- Jan 3, 2019
- 1,480
- 1,593
- 93
Tunnels Progress Report
Now where did I leave off?
Have had some nice progress, but ofc am not doing nearly as much playing with the new member of the family here . I have done 600 AT runs while rolling and evaluating maps (all AT runs should be assumed to be p1), and then 1000 runs after I found my current map. In general, I plan to "ignore" the map rolling/evaluating runs when I talk about my total number of runs in this thread, so that I can have a nice round number showing on the runcounter.
Amaresu is level 93 and going strong. Fun to have my first hc character get into those low 90s. Runtimes are much much slower than I can do in sc though. I'm averaging about 54 second runs at the moment. And to be fair, am taking a pretty relaxed approach, but I don't think I could push them consistently down below 48s or so, whereas i can do ~35-36s in sc. I think the difference is just damage, since my playstyle is pretty much the exact same. Which isn't the best news since I don't see too much in the future that will improve my damage. I refuse to use any shield but stormshield, and likely will continue using wizzy for those huge resistances. At least my mf total has tons and tons of room to improve.
I started out running 63fcr and ~300mf, but quickly ended up lowering the mf for some quality of life improvements. Sacrificed 3 sc's for inventory slots to keep a tome of id on me, as well as a flawless amethyst to shrine up (was too annoying taking it in and out of the cube). I also replaced chancies with trangs gloves and the nagelring with an fcr/fire res ring to hit 105fcr. This lowered mf to ~235ish, but man 105 just feels so much better to play. Still running the soj though for the extra skill. And mf will jump up by ~150 immediately if that tals armor shows up. But I will have to drop the soj for a second fcr ring to maintain 105. So will have to either decrease in dmg or go to 63fcr. Or maybe I'll find a cold skiller, we'll see!
The merc started out wearing tals mask, lionheart, and used a non eth partizan insight. Over these runs he upgraded to a non eth thresher insight, a 10/30 andys, and duriels shell. The cbf was a big improvement. I think I'll try switching to treachery and kiras if I drop a lem, and see if I miss the leech. No eth elite polearms yet.
Also one last funny thing on the gear. I did have a single NDE, and it was very scary. It was from conviction horror mages... while I was accidentally on my cta swap
. Rejuv and s/e kept me alive but man that life went down fast. I had ofc been using lidless on the swap with cta for the extra skill, but this incident made me reevalute. I decided this would, unfortunately, probably not be the last time I missed my weapon swap without noticing, and the resistance disparity between swaps is huge, with wizzy and pdiamond stormshield being replaced by 2 items without resists. So I had to close the resistance disparity a bit, and I started using a 3 pdiamond tower shield right away. But I figured next mal I found, I'd roll a sanctuary runeword in it, hopefully getting more res, and also having max block on the cta swap. Well a mal dropped shortly and i rolled it. Unfortunately only 52@ haha. I'll probably reroll it once more and hope for better. But I think that is actually the safest way to move forward for me. Also kind of a funny point, but the fact I don't have the 20fcr from lidless makes me drop 2 fcr breakpoints on cta swap rather than one, making me much more likely to notice I'm on the wrong swap while tele'ing to the trapdoor, so another "benefit". Haha resistances on cta swap. Not something I would've thought about.
Finds
First off, the current grail status is at -119. Should get under 100 soon. Honestly feels like it takes a little longer than i expected to get down to a respectable number remaining, but obviously the total number doesnt really matter till most of the big fish are knocked off the list.
Secondly, I'm hoping for tal's armor as described above, and no dice so far. Several blue ones, a few yellows, and even one failed unique
. Hopefully it shows up soon!
But I did have a few verrry exciting finds.
Oh man that was fun! Before I've seen even a set diadem. Roll was 12/15. Sorta glad it's lower than my ones in sc, since I don't really have plans to use it
.
Wow wow! Those are much much more fun to start of the rare finds than something boring like stormspire and steelrend. Not as exciting as in sc I suppose, since I don't really have plans to make use of either, but tons of fun! And that wasn't the last one... also got a green caddy during this stint! Was my 6th griz caddy overall... all with 3os, but still I'll take it! Also, found, irrc, my second unique phase blade, and azurewrath! I find this item so much more than I think I should haha. Quite a nice start.
Finds Summary
S/U's: HoZ, Andy's (10/30), Eth Messerchmidts, Griffons (12/15), Gut Siphon, Alma Negra, Seraphs Hymn, Windforce, Frostwind, Griz Caddy, Azurewrath, Steel Carapace, 15/15 treks, 15/10 eth treks
Runes: Mal, Mal, Mal, Um
Other: 6cres/7mfsc, fire skiller
Map Rolling
This section will get a bit techincal, but one main priority in AT was to get a halfway decent map. At first I just wanted to get some runs in, and did a few hundred on a map I knew I wouldn't keep:
This one has a nice path, but you have to backtrack out of the chest room and visit 10 tiles total. Just too long a route.
