@D30D043 kinda weird, but now you have to click the "toggle BB Code" button (looks like [ ]) to delete the quotes around your message.
Yes nihla starts with base 70 cold res so he rolls unbreakable cold immune quite often. He only rolls unbreakable fire or light immune 1.52% of the time.
I think its like this:
31.82% cold immune
16.67% unbreakable cold immune
16.67% fire/light immune
1.52% unbreakable fire/light immune
I made a sheet to help calc this for fire and lightning anyways way back here, and just checked it quickly for cold. I think we may have chatted about cold sorc running nihla back in that thread too, but been too long.
@D30D043 Luhkoh nailed it. Cold immune rolls much more frequently, making (I think) pure Cold the worst choice because more unbreakable rolls and abandoned runs. @Pb_pal ran Blova and used Nova on broken Nihl, and he made it through without a death. My Sorc didn't run Crescent Moon, and ended up bailing on broken LI rolls because it took too long. She wasn't able to get up to 2.5M benchmark as a result, so it might be a good proxy for the amount of abandoned runs by pure cold sorc. Gerat progress, and stay safe!
Exactly why Crescent Moon is so impactful for Lightning Sorcs running Nihlathak. Far too many runs roll with mitigated lightning damage or breakable immunity and they slow you down far too much. Griffon’s is nice but CM is so easy to acquire/get the build online and the difference with that alone is quite noticeable.
Cheers guys. I'll test the Crescent Moon build if I get the chance, but finding items for 105 FCR breakpoint is going to be very iffy without Hoto. Well, I have 110-120 hours of play time left thus I will think of something. Perhaps playing with lower FCR breakpoint might be an option Oo. I´ll do some testing.
@D30D043 For 117 FCR on Lightning, it's possible with Spirit (35), gloves (20), Arachnids (20), Vipermagi (30), FCR amulet (12+) or 2x jewelry with 10 FCR. My problem was that I didn't have Arachnids (or reasonable 20 FCR circlet without Griffon's). Others had good success with meteor build, and easy to hit 105 FCR break point. Good luck!
@PhineasB I would think its by far easiest to use one 10fcr ring so you can still use natures peace, and then any caster amulet. Works with shako and the gear you described above.
Another option I never see used, but that I remember drmalawi using a while back is to run fire sorc with 4 piece tals and a couple of facets in your gear. Those are really the only nihla running setups I would consider tbh:
1. 4 piece tals fire sorc with 2 facets
2. cmoon shako light sorc
3. phoenix fire sorc
4. cmoon griffs light sorc
In roughly ascending order of quality. All with natures peace and delirium+infinity merc (but hopefully that goes without saying). I'm sure a hybrid sorc can get the job done quite well too (like pb pals sorc), but seems like they would sacrifice a fair bit of speed.
@Jpy I did loads of calcs before I started my 98-99, if you want to look at that post I linked back in my original reply to D30. And I concluded that for my available gear, phoenix with 4 skillers would be slightly better than cmoon shako with 6 skillers. But that was from an approximate calc, not from a test, and the result was so close that the distinction is probably meaningless. I got 3.8 million exp/hr for my hall of record entry with this setup, and was getting 3.5ish on average in the second half of the level. This was with 3-4s lag for the nihla runs, zero shrines, and not enough dmg to hit the primary dmg breakpoint I would have liked to (nihla dead in 1 meteor when he doesnt have an res-boosting mods). I think I calc'd if I had two more skillers I would have hit that breakpoint.
Do you have any data from how far someone has pushed with cmoon shako setup? Or even the griffons + cmoon setup on a windows computer? I'm not at all sure that phoenix fire is better than cmoon shako, but I will posit that all 3 of those "top" setups are very close to one another in speed, and that you might be underestimating the fire setup's potential. I was also able to get a bit better resists and life with my available fire setup than my light setup at that time.
Originally I had plans to go back and test my lightning setup at nihla after I hit 99, but by that time I wasn't interested in doing a single extra nihla run, so I haven't tested it haha. I would've also loved it if ffs had tested fire sorc back when he was running d2 on native mac to compare it to his OP light sorc exp/hr.
It's hard to compare run times across different operation systems and builds. While S&E on Mac was basically instant for me, there were definitely downsides such as frustring loading times when switching areas during a run (e.g. HoP -> HoV), and the game just running slowlier and more choppy on Mac overall. You can see that in some of the old vids I posted with my 99er Sorc for example. Just something to keep in mind for this.
When I was still on Mac, I did test Fire Sorc. IIRC she was just under 4m XP/h, which was great but still a meaningful difference in comparison to Lightning Sorc numbers. I posted something on the old forums when the same discussion came up, can't remember the exact number though (nor want to dig through the posts ).
