that Crainte Vomir (upgraded version) is actually quite a godsend vs anything that should be difficult 1 to 1 mainly because of the slow target by 35%. I had no idea Mephisto was attacking so fast until I switched to the Doombringer which hardly did any damage to him even though it statistically says it does nearly double my Legend Sword. I think it's the crushing blow on my gloves that let me get some decent damage off him. By the way what's the damage on your frozen orbs? To take him out sooo quickly you must be toting alot of +skills hehe. It takes me like 45 seconds of swinging and battle crying to take him down. :blink:

One last note, it looks like every hit I make is a critical strike (ie. I see that yellow flash) but the damage doesn't seem to be that great, so is this a display bug? or is the mastery bug still in? Because my percent for critical is only near 20% and there's no way every hit should register a yellow spark on strike.

Ah yeah and Caaroid, I only realised the connection to the starting room and the exit room when my friend told me about the trick to Worldstone Level 2 (and this is after doing Mephisto for so long :lol:) which is basically the same deal as Durance EXCEPT it's on the opposite direction. So, NE is to SE and SE is to SW etc.

[Caaroid]

Truth to tell, my Orb damage is quite sad. That is, the Orb damage displayed is quite sad. The max is around 360-380, don't know exactly. As I noted before, for all purposes it would have been better to max IceBolt instead of Thunderstorm + Lightning mastery, but anyway.

The incredible thing about Orb is cold mastery. Right now I have -140% to enemy resists, meaning that ANYTHING that is not TOTALLY cold immune (resistance 100%+), takes AT LEAST 500 points of damage from my orb. (This is according to the info Jarulf posted, that states that cold mastery is a flat reduction of resistances). Those without cold resist take ~ 850 damage. And mind you, that is PER SHARD. Now our little friend Mephisto is quite a huge monster. I estimate about 6-8 shards hit him each time. It is just silly how fast he goes down. Again: anything that is not totally cold immune cannot resist the power of an Orb sorc, even one without any synergies. No wonder everyone and their mother is playing Fireball/Orb sorceresses these days :)

Good luck for the monarch :)

[Myge]

WOAH!

That is news indeed for me, and I feel quite pitiful spending about as long killing Mephisto as finding the stairs. Now I have got to get my friend to start up a Frozen Orb sorc 'cos that is absolutely insane the way you can kill everything so fast with Cold Mastery way up there.

[Nanasi]

---------------------------
Myge
Posted: Nov 8 2003, 05:36 PM

It's kinda lengthy but I'm sure the experienced players already know this, just a bit hard to explain since it concerns the design of the map spawned with specific set pairs of waypoint room vs Durance of Hate stairs room. Same thing goes with Worldstone Stone Level 2.
----------------------------

Myge is right.

Many people noticed the basic relations between Durance of hate waypoint and the room of stairs, about their locations in the map.

I drew a picture to explain what I knew about these relations.

http://www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~zod/nanasi/mephruntip.gif

I hope this picture will help many people, especially beginners of this game.

Thank you Myge, and thank you people for reading this post.

[JustAGuy]

That's a great picture. There are caveats that one must be aware of when finding the durance level 3 entrance. Sometimes, the level 3 entrance spawns right beside the way point (as is the case with WP1 in that picture) more often than the others.

From the picture: WP1 and WP4 are the easiest to find, by far. Just hit the edge of the map in that direction, and follow the edge of the map in the direction that is stated by the picture. You will find the level 3 entrace within seconds. For the other two, the same method applies, but sometimes, the level 3 entrance is in the middle, or behind the way point. It's important to check the surrounding area of the way point to make sure you don't overrun (over-teleport) the entrance.

WP2, for example, is usually pretty easy to spot. Most times, you teleport north-west, and it'll be right there. Sometimes, you'll hit the classic U shape, and it won't be there. It might be just above, in another U-shape configuration not two or three screens away.

In most cases (I'm talking 95% here), if you stick to the edge of the map, and teleport in the directions shown in that diagram, you will find the level 3 entrance in your first try. There are those odd exceptions, where the map has two dips in it, and the level 3 entrance spawns at what looks like the middle of the map. By the game's logic, it isn't in the middle, but looking at the map, it really is. It shouldn't end up being a problem to find any of these oddities if you stick to the diagram's path directions.

Check out this post I did for info on how I do my runs:
http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.p...=36975&linear=0

I use a dual-character approach to increase the better drop probability (slightly, but increased nonetheless) and to keep the sorceress from being hammered. This dual-character approach provides the sorceress a truly unkillable tank and allows her to specialize in magic find equipment (496% MF on last count).