So i rerolled it and ran this one a smidge:
Nice short path, but only 7 rooms total are visited, and I'm starting to think you definitely need 8 (including the entrance and chest tile) to mostly max out the spawns. So the density definitely wasn't here, not to mention again backtracking my way out of the chest room.
Next map was this one:
This one controls the spawns nicely and had a nice boss count, but 10 rooms is too many to check. The route was too long.
So after consulting @Albatross's guide for the millionth time, I decided I just wasn't couldn't compromise on the following criteria:
Sidenote, I probably would've also stopped for a map that looked anything like @Nano's from his HoR entry. He ran a low boss count map that spawns the chest tile first thing, completely against conventional wisdom. And furthermore, he used a different playstyle from what we commonly see from the efficient blizz sorc runners here, running infinity instead of insight and mostly using static field between blizzards as opposed to ice blast. But anyways, I initially took this to mean Nano was amazing and would do even better on a "good" map (which he is an amazing player to be sure), but I now think his map is about the best map possible amongst those where the chest tile is spawned on entering AT. So he visits 6 tiles total and does very fast runs. I would probably keep and try out a map like that if the boss density was 5.2ish+. But didn't stumble on such a map.
However, I did eventually find this one:
Yellow is for bosses pretty much always present, orange for ones that spawn reasonably often but not extremely consistently.
So this map meets all my criteria (it's 3 teles to trapdoor) and it's been nice to run. The boss count started out around 6.1, but I haven't checked it recently. And so I think this map is very good, but far from perfect. The packs that can spawn in those tiny rooms/hallways are a pain to clean up with blizzard and ice blast. And also maybe once every handful of runs I will get a boss count along my route that I know is too low for my map. And then if I check those 3 tiles that are not along the route, they will have a boss or two that gets the map back up to a density I expect. Now I kinda doubt it's efficient to visit those tiles even when the boss count is low along the route, but it's annoying that it happens at all. So anyways definitely a keeper that is good to run, but I will probably reroll this map after a couple of thousand more runs.
That's it so far! Hoping for big grailers, tals armor, and bers/jah. Someday would love to switch to running blizzballer with infinity. But at least as of now, I'm just sticking with p1 AT and seeing what drops. Cheers everyone!
Now where did I leave off?
Have had some nice progress, but ofc am not doing nearly as much playing with the new member of the family here . I have done 600 AT runs while rolling and evaluating maps (all AT runs should be assumed to be p1), and then 1000 runs after I found my current map. In general, I plan to "ignore" the map rolling/evaluating runs when I talk about my total number of runs in this thread, so that I can have a nice round number showing on the runcounter.Amaresu is level 93 and going strong. Fun to have my first hc character get into those low 90s
. Runtimes are much much slower than I can do in sc though. I'm averaging about 54 second runs at the moment. And to be fair, am taking a pretty relaxed approach, but I don't think I could push them consistently down below 48s or so, whereas i can do ~35-36s in sc. I think the difference is just damage, since my playstyle is pretty much the exact same. Which isn't the best news since I don't see too much in the future that will improve my damage. I refuse to use any shield but stormshield, and likely will continue using wizzy for those huge resistances. At least my mf total has tons and tons of room to improve.I started out running 63fcr and ~300mf, but quickly ended up lowering the mf for some quality of life improvements. Sacrificed 3 sc's for inventory slots to keep a tome of id on me, as well as a flawless amethyst to shrine up (was too annoying taking it in and out of the cube). I also replaced chancies with trangs gloves and the nagelring with an fcr/fire res ring to hit 105fcr. This lowered mf to ~235ish, but man 105 just feels so much better to play. Still running the soj though for the extra skill. And mf will jump up by ~150 immediately if that tals armor shows up. But I will have to drop the soj for a second fcr ring to maintain 105. So will have to either decrease in dmg or go to 63fcr. Or maybe I'll find a cold skiller, we'll see!
The merc started out wearing tals mask, lionheart, and used a non eth partizan insight. Over these runs he upgraded to a non eth thresher insight, a 10/30 andys, and duriels shell. The cbf was a big improvement. I think I'll try switching to treachery and kiras if I drop a lem, and see if I miss the leech. No eth elite polearms yet.
