What’s your speed run character

I suspect a sorc or pala to be fastest if you twink them out with prepared gear.
Sorc with mana on kill and low level req high quality items.
Holy Fire pala with prepared gear second.

Holy Fire pala ftw

i´ve a prepped gear for this. Tarnhelmet, Eye of etlich, +3 Holy Fire szepter, a few pieces sigon and a few res charms for cs and diablo. Just walk through the acts. everything is max 2 ticks from Holy Fire. bosses die in 10 hits max. You can also use Ravenclaw, but i prefer the extra dmg from + skills

You can check out some NG+ runs if you want to see what a truly optimized Act 5 rushing setup looks like for each class. Naturally, the Sorceress is #1 on the leaderboard and it's not even close.

Speedruns:
https://www.speedrun.com/d2r?h=NG-norma ... n.4qyk9z31

Downloadable characters and stashes:
https://github.com/SliveniusD2/NG-Files

A couple of eye-opening discoveries that significantly improved my Sorceress rushes were the Gnarled Staff of Charged Bolt and Gnarled Staff of Frost Nova. Iirc, both can be shopped from Akara on higher difficulties & clvl's. It's been a long time since I looked--so I don't remember the most efficient way to find them--but it's possible to purchase staves with Level 11 Charged Bolt or Level 8 Frost Nova charges that can be equipped at very low levels. I have a couple of each just to help with the charges:
These staves have higher level requirements on non-Sorceress characters (7 and 12, respectively), but on a Sorceress the requirements are much lower (0 and 6). That makes them exceptionally strong leveling tools early on.

One of the bigger advantages is that using charged skills doesn't Consume mana, so you're only limited by how effectively you can group enemies. Both staves are powerful enough to one or two-shot many of the earlier monsters you'll encounter while rushing, making the early game dramatically faster.

If you browse those files on GitHub, you'll see that there are a few other very exciting low-level items that you can acquire, but most of them are exceedingly rare or expensive to craft. The jewels and rares they use are largely impossible to find, but it can give you a sense of the theoretical ceiling. One of the more obtainable albeit costly items would be a Level 16 20fcr Caster Amulet. Here is one from Jymnasium:
I hope to craft one of these myself one day, but it is difficult to justify the amethysts and jewels that would be required.

For what it's worth, I went down this rabbit hole as well.

forums/post-your-twink-gear-setup-t1481448.html

At the time I made that, I was going heavy into poison damage. You can give your level 1 sorc a bow with enough jewels of envy to be doing hundreds of poison damage. It's very fast at early leveling. But I eventually became convinced (partly due to NG+ runs), that it wasn't as fast as actually just using the sorc but making her better.

I will definitely look into the staff charges. That would make the first few levels even faster, after which you have enough skills and gear to stop using charges.

Don't sleep on stamina from charms. It's really helpful.

The sorceress , I use
Repeating Crossbow and rixot to kill diablo.
Repeating Crossbow 5 os , 20 poison, 15 Light/other resistance 8 life +any good thing x 5.
Lv 6 get Static Field

Sorc, only need 1 point in Static Field, others no need, use bow and melee to finish diablo and get into a5 p1.

use Static Field to reduce it to very low level.
use rixot to reduce it further, swap to Repeating Crossbow when it has less than 10% hp.

Sorc can be best because in final part of diablo, he will go into Berserk mode, continue use red horse. That paladin need Dodge it
but Sorc can just use Repeating Crossbow shot it down. Not mention Static Field can kill 50%+ hp.

This is Lv 6 play, or remove Static Field, lv 3 play.

---Lv 7 above , follow previous post. --

departure wrote: 1 month ago

For what it's worth, I went down this rabbit hole as well.

forums/post-your-twink-gear-setup-t1481448.html

At the time I made that, I was going heavy into poison damage. You can give your level 1 sorc a bow with enough jewels of envy to be doing hundreds of poison damage. It's very fast at early leveling. But I eventually became convinced (partly due to NG+ runs), that it wasn't as fast as actually just using the sorc but making her better.

I will definitely look into the staff charges. That would make the first few levels even faster, after which you have enough skills and gear to stop using charges.

Don't sleep on stamina from charms. It's really helpful.

I came to the same conclusion myself. Jewels of Envy are very attractive at first glance, and they’re a great value for their common rarity, but the answer becomes obvious once you start to look deeper and deeper into making the Sorceress’ own toolkit better. Poison is a trap.

As for stamina, nowadays I just keep a Belt full of stamina pots until I feel I’ve out-leveled the need for them.

i tried out warlock yesterday for the first time and with fire skills i went through the normal difficulty in a couple hrs easy. easier and faster than any character ive tried so far but im learning the game better and better all the time.