Another 99

And another hero on the Hall of Fame. This is Bone Master, the Skeleton whisperer.

He is a Summoner using

Amplify Damage and

Corpse Explosion for clearing the map.
It was a very nice play and had a lot of fun but a little bit annoying at start of the game, before raising the skeletal army.
I used the Nihlathak's Temple trick to speed up the things, tho. Enter the red portal from

Harrogath and quickly raise 16 skeletons and 7 skeletal mages before the Prowling Dead awakes and then the rest of the bony army (17 + 12) after some killing.

I have all the good items and an inventory full of skillers for max damage and resists (only fire is missing some points, is at 65). I also have a perfect one, 1 to Summoning skill +45 life .
Despite having 288 MF I couldn't manage to find more than one missing item from my Holy Grail list. It's getting harder to find the missing items as I need only 13 now. You can see this post and the new feature of Holy Grail below

forums/closing-on-holy-grail-25-items-r ... 24238.html
holygrailtracker.php?user_id=106606

To speed up the leveling I developed a tactic (I'm sure its well known but I just realised that). As I play offline, Single Player it works. Online it doesn't because the map resets every game.
After raising the bone army I quickly teleport through the known locations in search of Experience Shrine. I had about 23 locations with shrines and it was impossible not to find at least one or two. After getting the XP bonus start the run. I found this tactic at 97 and a half and from there I completed the other half of the 97 and the whole 98 with +50% XP bonus. It was very satisfying when I got a good amount of XP, despite being slow. If I hadn't used this method, I think it would have taken forever to reach level 99.

The Hall of Fame is:
I have only one Enigma and one

Annihilus, so they happily share them.

Krisa - Sorceress -

Hydra,

Fireball,

Meteor

Florian - Paladin -

Zeal,

Fanaticism,

Holy Shield

Storm - Amazon -

Lightning Fury,

Charged Strike,

Valkyrie

Shadow Blade - Assassin -

Dragon Talon,

Phoenix Strike,

Fade

Bone Master - Necromancer -

Raise Skeleton,

Amplify Damage,

Corpse Explosion

Congrats ! Only two left !

Can I ask what happens with experience collected at 99? Does the bar run full and then it stops counting? Or are experience points still added to the counter?

fraggykrueger wrote: 9 months ago

Can I ask what happens with experience collected at 99? Does the bar run full and then it stops counting? Or are experience points still added to the counter?

The bar goes empty and shows 0xp remaining.

And if you die you'll not lose any XP anymore.

And another hero on the Hall of Fame. This is Wind Master, the weather whisperer who uses

Tornado and

Hurricane to kill the enemies, aided by his loyal pets: Spirit Wolfs, Dire Wolfs, Grizzly and the Ravens.

It was not such a fun to play because of the poor aiming of tornadoes. You have to stay at a relatively straight angle and at a close range to the target to actually hit it. I missed a lot before I positioned right especially before level 65 when Enigma came into play and made the things a whole lot easier.

He is a good survivor thanks to maxed

Oak Sage and his pet army but not so fun to play. Sometimes, because of the poor aiming it takes too long to make a kill. You have to be close to target to do it fast but then it makes a little dangerous. Most of the danger comes when you transform when you are hit and the 1% of Delirium procs and you become a Bone pygmy. First of the six deaths came when I teleported in a middle of a pack of enemies and the

Oak Sage died and I became o pygmy and not being able to

Teleport away.

I had a total of six deaths, all of them from a

Conviction cursed enemies. One at level 94 and the rest of five at the level 98 when it hurts the most. I died three times in a row in

Frigid Highlands on a

Spike Fiend pack. It took away 4.5 hours of play, XP wise.

I used the same XP shrine tactic found when I played the Bone Master and helped a lot. I also used the

Ondal's Wisdom as @gensymmed mention earlier to further gain extra XP. With all of that it took very long to reach level 99. I made an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of time and XP and it summed a total of 67 hours of play from 98 to 99. It could be 62ish hour without those deaths but it was slow enough to not enjoying too much. Most of the time I played with extra 63% XP gain (8% from Anni, 5% from

Ondal's Wisdom and 50% from shrines). I mean probably 70 - 80% of play time. When I farmed The

Chaos Sanctuary I didn't bothered to look for shrines because of many cursing enemies. And sometimes on the Worldstone Keep.

He managed to find 5 items from my Holy Grail list, reducing it now to only 8 to go. You can see this post and the new feature of Holy Grail below.

forums/closing-on-holy-grail-25-items-r ... 24238.html
holygrailtracker.php?user_id=106606

The Hall of Fame is:
I have only one Enigma and one

Annihilus, so they happily share them.

Krisa - Sorceress -

Hydra,

Fireball,

Meteor - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/z45d40b3

Florian - Paladin -

Zeal,

Fanaticism,

Holy Shield - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/ug1o90lj

Storm - Amazon -

Lightning Fury,

Charged Strike,

Valkyrie - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/tx5gv0bo

Shadow Blade - Assassin -

Dragon Talon,

Phoenix Strike,

Fade - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/kk5hq0b5

Bone Master - Necromancer -

Raise Skeleton,

Amplify Damage,

Corpse Explosion - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/zh1sq0l6

Wind Master - Druid -

Tornado,

Hurricane,

Oak Sage - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/9g5l70bh

Huge congrats!

Meanwhile I don’t have a single level 99. Highest is 94.

well done!

barb next?