Also one last funny thing on the gear. I did have a single NDE, and it was very scary. It was from conviction horror mages... while I was accidentally on my cta swap
. Rejuv and s/e kept me alive but man that life went down fast. I had ofc been using lidless on the swap with cta for the extra skill, but this incident made me reevalute. I decided this would, unfortunately, probably not be the last time I missed my weapon swap without noticing, and the resistance disparity between swaps is huge, with wizzy and pdiamond stormshield being replaced by 2 items without resists. So I had to close the resistance disparity a bit, and I started using a 3 pdiamond tower shield right away. But I figured next mal I found, I'd roll a sanctuary runeword in it, hopefully getting more res, and also having max block on the cta swap. Well a mal dropped shortly and i rolled it. Unfortunately only 52@ haha. I'll probably reroll it once more and hope for better. But I think that is actually the safest way to move forward for me. Also kind of a funny point, but the fact I don't have the 20fcr from lidless makes me drop 2 fcr breakpoints on cta swap rather than one, making me much more likely to notice I'm on the wrong swap while tele'ing to the trapdoor, so another "benefit". Haha resistances on cta swap. Not something I would've thought about.Finds
First off, the current grail status is at -119. Should get under 100 soon. Honestly feels like it takes a little longer than i expected to get down to a respectable number remaining, but obviously the total number doesnt really matter till most of the big fish are knocked off the list.
Secondly, I'm hoping for tal's armor as described above, and no dice so far. Several blue ones, a few yellows, and even one failed unique
. Hopefully it shows up soon!But I did have a few verrry exciting finds.
Oh man that was fun! Before I've seen even a set diadem. Roll was 12/15. Sorta glad it's lower than my ones in sc, since I don't really have plans to use it
.
Wow wow! Those are much much more fun to start of the rare finds than something boring like stormspire and steelrend. Not as exciting as in sc I suppose, since I don't really have plans to make use of either, but tons of fun! And that wasn't the last one... also got a green caddy during this stint! Was my 6th griz caddy overall... all with 3os
, but still I'll take it! Also, found, irrc, my second unique phase blade, and azurewrath! I find this item so much more than I think I should haha. Quite a nice start.Finds Summary
S/U's: HoZ, Andy's (10/30), Eth Messerchmidts, Griffons (12/15), Gut Siphon, Alma Negra, Seraphs Hymn, Windforce, Frostwind, Griz Caddy, Azurewrath, Steel Carapace, 15/15 treks, 15/10 eth treks
Runes: Mal, Mal, Mal, Um
Other: 6cres/7mfsc, fire skiller
Map Rolling
This section will get a bit techincal, but one main priority in AT was to get a halfway decent map. At first I just wanted to get some runs in, and did a few hundred on a map I knew I wouldn't keep:
This one has a nice path, but you have to backtrack out of the chest room and visit 10 tiles total. Just too long a route.
So i rerolled it and ran this one a smidge:
Nice short path, but only 7 rooms total are visited, and I'm starting to think you definitely need 8 (including the entrance and chest tile) to mostly max out the spawns. So the density definitely wasn't here, not to mention again backtracking my way out of the chest room.
Next map was this one:
This one controls the spawns nicely and had a nice boss count, but 10 rooms is too many to check. The route was too long.
So after consulting @Albatross's guide for the millionth time, I decided I just wasn't couldn't compromise on the following criteria:
- 4 or less tele's to trapdoor
- Visit a total of 8 tiles without backtracking
- The chest tile is spawned last of the 8
- No unvisited tiles spawn monsters before the chest tile
- 5.8+ boss density
Sidenote, I probably would've also stopped for a map that looked anything like @Nano's from his HoR entry. He ran a low boss count map that spawns the chest tile first thing, completely against conventional wisdom. And furthermore, he used a different playstyle from what we commonly see from the efficient blizz sorc runners here, running infinity instead of insight and mostly using static field between blizzards as opposed to ice blast. But anyways, I initially took this to mean Nano was amazing and would do even better on a "good" map (which he is an amazing player to be sure), but I now think his map is about the best map possible amongst those where the chest tile is spawned on entering AT. So he visits 6 tiles total and does very fast runs. I would probably keep and try out a map like that if the boss density was 5.2ish+. But didn't stumble on such a map.
However, I did eventually find this one:
Yellow is for bosses pretty much always present, orange for ones that spawn reasonably often but not extremely consistently.
So this map meets all my criteria (it's 3 teles to trapdoor) and it's been nice to run. The boss count started out around 6.1, but I haven't checked it recently. And so I think this map is very good, but far from perfect. The packs that can spawn in those tiny rooms/hallways are a pain to clean up with blizzard and ice blast. And also maybe once every handful of runs I will get a boss count along my route that I know is too low for my map. And then if I check those 3 tiles that are not along the route, they will have a boss or two that gets the map back up to a density I expect. Now I kinda doubt it's efficient to visit those tiles even when the boss count is low along the route, but it's annoying that it happens at all. So anyways definitely a keeper that is good to run, but I will probably reroll this map after a couple of thousand more runs.
That's it so far! Hoping for big grailers, tals armor, and bers/jah. Someday would love to switch to running blizzballer with infinity. But at least as of now, I'm just sticking with p1 AT and seeing what drops. Cheers everyone!
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