Damage numbers are one thing, but the key mechanic that IMO gives Lightning the edge is that it always and instantly hits Nihl. It's irrevelant whether there are monsters between the Sorc and him. Fire Ball on the other hand doesn't always damage him due to minions being in the way. Having Meteor as a backup is nice, but if Nihl often dies only once it drops, that's not exactly ideal. If it was possible to consistently get the all Fire Balls to deal damage to Nihl, that would make a big difference. Not sure whether that can be achieved e.g. by finding a specific landing spot where Nihl is always hit by FBs or something like that... but Viper's can screw up landing spots big time anyway, so it's just hard to get that consistency with FBs. At least I didn't see how, but also didn't test her extensively.
@ffs fun stuff. Did you take a look at that calc? It's ofc just approximate, but saying "damage number are one thing" really undersells it. I didn't just calc fb dmg bs lightning dmg. I tried to calc the time from first cast to nihla kill for both, including time for meteor to drop and including an estimate for number of fireballs that hit minions before the first fireball hits nihlathak. And I also speculated that lightning would really be a bit worse than my calc shows, because a big range of dmg output affects the true average time to kill negatively. Meaning low rolls on lightning dmg lose time more so than high rolls on lightning dmg make up for. My calc doesnt capture that, since it just uses avg dmg numbers.
One other small advantage fire sorc has is that she's sorta dual element, with static and fireball. Which means that I think fire sorc kills FE nihla a good bit faster than light sorc takes down LE nihla. He has to roll FE/LE to reallly slow down the fire sorc. I have a hard time believing that you couldn't crack 4m when I got 3.8 with subpar gear and big loading times, but I could of course just be really underestimating the light sorc too. Maybe this conversation will motivate me to throw on some gear and do 50 runs with lightning. I'm sure I won't be half as dialed in as I was back when running my 99er sorc, but should be able to give some sort of comparison for me. But idk, 50 runs is unlikely to roll a reasonable distribution of all the relevant modifiers on nihla. Too bad I don't have another lvl 98 sorc haha.
After more than a month I am finally back with a new update on my 99er Barb named Anger.
I wanted to wait with the update until the "Find Balance MF/RF" Tournament was over so that i can share my drops here.
And then I decided to wait until i hit level 96 which just happened.
Since the last update at level 92 I joined the MF/RF Tournament where I participated in the Baal category. I did a 20h set running baal
where i hit level 95 and about 20%.
Whenever I thought that I will complete this level without dying a stupid death happened which was always a huge setback for because I have very limited time to play
and every death and exp loss felt like a huge waste of time. But I never gave up and continued leveling after a short break.
After achiving level 95 I finally visited normal and nightmare to use my last 2 larzuk quests to socked my mercs kiras and his reapers toll. Putting a 15% ias and a sheal into helmet and weapon. After that I rolled a new baal map and it was a very good decision which i should have made earlier.
Where as before doing 4min runs was something that didnt happen all the time I am now able to push my runs to 3:40 sometimes which over the long run seems like
a huge time save.
The only danger of dying is still some stupid lister pack. The last death at level 95 and 60% I just got 2 shot by wave 5. I couldnt even press ESC in time to S/E. It happened way to fast.
Now for some drops. Sadly I still didnt find any high rune =(
Iam really hoping for a LO drop to reroll my terrible 351 grief. I hope it will happen soon.
Some noteworthy drops (you can find my MF Tournament drops in the Results Thread of said tournament. Allthough they werent that amazing):
Stormspire, Verdungos, Waterwalks 51, Maras 27 and Maras 25 (both dropped in a 10 minute time window lol), Jalas, Giant Skull 1sox, Titans, 6 life 3@ sc and the biggest drop was
a +1 Cold Skills 36life GC.
Iam now using the maras 27 and I was wondering: Is highlords wrath really that much better (I still havent found one yet)?
Maras gives me +2 skills and much needed res. Where as the highlords only benefit would be the deadly strike? And this it even increase my damage that much?
Since I allready have alot of deadly strike chance.
Iam really excited to tackle level 97 now. According to my run counter it will take me about 440 baal runs over ~30 hours. So probably one month for me.
Which doesnt seem that bad tbh.
During the 2nd lockdown in my country and the fact that schools are basicaly closed I only have to look after a few children in my school. They are all busy doing their
distance learing on their notebooks so I actually have alot of time to play diablo at work which is amazing.
Iam not comfortable to level my barb using the schools PC setup so I started a UT 99er to be paladin. He just reached hell and is at level 64.
I hope I cant take him to LK soon and start gringing LK for enigma while Iam sitting in the classroom.
