Crazy for sure... but she wanted to get a good chunk outta the way so that she could take a break for a while, let everyone else play. I have honestly forgotten how high her earnings became, but I do remember that Happy gets 250M/hr, and Sleepy has better %EG
and she clears faster. So she probably earns somewhere in the range of 450 to 550 M/hr, would be my guess. She made almost 5 billion gold just clearing Act V, though that is not much of a gauge of her efficiency.
[EDIT2: Not that it much matters to anyone else but me, but I was way off - Sleepy gathers over 1.9 billion gold per hour running ToD.]
As far as time creating the scrolls, her efficiency from the moment she took command from Happy was high enough to warrant the use of full Scroll creation, so it took her just shy of 2 minutes per scroll to make them. That means she spent 13 1/3 hours spinning
hair into gold gold into Scrolls, though obviously not all at once.
Regardless of all that, it wasn't a marathon accomplishment. What the sentence that you quoted doesn't intimate is the fact that it occurred over the course of at least two weeks. A lot here, a little there, and a bit in between.
As for the Necromancer, if you get his Raise Skeletal Mage and Skeleton Mastery as high as you can (preferably 300 or more), that's about all the stats you need to make Mages viable. I'm currently a few hours into Gumpy-III's assault on Mount Arreat. He has over 400 in those two skills, and while SS and WoW have so far not been cake walks (I've not quite figured out how to position the Mages so that they preserve their numbers), they are certainly doable with 350ish Mages. Basically, I'm going by what little information I was able to glean from Dapaba's posts in this thread, and Al's posts in the Master's thread. Is that what you meant? Do these answers help at all?
Good luck to you, sir!
ps - It occurs to me that you might have been referring to character stats, rather than Mage stats. That in turn brings to mind something else that Dapaba talked about, however briefly. He would teleport the mages where he wanted them to do damage, and then take the hits while they mowed things down. My Necromancer has the same life jewel that all of the Ragtags have, which gives him roughly 4.5 million life. That is enough to take a few hits, but if there are more than a couple of either kind of Sith Lords, or more than one Chimera, he has to back off. When he does, Sith Lords beat the crap outta the Mages, and in a hurry! Same with large packs of Chimeras, though just a few are fine. What I tend to do with Sith is to slowly retreat to a choke point like a bridge. That prevents both the Mages and the Sith from spreading out, creating a single point of contact from the Sith side, and 350 points of contact from the Mage side. I lose a lot fewer of them that way. I'm sure there are more tricks to learn, and I am keen to hear about your own experiences with the Mages!
[EDIT1]
---------------
Sneezy the Druid
Sneezy become a Destroyer at level 376, at which point he started testing Spirit Wolves one skill point at a time, finally settling on skill level 203. The wool-uffs do pretty good damage at that level, and their life is not too terrible. They are still semi-fragile, but at least they are not just cardboard cutouts. It doesn't look like it is going to get any better than that, so I'll take what I can get. Sneezy took to using his teleport boots to turn his 24 wolves into a point mass just like Necromancers do, focusing damage where he needed it focused, and that has helped a lot as well.
I am most keen to hear everyone else's approach to playing a Druid in the Insanity levels, as it surely seems that I am doing something wrong – I must be making this more difficult than it should be, right?
Sneezy had fashioned himself a nice Zy-El's Vengeance Artifact for the sweet elemental damages on it, but it swings so incredibly slowly, even with close to 1000% Increased Attack Speed.
I want him to have access to a shield, so he will keep the Vengeance and the Zy-El's Defense Artifact on switch, but he will probably get more use out of the Trinity Demon Blade Bow that he made to supplement it. Both of the Artifact bows have much slower base weapon speed than the Blade Bow, so he avoided making one of those. Sadly, there were no Mega3/4 to any weapon scrolls to use on his bow, so he instead megaloaded a couple of jewels with min damage to get him close to the cap. We'll see if his bow fails to have a damage cap at all, like Sleepy's failed to have. If it does have a cap, he will remove a little dexterity BoCL at a time from his Requiem to keep it under control.
In the aftermath of this flurry of activity came a flurry of leveling, testing everything out. He managed to reach level 1399 in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Compared even to the Sorceress, it is a lot more work playing the Druid in SS, WoW, and OtO, but it is a ton of fun.
