How long do your CS runs take? My Sorc (no good gear at all, really) took well over 30 minutes; even with constant life tapping for the merc I had to run often. Just doesn’t feel worth it unless I get waaaay better gear.
I’m guessing folks generally do them with really well heeled characters.
It varies a lot. If I just do CS and rush it, probably around 10 minutes. The River of Flame takes some time since I'm running. On the other hand, my gear is quite good aside from the lack of Enigma. I have 10 combat skillers to boost hammer damage, but only two have a life, for a total of +20. :/ The row of small charms is just plain mf charms and some fire res charms with a little bit of life. There's significant room for improvement in charms, but not so much in armor and weapons.
It is usually more like 30 or 40 minutes since I hit other targets as well (maxed Vigor and ~10 spent in Charge help to move around the map). I've started including Hephasto since he has a good chance for runes and the map I have has the hellforge very close to the waypoint. He can be a bit slow to kill, though, so I may stop hitting him.
As far as I know, a Hammerdin is ideal for CS (partly since there are no magic immunes there), so you might consider doing Meph runs until you can gear a halfway decent Hammerdin. I'm sure I've done CS runs with a sorc before, but I don't remember how hard it was to deal with immunes.
I will add, though, that switching from a fire Iron Wolf to a Desert Guard using Insight has been a *big* help. I had read somewhere that Act 3 mercs are good in CS (using Lawbringer), but it just didn't work very well for me.
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