I will probably post some updates of my pala once I complete Enigma and start running CS.
Thanks for reading and see you in a month with my next update.
No that wasn't in reference to the calc (had a look just now). What I meant was that FB damage is certainly not worse than Lightning, but the "monsters in the way" issue is a problem. If your calc takes that into account that's great. But as with any other build, in the end the real test is just in-game runnig and personally I saw a difference there. However, like I said I didn't run a lot with FB Sorc so definitely could be down to lack of practice with her. Back then the XP/h numbers/difference didn't seem off to me, i.e. in line with how runs "felt" as to kill speed.
Iam now using the maras 27 and I was wondering: Is highlords wrath really that much better (I still havent found one yet)?
Maras gives me +2 skills and much needed res. Where as the highlords only benefit would be the deadly strike? And this it even increase my damage that much?
Since I allready have alot of deadly strike chance.
Highlord's will be a considerable boost for kill speed, you should definitely use it once you find it. (Assuming DS/CS from Grief and mastery, adding Highlord's will increase chance of double damage by ~25% or so, it's quite significant.) Resists can relatively easily be obtained via inventory to the extent necessary, e.g. it definitely makes sense to swap out some damage charms for resist charms, if that means you can "safely" use HLW instead of Mara's.
@Luhkoh iirc I had 3.5-3.6m with Shako/CM and 3.6-3.9m with Griffon’s/CM, both with 1 GC I believe and no facets/no mac. Like @ffs said, pierce is amazingly convenient for those runs
Pretty uneventfull 10% of the level... again. These last 20% have been really dry... no wonder it took me two months to make an update.
Some things that happened: I started using Glide. I almost got a ring upgrade for my gear but didn't. I rerolled my Nihla map and got three shrines to replace the two shrine map I used for the previous 75% of the lvl. Had a streak of five consecutive runs with Exp shrine and got cursed out of it every single one of those times! Haha I hate those witches!!!!
Drops: 11% fire ball Ormus, trash fire facet, 2 Mal runes. There was something else I can't be bothered to remember XD (Not even worth the pics, guys).
@D30D043 I've been mulling over the vanilla 98-99 runner a bit more. It's kind of an interesting deal not having infinity. I know buckcrazy got like halfway through the lvl running nihla on hc vanilla on the old forum but i dont remember what build he was using. I think it was lightning, but aborting 16% of runs sounds pretty bad to me. Some speculation on what I might do in your situation follows.
Best might be best just to do p1/p7 CS runs as a blizz sorc. And either just use the merc to kill de seis and/or a weakish fireball backup. Shouldn't be bad since you'll kill him on p1.
If nihla is better or more desirable, I think I would want a hybrid sorc so you don't have to abort so many runs. Blizzard as main attack seems a no-brainer to me in this case since you should have a backup attack for the 1/3 of runs where he is immune, and cold mastery makes blizzard your only super heavy-hitter. And then my guess for best backup attack would have to be meteor/fb. Nova or firewall are the other two options, but I think both are fairly slow even with infinity. So maybe meteor + static + fb could get the job done ok? Not really sure, never tried it.
The other line of thought I would have is to use blizzard as the backup attack since it can be an ok backup attack with little investment. Then either meteor or lightning as the main attack. But I just have no idea how feasible these are since they'll do like less than half the dmg of a non-hybrid build that has infinity. So idk. Maybe a pure lightning build where you just abort 16% is the way to go.
So i guess I didn't really offer anything on the nihla approach other than some thoughts to keep the discussion going. I think I'd just stick to CS honestly. I think it will be best. But really interested to see what you end up deciding to do and how it goes. Good luck!
Death is a quarter of the way into the final level. I've abandoned howl and instead focused on direct Nihl landing spot, howling only if lots of nasties around. I did a half hour test while focused and hit 1.8M, with a more casual hour (just looking at the clock) netting 3.2M. Otherwise, I'm not focused on timer too much to avoid pushing too hard, and have been focused on chunks of time when available.
Drops: Nope. Two Puls and a triple key drop were only items worthy of screen shots (the Puls only because they were highest runes so far), and it's more effort than worth it to even upload screenies He also picked up a plain +20 SC of Vita, and has dropped Gheeds in favor some vita and AR. Hoping for more charm upgrades!
A week for the first quarter level is quite a lot, and not sustainable, with an unfortunate 3am waking up mixed in there. I don't see that pace cotninuing, but hopefully if he can net another half level between now and Christmas (four weeks, with some solid time off over the next four days, so definitely within reason), we may close things out by New Year's. Even if not, I'm pretty sure we can get there by mid-January 2021.
Very safe, with only a single NDE below 1000 HP (quite early after the testing update):