96 TZ Clear experience (new patch)

Last night, on a whim, I decided to clear a TZ game created by my 94 Warlock with my 87

Nova sorc (this took into the next day, sleep). I can tell you straight off, this was not a win for feminism. The number of times my man had to rescue me and pay for my merc was countless (somewhere around 2 million

Gold). Mind you, my Warlock doesn't do damage anymore, so these were the most painfully irritating times. I still have my immortal Hephisto, so he would just stand there and tank while i casted for a good 15 minutes to kill a

Herald.

I have 30 MF, for the record.

My best drops:
Act 1 jail t-5 Dark One @ 21:13

Latent Cold Rupture
Act 1 T-5 Carver @21:33

Latent Flame Rift

At this point, I'm thinking... wow, they really did up these drop rates.

I played until midnight, clearing A1, A2, and Kurast... nothing more dropped

Next day,
Act 4

Plains of Despair t-5 strangler @10:32,

Windforce
Act 4

City of the Damned t-5 Burning soul @ 10:41,

Arachnid Mesh

Finished clearing A4, A5, and most of A3 (didn't pop shard, as its 80% clear from the normal rotation) . No other finds to note.

Herald Spawn rate:

I don't know. How do you guys keep track of this? Do you really count the heralds and write it down? I can tell you that the shortest time between heralds was one pack of monsters in the flyer dungeon. The longest was the

Bloody Foothills, with just one T-5 for the entire section. However, I can say there were absolutely tons of these things. Multiple per area. This is way up from before. I never even bothered with shards last patch because they were hard to find, and you might not get a

Herald for an entire act. I could raise "ire" a million times, but couldn't find a

Herald. It's quite the opposite now, shards drop like hotcakes and heralds are a dime a dozen. TBH, i like this better. I don't feel bad when using a shard, therefore i use them.

Herald difficulty:

Some were extremely easy.. the Dark One type's (all acts) just fall down. The archers in act 1.... damn near impossible. I got a burning Soul in Act 4 that neither my sorc or my warlock could kill... so much damage, one hit from one monster in the pack dropped my sorc, dropped warlock to half health... i bounced. Mana burn was rough. In just about every fight, I had to keep my merc clear or he would die.

Experience:

Not worth it. P2, 6-7 hours got me from 87-89.5. All the deaths didn't help. I could have done this in half the time or less with

Baal runs.

Overall, it was fun... but I can't say if it was worth it. The price for sunders seems to have cratered overnight and

Windforce/amesh are probably worth

Ist each, maybe? These are my first sunders, but only time will tell if TZ is the place to be to find them, or if they will easily be found elsewhere (didn't find any in my 150 Chaos runs)

StoBeast wrote: 1 hour ago

Last night, on a whim, I decided to clear a TZ game created by my 94 Warlock with my 87

Nova sorc (this took into the next day, sleep). I

I think once swap to ur lvl 87 sorc, the game room will adjust the tz level based on ur sorc, not what ur lvl84 originally created unless u running multiple d2r?

if you play Warlock , try dropping Sigon:Rancor on the place where

Herald pack about to be spawned.
with one point invested it rocks. Don't want to respec - try it from the random looked book or

Dagger.
I am still learning Rancor but it works very nice on Heralds and spawned/Binded demons.

StoBeast wrote: 1 hour ago

Overall, it was fun... but I can't say if it was worth it. The price for sunders seems to have cratered overnight and

Windforce/amesh are probably worth

Ist each, maybe? These are my first sunders, but only time will tell if TZ is the place to be to find them, or if they will easily be found elsewhere (didn't find any in my 150 Chaos runs)

I think it's commonly accepted at this point that the new

Herald spawn rates are fine, Shard drop rates are so high that you can indeed use them without second thoughts, but the loot that comes around is garbage.

Herald fights can be exciting, which is not something that happens often for lvl90+ characters imho, but their loot seems to be even worse than before the patch. Most likely this is an overreaction to the complaints about too much

Herald loot in the PTR. If things stay as they are, most likely shards will see use to terrorize bosses again and again as nothing else is really worth the effort.