Nice, congratulations! I admire your endurance

I currently have two Chars at 95 and one at 94. So far I have never gotten beyond 95 - my Sorc might probably be the first one

Solid, congrats mate.

Congrats !

Thank you all!

krathkor wrote: 7 months ago

barb next?

Yes, is the last one. I 'd like to make him an item finder but I'm not sure if he'll be strong enough to make it on P8 and capable of Ubers.

All of my previous ones were able to kill the Ubers. The Druid was the weakest one. I had to change the regular desert merc to an A5

Frenzy barb to make it. He did it but very hard.

After that I'll probably start different builds or a hardcore one. I'm a little nervous about starting over if I'll die and loosing all the items.

Nice!

I don't think I saw it mentioned in this thread, but in addition to the 99s, I want to call attention to and give credit for the effort you put in to the graphics work assembling your hero images from your screenshots.

Snakecharmed wrote: 7 months ago

I don't think I saw it mentioned in this thread, but in addition to the 99s, I want to call attention to and give credit for the effort you put in to the graphics work assembling your hero images from your screenshots.

Thank you!
I'm not a graphic expert (for many tasks in real life I use Paint ) but I like to make it as aligned as can be and with the same size pictures. I use Photoscape and Greenshot for this.
I have the free version of Photoscape and I can't save the project and I have to remake the big picture every time.

And after four months, here is the last one on the Hall of Fame. This is the mighty Tiny, the

Frenzy and

Find Item barbarian.

I tried to maximize magic find and the regular game (Normal, Nightmare and Hell) I played with two... Gulls socketed with a

Perfect Topaz and later with an

Ist each. They were upgraded to

Poignard and

Bone Knife. Imagine killing

Baal with two toothpicks . For horking I used two

Blade Of Ali Baba with two Ists each. I was carrying as much small charms with +7 MF as I could. At some point I had 803 MF. It was so slooooowww but this was the strategy.
It took so long because I kept record of all Sets and Unique I found (for runes I kept only one of each type on the list). I made an Excel spreadsheet and wrote down all items. He solely managed to find 90.8% of the whole Holy Grail (495 of 545 items). He found in total 3861 items (1675 sets and 2159 unique and 27 runes - only one per type).

After completing the game I switched to two Griefs and Sharp Charms with +damage and all speed up. But it was a slow journey caused by horking almost every corpse. When I was with an active XP shrine I was killing as many enemies as I could and skipped horking.
The journey took 355 hours to reach level 99 spread over 4 and a half months, from 21st of April 2025 to 6th of September 2025. A little more that the first to reach level 99 on ladder who was there after 3 days.
From 98 to 99 took 55 hours.
I didn't use the XP shrine tactic because of horking. I had them when I found but not actively looking for them on all areas.

I died four times at level 21, 34, 92 and 97. Not very happy but it was manageable.
He was able to do Ubers but it did only one time. Now I have a lot of keys but I'll do it with other characters.
For the Holy Grail he gathered only two item even I sacrificed speed over MF for a good part of the game. He found

Death's Fathom and

Schaefer's Hammer. But is understandable because were only 8 items to find (now I have only 6 remaining). You can see the progress here:
forums/closing-on-holy-grail-8-items-re ... 24238.html
holygrailtracker.php?user_id=106606

Leveling all characters to 99 took me a little over two years, from 21st of August 2023 to 6th of September 2025.

Now I have to decide what to play next. Maybe a Bowazon, maybe a hardcore character (not so likely) or I'll focus on Holy Grail with Shadow Blade with an inventory full of +7 MF small charms.
Or I'll have a go with Cities Skylines 2 or go racing on Formula 1 games. I left them at F1 2019 and now is F1 2025 already.

The Hall of Fame is:
I have only one Enigma and one

Annihilus, so they happily share them.

Krisa - Sorceress -

Hydra,

Fireball,

Meteor - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/z45d40b3

Florian - Paladin -

Zeal,

Fanaticism,

Holy Shield - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/ug1o90lj

Storm - Amazon -

Lightning Fury,

Charged Strike,

Valkyrie - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/tx5gv0bo

Shadow Blade - Assassin -

Dragon Talon,

Phoenix Strike,

Fade - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/kk5hq0b5

Bone Master - Necromancer -

Raise Skeleton,

Amplify Damage,

Corpse Explosion - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/zh1sq0l6

Wind Master - Druid -

Tornado,

Hurricane,

Oak Sage - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/9g5l70bh

Tiny - Barbarian -

Frenzy,

Find Item,

Battle Orders - https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/4snq0c2l

You can sort of do the XP shrine trick on multi-player -

Cold Plains and

Stony Field way point have high chance to spawn XP shrine near them or so it appears from my experience. Can always save and exit until one spawns near the WP.

And once again congrats, never gotten any characters to 99 myself. Got offline SP

Frenzy Barb to 94, Zealer/Smiter to level 88, lightning sorc and Javazon to 91. Zealer/Smiter pally and

Frenzy barb were only ones I could ever finish Ubers with.

Currently have 85 lightning sorc and 87 Zealer on Ladder who I'm gonna try to level to 99 before this ladder season ends. July and August didn't put much time in.

Congrats, what an achievement ! Impressive.

Whooooahhhh now that's a feat and a half! :O Congrats man! I have about 15k hours on D2 (legacy + D2R) and I have never come even close to 99 xd