It's truly astounding how quickly levels are acquired in the Insanities! Named Chimeras still give him 16 levels each, for crying out loud. That's... yep, insane!
Bashful the Assassin
It is difficult to drop a character that is finally doing relatively well, but Bashful wanted a turn as well. Unlike Sloth the Assassin, Bashful the Assassin was eager to get out there and make a name for herself on the slopes of Mount Arreat. First, however, she needed a good bit of prep work done.
Happily, her weapons were up to snuff, and needed no attention at all. Choosing weapons has been a real time-consuming process for most of the RagTags, in fact. She put in an order with Happy for new Zy-El's Stride boots, Zy-El's Vice gloves, and a Zy-El's Decorum chest armor. She also requested the standard 20/20 life jewel with FHR, %MF, Damage Reduction, and dual applications each of mana and maximum mana %. She stuck a Shard of Accuracy into a Narrow Charm for ITD, requested a Zy-El's Marker with the Knockback removed, and a jewel with Open Wounds applied to it, which jewel she planned to pair with the Marker.
Where she deviated from the normal plan was in asking for 210% Mana Leech (one application) and 1500% Life Leech (ten applications) to be added onto her Open Wounds jewel. Flash forward a few hours: it turns out that 1500% Life Leech is barely good enough for Normal Insanities with life in the millions. If I had it to do over, I would have foregone any Life Leech until I could put at least 50 applications of it on a jewel (7500%), if not more. Even in Normal, 1500% is not enough to counter the poison after several hits by Mini Mauls.
With those trinkets fashioned by the Happy Barbarian, Bashful turned her attention to her skillset. She used all of the cube scrolls she had, raising her Requiem to +126 Assassin Skill Levels. She then spent an eternity clicking together 32 Cube Locks, then using them to add +127 All Skills to her belt. This brought her 82-hard-point Blade Shield up to 76k. She maxed out her Charged Bolt Sentry (409 total points) so that it did 32k damage per bolt, and maxed out her Wake of Fire so that it did 48k damage per wave. Her Venom shows over 5 million damage over 4 seconds on the skill screen, and over 6 million applied damage on the LCS. Either way, it is monstrous.
She was ready to hit the slopes, the deadliest ski-bunny Arreat had ever seen. She did the opposite of what most of her contemporaries had done... she played through the act at p127 until she got to the Throne of Destruction, at which point she avoided the entire mess of Witches by Burst of Speeding her way to Baal's Minions. She became Destroyer at level 304.
Done with normalcy, she decided to brave the Insanities... and apart from the Amazon, she was by far the easiest character to play in there. Monsters simply melt under the triple-pointed assault of traps, Blade Shield, and Crushing-Blow-augmented-Venom. On her first-ever trip through SS, WoW, and OtO, she gained a total of 270 levels, and that was with a big goose-egg worth of Chimeras. That's right, not a single bloody Chimera showed up in WoW at all. Cowards! There were two packs of Immortals in OtO, all commingling in the same room. This is where she discovered her only offensive weakness – she has nary a point of Magic Damage on her person. She may need to remedy that someday, but then again, it seems that it would be a lot more efficient to simply restart and clear those areas out again rather than spend dozens of hours worrying about 0.5% of the monster population... I'm sure Nightmare and Hell will show me the error of my theory.
Gumpy_III the Necromancer
Finally and at last, it was time for Grumps to redeem himself in my eyes. Taking a look at his kit, it was evident that he would need to rebuild it from nearly the ground up (he held onto his amulet and his belt). Or rather, that one of his comrades would need to do so, as he didn't have access to the full range of crafting resources that they did. His requiem had already been fashioned months ago, so all he had to do was toss the Helm of Fierce Wool-uffs in favour of the more traditional Diadem of Glorious Goodness.
He perused the list of goodies available and put in his rather tall order: Zy El's Vice, Stride, Idea x 2, Decorum, Marker, Ransom, and Deceit Artifacts. As well, he requested the standard 20/20 life jewel with FHR, DR, FBR, %MF, and five applications each of mana and max mana %. Hours later, his order came in and he could start adding skills to the various pieces.
He put all of the common +Nec skills cube scrolls on his Requiem, as that is the only place they can go. He brought it up to +50 and will leave it open to receive further commons. From the Decorum he removed all other class skills, leaving only Necromancer skills. To this he could then add uncommon +Nec skills scrolls, and he did just that, raising the total to +43. The gloves he left as +All Skills, and to this he can add +All skills scrolls. Again, he followed up preparation with action, raising the Vice's +All Skills to a healthy +70. All total, he has +455 to his maxed Summon Skeletal Mage, Skeleton Mastery, Poison Nova, Bone Spear, and Bone Armor, and +356 to all of his 1-point skills.
To his Vice Vambraces, he added a slew of FCR scrolls to enable him to spam his summons or his Bone Spear, or whatever he wanted to spam. A slew in this case turned out to be exactly 175%, which was perfect for every circumstance he encountered.
Ready to try out his new digs, he barreled out of the gates of Harrogath at p127, waded into the first group of druidic vine-casters he stumbled across, and started spamming Poison Nova. They succumbed rapidly, and before long he had a massive army of Mages over 300 strong. His mana pool with the 5/5 jewel is permanently full, even spamming Mages or Poison Nova, which he does whenever he possibly can.
He did Quests and Waypoints, and the various group of monsters here and there that looked ripe and juicy, ready for plucking. He also ducked into each of Suicide Sanctum, Wayside of Woe and Orifice to Oblivion as he happened across them, and started learning how to be a real Necromancer. Here are the two top-priority essentials of Necro-hood that I've learned so far. Never. Move. Without. Teleporting. That's the big one. Only slightly less important, though, and a little more subtle to pick up on, is: If you are losing Mages, then you aren't teleporting enough! Seriously, try applying that principle, and just see if it doesn't cause an audible *click* somewhere inside your head. Mages cast
instantaneously upon landing from a teleport. There is no lag, no delay of any kind that I can tell. So if you are getting mobbed from Chimeras or Sith Lords of either kind, or anything else that can possibly hurt you or the Mages, back up every half-second if you have to. Just a little way, keep the target in missile range, but out of melee range. The Mages will do the rest. Your first (and possibly only) priority is to ensure their survival, and thereby your own. That should be an alien notion to most people who have used mercs before. Ensuring the survival of a merc
will get you killed. Maybe not yet, but soon if you are still doing it. Guaranteed. Ensuring the survival of level 450 Skeletal Mages has the exact opposite effect.
The only other piece of advice about Mages that comes to mind is a pretty obvious tidbit: use Lower Resists liberally. They really get off on that.
Doubling their kill time when you are getting a level per kill is... helpful... to say the least!
For me, the ideal number of mages for harder areas has been 400, but that could change as I get better at using Teleport to control attrition. However, the damage that 400 Mages do is fast enough to keep me from getting antsy, even if I never lost another one.
He became a Destroyer at around level 730, or 750, or something like that. One more run through SS, WoW, and OtO brought him up to level 1190.
That brings the team to
this point, with all of them having finished Normal and, apart from Happy, ready to slam through Nightmare. Happy lacks his life jewel and any Artifacts, and I am going to go ahead and ditch his stupidly-slow Colossus Swords and replace them with Cuisinart Finery Phase Blades. Phase Blades are just too incredible for him to waste any more time with anything else. Playing Lust really brought that point home for me.
Unfortunately, Happy's neediness raises some slight problems. The gold supply for the team is dwindling and the crafted charm supply has been entirely used up (thanks a lot, Gumpy_III!). That means about 300-400 million gold just for the charms, plus a healthy reserve for what QL promises will be lean times ahead in Nightmare mode. Time for Sleepy to come out of hibernation and
do some of that pilot s**t slaughter the baddies for some cold, hard cash.
Code: Select all
The RagTags
Name/Class Level Difficulty/Act Name/Class Level Difficulty/Act
------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------
Bashful/Assassin 1045 Normal/5 Happy/Barbarian 728 Normal/5
Doc/Paladin 824 Normal/5 Sleepy/Amazon 2543 Normal/5
Dopey/Sorceress 830 Normal/5 Sneezy/Druid 1399 Normal/5
Gumpy_III/Necro 1190 Normal/5
{Total: 8559 Position: 3rd Deaths: 2}
)
and only level 115 right now. His damage is not worth mentioning and he needs a lot more life to survive in Act 5. I guess I'll finish him a jewel with life and min damage and send him to Act 3 for a little practice at Tristram.
Get the paladin ready to kill Baal!
Prepare a jewel with life and %life.
.